ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Man in the Universe: Permanence Amidst Apparent Change [Main Debate] It is often forgotten that before man began to view his relation to nature only from the aspect of change and impermanence, he had become himself inwardly detached from the immutable principle of the Intellect, the nous, which along with revelation is the only factor that can act as the permanent and immutable axis for the machinations of human reason.

With the weakening of gnostic elements in Christianity the rational faculty of Western man became gradually estranged from the twin sources of immutability, stability and permanence: namely, revelation and intellectual intuition.[^1] The result was on the one hand the nominalist trend, which destroyed philosophical certainty, and on the other this reduction of man to the purely human cut off from any transcendental elements, the man of Renaissance humanism.

Such a concept of man itself implied sheer change and becoming—which are apparent even outwardly during that period in those rapid transformations of Western society which have given the Renaissance its transitional character. But even then man's concept of the Universe had not as yet changed. His science of nature was still essentially medieval, comprised of Hermetic and Scholastic elements.

It is only his conception of himself that had changed, leading in turn to a change in his concept of the Universe and his own place in it.

It is always essential to bear in mind the time-lag between the religious and metaphysical revolt at the end of the Middle Ages expressing an attempt on the part of Western man to cut himself away from his celestial and immutable archetype and to become purely terrestrial and human, and the scientific revolution which carried this secularized vision of man to its logical conclusion by creating a purely secular science, Man, once he came to consider himself a predominantly secular being, developed a science that considers the changing aspect of things alone, a science that is concerned solely with becoming rather than being, and this is a most logical happening if we remember that even etymologically secular is derived from the Latin secularis one of whose meanings is change and temporality.

The destruction of the sacred vision of man and the Universe is equivalent to the destruction of the immutable aspect of both man and the Universe.