The Teilhard Page
by Doug Phillips
from Le Phenomene Humain[2]
Mega-Synthesis
The coalescence of
elments and the coalescence of stems, the spherical geometry of the earth
and psychical curvature of the mind harmonising to counterbalance the inidividual
and collective forces of dispersion in the world and to impose unification--there
at last we find the spring and secret of hominsation.
But why should
there be unification in the world and what purpose does it serve?
To see the answer
to this ultimate question, we have only to put side by side the two equations
which have been gradually formulating themselves from the moment we began
trying to situate the phenomenon of man in the world.
- Evolution=Rise of consciousness,
- Rise of consciousness=Union effected
The general
gathering together in which, by correlated actions of the without and
the within of the earth, the totality of thinking units and thinking
forces are engaged---the aggregation in a single block of a mankind whose
fragments weld together and interpenetrate before our eyes in spite of (indeed
in proportion to) their efforts to separate--all this becomes intelligible from
top to bottom as soon as we perceive it as the natural culm ination of a cosmic
process of organisation which has never varied since those remote ages when our
planet was young.
First the molecules
of carbon compounds with their thousands of atoms symmetrically grouped; next
the cell which, within a very small volume, contains thousands of molecules
linked in a complicated system; then the metazoa in which the cell is no more
than an almost infinitesimal element; and later the manifold attempts made
sporadically by the metazoa to enter into symbiosis and raise themselves to a
higher biological condition.
And now, as a
germination of planetary dimensions, comes the thinking layer which over its
full extent develops and intertwines its fibres, not to confuse and neutralise
them but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.
Really I can see no
coherent, and therefore scientific, way of grouping this immense succession of
facts but as a gigantic psycho-biological operation, a sort of mega-synthesis,
the 'super-arrangement' to which all the thinking elements of the earth find
themselves today individually and collectively subject.
Mega-synthesis in
the tangential, and therefore and thereby a leap forward of the radial energies
along the principal axis of evolution: ever more complexity and thus ever more
consciousness. If that is what really happens, what more do we need to convince
oursleves of the vital error hidden in the depths of any doctrine of isolation?
The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain
egoistically the extremity of 'everyone for himself' is false and against
nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all the others with
itself.
Also false and
against nature is the racial ideal of one branch draining off for itself alone
all the sap of the tree and rising over the death of other branches. To reach
the sun nothing less is required than the combined growth of the entire
foliage.
The outcome of the
world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human--these are not
thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the
exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together,
in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a
spiritual renovation of the earth....
Unanimity
We have used the
term mega-synthesis. Within a better understanding of the collective, it seems
to me that the world should be understood without attenuation or metaphors when
applied to the sum of all human beings. The universe is necessarily homogeneous
in its nature and dimensions. Would it still be so if the loops of its spiral
lost one jot or tittle of their degree of reality or consistence in ascending
ever higher? The still unnamed Thing which the gradual combination of individuals,
peoples and races will bring into existence, must needs be supra-physical,
not infra-physical, if it is to be coherent with the rest. Deeper than
the common act in which it expresses itself, more important than the common
power of action from which it emerges by a sort of self-birth, lies reality
itself, constituted by the living reunion of reflective particles.
And what does that
amount to if not (and it is quite credible) that the stuff of the universe, by
becoming thinking, has not yet completed its evolutionary cycle, and that we
are therefore moving towards some new critical point that lies ahead. In spite
of its organic links, whose existence has everywhere become apparent to us, the
biosphere has so far been no more than a network of divergent lines, free at
their extremities. By effect of reflection and the recoils it involves, the
loose ends have been tied up, and the noosphere tends to constitute a single
closed system in which each element sees, feels, desires, and suffers for
itself the same things as all the others at the same time.
We are faced with a
harmonised collectivity of consciousnesses equivalent to a sort of
super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by
myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking
envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of
thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping
themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single
unanimous reflection.
This is the general
form in which, by analogy and in symmetry with the past, we are led
scientifically to envisage the future of mankind, without whom no terrestrial
issue is open to the terrestrial demands of our action.
To the common sense
of the 'man in the street' and even to a certain philosophy of the world to
which nothing is possible save what has always been, perspectives such as these
will seem highly improbable. But to a mind become familiar with the fantastic
dimensions of the universe they will, on the contrary, seem quite natural,
because they are simply proportionate with the astronomical immensities.
In the direction of
thought, could the universe terminate with anything less than the
measureless---any more than it could in the direction of time and space?
One thing at any
rate is sure--from the moment we adopt a thoroughly realistic view of the
noosphere and of the hyper-organic nature of social bonds, the present
situation of the world becomes clearer; for we find a very simple meaning for
the profound troubles which disturb the layer of mankind at this moment.
The two-fold crisis
whose onset began in earnest as early as the Neolithic age and which rose to a
climax in the modern world, derives in the first place from mass-formation
(we might call it a 'planetisation') of mankind. Peoples and civilisations
reached such a degree either of frontier contact or economic interdependence or
psychic communion that they could no longer develop save by interpenetration of
one another. But it also arises out of the fact that, under the combined
influence of machinery and the super-heating of thought, we are witnessing a
formidable upsurge of unused powers. Modern man no longer knows what to do
with the time and the potentialities he has unleashed. We groan under the
burden of this wealth. We are haunted by the fear of 'unemployment'. Sometimes
we are tempted to trample this super-abundance back into the matter from from
which it sprang without stopping to think how impossible and monstrous such an
act against nature would be.
