Teilhard

[Guest guest]

>

>Dharma <deva

>Tue, 8 May 2001 08:13:57 -0700

> Teilhard

>

>[ Pere Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest, a geologist and

>paleontologist, and a member of the team that discovered Peking Man; his

>great work was _The Phenomenon of Man_. Here are some excerpts from the

>"Pensees," part of Teilhard's poetic _Hymn of the Universe_.]

>

> PENSEES

>

> 24

>Within a universe which is structurally convergent the only possible way

>for one element to draw closer to other, neighbouring elements is by

>condensing the cone: that is, by driving towards the point of convergence

>the whole area of the world in which it is involved. In such a system it is

>impossible to love one's neighbour without drawing close to God - and vice

>versa for that matter. This we know well enough. But it is also impossible

>- and this is less familiar to us - to love either God or our neighbour

>without being obliged to help in the progress of the earthly synthesis of

>spirit in its physical totality, for it is precisely the advances made in

>this movement of synthesis that permit us to draw close to one another and

>at the same time raise us up towards God. Thus, because we love, and in

>order to love more, we find ourselves happily reduced to sharing - we more

>and better than anyone - in all the struggles, all the anxieties, all the

>aspirations, and also all the affections, of the earth insofar as all these

>contain within them a principle of ascension and synthesis.

> This breadth of outlook does not involve any modification whatsoever of

>christian poverty of spirit [detachement]. But instead of 'leaving things

>behind' it carries them onwards; instead of cutting down it raises up: it

>is a question now not of a breaking-away but of a crossing-over, not a

>flight but an emergence. Without ceasing to be itseif, charity enlarges its

>scope to become an upward-lifting force, a common essence, at the heart of

>every form of human endeavour, whose diversity tends in consequence to be

>drawn together in synthesis into the rich totality of a single operation.

>Like Christ himself and in imitation of him it becomes universal, dynamic

>and, for that very reason, fully human.

> In short, in order to correspond to the new curve of the time-flow,

>christianity is led to the discovery, below God, of earthly values, while

>humanism is led to the discovery, above the world, of the place of a God.

>

> 34

>It is easy for the pessimist to belittle that extraordinary period of

>history during which in the space of a few thousand years civilizations

>crumbled one after another into ruin. But it is surely far more scientific

>to discern once again, beneath these successive waxings and wanings, the

>great spiral of life always irreversibly ascending, but by stages, along

>the dominant line of its evolution. Susa, Memphis, Athens may crumble: but

>an ever more highly organized awareness of the universe is passed on from

>hand to hand and increases with each successive stage in clarity and

>brilliance.

> When we are dealing in general with the gradual development of the

>noosphere into planetary consciousness we must of course do full justice to

>the great, the essential part played by the other sections of the human

>race in bringing about the eventual plenitude of the earth. But in dealing

>with this historical period we should be allowing sentiment to falsify fact

>if we refused to recognize that during its centuries the principal axis of

>anthropogenesis has passed through the West.

>>snip<

> The fact is that during the last six thousand years, in the

>Mediterranean area, a neo-humanity has been germinating and is now at this

>moment completing its absorption into itself of the remaining vestiges of

>the neolithic mosaic of ethnic groupings, so as to form a new layer, of

>greater density than all the others, on the noosphere.

>>snip<

>

> 35

>Let us admit this frankly, once and for all: what most discredits faith in

>progress in the eyes of men today, over and above its reticences and its

>helplessness in meeting the cry of the 'last days of the human species', is

>the unfortunate tendency still shown by its adepts to distort into pitiful

>millenarianisms all that is most valid and most noble in our now

>permanently awakened expectation of the future appearance of some form of

>'ultra-humanity'. An era of abundance and euphoria - a Golden Age - is,

>they suggest, all that evolution could hold in reserve for us. And it is

>but right that our hearts should sink at the thought of so 'bourgeois' an

>ideal.

> In face of this strictly 'pagan' materialism and naturalism it

>becomes a pressing duty to remind ourselves once again that, if the laws of

>biogenesis of their nature suppose and effectively bring about an economic

>improvement in human living-conditions, it is not any question of

>well-being, it is solely a thirst for greater being

>that by psychological necessity can save the thinking world from the

>taedium vitae.

> And here we can see with complete clarity the importance of the idea,

>suggested above, that it is at its point or superstructure of spiritual

>concentration and not at its base or infrastructure of material arrangement

>that humanity must biologically establish its equilibrium.

