It was put in various ways to this effect: Typhoon Yolanda was not only stronger than Katrina — it was the most powerful storm known or recorded in history.
Sounds like there’s room for the possibility that before history’s hundreds of thousands of years, there have conceivably been stronger ones, some preceding the appearance of homo sapiens on the planet. After all, the planet is much, much older than history.
Our minds intuit so. But then the counter intuition coming with our consciousness of what scientific and technological man has done to the planet — to wit, global warming.
Because of this — global warning — typhoons have become more powerful, more destructive, deadlier. Thus, Yolanda.
From there, one can pursue various lines of thought. I am interested in one, and hopefully won’t get lost in my pursuit of it.
Let us assume — go hypothetical, that is — that our species, the planet’s most dominant, is able to avert extinction, overcomes its greed and rapacity, wakes up before it’s too late (I understand environmentalists are saying re global warming, that it’s too late), and restores our planet to the health it possessed before the advances, so dramatic in our day, of science and technology.
That planet will still know natural catastrophe — earthquakes and volcano eruptions and typhoons, etc. Natural catastrophe preceded man. In fact, we are told that an unknown one wiped out the dinosaurs that were here before us for a million years. Longer. And really wiped out. No survivors — except in movies.
After the dinosaurs came man, inheriting a world to which catastrophe is no stranger, flawed, imperfect.
To move in without further ado: If the world was created by a God who loves His creation, why does he allow catastrophe and suffering? That’s the old Gnostic question that’s never been adequately answered by theodicies: Why does God allow evil?
In our time, the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Frenchman Albert Camus, great writers both, asked the question powerfully with specific attention to one detail.
To the traditional Christian answer that all this is God’s chastisement, that man has become so wicked, has all but forgotten God, that the latter resorts to chastisement, Dostoevsky and Camus asked further: Why then allow the suffering of innocent children?
The Russian and the Frenchman can be said to have calibrated the Gnostic question to unanswerability.
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, also of our day, therefore, said evil ‘is a mystery that none of our spiritual powers can reach.’
The question of the Gnostics is the capping argument in support of their awful belief that this world was not made by God but by an inferior power they called the Demiurge.
Jewish to the core is Buber’s reply above. God made the world and saw that it was good.
If we persist in that faith, of Classical Religion, we will always be in a state of bafflement, confronted by the incomprehensible. Buber lived with it.
But what if?
What if it’s true?
That the world is perfect but man has undone it?
And we don’t mean ecology.
Sure, man is a late comer to the planet of the extinct dinosaurs. But that is man according to science and materialism.
According to the arcane and esoteric, man is as old as the universe — man IS the universe. That world was undone when cosmic man went wrong, fell. Sinned.
The global warming thing sounds like an intriguing echo, right?
The arcane and esoteric — the occult, if you will — says further that it is in man’s power to correct the harm he has done — through tiqqun.
Go look up.
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Author’s email: cezaruis@gmail.com