When we consider
the increasing compression of elements at the heart of a free energy which is
also relentlessly increasing, how can we fail to see in this two-fold
phenomenon the two perennial symptoms of a leap forward of the 'radial'--that
is to say, of a new step in the genisis of mind?
In order to avoid
disturbing our habits we seek in vain to settle international disputes by
adjustments of frontiers--or we treat as 'liesure' (to be whiled away) the activities
at the disposal of mankind. As things are now going it will not be long before
we run full tilt into one another. Something will explode if we persist in
trying to squeeze into our old tumble-down huts the material and spiritual
forces that are henceforwared on the scale of a world.
A new domain of
psychical expansion--that is what we lack. And it is staring us in the face if
we would only raise our heads to look at it.
Peace through
conquest, work in joy. These are waiting for us beyond the line where empires
are setup against other empires, in an interior totalisation of the world upon
itself, in the unanimous construction of a spirit of the earth.
THE CHRISTIC[3]
INTRODUCTION: THE
AMORIZATION OF THE UNIVERSE
What follows is not
a mere speculative dissertation in which the main lines of some long-matured
and cleverly constructed system are set out.
It constitutes the
evidence brought to bear, with complete objectivity, upon a particular interior
event, upon a particular personal experience, in which I cannot but distinguish
the track followed by a general drift of the Human as it folds in upon itself.
During the course
of my life there has gradually been aroused in me, until it has become
habitual, the capacity to see two fundamental psychic movements or currents in
which we all share, without, however, being sufficiently aware of what they
mean.
On one side, there
has been the irresistible convergence of my individual thought with every other
thinking being on the Barth —and in consequence with everything that is going
through a gradual process of ‘arrangement’, wherever it be, and to whatever
degree, in the immensities of Time and Space.
And on the other
side, there has been the persistent individualisation, at the centre of my own
small ego, of an ultra-Centre of Thought and Action: in the depths of my
consciousness, the rise, which nothing can stop, of a sort of Other who could
be even more I than I am myself.
On one side there
was a flux, at once physical and psychic, which made the Totality of the Stuff
of Things fold in on itself, by giving it complexity: carrying this to the
point where that Stuff is made to co-reflect itself.
And on the other
side, under the species of an incarnate divine being, a Presence so intimate
that it could not satisfy itself or satisfy me, without being by nature
universal.
This was the double
perception, intellectual and emotional, of a Cosmic Convergence and a Christic
Emergence which, each in its own way, filled my whole horizon.
Although they both
made themselves felt in the very core of my being, it is conceivable that these
two new tides of consciousness might have had no effect upon one another — for
they reached me from different angles.
But it was not so;
and it is precisely this contrary experience that I hope to describe in this
essay, for the delight of my life and all that gives it strength will have been
my discovery that when these two spiritual ingredients were brought together,
they reacted endlessly upon one another in a flash of extraordinary brilliance,
releasing by their implosion a light so intense that it transfigured (or even
‘transubstantiated’) for me the very depths of the World.
I saw how the joint
coming of age of Revelation and Science had suddenly opened a door for
twentieth-century Man into a sort of ultra-dimension of Things, in which all
differences between Action, Passion [in the sense of being acted upon] and
Communion vanish — not by being neutralized but by reaching an explosive
climax: and this at the high temperatures of the Centre and on the scale of the
Whole.
I saw the Universe
becoming amorized and personalized in the very dynamism of its own evolution.
It is already a
long time since, in response to these new ways of seeing things, still barely
defined in my mind, I tried, in The Mass on the World and Le Milieu
Divin, to give distinct expression to my sense of wonder and amazement.
Today, after forty
years of continuous thought, 1 it is still exactly the same
fundamental vision that I feel I must present, and enable others to share in
its matured form — for the last time.
It may not be
expressed with the same freshness and exuberance as resulted from my first
meeting with it — but the wonder and the passion will still be there, undimmed.
A. THE CONVERGENCE OF THE UNIVERSE
Whether we admit it
or not, we have today no choice: we have all become ‘evolutionists’. Through
the narrow Darwinian crack opened a century ago in zoology, the feeling of
Duration has now so completely and permanently coloured the whole of our
experience that we have to make an effort, for example, to get back to those
not so distant days (about I900!) when the formation of species was still a
matter for bitter argument, and we had not the vaguest suspicion that fifty
years later the whole economy of mankind would be based on the birth of the
Atom.
Today, of course,
we all inevitably think and act as if the World were in a state of continual
formation and transformation.
This is far from
meaning, however, that this general frame of mind has yet reached its final and
complete expression in our thought.
At a first stage,
and that the vaguest, to evolve can mean to change, irrespective
of the nature and modalities of the changing:
they may be
irregular or methodical, continuous or periodical, additive or dispersive and
so on.
