This recently born creature...

This recently born creature, who has succeeded in wreaking havoc upon the earth and practically upsetting the ecological balance of the natural order itself in only some five centuries,4 is little aware that to overcome the impasse into which modern man has thrown himself as a result of attempting to forget what it really means to be man he must rediscover himself.

He must come to understand the nature of man as that pontifical and central creature on this earth who stands as witness to an origin from which he descends and a center to which he ultimately returns.

The traditional doctrine of man and not the measurement of skulls and footprints is the key for the understanding of that anthrōpos who, despite the rebellion of Promethean man against Heaven from the period of the Renaissance and its aftermath, is still the inner man of every man, the reality which no human being can deny wherever and whenever he lives, the imprint of a theomorphic nature which no historical change and transformation can erase completely from the face of that creature called man.

In recent decades many attempts have been made to trace the stages of the “disfiguration of the image of man in the West”5 beginning with the first stages of the Promethean revolt in the Renaissance, some of whose causes are to be seen already in the late Middle Ages, and terminating with the infrahuman condition into which modern man is being forced through a supposedly humanistic civilization.

The tracing of this disfiguration could not in fact be anything other than the tracing of one facet of that process of the desacralization of knowledge and of life already outlined in the first part of this book.

The decomposition and disfiguration, in the history of the West, of the image of man as being himself imago Dei, came into the open with that worldly humanism which characterizes the Renaissance and which is most directly reflected in its worldly art.6 But there are certain elements of earlier origin which also contributed to this sudden fall, usually interpreted as the age of the discovery of man at the moment when the hold of the Christian tradition upon Western man was beginning to weaken.

One of the elements is the excessive separation between man as the seat of consciousness or the I and the cosmos as the “not-I” or a domain of reality from which man is alienated.