New #7 (War)

On the seventh day, when God rested, creation itself should have been safe, preserved in the rhythm of divine completion. Yet it is precisely in this pause that humanity revealed its paradox: the only being capable not merely of inhabiting the world, but of undoing it. The same hands that plant seeds also strike the match; the same mind that shapes cathedrals and sonatas engineers weapons of unspeakable ruin. No other creature carries within its essence this impulse toward self-erasure.
 
The ancients already glimpsed this abyss. Sophocles, in "Oedipus at Colonus", calls man “deinotaton” — the most uncanny, the most terrible. For he alone bends nature to his will, yet cannot master the fury within himself. Centuries later, Nietzsche declared that “man is the sick animal,” diseased not only in body but in his very drive for transcendence, his hunger to overcome nature at any cost. And Dostoevsky, in "Notes from Underground", reminds us that even when man is offered paradise, he will sabotage it — out of spite, out of freedom, out of the perverse ecstasy of proving himself capable of destruction.
 
This capacity for self-destruction is not accidental, but constitutive. To be human is to be divided against oneself: to long for permanence yet secretly crave the fall, to erect towers while yearning to see them collapse. As Rilke wrote, “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,” and perhaps what terrifies us most is our own reflection — the knowledge that in our creativity lurks the seed of undoing.
One might call this the “metaphysics of ruin.” On the seventh day, God rested, but man did not. Restless, he took up the unfinished role of creator, yet with each act of making came the shadow of unmaking.
 
And yet, paradoxically, this self-destructive tendency may also be the engine of renewal. From the ruins rise new myths, new forms, new possibilities. The same impulse that tears down also clears the ground for beginnings. Still, the question remains: is this a cycle of tragic creativity, or a path toward final annihilation? If God’s rest was trust in creation’s endurance, man’s unrest is a testament to his refusal to let anything — even himself — endure unchanged.