Teilhard de Chardin 1.pptx

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Teilhard de Chardin
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Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
was a French Jesuit priest and scientist.
He worked as a stretcher-bearer on the front lines in WW1.
His genius was to work out a unified vision that combined the world views of
faith and science into a single whole.
His ideas were very much ahead of his time. For this reason he was forbidden
by the Vatican to publish his thinking during his lifetime, which he mostly spent
working as a palaeontologist-geologist in China.
His work has become a source of huge inspiration for many,
and is being promoted in particular by the Center for Christogenesis in America.

The following slides are a summary by
Hilda Geraghty
of the book
An Introduction to
Teilhard de
Chardin
by
N.M. Wildiers
Fontana Books, London, and
Harper & Row, New York, 1968.
“Love is the most powerful
and still most unknown energy in the world.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Norman Max Wildiers, DD.,
Dutch theologian
and
general editor of the official
French text of the works of
Teilhard de Chardin.

Pierre Teillard de Chardin S.J.
“Studying
the very ancient past
has revealed to me
how the future is built.”

Teilhard de Chardin’s work is very diverse,
revealing the vast and varied sweep of his mind.
An outstanding scientist in geology and palaeontology
[study of ancient life forms], he wrote many
authoritative studies in these areas.
Through these, along with the insights of modern science,
he developed a kind of synthesis,
a whole view of the universe,
considered as a single phenomenon.

His entire work reveals an inner tension that consumed his whole life:
by temperament and occupation he knew himself to be ‘a child of earth’,
attracted and uplifted by the cosmos to which he felt himself personally
linked, - his scientific side.
Simultaneously, by upbringing and intellectual training, he felt himself to be
‘a child of heaven’, nurtured and imbued with the Christian faith.
He knew from direct personal experience the ‘ethos’ of both worlds.
His entire inner life was entirely bound up with this perpetual confrontation
between Heaven and Earth.

“However far back I go in my memories
(even before the age of ten)
I find in myself the presence of
a strictly dominant passion:
the passion for the Absolute.”

For many people the world of science and the world of faith have nothing in
common.
They are two totally different territories, fenced off by a mental barrier.
But Teilhard could not be content with this inner division inside himself,
this intellectual and spiritual ‘schizophrenia’.
“I felt an insatiable need for an organic cosmos”.
Teilhard wants totality, not just different separate pieces.

His personal experience is filled with the tension between his “cosmic sense” and his
“Christic sense”.
“By cosmic sense, I mean the cosmic affinity that binds us psychologically with the Totality all around us.”- the world.
Christic sense, or Christ consciousness, means the conviction of Christians
that Christ is the centre and final goal of all things.

At first he felt inwardly conflicted between these two world views,
yet after years of inner growth and tireless work,
these two different realities in his mind came to cohere, converge and unify.
He came to recognise clearly that Christ had a precise function in this cosmos,
and that the evolution of the cosmos had to be seen
as moving towards a cosmic central point.

There are three possible approaches to God and the world:
• Dismiss the term ‘God’ and accept the world as the only reality.
• Eliminate the term ‘world’ and see only God as having a claim to be real;
• Or keep both concepts and try to find the right connection between them.
• The atheist takes the first option and dismisses the notion of God,
as an obstacle to true human achievement and fulfilment.
The philosophers Hegel, and later Marx, accused believers of thinking of God
so much
that they neglected the legitimate demands of life on earth,
and became estranged from their proper task in the world.
[Presumably the agnostic would belong in this option as well].

• The second option is to abandon the concept ‘world’.
For some mystics in Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, the world is virtually non-
existent. They tend to see existence itself as a nothingness, a mere appearance,
a passing vanity from which we should hold apart.
Among Christians too this notion is sometimes to be found,
- everything that is not God is to be looked down on,
as having little value in itself.

• In the third option, both God and the world are maintained in full,
and our task must be how to live them both harmoniously.
The problem of Teilhard’s life was therefore to discover
how the personal God of Christianity related to the universe,
the one that science is revealing in all its wonder, in time and space.

