We are part of the universe. We cannot stand above it to get a bird's eye view. We can transcend it in our minds. But never completely. For our minds are also conditioned by many limits.

(a) Our five senses are not equipped to take in all the data in the universe. A dog sees and hears different things which we don't see or hear. There are radio waves in this room which our sense equipment does not pick up, but an ordinary radio can pick up and transmit to our ears as sound waves. In fact, with all our sophisticated scientific equipment and technology, we have access only to a very tiny segment of the spectrum of reality. We see reality only “as through a glass, darkly.”

(b) Our culture limits our perception. Our ways of looking at and understanding reality is severely conditioned by our cultural traditions, linguistic habits, our educational system by our historical experiences, by our geographical location, by our science and technology, by our religious heritage, and so on.

(c) Our perception is also limited by our interests. We perceive more readily what is useful to us. If there is a gold coin and a piece of tin lying on the floor, we are more likely to perceive the gold rather than the tin. If making money is our main interest, then we will readily perceive the easier ways of gaining profit, and our admiration will be for those who are making piles of money. If power is our main interest, the powerful and their acts will be the ready objects of our perception. If you are a capitalist, you are likely to see more easily the obstacles to the development of capital and profit, rather than the problems faced by the poor. Our interest determines our perception and we cannot see some things in the world, because to see them in their true light would demand some difficult and radical changes in our own attitudes and actions. My perception of the world may not agree in all respects with yours, for my cultural tradition as well as my interests may not be the same as those of some of you.

We can see the universe as composed of inter-related objects in space, beginning with the galaxies of space coming to our own star, the sun, and our own planet, the earth, and our own continent, country, town, village, home. etc. This is the spatial view of the universe -the universe of physical scientists for the last several centuries.

More recently, especially as a result of the Hegelian philosophical tradition. we have come to see the universe, not as a series of objects, but as a series of inter-locking events. Each event is a unit of reality related to both past and future events. The event is the stage in which the objects and persons play out the drama, and all events together constitute a process. This view has been popularized by thinkers like Bergson, Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin. We will call it the temporal view of the universe. Historical understanding and Process Philosophy prefer this framework for looking at the universe. This is the view today of the social sciences.

A Christian view must take into account the views of both the physical sciences and the social sciences. But that is not sufficient. In certain circles of western thought, there is growing up a new framework, which comes closer to the Christian understanding of reality. And this framework is of primary significance. Most of our world analyses, while sophisticated and complex within their own framework, show the limits of the framework which does not allow all the data being taken into account.

This new framework is provided by a confluence of several fields of new biological research. Prof. Burr of Yale was one of the early pioneers. much misunderstood by his contemporaries, of the line that life itself was a field of forces* an interdependent system of force fields. Many of these forces we do not as yet know very much about, but have evidence enough to suspect that they are impinging upon us.

A human being is not simply put together with three components called body, mind and Spirit, but is himself or herself a force-field which inter-acts with other force-fields. But so are animals, plants, all living things. The development of Kirlian photography in the Soviet-Union and ongoing research in what they call ‘Bioplasmic Energy’ in the Soviet-Union, has made it possible to perceive that there is in each living being a field of energy which grows and develops and changes in inter-action with other force-fields in the universe. The genes and chromosomes direct this energy in a particular direction of growth, but not the only determinant. The whole environment, with various known and unknown force-fields, interacts with the force-field of each unit in it. These force-field and their mutual interaction are not completely predetermined. The forces which we call consciousness and will are also components of this system of inter-action of force-fields.

It is very important to get this perception right, because it provides a more comprehensive framework for our ‘World Overview’. I cannot go into detail here, but proceed from this to a Christian theological perspective which helps us to see the world from the perspective of the faith.

Again one goes into short-hand to provide the rough outline of this Christian perception of reality. We posit the following basic force fields which constitute reality.

This is the fundamental reality from which all created reality flows and on which everything else is dependent. We say that it is God Who, without Himself being caused, is the cause and ground of all. He not only ‘called’ the creation into being from non-being; He directs its movement forward to its fulfillment, gives the energy for that forward movement, and takes the universe to its goal. Without the guiding and sustaining force-field of the energeia of God, nothing can exist, and all that exists will go back to nothing when it falls outside this force-field of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This is the realm where our science explores the reality and its inter-relationships. Science is also a growing and changing body of knowledge. No philosopher of science worth his salt can today say that it is a body of proved knowledge. All they can say is that this body of knowledge stands up fairly well to certain reality tests and are therefore helpful for our understanding of that reality and for the development of a technology that allows us to control, transform, manipulate and use that reality for our own purposes. Science does not reveal to us the whole of reality. It helps us to uncover certain hidden aspects of the inter-relation between various sub-fields of energy (matter and life in there various manifestations). Matter, too, is a field of energy, we know now. So is life, as also consciousness and will.