> For once we admit, following this line of argument, the existence of

>a critical point of species-formation at the end of the evolution of

>technical developments and civilizations, we realize that what finally

>opens out at the peak of time (maintaining to the end the priority of

>tension over rest in biogenesis) is an issue: an issue not merely for our

>hopes of escape but also for our awaiting of some revelation.

> And this is exactly what could best relieve that tension between

>light and darkness, exaltation and anguish, into which a renewed awareness

>of our human species has plunged us.

>

> 36

>Fold your wings, my soul, those wings you had spread wide to soar to the

>terrestrial peaks where the light is most ardent: it is for you simply to

>await the descent of the Fire - supposing it to be willing to take

>possession of you.

> If you would attract its power to yourself you must first loosen the

>bonds of affection which still tie you to objects cherished too exclusively

>for their own sake. The true union you ought to seek with creatures that

>attract you is to be found not by going directly to them but by converging

>with them on God sought in and through them. It is not by making themselves

>more material, relying solely on physical contacts, but by making

>themselves more spiritual in the embrace of God that things draw closer to

>each other and, following their invincible natural bent, end by becoming,

>all of them together, one. Therefore, my soul, be chaste.

> And when you have thus refined your crude materiality you must loosen

>yet further the fibres of your substance. In your excessive self-love you

>are like a molecule closed in upon itself and incapable of entering easily

>into any new grouping. God looks to you to be more open and more pliant. If

>you are to enter into him you need to be freer and more eager. Have done

>then with your egoism and your fear of suffering. Love others as you love

>yourself, that is to say admit them into yourself, all of them, even those

>whom, if you were a pagan, you would exclude. Accept pain. Take up your

>cross, my soul...

>

> 58

>Since Jesus was born, and grew to his full stature, and died, everything

>has continued to move forward because Christ is not yet fully formed: he

>has not yet gathered about him the last folds of his robe of flesh and of

>love which is made up of his faithful followers. The mystical Christ has

>not yet attained to his full growth, and therefore the same is true of the

>cosmic Christ. Both of these are simultaneously in the state of being and

>of becoming; and it is from the prolongation of this process of becoming

>that all created activity ultimately springs. Christ is the end-point of

>the evolution, even the natural evolution, of all beings; and therefore

>evolution is holy.

>

> 60

>It is the whoIe of my being, Lord Jesus, that you would have me give you,

>tree and fruit alike, the finished work as well as the harnessed power, the

>opus together with the operario. To allay your hunger and slake your

>thirst, to nourish your body and bring it to its full stature, you need to

>find in us a substance which will truly be food for you. And this food

>ready to be transformed into you, this nourishment for your flesh, I will

>prepare for you by liberating the spirit in myself and in everything:

>through an effort (even a purely natural effort) to learn the truth, to

>live the good, to create the beautiful; through cutting away all inferior

>and evil energies; through practlcing that charity towards all men which

>alone can gather up the multitude into a single soul ...

> To promote, in however small a degree, the awakening of spirit in the

>world is to offer to the incarnate Word an increase of reality and

>stability; it is to allow his influence to grow in intensity around us.

>

> 63

>Henceforth we know enough - and it is already a great deal - to be able to

>say that these onward gropings of life will succeed only in one condition:

>that the whole endeavour shall have unity as its keynote. Of its very

>nature the advance of the biological process demands this. Outside this

>atmosphere of a union glimpsed and longed for, the most legitimate demands

>are bound to lead to catastrophe: we can see this only too clearly at the

>present moment. On the other hand, once this atmosphere is created almost

>any solution will seem as good as all the others, and every sort of effort

>will succeed, at least in the beginning. Thus, if in dealing with the

>problem of the various human races, their appearance, their awakening,

>their future, we start from its purely biological roots, it will lead us to

>recognize that the only climate in which man can continue to grow is that

>of devotion and self-denial in a spirit of brotherhood. In truth, at the

>rate the consciousness and the ambitions of the world are increasing, it

>will explode unless it learns to love. The future of the thinking earth is

>organically bound up with the turning of the forces of hate into forces of

>charity.

>

> 64

>Though the phenomena of the lower world remain the same - the material

>determinisms, the vicissitudes of chance, the laws of labour, the

>agitations of men, the footfalls of death - he who dares to believe reaches

>a sphere of created reality in which things, while retaining their habitual

>texture, seem to be made out of a different substance. Everything remains

>the same so far as phenomena are concerned, but at the same time everything

>becomes luminous, animated, loving. . .

> Through the workings of faith, Christ appears, Christ is born, without

>any violation of nature's laws, in the heart of the world.

