Confessing Evangelical

Prompted by my second book tag post, I've started re-reading Henri Blocher's book on Genesis 1-3, In the Beginning. I described this as "very French ... in a good way", and this recollection was confirmed when I turned to the opening sentences of the book (p.15).

Is it just me, or is there something very ... French ... about this opening? Mind you, I love the two opening sentences (highlighted):

Curiosity about our beginnings continues to haunt the human race. It will not call off the quest for its origins. One might have thought that "future shock" would divert it and that, by adopting a "prospective" attitude, modern man would no longer be interested in anything but the future.

Far from it. Mircea Eliade has seen clearly that the enormous historiographical task that has been going on since the last century is another form of the old search. "There is a veritable recuperation of the past, even of our primeval past," he writes, by which man "protects himself against the pressure of contemporary History", and he is doing an anamnesis comparable to a return by psychoanalysis to the events of early childhood.¹

Futurology is mirrored by archaeology, whose popularity remains unabated. And what is the most up-to-date way of explaining what happens to things? You consider their beginning, whereas Aristotle considered their end!

¹ Mircea Eliade, Aspects du mythe (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), pp.167ff.