At this elementary
level, we may say that so far as Physics and Biology are concerned there is no
longer any uncertainty. The movement that animates the Stuff of the Universe in
and around us, is no mere agitation and no mere drifting into the homogeneous.
It presents itself
to our experience as a distinctly recognizable process — or, more correctly, as
the product of two processes —which is by nature subject to direction.
I. First there is the process
of ‘arrangement’ which, through the gradual ‘corpusculizing’ of cosmic Energy,
produces the infinite variety (ever more complex and ever more ‘psychized’) of
atoms, molecules, living cells, etc.
2. Secondly, there is the
process of 'dis-arrangement' (Entropy), which is constantly bringing arranged
Energy back to its most probable, and therefore most simple, forms.
We may say that
competent observers today are in agreement about the general picture of an
Evolution which may be compared, broadly speaking, to a river made up of
amorphous streams (Entropy) within which countless eddies are individualised by
a counter-current. ‘Phenomenally’ speaking, we see the World not merely as a
system that is simply in movement, but as one that is in a state of genesis —
a very different matter. Across the metamorphoses of Matter something is being
made (and at the same time being unmade) in accordance with a particular global
orientation — and this irreversibly and cumulatively.
Once we understand
that, a further problem — not to say the final problem — presents itself.
In the case of the
river we have just used as a comparison, what is most permanent and most
important is, of course, the main stream — and not the eddies that come and go
in the general mass of moving water. In Cosmogenesis, on the other hand, how
are we to decide the relative value of the two confronting terms? Is (as might
well at first appear) that majestic and inflexible Entropy really ‘what counts’
in Evolution? In other words, is it Entropy that has the last word cosmically?
Or (in spite of certain apparent indications of fragility) is it rather the
ever more complex and ever more centred nuclei that are successively formed in
the course of planetary ages? To put it in another way, does the Universe
ultimately come to rest upon itself in equilibrium in the direction of the
non-arranged-unconscious (which is the materialist solution), or in the
direction of the Arranged-conscious (which is the spiritual solution)?
Vital though this
problem is for us — for it bears on real values and our real future — Science
as yet refuses to make up its mind, opinions are divided. We are constantly
being told that it is a matter which cannot be solved experimentally: the
answer must be left to the philosophers or dictated by personal feeling.
I cannot emphasise
too strongly that the problem is, on the contrary, soluble by the techniques we
command provided our eyes are opened to the bio-cosmic significance of a
phenomenon which is at the same time so enormous and so close to us that in the
end we are completely swamped by it and entirely fail to see it. And the
Phenomenon I refer to is that of human co-reflection.
Because we are born
and live in the very heart of this thing that is happening, we still find it
quite natural not only to think with ourselves but also, inevitably, to think
with all other persons at the same time: in other words, we cannot move a
finger without finding ourselves involved in the construction of a total human
act that includes what we see and what we make.
We must try a
different approach, first retracing our steps sufficiently, and so re-introduce
into our general picture of the World the process of ‘co-conscientizing’ in
which we share..
Once we do that, a
perfectly clear (and strangely emancipating) indication emerges from the facts:
that beneath the apparent commonplace superficiality of the Earth’s
technico-social disposition, it is Evolution itself — in that aspect of it
which is orientated towards the Improbable — that is extending itself with
increasing speed beyond our own insignificant individual centres in the
direction of a Complexity-Consciousness of planetary dimensions.
The discovery of
this simple fact is of decisive importance for both our understanding and our
will.
Among those who
theorize about Biogenesis, there are still many who speak as though the cosmic
(anti-entropic) drift into Arrangement ultimately found expression in a diversifying
and dispersing expansion of living forms. If the fact of terrestrial
co-reflection is correctly interpreted, however, we see that when this drift
has fully developed it inevitably takes on the form of a centration of
the hominized portion of the Stuff of Things, which at the same time differentiates
and fosters a common unanimous mind and spirit.
Experientially, if
the Universe is examined in its most advanced areas, in the direction of
the Improbable, it is seen that it converges upon itself
To my mind, it is
impossible to be fully an evolutionist in the
true sense of the
word without seeing and admitting this ‘psychogenic’ concentration of the World
upon itself.
And it is equally
impossible, I may add, to arrive at an understanding of such a ‘centripetal’
form of cosmogenesis , without being obliged to recognise and accept as a fact
(for a number of reasons, as much physical as psychological 2) that
the Universe simultaneously takes on consistence and value in the direction,
inevitably, in which it folds in upon itself— and not in the opposite
direction. It is thus that a universal Flux, both unifying and
irreversifying, appears and asserts its power; it transfigures the World
that it illuminates, warms and consolidates — and we, too, are swept along in
that Flux.
This is the higher
dynamism, that controls and superanimates all the other dynamisms from within.
It provides, in
fact, the neo-milieu of vision and action, for lack of which we might well fear
that Anthropogenesis will lose its vigour and so wither: but within which, on
the other hand, we can see that there is no further forward limit to the forces
of ultra-hominization.
B. THE EMERGENCE OF CHRIST
I have tried in the
preceding section to bring home how completely the shape of the World is
transformed as soon as we make up our minds to allow the Human Phenomenon of
Co-Reflection to find in it its full expression and its true place.