>

> 65

>As the years go by, Lord, I come to see more and more clearly, in myself

>and in those around me, that the great secret preoccupation of modern man

>is much less to battle for possession of the world than to find a means of

>escaping from it. The anguish of feeling that one is not merely spatially

>but ontologically imprisoned in the cosmic bubble; the anxious search for

>an issue to, or more exactly a focal point for, the evolutionary process:

>these are the price we must pay for the growth of planetary consciousness;

>these are the dimly-recognized burdens which weigh down the souls of

>christian and gentile alike in the world of today.

> Now that humanity has become conscious of the movement which carries

>it onwards it has more and more need of finding, above and beyond itself,

>an infinite objective, an infinite issue, to which it can wholly dedicate

>itself.

> And what is this infinity! The effect of twenty centuries of mystical

>travail has been precisely to show us that the Baby of Bethlehem, the Man

>on the Cross, is also the Principle of all movement and the unifying Centre

>of the world: how then can we fail to identify this God not merely of the

>old cosmos but also of the new cosmogenesis, this God so greatly sought

>after by our generation, with you, Lord Jesus, you who make him visible to

>our eyes and bring him close to us?

>

> 66

>Let us leave the surface and, without leaving the world, plunge into God.

>There, and from there, in him and through him we shall hold all things and

>have command of all things, we shall find again the essence and the

>splendour of all the flowers, the lights, we have had to surrender here and

>now in order to be faithful to life. Those beings whom here and now we

>despair of ever reaching and influencing, they too will be there, united

>together at that central point in their being which is at once the most

>vulnerable, the most receptive and the most enriching. There, even the

>least of our desires and our endeavours will be gathered and preserved, and

>be

>able to evoke instantaneous vibration from the very heart of the universe.

> Let us then establish ourselves in the divine milieu. There, we shall

>be within the inmost depths of souls and the greatest consistency of

>matter. There, at the confluence of all the forms of beauty, we shall

>discover the ultra-vital, ultra-perceptible, ultra-active point of the

>universe; and, at the same time, we shall experience in the depths of our

>own being the effortless deployment of the plenitude of all our powers of

>action and of adoration.

> For it is not merely that at that privileged point all the external

>springs of the world are co-ordinated and harmonized: there is the further,

>complementary marvel that the man who surrenders himself to the divine

>milieu feels his own inward powers directed and enlarged by it with a

>sureness which enables him effortlessly to avoid the all too numerous reefs

>on which mystical quests have so often foundered.

>

> 69

>Lift up your head, Jerusalem, and see the immense multitude of those who

>build and those who seek; see all those who toil in laboratories, in

>studios, in factories, in the deserts and in the vast crucible of human

>society. For all the ferment produced by their labours, in art, in science,

>in thought, all is for you.

> Therefore open wide your arms, open wide your heart, and like Christ

>your Lord welcome the wave-flow, the flood, of the sap of humanity. Take it

>to yourself, for without its baptism you will wither away for lack of

>longing as a flower withers for lack of water; and preserve it and care for

>it, since without your sun it will go stupidly to waste in sterile shoots.

> What has become of the temptations aroused by a world too vast in its

>horizons, too seductive in its beauty?

> They no longer exist.

> The earth-mother can indeed take me now into the immensity of her arms.

>She can enlarge me with her life, or take me back into her primordial dust.

>She can adorn herself for me with every allurement, every horror, every

>mystery. She can intoxicate me with the scent of her tangibility and her

>unity. She can throw me to my knees in expectancy of what is maturing in

>her womb.

> But all her enchantments can no longer harm me, since she has become

>for me, more than herself and beyond herself, the body of him who is and

>who is to come.

>

> 72

>Only love can bring individual beings to their perfect completion, as

>individuals, by uniting them one with another, because only love takes

>possession of them and unites them by what lies deepest within them. This

>is simply a fact of our everyday experience. For indeed at what moment do

>lovers come into the most complete possession of themselves if not when

>they say they are lost in one another ? And is not love all the time

>achieving - in couples, in teams, all around us - the magical and reputedly

>contradictory feat of personalizing through totalizing? And why should not

>what is thus daily achieved on a small scale be repeated one day on

>worid-wide dimensions?

> Humanity, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and

>peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, of the

>one with the many: all these are regarded as utopian fantasies, yet they

>are biologically necessary; and if we would see them made flesh in the

>world what more need we do than imagine our power to love growing and

>broadening till it can embrace the totality of men and of the earth?