CONTRA FATUM

”All the evils, and I choose my words carefully, all the evils of the world stem from our taking ourselves to be the Creator. Some, as warriors, transform the planet through their flashing conquests. Others, as dictators, shape a society. But the image always remains the same: a hand that molds a shapeless hunk of clay. We give glory to the creator of a state, a new order, or an empire, but also to the scientist who takes himself for the Creator – even though he inevitably ends up with the atomic bomb. Every time you take yourself to be a creator (even as an artist!), you become a destroyer, an annihilator. [...] [but] Every human work created in silence, discretion, and humility (in the image of the Creator, who works incognito!) is positive, useful, and life-giving. Every work of power, in which a person takes himself for a creator, becomes a work of emptiness that produces emptiness.” (Ellul, Reason for Being, p. 281)

"[...] man was brought into the world last after the creation, not being rejected to the last as worthless, but as one whom it behoved to be king over his subjects at his very birth. And as a good host does not bring his guest to his house before the preparation of his feast, but, when he has made all due preparation, and decked with their proper adornments his house, his couches, his table, brings his guest home when things suitable for his refreshment are in readiness,—in the same manner the rich and munificent Entertainer of our nature, when He had decked the habitation with beauties of every kind, and prepared this great and varied banquet, then introduced man, assigning to him as his task not the acquiring of what was not there, but the enjoyment of the things which were there; and for this reason He gives him as foundations the instincts of a twofold organization, blending the Divine with the earthy, that by means of both he may be naturally and properly dispos...