The Words of the Kwon Family

Religious Revolution and the Principle of Creation (1)

Yoon Hyuk Kwon
May 1971
Professor, Donggook University, Korea

1. Preface

How does the culture deploy?

Martin Heidegger (1889...), leading scholar in the field of the Existential philosophy insists that the current European culture is at the age of the world night (Weltnacht) and there will be sure to come the dawn of new age quite different form it. (See Holzwege, 1950. S. 300) and he foresees for the bewildered history of the world to be changed with the new culture and ethical one. Such a discernment may well be noted that the western culture during the past 2,000 years comes to its climax and now is the time for a new world-wide culture to be formed standing aloof from the western one.

As a matter of fact, the 2,000 year \A (stern culture has recently reached the scientific and technical civilization and such a civilization has given rise to the division of the entire world into two blocs and there lies a naught abyss between them. Such a situation surely means the terminated technical civilization of the Western Europe and it's necessarily required for a high dimensional new universal culture to conquer it to be formed, without confluence of the two sources… both materialistic and spiritual cultures in Occident and Orient, there may be no formation of such a culture. Such a formation should be based on the new consciousness of the origin and principle of deploying process of the world, and they are the principal issue of metaphysics and religion for revolution. It is the object of this issue to form an estimate of the propriety of the Unification Church recently having been boldly trying to revolutionize a religion for the redemption of the modern people. The present writer is neither a theologian nor a member of the Church. So I previously excuse myself, to have inquired into the principal matters of the Church which are revolutionary from the viewpoint of political philosophy.

2. Necessity of the religious revolution

It can and should be the essential qualities of a religion to make a redemption of the populace in illusion and distress, quite different from political or economical ones. The redemption by means of religion could be no other than the relief of the multitudes by dint of faith and reliance on the Absolute Cause. The Absolute Being stands aloof from the history and various phenomena in the historical course are the manifested of Him, there can be no change in Himself, whereas a religion itself is one of the cultural forms of mankind and can't be out of historical and relative one, because the Almighty does not manifest Himself but does His lateral appearance for the basis according to the shape of human culture. In fact, during the long period of history, every new historical age has been forced to be accompanied by the new interpretation of the Absolute, so the revolution has been necessarily required for clearing accounts of the religious forms. For example, the end of the mediaeval feudal age, coming to near, the feudal form of Christianity was sublated through the Reformation, Protestantism by Martin Luther(1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564) giving rise to new Biblical interpretation and renewed manifestation of God an. Christ. In India, coming to appear since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), Swami Dayananda Serasavati (1824-1833), and Ramakrishna Parama (1834-1886) carried out the revolution of Hinduism. And Mohammedanism was revolutionized by the great religious leaders named Sir Syed Ahmad Kahn (1817 -- 1898), and Sir Mohammed Iqbal (1873-1938). Now we are in the historical age of Copernican change calling for another revolution of a religion. The agitation and denial of conviction and valuable system in the modern world have been made since long time ago. Historically considering, the communist theory based on the dialectical materialism by Karl Marx (1818-1883), Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) and Nikolai Lenin (1870-1924) brought the division and confrontation to the modern world denying various theism and religions. Meanwhile there has come to appear a philosophy named existentialism to make a formation of new system of faith, entirely denying the systems of faith and value of the modern world, and particularly Nihilism persisted by Friedrich Nietzsche(1844-1900) may well be the typical one.

Nietzsche regards the democratic morals in the modern society as a vulgar and slavery one seized by the utility and said that the New Testament could be nothing but a gospel only for the weakened and Christianity would finally come to make mankind decadent and go to ruin and even insisted a God's death. We can easily find out another part of the existential philosophy in Karl Jaspers (1833 --), and he tries to shape a system of faith and value of today in the mass-society. He persists on recovering personal subjectivity buried in the mass-society, outcome of the present scientific civilization. Differentiated mechanical labor, and horizontally generalized sense of life by means of rapid spread of mass communication such as goods, papers, magazines, radios and televisions -- standardized living implements are the critical feature of the mass-society, so there may be no recovering the human subjectivity without overcoming this. Then what can be the process for its recovery? According to jaspers, man, a current being seeks after the ordinary, but breaking through such a current dimension, man comes into the dimension of consciousness, and here there will be told the universal truth, but it will be obstruct one and not realistic, so man enters the spiritual dimension jumping out of the conscious one. The spiritual dimension is one in which a dialectical self-identity of individuality and the whole is settled. However, from the viewpoint of spiritual dimension, the person is the irrational, and not comprised to the whole. Hereupon, human being comes into the existential dimension, breaking through the spiritual one. The existence standing above the spiritual dimension comes to meet the Super Being including all the beings, but the transcendent is the Absolute unidentifiable symmetrically or objectively. Thus the existential philosophy by Jaspers which has come to the theistic one, could make clear the religious existence of the insecure and lonely, and no God's truth which can stand aloof from the uneasy social contradiction has been made clear, because not a mere theistic philosophy can be religious principle able to overcome to worldwide uneasiness. Such a religious principle can be set up only based on the principle of creation realized through the inter-supplementary unity of the Orientalism and the traditional Occidentalism with the existential philosophy as its turning point, that is to say, such a new religious principle should be deployed in high dimension sublating the established religious thoughts in the Orient and Occident. From such a viewpoint, hereupon it is required for the principle of creation of the Unification Church to be studied.

(To be continued) 

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