A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO COR;NERS
vividly aware, be conquered. But the original sin will not be eradicated
by the superficial destruction of its external signs and traces. To
unlearn the art of writing and expel the Muses (to use Plato's words)
would be only a palliative: once again characters will appear, and
once again the scrolls will reproduce the same invariable tale of the
rock-chained prisoners in Plato's cave.
Rousseau's dream originated in his unbelief. On the contrary, to
live in God means essentially not to live entirely in the relativity of
human culture, but with some part of one's being
to
grow away from
it toward the outside, toward freedom. Life in God is really life,
i.
e.,
motion: it is spiritual growth, the path to the mount and the heavenly
ladder. One needs only set one's feet on the way to find the path–
the rest will come of itself. Spontaneously, the surrounding objects
will change their position, the voices will vanish, and new horizons
will open up. The door to freedom is the same for all of us who live
in common in the same enclosure, and this door is always open.
If
one goes, another will follow him. Perhaps all will set out, one
after the other. Without faith in God man cannot regain his lost
freshness of spirit. It is not enough to throw off worn out clothing, one
must throw off the old Adam. Only the water of life rejuvenates. And
the vision that appears before you of a revitalized community "with–
out Muses and written characters," however fascinating, is a delusive
dream and a sign of decadence as is .all Rousseauism, if the human
community that you exalt is not a community of prayer but a new
sprout of the same corrupt stalk that we are ourselves.
If
you answer that the very act of building a new culture, of
tracing new signs on the
tabula rasa
of the human soul, will plunge
mankind into a fresh tide of creativeness, a direct perception of the
world, and a new youth, there is only one thing I can do-to shrug
my shoulders and marvel at the deep optimism of your proposed an–
swer, which springs from the failure, characteristic of Rousseau's
age, to understand the fatal truth that the very sources of spiritual
life have been poisoned, that the Orphic or Biblical assertion of
"original sin" is, alas, not a lie. In this case, our conversation would
be
reminiscent of another, ancient conversation that Plato relates in
Timaeus.
The interlocutors .are Solon and an Egyptian priest. "You
are children, Hellenes, and there is no aged man among you," the
second says to the first. It goes on to say that periodic floods and
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