If we now look in
an apparently completely different direction, if, that is, we move from the
physical grounding of knowledge to its mystical plane, we may well consider a
further point: let us see whether, perhaps, a metamorphosis of the same order
(symmetrical — or even complementary) is not found to be operative in our
intellectual and emotional outlook on the Universe, if we examine more
attentively the Christian Phenomenon of Worship.
The Christian
Phenomenon...
As a result of the
progressive extension of the realm of Science by the study of comparative
religion, this great event (which for nearly two thousand years has been
universally regarded in the West as unique in world-history) might at first
appear to be now passing through an eclipse, in the same way as did Man’s
appearance in Nature during the Quaternary age, when Darwinism first came on
the scene. ‘Christianity: a remarkable sort of religion, of course: but only
one among many, and for only a particular period of time.’ That is what the
vast majority of ‘intelligent’ persons say to themselves, and openly proclaim,
more or less explicitly.
In the case of Man,
all that was needed to restore the Human to its primacy — no longer at the
centre, but now at the head of things — was the gradual entry into our
world-view of the place and evolutive function of Reflection. In just the same
way, it seems to me, Christianity is far from losing its primacy in the vast
religious medley let loose by the totalization of the modem world; on the
contrary it is regaining and consolidating its axial, directive, place as the
spear-head of human psychic energies — so long, that is, as we allow sufficient
weight to its extraordinary and effectively significant of ‘pan-amorization’.
Christian love -
Christian charity.
I know very well,
from my experience, the reaction — sometimes kindly, and sometimes of
ill-natured incredulity — that is generally aroused when those terms are used
in front of non-Christians. ‘Surely,’ is the objection we hear, ‘there is a
psychological absurdity in loving God and loving the World? How, in fact, can
we love the Intangible and the Universal? Further, in so far as a love of all
and of the All can, more or less metaphorically, be said to be possible,
is not that inner gesture already familiar to the Hindu Bakti, to the Persian
Babis - and to any number of others. No, it is far from being specifically
Christian.’
And yet, are not
the facts there, staring us in the face, to prove to us the contrary, to prove
it concretely, almost brutally?
On the one hand,
whatever may be said, a love (a true love) of
God is perfectly
possible; for, if it were not, all the monasteries and churches in the world
would be emptied overnight, and Christianity, in spite of its framework of
ritual and teaching and hierarchical order, would inevitably collapse into
nothingness.
And on the other
hand, this love has in Christianity something stronger than it has anywhere
else. Were this not so, all the virtues and all the charms of the tenderness we
find in the gospels could not have prevented the teaching of the Beatitudes and
of the Cross from long ago having made way for some more assertive Creed —and
more particularly for some humanism or ‘terrenism’.
Whatever may be the
merits of other religions, and whatever the explanation that may be given, it
is indisputable that the most ardent collective focus of love ever to appear in
the World is glowing hic et nunc at the heart of the Church of God.
The facts tell
us that no religious Faith releases - or ever has released at any moment in
History — a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification
than the Christianity of our own day - and the more Catholic it is, the truer
my words. And logic tells us that it is perfectly natural that that
should be so; for in no other Creed, present or past, can be found so
miraculously and effectively associated in their power to attract and captivate
us, the three following characteristics of the incarnate Christian God:
I. Tangibility in the
experiential order, as the result of Christ Jesus’s historical entry (by his
birth) into the very process of Evolution.
2. Expansibility in the cosmic
order, conferred on the Christic Centre by the operative power of
‘resurrection’.
3. And finally,
assimilative power, in the organic order, potentially integrating the totality
of the human race in the unity of a single ‘body’.
It is easy enough
to bring abstract criticisms against this apparently illogical mixture of
primitive ‘anthropomorphism’, mythical marvel and gnostic extravagance. But the
remarkable fact remains — let me emphasize this — that, however strange the
combination of the three factors may appear, it holds good — it works
- and that you have only to diminish the reality (or even the realism) of a
single one of the three confronting components for the flame of Christianity to
be immediately extinguished.
When all is said
and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all
other types of Faith, is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis,
in other words with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal
Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying.
Here we have the
exact counterpart of what was earlier disclosed to us (but in terms of ‘Flux’)
by a full analysis of the Phenomenon of Man.
In the second case,
the Christian, we reach an expanding Centre which is trying to find itself a
sphere.
In the former, the
Human, we reach a sphere that is extending deeper and deeper, and needs a
centre.
Could so remarkable
a complementarity be no more than a coincidence — or an illusion?
C. THE CHRISTIFIED UNIVERSE
First, we are aware
of being contained in a World whose two halves (the physical and the mystical)
are slowly closing in with planetary force upon a Mankind that is born of their
approach to one another. And then we realize that we are moving into a
hyper-milieu of Life, produced by the coincidence of an emergent Christ and a
convergent Universe.
Here we touch the
very heart of the experience I am trying to describe, from what I know myself,
in this essay.