His actual problem lies rather in the plane of action, of lived faith.
The issue for him is how love for God and love of the world may be reconciled
and brought into unity.
“It must be possible to reconcile cosmic love of the world and heavenly love of God…
to bring together the cult of progress and passion for the glory of God”.

His personal quest brought an outcome as he saw it, that could well be of
benefit to others.
“To Christify matter…therein lies the whole adventure of my inner life.”
“I wanted to define the relationship through which
the Kingdom of God and the labours of humankind
are genetically linked with each other.”

“The major event of my life has been to gradually find
two sources of light on the horizon of my soul,
the first being the final point of a converging evolution,- the Omega point-
and the other formed by the risen Christ of the Christian faith.”

Living for long periods of his life among unbelievers, Teilhard had a broader
personal experience than most theologians, and felt with full force certain
difficulties between modernity and Christianity.
His work to resolve these is where his value lies.
Explaining teachings of the faith in terms borrowed from modern
science makes it easier for many people to access Christianity.
Indeed, Vatican II invited us to search for forms
in which to express the truths of the faith in the spirit of our times.

The paradox of Teilhard is to make the world of the natural sciences
his starting-point for solving a spiritual and theological problem.
Therein lies his originality and value.
If Teilhard gave so much importance to his personal experience, it is because
he was deeply convinced that his problem was one of the most important
confronting humanity at the present time,
and that his findings could be of use and benefit to others.
The problem he experienced so intensely is found
at the interface between our modern science-based culture and Christianity.

That to a large extent, is the problem facing
every thinking Christian.
The result of this often is, that some people are wholly
engrossed by a this-worldly culture and its values,
rejecting faith, as a form of self-alienation,
if they ever think about it at all.
However, others hide within an other-worldly faith
and have little esteem for the world’s values.
To synthesise in one’s life the positive values of modernity
with the timeless truths of the Christian revelation
is a pressing task for the thinking Christian today.

Teilhard’s experience mirrors that of countless Christians,
quietly searching and thinking in their own lives.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that his writings have met with such a big response
in the world of the 20th and 21st century.
Contemporary people feel stirred by him,
more even by his broadly human and religious message
than by his purely scientific insights.

“His appeal to so many is to be explained primarily by the fact that
he succeeded in making once again a temple out of the universe.”
(Jean Lacroix)

A spirituality that takes no account of the world’s values
has become insupportable to modern humanity.
Gabriel Marcel, a Christian existentialist, echoes the opinion of many:
“It is my deepest conviction …that it is not God’s will at all to be loved by us as
against the creation, but rather glorified by us through the creation and with
the creation as our starting point. That is why I find so many religious writings
intolerable. A god who opposes himself to what he has created…would be in
my eyes a false god and nothing more.”

Teilhard’s findings are of huge importance for the intellectual and spiritual life of
our times. That is why he merits our esteem, not only as a fine scientist
and a distinguished Christian, but even more as a credible witness
to what is now taking place deep in the human soul.
Teilhard de Chardin arouses admiration and enthusiasm in some people,
whereas others are just as hostile and ready to dismiss him.
N.M. Wildiers believes that in most cases a person’s reactions to Teilhard’s
work is largely conditioned by their own inner experience.

If you have felt in your own mind the tension between modern culture and
faith,
between admiration for science and technology and the ideals of the
Gospel,
between hopes centred on this world and hopes centred on the next,
“between the cult of progress and the passion for the glory of God”
then you will feel instinctively drawn to Teilhard.
For many people like you, meeting the whole world
of his ideas has proved a kind of intellectual and
spiritual deliverance, for which they will always
be grateful.

If, however you have never felt this inner tension
and are settled in an ideology or in strongly traditional ideas,
you will see Teilhard as a disruptive influence.
In the meantime, it is good to have healthy debates.
The main thing is that Teilhard de Chardin’s experience should be of service
to others
and be a leaven in the intellectual life of Christianity
and humanity.

