If any ques­tion still lingers in us in this world of uncer­tainty, let us put two of them into words once more! What is the cos­mic or meta­phys­ic­al hori­zon of earthly exist­ence, for the indi­vidu­al and for the whole of human­ity? What is the role of reli­gion in the post­mod­ern age? The lac­on­ic answer: Decay and Ascent, and the way out…

Decay and Ascent

Like a spell­bound prey-mouse, man stands frozen in the beam of the time-ser­pent's mes­mer­ising gaze, and so awaits his des­tiny. In vain the seem­ingly self-for­get­ful activ­ity or the fever­ish zeal, in vain the joy of mov­ing from place to place on a plan­et grown small; intel­lec­tu­ally and spir­itu­ally, man for the most part marks time on the spot. Hustle and bustle and frozen idle­ness alike are strategies for escap­ing decay. If the uni­verse is head­ing towards anni­hil­a­tion, then Space­ship Earth and man, trav­el­ling aboard it, are no excep­tion to this law. A squandered life is head­ing towards decay. Against mater­i­al­ism's fatal notion of anni­hil­a­tion, spir­itu­al­ity offers quite other hori­zons. The Neo­pla­ton­ist Plotinus, for example, declares in the Enneads: ‘Life is the energy of the spir­it’ (VI.9.17.), ‘the energy of the Good, bounded by the spir­it’ (VI.7.21.6.), and so we may rightly assume that life has a sub­lime task: its rein­teg­ra­tion into this high­er spir­itu­al order. Numeni­us, in turn, quotes Plotinus's mas­ter, Ammoni­us: ‘the body does not over­come (the soul), but she over­comes it, not as if she were in the body as in a sack, but rather the body is in the soul’. (Plotinus: De nat. hom. 3.8.600.3.) This mil­len­nia-old thought chimes with the view of the Indi­an teach­er Swami Vivekananda, that man is a soul who has a body rather than merely a body that may at times have a soul as well.

The Way Out

It is as if man had fallen into a trap. Or into a maze, a far more relent­less struc­ture than the labyrinth. The aim of the labyrinth is not to lose the way but to reach the centre, to pass through the trans­form­a­tion that hap­pens there, and then to come out again into the open, but now as a fuller human being, as the ini­ti­ated con­quer­or of the prim­al fear of dark­ness.

In the labyrinth the first task is to fol­low with trust and cour­age, walk­ing the path to its end. The second, and per­haps the most fear­ful, task is to reach the centre. The centre has a single call­ing: to lead man on until his own inner tur­moil, his fears, his inner dark­ness are dis­solved. Here man cries out into the dark – into the dark­ness of his own sub­con­scious – that there is no mon­ster, no demon, there is only light. Of course, at the centre of the labyrinth this is still only a hope, not a cer­tainty. It becomes real­ity when man sets out for the exit and, hold­ing the golden thread of the god­dess's provid­ence in his hand, walks the path now in the oppos­ite dir­ec­tion and finds his way out again into the day­light. This is the labyrinth's third call­ing. Then the words that a moment ago were only a hope become real­ity: There is no dark­ness! And man, reborn with his insights and real­isa­tion, finds his way back to his bet­ter self, to him­self. Such is an ini­ti­ation of a high order…

Reli­gion, broadly speak­ing, ought to serve as this way out. It is not social good works, not civic engage­ment, not the tend­ing of cul­tur­al val­ues or mere moral edu­ca­tion that is the task of reli­gion, but show­ing forth meta­phys­ic­al real­ity and help­ing those who prac­tise it reach the goal. This task holds true in the post­mod­ern age as well.