My description will
be more forceful if I can put things in their proper order. Let us, then, look
in turn at the following:
First, the way in
which, as the process develops, the Universe and Christ — one on one side and
the other on the other side —find fulfilment in their conjunction.
And secondly, how
from that very conjunction a third Thing
appears (a
universal Element, a universal Milieu, and a universal Countenance: all three
at the same time). And how in that third Thing the most familiar categories of
our activity and our understanding cease to conflict with one another and yet
at the same time attain their fullest expression.
1. The Consummation of the Universe by Christ
Writing with full
sincerity, I have already (in Section I) noted and extolled the reality and
spiritualizing value of the new form of ‘cosmic sense' aroused in modern Man by
the evidence that Science provides of his belonging to a convergent-type
Universe.
I know as well as
anyone, from my own experience, to what a degree this ‘sense of evolution’ (or
‘sense of man’) can simultaneously fill one’s mind, strengthen and exalt one.
And I am therefore completely convinced that the great spiritual edifices of
tomorrow can be constructed (and will in fact be constructed) only if we start
from this new element and use it as our foundation.
For a number of
important reasons, however, I am still doubtful whether, left to itself, our
consciousness (however intense it may be in each one of us) of sharing in a
planetary Flux of co-reflection is capable of building up the sort of religion
that has been foretold with such warmth and brilliance by my friend Julian
Huxley: to which he has given the name of ‘evolutionary humanism’.
Let me explain why
I say this: either of two things may convince us that a higher Pole of
completion and consolidation (which we may call Omega) awaits us at the
higher term of Hominization; those two are the specific curve followed by the
cosmic milieu in which we are involved, and the absolute necessity of being
irreversible which is inherent in our reflective Action. Nevertheless, however
strongly convinced we may be of the existence of this Omega Pole, we can never
in the end reach it except by extrapolation: it remains by nature conjectural, it
remains a postulate.
There is the
further reason that even if Omega is accepted as ‘guaranteed in its future
existence’, our hopes can envisage its features only in a vague and misty way;
in our picture of it the Collective and Potential are dangerously mixed up with
the Personal and Real.
What, on the other
hand, do we find if our minds can embrace simultaneously both contemporary
neo-Christianity and contemporary neo-Humanism, and so first suspect and then
accept as proved that the Christ of Revelation is none other than the Omega
of Evolution?
Forthwith, we both
see with our minds and feel with our hearts that the experiential Universe is
once and for all activized and plenified.
On the one hand, we
can indeed begin to distinguish above us the positive gleam of a way out at the
highest point of the future. There is no longer any danger of our suffocating,
for we are in a World whose peak certainly opens out in Christo Jesu.
And on the other,
what comes down to us from those heights is not merely air for our lungs; it is
the radiance of a love. The World, therefore, is not simply a place in which a
Life can breathe because its power to look into the future has been aroused; we
can now see its evolutive summit and so feel its absorbing magnetic attraction.
Speaking in terms
of energy, we have to recognise that Christ intervenes today at exactly the
right moment not only to save Man from revolt against Life, justifiably
prompted by the mere threat, the mere suspicion, of a total death — but also to
give him that most forceful stimulus without which, it would appear, Thought
cannot attain the planetary term of its Reflection.
It is Christ, in
very truth, who saves,
— but should we not
immediately add that at the same time it is Christ who is saved by
Evolution?
2. The Consummation of Christ by the Universe
Christian tradition
is unanimous that there is more in the total Christ than Man and God. There is
also He who, in his ‘theandric’ being, gathers up the whole of Creation: in
quo omnia constant.
Hitherto, and in
spite of the dominant position accorded to it by St Paul in his view of the
World, this third aspect or function - we might even say, in a true sense of
the words, this third ‘nature' of Christ (neither human nor divine, but cosmic)
— has not noticeably attracted the explicit attention of the faithful or of
theologians.
Things have changed
today: we now see how the Universe, along all the lines known to us
experientially, is beginning to grow to fantastic dimensions, so that the time
has come for Christianity to develop a precise consciousness of all the hopes
stimulated by the dogma of the Universality of Christ when it is enlarged to
this new scale, and of all the difficulties, too, that it raises.
Hopes, of course:
because, if the World is becoming so dauntingly vast and powerful, it must
follow that Christ is very much greater even than we used to think.
But difficulties,
too: because, in a word, how can we conceive that Christ ‘is immensified’ to
meet the demands of our new Space-Time, without thereby losing his personality
— that side of him that calls for our worship — and without in some way
evaporating?
It is precisely
here that in a flash there comes into the picture the astounding, emancipating,
harmony between a religion that is Christic, and an Evolution that is
convergent, in type.
Were the World a
static Cosmos — or if, again, it formed a divergent system — the only relations
we could invoke as a basis for Christ’s Primacy over Creation would be (make no
mistake about this) by nature conceptual and juridical. He would be Christ the
king of all things because he has been proclaimed to be such — and not
because any organic relationship of dependence exists (or could even
conceivably exist) between Him and a Multiplicity that is fundamentally irreducible.
From such an ‘extrinsical’
point of view, one could hardly, with any honesty, speak of a Christic
‘cosmicity’.
