The Return from Rome

133:5.1They shortly ar­rived at the olden cen­ter of Greek sci­ence and learn­ing, and Ga­nid was thrilled with the thought of be­ing in Athens, of be­ing in Greece, the cul­tural cen­ter of the one­time Alexan­drian em­pire, which had ex­tended its bor­ders even to his own land of In­dia. There was lit­tle busi­ness to trans­act; so Gonod spent most of his time with Je­sus and Ga­nid, vis­it­ing the many points of in­ter­est and lis­ten­ing to the in­ter­est­ing dis­cus­sions of the lad and his ver­sa­tile teacher.

133:5.2A great uni­ver­sity still thrived in Athens, and the trio made fre­quent vis­its to its halls of learn­ing. Je­sus and Ga­nid had thor­oughly dis­cussed the teach­ings of Plato when they at­tended the lec­tures in the mu­seum at Alexan­dria. They all en­joyed the art of Greece, ex­am­ples of which were still to be found here and there about the city.

133:5.3Both the fa­ther and the son greatly en­joyed the dis­cus­sion on sci­ence which Je­sus had at their inn one evening with a Greek philoso­pher. Af­ter this pedant had talked for al­most three hours, and when he had fin­ished his dis­course, Je­sus, in terms of mod­ern thought, said:

133:5.4Sci­en­tists may some day mea­sure the en­ergy, or force man­i­fes­ta­tions, of grav­i­ta­tion, light, and elec­tric­ity, but these same sci­en­tists can never (sci­en­tif­i­cally) tell you what these uni­verse phe­nom­ena are. Sci­ence deals with phys­i­cal-en­ergy ac­tiv­i­ties; re­li­gion deals with eter­nal val­ues. True phi­los­o­phy grows out of the wis­dom which does its best to cor­re­late these quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive ob­ser­va­tions. There al­ways ex­ists the dan­ger that the purely phys­i­cal sci­en­tist may be­come af­flicted with math­e­mat­i­cal pride and sta­tis­ti­cal ego­tism, not to men­tion spir­i­tual blind­ness.

133:5.5Logic is valid in the ma­te­rial world, and math­e­mat­ics is re­li­able when lim­ited in its ap­pli­ca­tion to phys­i­cal things; but nei­ther is to be re­garded as wholly de­pend­able or in­fal­li­ble when ap­plied to life prob­lems. Life em­braces phe­nom­ena which are not wholly ma­te­rial. Arith­metic says that, if one man could shear a sheep in ten min­utes, ten men could shear it in one minute. That is sound math­e­mat­ics, but it is not true, for the ten men could not so do it; they would get in one an­other’s way so badly that the work would be greatly de­layed.

133:5.6Math­e­mat­ics as­serts that, if one per­son stands for a cer­tain unit of in­tel­lec­tual and moral value, ten per­sons would stand for ten times this value. But in deal­ing with hu­man per­son­al­ity it would be nearer the truth to say that such a per­son­al­ity as­so­ci­a­tion is a sum equal to the square of the num­ber of per­son­al­i­ties con­cerned in the equa­tion rather than the sim­ple arith­meti­cal sum. A so­cial group of hu­man be­ings in co-or­di­nated work­ing har­mony stands for a force far greater than the sim­ple sum of its parts.

133:5.7Quan­tity may be iden­ti­fied as a fact, thus be­com­ing a sci­en­tific uni­for­mity. Qual­ity, be­ing a mat­ter of mind in­ter­pre­ta­tion, rep­re­sents an es­ti­mate of val­ues, and must, there­fore, re­main an ex­pe­ri­ence of the in­di­vid­ual. When both sci­ence and re­li­gion be­come less dog­matic and more tol­er­ant of crit­i­cism, phi­los­o­phy will then be­gin to achieve unity in the in­tel­li­gent com­pre­hen­sion of the uni­verse.

133:5.8There is unity in the cos­mic uni­verse if you could only dis­cern its work­ings in ac­tu­al­ity. The real uni­verse is friendly to ev­ery child of the eter­nal God. The real prob­lem is: How can the fi­nite mind of man achieve a log­i­cal, true, and cor­re­spond­ing unity of thought? This uni­verse-know­ing state of mind can be had only by con­ceiv­ing that the quan­ti­ta­tive fact and the qual­i­ta­tive value have a com­mon cau­sa­tion in the Par­a­dise Fa­ther. Such a con­cep­tion of re­al­ity yields a broader in­sight into the pur­pose­ful unity of uni­verse phe­nom­ena; it even re­veals a spir­i­tual goal of pro­gres­sive per­son­al­ity achieve­ment. And this is a con­cept of unity which can sense the un­chang­ing back­ground of a liv­ing uni­verse of con­tin­u­ally chang­ing im­per­sonal re­la­tions and evolv­ing per­sonal re­la­tion­ships.

133:5.9Mat­ter and spirit and the state in­ter­ven­ing be­tween them are three in­ter­re­lated and in­teras­so­ci­ated lev­els of the true unity of the real uni­verse. Re­gard­less of how di­ver­gent the uni­verse phe­nom­ena of fact and value may ap­pear to be, they are, af­ter all, uni­fied in the Su­preme.

133:5.10Re­al­ity of ma­te­rial ex­is­tence at­taches to un­rec­og­nized en­ergy as well as to vis­i­ble mat­ter. When the en­er­gies of the uni­verse are so slowed down that they ac­quire the req­ui­site de­gree of mo­tion, then, un­der fa­vor­able con­di­tions, these same en­er­gies be­come mass. And for­get not, the mind which can alone per­ceive the pres­ence of ap­par­ent re­al­i­ties is it­self also real. And the fun­da­men­tal cause of this uni­verse of en­ergy-mass, mind, and spirit, is eter­nal—it ex­ists and con­sists in the na­ture and re­ac­tions of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther and his ab­so­lute co-or­di­nates.

133:5.11They were all more than as­tounded at the words of Je­sus, and when the Greek took leave of them, he said: “At last my eyes have be­held a Jew who thinks some­thing be­sides racial su­pe­ri­or­ity and talks some­thing be­sides re­li­gion.” And they re­tired for the night.

133:5.12The so­journ in Athens was pleas­ant and prof­itable, but it was not par­tic­u­larly fruit­ful in its hu­man con­tacts. Too many of the Athe­ni­ans of that day were ei­ther in­tel­lec­tu­ally proud of their rep­u­ta­tion of an­other day or men­tally stupid and ig­no­rant, be­ing the off­spring of the in­fe­rior slaves of those ear­lier pe­ri­ods when there was glory in Greece and wis­dom in the minds of its peo­ple. Even then, there were still many keen minds to be found among the cit­i­zens of Athens.