Overview:
The work is written from a purely scientific viewpoint.
We understand the universe and our planet much better than before.
We now know that time plays a part in the existence of everything.
That means the whole universe, and everything in it, has come to exist through
a growth process,- a story in time, an evolution.
This has changed our understanding of ourselves.
WHO ARE WE IN THE UNIVERSE NOW? is the question.

There are three great phases in the evolution of the universe:
The formation of matter
The emergence of life
The emergence of mind.
As the nervous systems of life grow ever more complex, they carry within them
ever higher levels of consciousness.
The more complex the organism, the more conscious it is.
Each creature has an ‘inside’, a psyche, a consciousness,
as well as an ‘outside’, a body.

In human beings, the universe has become conscious of itself.
As such we are now the spearhead of evolution.
Evolution in the human world is converging, moving towards a unity,
creating a union of minds, a union of all conscious human life.
This is the “noosphere.” [Greek nous = mind]

In the future, humans in the noosphere will pool their minds more and more,
And evolution will move towards a single point of convergence,
the Omega point.

And now, a look at
The Human Phenomenon
in more detail

When science studies the universe
as a single phenomenon …

The great human thinkers have always aspired to reflect
the whole world order in our mind.
And from the ancient Greeks onward,
the earth was seen as the centre of the universe,
its plants and animals nourishing humans,
for whom everything else was made.
This is the background of everything from Thomas Aquinas’
Summa Theologica to Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Their understanding of humans (anthropology) and their
understanding of God (theology) flowed from their
understanding of the world or universe (cosmology).

As we know, that world view ended with the discovery of the telescope
and the microscope (Copernicus, Galileo, Van Leeuwen).
Thus began a time of huge intellectual growth,
but also one of confusion and discomfort over the following centuries,
as we tried to assemble new world views.
Are we just a chance by-product,
living on a pinhead of a planet
in an absurdly vast universe?
Do we matter?
Or only to ourselves?

Yet today many scientists are seeing a certain convergence between the
fields of science, as the boundaries between astronomy, physics, chemistry
and biology are growing vague, and the world is once again starting to seem
like a fundamental unity.
A new image of the world is taking shape in our minds.
To contribute to this emerging scientific picture of reality was Teilhard’s aim,
and in so doing he also drew out the consequences for philosophy and
theology of such a new vision.

Teilhard was a scientist of real stature.
As a palaeontologist his focus was
on the origins and history of ancient humans.
“Studying the most ancient past
has revealed to me
how the future is built.”
The synthesis emerging from his work was not the work of a dreamer
but of someone who had deeply studied natural phenomena all his life.
His primary theme became the universe.
What is the human place and task in this new and marvellous world?

Philosophy Astronomy
Mathematics Biology
Botany History
Geography Paleontology
Theology Physics
Chemistry Ecology
Geology
The world can be studied from many different viewpoints.
Each separate science gives
only a partial insight into the whole,
and therefore a place must be made
for a science concerned with the totality
of the cosmic phenomenon,
one that seeks to probe
right into its structure and inner dynamic.

This includes studying its inner meaning. E.g. We might study a timepiece
in all its aspects: dimensions, weight, shape, make-up of its mechanism.
Yet we have not understood it until its purpose dawns on us, until we
have grasped that it is meant to do something, in this case, to measure
time.
To explain any phenomenon therefore, you must explain what its purpose
is. This purpose is inherent in it, objectively, not something imputed from
outside. Teilhard’s aim, then, is to explain this entire world and how it
moves forward with an inner sense of direction, as if with a purpose.

When we ask what the world is for, what its purpose is, we are asking
about a course of events.
A complete understanding of the world must encompass both its past
and its future.
Scientists clock
the fastest interval of time
in 'zeptoseconds'
As often said, the major discovery of modern science is really the
discovery of time, - of time as a constituent of everything.
This is what has given us the new perspective our ancestors did not have.
It’s only in the last century that we became aware of the gigantic
dimensions and amazing structure of the universe.