As it expresses itself in person and community, in society and history. This human creation is the area where freedom, which is God - bestowed in creation, most clearly manifests itself, at least from our own perspective. The human mind or consciousness and will, which is itself more than just the activity of the brain, cannot be located in any part of the human body. It is an aspect of the forcefield that constitutes us as human beings, and has its own freedom, within limits, to choose, to understand, to will. to image, to create, to transform. It is an important concern of Christians that all humanity is able to develop to the full this freedom. But it can be developed only when that which stands in its way is removed.

This force of evil, generated in freedom by the creation itself, contradicts and seeks to countervail the power of being and the good given to the creation by its Creator. This force-field is operative, Christians believe, not only in each human being; it is operative also in the institutions and structures of society; it works even in organic and inorganic matter, for we see that everything in creation is subject to non-being, driving everything towards disintegration, decay and death. This universe now open to our senses is subject to death and decay. It is not permanent. If it is to endure, it has to be different, not subject to Carnot's Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all things are energy-fields giving out the finite amount of energy contained in them and moving towards the “stable equilibrium” of death and inert non-being. St. Paul says the same thing in Romans 8: 21, when he says that the creation itself shall be liberated from the slavery to decay and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We would be making a big mistake in our World Overview if we assumed that it is in this world of time as we now experience it that evil shall be finally overcome. The ultimate overcoming of evil demands a reconstitution of our world at all levels. Matter itself will have to be reconstituted in the New Heaven and the New Earth. so that it no longer obeys Carnot’s Second Law, but is able to endure for ever as a non~disintegrating force-field.

We must also not make the other mistake in our World Overview that because in history the good will always be mixed with evil, therefore we can do nothing about it. Our business in history is to carry on the struggle against evil, to overcome evil by the good.

The final overcoming of evil is, however, assured. It is assured because Christ is risen. Death, who ruled as king in our little world has been overcome. He has lost his universal triumph. “Where, o death, is Thy victory?” “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15: 54) when Christ tasted death and broke its fetters by rising from the dead. The power of the Risen Christ is the place where we see the uncreated force-field of the Triune God. And the created forcefield of the human energy come together into an ineffable union for the redemption of this death-bound universe. This new force-field of the Incarnate Christ is also operative in our world, redeeming it, saving it, taking it from death to life, from evil to good, from nonbeing to being. We Christians are privileged to be conscious of the mystery of the Incarnate Christ’s presence in the world, and are (ought to be) ourselves manifestations of that Incarnate Presence. This is the new dispensation of the Holy Spirit. where the life-giving, form-creating, liberating, personal power of God operates through a new divine-human community called the Church. Despite all her failures, despite all her atrocious betrayals of her Lord, despite all her lethargy and indifference, despite all her desire for power and glory, for comfort and popularity. she continues in a mysterious way, to be the bearer of the redeeming power of Christ. Without any civil or economic power, or despite her misuse of civil and economic power, she is a force-field in which the power of the incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended Christ, the power of the new economy of the Spirit, operates in a mysterious way to bring the creation to its fulfilment and destiny. The mystery is in the ineffable way in which both the uncreated divine and created human force-field's work together in a synergism which we believe but cannot understand.

Our faith affirms that the drama of history is larger than the stage of history that we can see with our senses. The author of Ephesians tells us of powers and forces “in the heavenlies” (3:10) who are involved, negatively and positively, in our historical struggle. As the Jerusalem English Bible puts it: “The sovereignties and powers should learn, only now through the Church, how comprehensive God's wisdom really is, exactly according to the plan which he had had from all eternity in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph. 3:10-11). On the one hand, “it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle, but against the sovereignties and the powers who originate darkness in this world, the spiritual army of evil in the heavens” (Eph. 6:12). On the other hand, the heavenly ‘cloud of witnesses on every side of us, invisible but operative, are engaged with us in the same struggle of good and evil, between being and non-being, between life and death. Christians can subscribe to no world overview that disregards or overlooks this dimension of the process of the universe.

This, I submit, is the hasty sketch of the framework within which we must view the world, neither a three-storey framework of hell, earth and heaven, nor a secular framework which takes history as self-contained, self-generating and autonomous. All six aspects are important.

