Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

23

dialectic in time. His thesis, antithesis and synthesis are in succession. It is concerned with history, but not with the three states of consciousness or the threefold nature of man. Christian doctrine deals with the threefold nature of Man and of God, and is concerned with history.

Mitrinovié’s notion of the Three Revelations followed from his realisation of the organic connection between the triune revelation of the Vedanta simultaneously in space, that of Hegel successively in time and that of Christian doctrine in both space and time. To those who see this connection the three revelations can be shown as relatable and as simultaneously valid, though they happened in succession. And they can be seen as a means of containing conflicting points of view within a single whole. They represent three different but equally necessary approaches to reality. Their significance for the ordering of mankind is that they represent three major world views, each of which is held today by a very large proportion of the world’s population.

Their comprehensiveness can be illustrated imaginatively by the symbolism of the circle, which consists of circumference, centre and radius. The circumference, representing the whole, typifies the first revelation, the view of which is total and a-centric, looking at life and the world more from a cosmic view than from that of the individual. The centre is the essential Christian view, looking from the central event in human development of the incarnation of God in a single Man, and so emphasising the significance of the individual person. The third revelation can be thought of in terms of the radius. There is in a circle an indefinitely large number of radii relating the centre and the circumference, which may respectively be regarded as the ideals of the individual and the world whole. On each of these radii is an indefinitely large number of points, which can be taken to represent individual persons. Each of these is the potential centre of a circle which may expand towards the universality of the whole, though only from one centre can the whole universality of the circumference be reached. This is clearly representative of the third revelation, of which the essence is not just the individual, but the inter-relationship between many individuals. This revelation does not supersede the other two, for without the centre and the circumference there would be no circle.

Everyone throughout the world tends to view life more from one of these three points of view, the collective, the individual, or the inter-relatedness of individuals. They regard the point of view to which they incline as the right _ one. But it is also possible, while being more sympathetic to one view rather than the others, to recognise the validity of the other two. And there is yet a