Another new discovery of science is that everything is related to
everything else.
The world is presenting as an organism building itself up from within,
where all entities have appeared through a growth process.

“Driven by the forces of love,
the fragments of the world seek each other,
so that the world may come to being.”

Finally, the old world view saw the universe as changeless and static,
but this view too has faded away.
Now we see the universe as a huge historical process, a vast evolutionary
event going on for billions of years.
Our world view has become entirely dynamic.

So: we live in a gigantic universe, building itself up as a cohesive whole,
and driven by inner dynamic energy towards its completion.
And for the first time, we humans are coming to terms with
the revolution brought about in our consciousness.

The life sciences have contributed even more than astronomy to this view:
it was the study of life forms that produced the idea of evolution,
of progressive growth.
That concept has spread to all the other sciences,
and to finally condition our whole way of seeing the world.
Darwin’s importance goes beyond his scientific theories.
We now know that even atoms have their history, stars have their birth,
their prime and their decay, that cultures come and go.
The concept of history now extends to the evolution of the universe itself.
The world is like a gigantic plant which has brought forth
human beings as its flower.
As Teilhard saw it, the “human phenomenon” is essential to understanding the
world correctly.

The history of our planet is a continuous flow of events and changing
conditions.
Yet it has three clear stages:
The cooling and solidifying of matter,
The emergence of life after four billion years and its unfolding into
countless living forms,
Then the arrival of human beings with their dimension of mind.
The three major steps in the world’s
great becoming are:
matter, life, mind.

The emergence first of life, and secondly of mind, - are the two ‘hinges’ of
cosmic history.
The junctions between the three phases remain mysterious to science.
There is a hypothesis here, which Teilhard was aware of.
However, without the hypothesis that one stage emerged from the previous
stage, one could not build a phenomenological account of the universe.
As a pure phenomenon,
earliest life seems to have had a natural cause.
“In every domain, when anything goes
beyond a certain measurement, it suddenly changes its aspect,
condition or nature. The curve doubles back, the solid
disintegrates, the liquid boils into steam, the germ cell divides,
intuition suddenly lights up a pile of facts.

Critical points have been reached, rungs on the ladder, involving a change
of state- jumps of all sorts are made in the course of development.
For now, this is the only way in which science can speak of a “first instant”.
But it is none the less a true way.”

“We are separated by a chasm which the animal cannot
cross. Because we reflect back onto ourselves we are not only
different but quite other. It’s not a matter of change of
degree, but of a change of nature…
The being who is the object of its own thinking, because
of that very doubling back upon itself becomes in a flash able
to raise itself into a new sphere. Another world is born.
Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and invention,
mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties and
dreams of love- all these activities of inner life are nothing else
than the bubbling of the newly formed centre as it bursts onto
itself.”

Does evolution point itself in a direction?
Teilhard thinks it does.
The course of evolution does not look
disorderly,
but rather seems a gradual ascent,
set irreversibly in one direction and from
within itself.
And it always moves from simpler to more
complex,
- from elementary particles to atom, from
atom to molecule, from molecule to cell, from
cell to pluri-cellular creatures,
ending up with the most complex of all,
the human being.

However, running parallel there is a second sign of evolution:
an ever higher degree of consciousness.
Throughout the whole growth process there is a gradual growth of psyche,
as the nervous system grows more perfect, reaching its climax in the human
being and brain. Each degree of consciousness always rests on an equal
degree of biological complexity.

This brings us to the very centre of Teilhard’s system.
The world stuff is seen to have always two aspects,
the exterior and interior. Interiority, the within of
things, psychism, consciousness, the awareness
of self, this too is a cosmic phenomenon to be
given its rightful place.
We perceive it clearly in ourselves but it is also visible
in the higher animals, and down along the scale.
Thus, there are degrees of consciousness, and as it
increases we find higher and higher and totally new qualities emerging.
In Teilhard’s view, this law which links growing complexity to growing
consciousness, is key if we are to correctly understand evolution.
Without this law the universe cannot be seen as a single whole.