But if, on the
other hand, and as the facts make certain, the Universe — our Universe 3 —
does indeed form a sort of biological ‘vortex’ dynamically centred upon itself,
then we cannot fail to see the emergence at the system’s temporo-spatial peak,
of a unique and unparalleled position, where Christ, effortlessly and without
distortion, becomes literally and with unprecedented realism, the Pantocrator.
Starting from an
evolutive Omega at which we assume Christ to stand, not only does it become
possible to conceive Christ as radiating physically over the terrifying
totality of things but, what is more, that radiation must inevitably work up to
a maximum of penetrative and activating power.
Once he has been
raised to the position of Prime Mover of the evolutive movement of
complexity-consciousness, the cosmic-Christ becomes cosmically possible. And at
the same time, ipso facto, he acquires and develops in complete
plenitude, a veritable omnipresence of transformation. For each one of
us, every energy and everything that happens, is superanimated by his influence
and his magnetic power. To sum up, Cosmogenesis reveals itself, along the line
of its main axis, first as Biogenesis and then Noogenesis, and finally
culminates in the Christogenesis which every Christian venerates.
And then there
appears to the dazzled eyes of the believer the eucharistic mystery itself,
extended infinitely into a veritable universal transubstantiation, in which the
words of the Consecration are applied not only to the sacrificial bread and
wine but, mark you, to the whole mass of joys and sufferings produced by the
Convergence of the World as it progresses.
And it is then,
too, that there follow in consequence the possibilities of a universal
Communion.
3. The Divine Milieu
Hitherto Man had
tried only two roads in his efforts to unite himself to the Divine. The first
was to escape from the World into the ‘beyond’. The second, on the other hand,
was to allow himself to dissolve into things and so be united with them
monistically. What else, in fact, could man try, in a cosmic economy if he
wished to escape from the internal and external multiplicity that was
tormenting him?
By contrast, from
the moment when the Universe, through Cosmogenesis directed upon a Christic
Omega, assumes for us the shape of a truly convergent whole, a third and
completely new road opens up by which the ‘mystic’ may arrive at total unity.
And (since the whole Sphere of the World is precisely a Centre in process of
centration upon itself) that road is to give all one’s strength and all one’s
heart to coinciding with the Focus of universal unification, as yet diffuse but
nevertheless already in existence.
With the
Christified Universe (or, which comes to the same thing, with the universalized
Christ) an evolutive super-milieu appears — which I have called ‘the Divine
Milieu’ — and it is now essential that every man should fully understand the
specific properties (or ‘charter’) of that milieu, which are themselves linked
with the emergence of completely new psychic dimensions.
All that I have
just been saying leads up to this, that what basically characterizes the Divine
Milieu is that it constitutes a dynamic reality in which all opposition between
Universal and Personal is being wiped out, but not by any confusion of the two:
the multiple ‘reflected’ elements of the World attaining their fulfilment, each
one still within its own infinitesimal ego, by integrant accession to
the Christic Ego, towards which the totality of Participated Being
gravitates; and in so doing, the Participated, in consummating itself,
consummates that Ego too.
By virtue of this
total inter-linking of convergence, no elementary ego can move closer to
the Christic Centre without causing the entire global sphere to be compressed
more tightly; similarly, the Christic Centre cannot even begin to communicate
itself more fully to the least of the World’s elements, without causing itself to
be contained more strictly within the entire integument of concrete realities.
Whether rising or
descending, every operation (because of the very curvature of the particular
‘space’ within which it finds completion) is ultimately pan-humanizing and
pan-Christifying at the same tune.
So true is this,
that to the ‘informed eye’ all opposition is blurred between attachment and
detachment, between action and prayer, between centration upon self and
excentration upon the Other.
And this because
God can in future be experienced and apprehended (and can even, in a true
sense, be completed) by the whole ambient totality of what we call Evolution - in
Christo Jesu...
This is still, of
course, Christianity and always will be, but a Christianity re-incarnated for
the second time (Christianity, we might say, squared) in the spiritual energies
of Matter. It is precisely the ‘ultra-Christianity’ we need here and now to
meet the ever more urgent demands of the ‘ultra-human’.
D. THE RELIGION OF TOMORROW
Although we are not
as alive to it as we should be, the key question that is beginning to present
itself to Mankind in process of planetary arrangement, is a problem of
spiritual activation. In our recent mastery of the Atomic we have
reached the primordial sources of the Energy of Evolution. This decisive
victory cannot be carried to its conclusion unless, to match it at the other
pole of things, we find a way to increase the Drive of Evolution to an
equal degree within the Noosphere. New powers call for new aspirations. If
Mankind is to use its new access of physical power with balanced control, it
cannot do without a rebound of intensity in its eagerness to act, to seek, to
create.
For a reflective
being, such an eagerness for self-fulfilment can fundamentally be found only in
the expectation of a supreme Summit of consciousness which can be attained, and
so provide a permanent home.
And such a
hope-inspired faith in some future consummation cannot, in turn, take any form
but that of a ‘religion’ in the truest, and most psychologically apt, meaning
of the word.
A Religion of
Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more
explicitly if he is to survive and super-live’, as soon as he becomes conscious
of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.