{* Burr, The Fields of Life.}

[Written by  His Grace Dr. Paulose Mar Gregorios - Outstanding scholar, theologian, philosopher, polyglot and man of letters. Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios sought to bring together in a holistic vision, several unrelated disciplines like philosophy, economics, political science, medicine, education, physics and theology.

Born in 1922 at Tripunithura, Kerala, the great scholar bishop had his earlier stints in his homestate as a journalist and postal service employee. He proceeded to Ethiopia in 1947 accepting the job of a teacher there and in course of time became the Special Secretary to Emperor Haillie Sellasi. He had an exceptional educational career in Yale, Princeton and Oxford Universities. Returning to Kerala, he was ordained as a priest of the Orthodox Church. In 1967 Fr. Paul Verghese became the Principal of the Orthodox Theological Seminary. In 1975, he was elevated as a bishop. Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios took charge of the Delhi Diocese of the Orthodox Church in July 1975.

Honours came unsought to Mar Gregorios. He had the good fortune to be the President of the World Council of Churches and the Indian Philosophical Congress. In 1988, he received the Soviet Land Nehru Award. His Grace travelled widely and showed an unusual intellectual courage to explore new paradigms in human thinking. He was visiting professor in several universities like the J. N.U. in New Delhi. The philosopher-bishop passed away on 24th November 1996 and his mortal remains lie entombed in the Orthodox Seminary Chapel, Kottayam.

Mar Gregorios has authored more than 50 books. The Joy of Freedom, Freedom of Man, The Cosmic Man, The Human Presence, Enlightenment East and West, A Light Too Bright and the spiritual autobiography Love’s Freedom: The Grand Mystery are some of the most remarkable among these. Hundreds of his articles and lectures have been published in leading newspapers, and international magazines.

It is 24 years since HG Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios departed from us. His absence has created an emptiness that remains unattended or unsolved in our intellectual and spiritual scenarios.

Mar Gregorios, to this world, has been a great gift of God, in particular to India and the Malankara Church. However, it is a sad state of affairs that we have so far not been successful in forming a comprehensive biography of such a great man. We have not been successful so far, in collecting and publishing articles of His Grace, exceeding a thousand.

It is under such circumstances, Gregory of India Study Centre and Sophia Books have joined hands to do and execute whatever of relevance is possible in this area. In this volume, we have compiled a collection of some of the English writings of HG Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios who has his name all over the world as a Philosopher, a Theologian and a Scholar.

Most of the Gregorian writings in English stand collected, but we could publish only very few of them. There are many enthusiasts in contemporary days looking forward to see them published, as Gregorian thoughts are becoming more and more relevant.  Therefore, Gregory of India Study Centre is taking up this challenge as its mission.

We have attempted to publish many Gregorian writings in the past, not even bothering about copyright issues, on our conviction that they are assets of humankind in their entirety. Readers may recall our publications of the English volume authored by the Metropolitan namely, ‘The Faith of Our Fathers’ in 1996. Likewise, a Malayalam book ‘Matham, Marxism, Mathanirapekshatha’ came up in 1998 and a compilation of his Malayalam writings in four volumes.

His Grace was too tired a few months before he left us, but we were fortunate to have an interview then. During this interview, we expressed our concern that the persons holding responsible positions were not too keen to publish His Grace’s writings. His response to our concern appeared quite straight: “I don’t think I am going to show any interest in seeing my writings published. Let anyone who realizes their value publish them at their convenience.” Indeed, these words of His Grace enlightened us to take up these sorts of challenges without foreseeing consequences thereof.

His Grace Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios had a strong faith in his God who fed Prophet Elijah with Bread and Meat sent through a raven (1 Kings 17:4–6). We too wish that we might utilize our prudentially gifted talents that God takes us forward mysteriously. We thirst for Divine interference that impossibilities turn possibilities. As we experience the abundant inflow of God’s mercy these days, we are venturing to publish this volume courageously as we experience the Blessings of L/L His Grace in this endeavour.

We look forward to guide the readers making an entry into the world of Gregorian thought processes and that this volume ends up as a pointer for readers to understand this man and thinker Paulos Mar Gregorios. We are aware that our endeavour to introduce the philosophical insights of His Grace to humankind can never substitute the affection and love we experienced from His Grace. Yet, we present this enlightenment from the writings of His Grace to our generations, present and future, transcended by His Grace among co creations as the twilight of Divine Glory.

We are a bit perturbed with the financial burden associated with this challenge; however, we foresee batches of research scholars, keen and enthusiastic to learn the life and vision of Gregory of India. That ends up as our profit. Thanks to all.] Compiled and prepared by Joice Thottackad