Quotes - God is a flower born on a grave

God is a flower born on a grave.

I do not write to be remembered, but so that oblivion may be sufficiently fertile. And if this essay were to be forgotten in turn, in the same way that we have forgotten and buried the primordial religions of the Middle East, in the same way that we will one day bury today's religions, if only a single sentence were to remain, an ancient whisper in the ears of future generations, I would like them to hear this: God is a flower born on a grave.

God is ongoing.

What we call God is not an answer from above, but the echo of a thrust from below. We seek God less than God—understood as life's potential for self-transcendence—seeks itself in us.

God is a biological response erected into revelation.

Life through humanity—defined as a breach between the real and the conceptual—fertilizes the infinite, and God is the name we give to this gestation.

It is the glimmer of a God not ancient but becoming, a God who begs you to let him live and whose invisible lips brush against your ears.

God is the sum of our renunciations. He is everything that man has forgotten, sacrificed to become an efficiently hideous being, to become the Second Man.

Transcendence is merely the awareness of a breach in the real, an attractive fiction through which immanence projects itself further.

We are not chasing a mirage: we run, and our running draws the face of what did not exist before us.

Gods die so that gods may be born, each cycle establishes a new relationship with the world; to forget this law is to operate it, to erase it precipitates a new age.

The One represents the merciless revenge of Cronos: not only has he silenced his peers, but he forbids even the idea that another god might yet be born. In staying Abraham's knife, he does not save Isaac; he preserves the human soil and the cycle of generations that brings him forth.

To learn, said Plato, is not to acquire something new, but to remember what the soul already knew before its birth. The Socratic 'know thyself' is an archaeology of the self: to dig within oneself to rediscover the universal. 'Forget thyself' is an archaeology of the divine: to bury the self to let the other-than-self grow.

To forget in order to remember differently: such is the revelation, not the discovery of God, but the experience of becoming the place where God seeks to be born.

Yahweh is the greatest stroke of genius of a magnificent lie and the height of oblivion: having made us forget that He himself is the product of oblivion.

Man is the unexpected flaw between the terrestrial and the stars.

Man is the derivative function of life—that transformation operator which emerges from the biological while acquiring its own laws—and God is the tangent, that ideal line which, touching the human, launches itself toward the infinite of possibilities.

The human spirit is to the cosmos what the wing is to the sky, what the foot is to the earth, what the fin is to the water.

Among the unspeakable accidents of evolution that have projected species toward new horizons, Man is the one who has landed, despite himself, in the curious world of concepts—an animal in search of balance and truths suspended in the vertigo between his finitude and the infinite.

I do not write for those who seek God, but for those in whom God still seeks itself.

From gene to man, from the original soup of the depths to the most distant cosmos, each level of existence is both dependent on and blind to what it engenders, and it is precisely this groping blindness that makes emergence possible.

Between life and God, there are not only beliefs and prayers. There is the emergence of systems that crown humanity: art, music, sciences, literature brush human experience to draw further.

The true mystery is not God, but this vital force that passes through our minds to make them a sounding board probing the cosmos.

Our attraction to adventure, our desires for escape, our dreams of grandeur, of space conquest, are life's impulses to tear itself from terrestrial anchorage.

For God is the vital impulse beyond biology, that irrepressible force that projects us toward the infinite.

Life dreams through us. And this dream, from the origin, says only one thing: life seeks an exit.

Faith is an interior battlefield, where the anguish of the ephemeral transforms into creative force, where the soul draws from the abysses of the imaginary to forge the ultimate ambition: to give birth to God.

Like Iapetus, the Titan father of Atlas and Prometheus, grandfather of humanity (whose name means in Greek 'he who precipitates'); like Japheth (whose name means in Hebrew 'he who opens himself to the world'), son of Noah and father of nations; these two false twins illustrate spiritual selection in action: man opens himself to the world by precipitating meaning, and precipitates meaning to open the world.

The sacred does not spring from a presence (divine), but from an absence (the dead).

It is not man who invokes God. It is God who begs us to exist.

True invocation is not merely a cry launched toward the horizon of infinite progress. To invoke is first to remember oblivion. It is to fall silent, to listen toward what has not been transmitted. It is to refuse the deafness of the present.

Always remember the oldest and most beautiful form of human invocation: music. Not that of hymns. Not that of ceremonies. Remember the music that springs forth when we have nothing left, when we have lost everything, the one that carries the soul above chaos, that impulse which precedes the note.

Nothing is born from the formaldehyde of certainties.

The sacred is a plasticity that man strives to make into dogma.

We carry within us truths and beliefs greater than ourselves, which sometimes crush us with all they do not say.

The sword without altar rusts, The altar without sword crumbles to dust.

This original gesture persists in certain traditions, but its cycle is broken: the dead no longer give fertile sheaves to the living; the living place an ephemeral bouquet on the graves.

History is not written by victors, but by mushrooms, bacteria, worms, by the minuscule and invisible world of springtails, by everything that decomposes, digests, transforms.

The tragic irony of Antiquity is having missed its greatest prophecy: a future that no longer dreams.

Between Man and the Second Man, between he who dies in the dream of a God to come and he who faces awake the void of its absence, when the dream ceases to pass through us: thus die the prophecies.

We must imagine Prometheus not as a brilliant hero, but as an exhausted titan, dreaming of dying as a man and being forgotten.

We mourn far more than billions of dead, than the definitive loss of our history: we mourn a future without memory. From having fed the servers, only ashes remain on a ground of silicon and burned plastic.

Here we are, orphans of Joseph as of Freud, delivered to the lean cows of the Anthropocene. Signs no longer matter. Famines, droughts, pandemics have become a series of data to be processed by analysts for whom the symbolic and the sacred are neither modelable nor exploitable. So here is the result: a reality that burns our eyes makes us react less than an omen of fire once did.

The cradle is empty.

The history of the Second Man henceforth? A cosmic menopause. Prepare the coffins. Soon will come mourning.

In memory of the Anthropocene, the Time of Our Own arrives.

Civilizations are arteries bleeding toward the stars.

Walk among the ruins of Karnak, Delphi, Babylon, Rome. Everywhere, in the cracks of temples, whisper the murdered gods.

True power is that which, having made the world tremble, consents to rot in silence.

Josiah does not discover Deuteronomy: he precipitates its revelation into his kingdom through worship, transforming a text into destiny. His liturgy is the art of saturating the collective 'substance'. Socrates does not receive the truth from the oracle that designates him the wisest man in the world: he precipitates its meaning into the city through questioning, transforming an enigma into method. His maieutics is the art of obtaining the 'precipitate' of the individual.

The purpose of this essay is precisely to think about our responsibility for the emergence of the divine.

This essay states no truth; it speculates based on the law of humus—the process by which fertile oblivion regenerates meaning and the sacred—and on the law of spiritual selection which forges and breaks beliefs according to whether they allow life to take root in the cosmos.

The Anthropocene is defined here less as the moment when man becomes a geological force than as the shift from the founding myth of Oedipus to that of Cronos: from the son who blinds himself facing the weight of the past, to the father who stifles the future to remain sole master of a world without a god to be born.

We seek God less than God—understood as life's potential for self-transcendence—seeks itself in us.

Everything that refuses to rot under the air of time ends up rotting from within and breeds the worst diseases.

The Anthropocene is not merely a contraction of natural and spiritual selections: it is the troubled and painful womb of a divine future struggling to be born.

The internalization of the sacred is a perilous balance. The divine that germinates within us can nourish or poison.

Great thinkers are often the ironic midwives of the divinity they claim to bury.