‘In a system of
cosmo-noo-genesis, the comparative value of religious creeds may be measured by
their respective power of evolutive activation.’
If we use this
criterion, where, among the various currents of modern thought, can we hope to
find, if not the fullness at least the germ, of what (judging by its power to
ultra-hominize) may be regarded as the Religion of tomorrow?
In this order of
ideas, we immediately meet a fact which it is impossible to reject. It
is this: the sort of Faith that is needed, in terms of energy, for the correct
functioning of a totalized human world has not yet been satisfactorily
formulated in any quarter at all — neither among the religions of the Ahead (Marxist
and other Humanisms) nor among the religions of the Above (the various
theisms and pantheisms).
When I say ‘neither
among the religions of the Ahead’, I speak advisedly. It may be because
they are nervous of admitting the reality of a biological convergence of
Mankind upon itself and the consequences that this entails; or it may be
because they persist in seeing in the evolutive rise of the Psychic no more
than an ephemeral epi-phenomenon: whatever the reason, all the existing forms
of Humanism (even the least materialist) are demonstrably equally incapable of
giving Man the stimulus of confidence that is indispensable to his advance
towards a supremely desirable and —what is even more important — indestructible
goal, lying at the term of his activities. Whether the reason be the
depersonalizing socializing of individuals or the unexorcized threat of a total
death, there is not a single one of the ‘religions’ as yet produced by Science
in which the Universe does not become hopelessly icy, hopelessly closed (and
that ultimately means uninhabitable) ahead, in its ‘polar’ zones. There you
have the truth!
Nor, let me add, among the
religions of the Above. For (and in this direction we may confine ourselves
to the most significant and the most promising instance, by which I mean
‘classical’ Christianity) it is becoming every day more obvious that our
generation finds something lacking in an Evangelism infected with a near-Manichaeanism,
in which the advances of Knowledge and Technology are presented not as a
primary accompanying condition of human spiritualization, but simply as an
added extra; in which failure is regarded as on the same level with success,
endowed with just as much, if not more, sanctifying value; in which the Cross
is constantly held up before us to remind us of our world’s initial
miscarriage; in which the Parousia floats on the horizon in an atmosphere of
coming catastrophe rather than of fulfilment.
We must admit that
if the neo-humanisms of the twentieth century de-humanize us under their
uninspired skies, yet on the other hand the still-living forms of theism -
starting with the Christian — tend to under-humanize us in the rarified
atmosphere of too lofty skies. These religions are still systematically closed
to the wide horizons and great winds of Cosmogenesis, and can no longer truly
be said to feel with the Earth - an Earth whose internal frictions they can
still lubricate like a soothing oil, but whose driving energies they cannot
animate as they should.
It is here that the
power of the ‘Christic’ bursts into view - in the form in which it has emerged
from what we have been saying, engendered by the progressive coming together,
in our
consciousness, of
the cosmic demands of an incarnate Word and the spiritual potentialities of a
convergent Universe. We have already seen how a strictly governed amalgam is
effected, in the Divine Milieu, between the forces of Heaven and the forces of
Earth. An exact conjunction is produced between the old God of the Above and
the new God of the Ahead.
Indeed, once we
cease to isolate Christianity and to oppose it to the moving, once we
resolutely connect it up to the World in movement, then, however obsolete it
may appear to our modem Gentiles, it instantly and completely regains its
original power to activate and attract.
And this is
because, once that ‘coupling’ has been effected, it is only Christianity, of
all the forms of worship born in the course of human history, that can display
the astonishing power of energising to the full, by ‘amorizing’ them, both the
powers of growth and life and the powers of diminishment and death, at the
heart of, and in the process of, the Noogenesis in which we are involved.
As I said before,
it is still, and will always be, Christianity: but a ‘re-born’ Christianity, as
assured of victory tomorrow as it was in its infancy — because it alone
(through the double power, at last fully understood, of its Cross and
Resurrection) is capable of becoming the Religion whose specific property it is
to provide the driving force in Evolution.
CONCLUSION: THE PROMISED LAND5
Energy, then, becomes
Presence.
And so the
possibility is disclosed for, opens out for, Man, not only of believing and
hoping but (what is much more unexpected and much more valuable) of loving, coextensively
and co-organically with all the past, the present and the future of a Universe
which is in process of concentration upon itself.
It would seem that
a single ray of such a light falling like a spark, no matter where, on the
Noosphere, would be bound to produce an explosion of such violence that it
would almost instantaneously set the face of the Earth ablaze and make it
completely new.
How is it, then,
that as I look around me, still dazzled by what I have seen, I find that I am
almost the only person of my kind, the only one to have seen? And so I
cannot, when asked, quote a single writer, a single work, that gives a clearly
expressed description of the wonderful ‘Diaphany’ that has transfigured
everything for me?
How, most of all,
can it be that ‘when I come down from the mountain’ and in spite of the
glorious vision 1 still retain, I find that I am so little a better man, so
little at peace, so incapable of expressing in my actions, and thus adequately
communicating to others, the wonderful unity that I feel encompassing me?
Is there, in fact,
a Universal Christ, is there a Divine Milieu?
