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Chapter 2: (column 2) Love versus Oligarchism Destroying Humanity.We focus on the second column in this chapter, and its dimension of applicability. Through this, a whole new concept comes to light on which the higher perception of the function of this column depends. This new concept is related to the river for this column, "The rights of woman acknowledged morally, civilly, and socially." As was pointed out in Volume 3, the reference to woman is linked to the metaphor in which John the Revelator had seen the divine idea - not wrapped in a male/female 'animalist' envelop - but as 'woman' "clothed with the sun, and the moon (barren materialism) under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars (the stars of rejoicing).*(Revelation 12:1, and Science and Health 561:22-21) When we speak about the divine idea man in connection with manifestation and application in daily living, we cannot speak about an esoterical concept. We speak about reality here, and its manifestation. We speak about an intelligent self-recognition in terms that John had beheld, but manifest in actual experience. Thus, the divine idea is not something isolated into a never-never land of dream living, but is related to concrete, everyday manifestation "morally, civilly, and socially" as Mary Baker Eddy points out in the definition of the river. Thus she has drawn the human scene of public policies and cultural convention unto a higher level where she demands the manifest recognition of what is divinely real. She takes the entire concept of Science out of the conventional context and turns it around. She acknowledges that Truth is the real and eternal, and man's nature and reality is founded in absolute Truth. Thus, Science is not a tool to deal with reality, which is fixed by eternal Principle, but is a tool to deal with man's perception of reality - the discovery what is the reality of man's being, or one's own being. This fundamental distinction that distinguishes the spiritually real, from what is conventionally perceived through learned ignorance, was discovered in the fifteenth century by Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa. The distinction becomes apparent through a problem in mathematics, which arises from an endeavor to calculate the area of a circle with straight line geometry. It is possible to approximate a circle by inscribing a polygon within the circle, even by increasing the number of the sides of the polygon to infinity. In fundamental terms this infinite approximation can never describe the real nature of a circle and its fundamentally unique characteristic. If the polygon inscribed inside the circle has only four sides, it looks not at all like a circle, but is a square. If the polygon is given 64 sides, however, the polygon looks very much like a circle. Indeed such a polygon might be useful as a basis for calculating the area within a circle when accuracy is not an important factor. One might even increase the number of sides dramatically, so that the approximation becomes more accurate, and again for some application this approximation might be sufficient. The problem is, that this approximation can never yield an accurate statement of reality, because a circle is fundamentally a different geometric structure than a polygon. A circle simply is not a polygon, nor can it be understood in terms of straight line geometry mathematics. The circle has a quality that cannot be understood in terms of polygons, but can only be understood through a unique mathematical approach that acknowledges the distinct characteristics of the circle.*(See William Wertz, The Method of Learned Ignorance, Fidelio magazine Spring 1995, p.38; and Nicolas of Cusa's 'On the Quatrature of the Circle,' The New Federalist newspaper, Nov. 28, 1994, p.6) This fundamental distinction between the nature of what is truth and the most learned approximation of it, is important to everyday life. It was important to the Apostle Paul, who made the following comment on the difference between inaccurate perception, and clear fundamentally correct perception. He said, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."*(I Corinthians 13:11) || - page index - || - chapter index - || - Exit - ||
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