Or am I, after all,
simply the dupe of a mirage in my own mind?
I often ask myself
that question.
Every time,
however, that I begin to doubt, three successive waves of evidence rise up from
the deep within me to counter that doubt, sweeping away from my mind the
mistaken fear that my ‘Christic’ may be no more than an illusion.
First, there is the
evidence provided by the coherence that this ineffable element (or
Milieu) introduces into the underlying depths of my mind and heart. As, of course,
I know only too well, in spite of the ambitious grandeur of my ideas, I am
still, in practice, imperfect to a disturbing degree. For all the claims
implicit in its expression, my faith does not produce in me as much real
charity, as much calm trust, as the catechism still taught to children produces
in the humble worshipper kneeling beside me. Nevertheless I know, too, that
this sophisticated faith, of which I make such poor use, is the only faith I
can tolerate, the only faith that can satisfy me — and even (of this I am
certain) the only faith that can meet the needs of the simple souls, the good
folk, of tomorrow.
Next there is the
evidence provided by the contagious power
of a form of
Charity in which it becomes possible to love God ‘not only with all one’s body
and all one’s soul’ but with the whole Universe-in-evolution. It would be
impossible for me, as I admitted earlier, to quote a single ‘authority’
(religious or lay) in which I could claim fully to recognise myself, whether in
relation to my ‘cosmic’ or my ‘Christic’ vision. On the other hand, I cannot
fail to feel around me — if only from the way in which ‘my ideas’ are becoming
more widely accepted — the pulsation of countless people who are all — ranging
from the border-line of unbelief to the depths of the cloister - thinking and
feeling, or at least beginning vaguely to feel, just as I do. It is indeed
heartening to know that I am not a lone discoverer, but that I am, quite
simply, responding to the vibration that (given a particular condition of
Christianity and of the world) is necessarily active in all the souls around
me. It is, in consequence, exhilarating to feel that I am not just myself or
all alone, that my name is legion, that I am ‘all men’, and that this is true
even in as much as the single-mindedness of tomorrow can be recognized as
throbbing into life in the depths of my being.
Finally, there is
the evidence contained in the superiority of my vision compared with
what I had been taught - even though there is at the same time an identity with
it. Because of their very function, neither the God who draws us to himself,
nor the world whose evolution we share, can afford to be, the former less
perfect a Being, the latter less powerful a stimulant, than our concepts and
needs demand. In either case — unless we are going to accept a positive discord
in the very stuff of things — it is in the direction of the fullest that the
truth lies. Now, as we saw earlier, it is in the ‘Christic’ that, in the
century in which we are living, the Divine reaches the summit of adorability,
and the evolutionary the extreme limit of activation. This can mean only one
thing, that it is in that direction that the human must inevitably incline;
there, sooner or later, to find unity.
Once that is
understood, I immediately find a perfectly natural explanation for my isolation
and apparent idiosyncrasy.
Everywhere on
Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the
appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual
sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components
of the Ultra-human. These two components are everywhere ‘in the air’;
generally, however, they are not strong enough, both at the same time, to
combine with one another in one and the same subject. In me, it
happens by pure chance (temperament, upbringing, background) that the
proportion of the one to the other is correct, and the fusion of the two has
been effected spontaneously - not as yet with sufficient force to spread explosively
— but strong enough nevertheless to make it clear that the process is possible
— and that sooner or later there will be a chain-reaction.
This is one more
proof that Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be
impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and
setting everything ablaze.
New York, March 1955
1. In The Heart
of Matter (above) I have tried to describe, more or less
autobiographically, the general process and the principal stages of this ‘apparition’.
2. The physical
reasons are structural: it is the nature of union to consolidate - so long as
the unification continues. And the psychological reasons are based on logical
necessity: if the biological unification of the World could be conceived as being
bound sooner or later to come to a halt, the anticipation of such an ending
(see below) would be sufficient to produce an us an abhorrence of super-living
and so kill our evolutive effort of co-reflection.
3. And probably (in
so far as to create is to unify) every possible Universe.
4. Cf. The
Priest in Writings in Time of War, pp. 203—24. (Ed.’s note)
Soon after the end
of the World War I, Pere Teilhard had discerned, from the summit his thoughts
had reached, the emergence of the other Earth:
‘I shall advance into
the future with the new strength of my twofold faith as man and as Christian:
for, from the mountain peak, I have seen the Promised Land.’ Goldscheuer
(Baden) February In Writings in Time of War, p. 288. (Ed.’s.
note)
Papers
[1]
Teilhard de
Chardin and the Noosphere by Rev. Phillip J. Cunningham, C.S.P.
Aristotle, Teilhard de
Chardin, and the Explanation of the World by Dr. A.B. Kelly
Teilhard de
Chardin- Prophet of the Information Age by John A.Gowan
From Information Highways to
Songlines of the Noosphere: Global configuration of hypertext pathways as a
prerequisite for meaningful collective transformation by Anthony Judge
The Ecology
of Consciousness by James V. Hardt Ph.D.
The
Evolution of Consciousness: Teilhard
and Sri Aurobindo Compared by M. Alan Kazlev