After the earliest Darwinians, humans were usually regarded
as an accidental offshoot of the animal kingdom, a member
of the primate family, and different only in degree.
But later biologists have understood in a new way
how humans relate to the environment.
They are self-aware and free.
Only in them does the world become conscious of itself.
So the human being does, after all, have an exceptional position in the
cosmos! Modern science, which first robbed it of its central position, has
now restored it, and on a far more exalted basis.
Humans are the spearhead of evolution
and this gives them a dignity and superiority over their natural surroundings.

Over millions of years, nature has been at work fashioning the human being.
But this process is not ended. Why should it stop?
In this case it is with human beings that responsibility for the future rests;
it is in and through them that the world moves on toward greater completion.
Humans are the only beings pointed towards the future.

As self-aware and free beings, humans stand now
at the peak of cosmogenesis, of the cosmos becoming itself.
Through their creative energies
they will do their part toward completing the evolutionary process.
Within the framework of the laws of nature,
human beings are the architect of tomorrow’s world. What responsibility!

“The whole future
of the Earth,
as of religion,
it seems to me,
depends on
awakening
our faith in the
future.”

Up to now we have undergone evolution more than we have helped
bring it about.
If we accept evolution as a principal, we must face the question of the future.
We are now aware that we are responsible for the future,
and we are causing huge change fast.
Should we not know where it’s all going and how to guide it?
The laws of nature we have discovered apply just as much to the future as to the
present and past. “Studying the very ancient past
has revealed to me how the future is built.”

Mathematical certainty about the future isn’t possible,
but “serious extrapolations” can be made. What is to be our goal?
“The true summons of the Cosmos is a call consciously to share
in the great work that goes on within it…”

“Our duty, as men and women, is to go
forward as if limits to our ability did not
exist. We are collaborators in creation.”

The future will come from how the laws of nature
interplay with human freedom.
It is a future offered to us, not forced upon us.

Being the most recent phase of evolution,
it is within the noosphere that further evolution is going to occur.
We must give up any notion that evolution is a thing of the past.
We are in evolution “up to our necks!”
Precisely because we stand right in
the centre of it,
we need to think about the future
and act responsibly.

If the future is a continuation of the past, we must expect the very heart and
centre of humanity to grow more complex and more conscious.
Psychogenesis will continue to govern the future. Humanity today is unifying
more and more, and the life of the mind grows ever more intense.
Under the influence of trade, commerce and technology on a world scale,
the whole human race is evolving toward a unity never seen before.
The human species is folding back, as it were, upon itself
and expressing its oneness.

Now at last people right around the globe are sensing their solidarity.
We are bent on organising on a planetary scale.
This brings much tension and conflict,
but below the surface one can see that
humans today aspire to globalisation
and socialisation.

At deeper levels there is a shared, deepening, consciousness.
Across every frontier of country, race and language,
a common endeavour in science, thought, art, ethics and religion is emerging.
People have started to work together, concentrating
energies and resources like never before.
We are realising
we are locked together in life and death,
because we have only one choice:
to live together in peace
or perish together in total disaster.

The urge to socialisation, to join with others, is found at all levels of nature,
from the atom upwards.
Real community does not swallow the individual but actually creates diversity;
the larger and more complex the community,
the more opportunity it gives each individual to develop themselves.

There are two ways to unify humankind:
by coercion, or by a voluntary coming together.
Force may unify outwardly, but never brings inner agreement,
which is intrinsic to unity.
Only free and close association, only sympathy and affection, can do that.
These are the truly creative forces in the human world.

“Love is the affinity which links and draws together
the elements of the world...
Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.”

Human association engenders the family, the nation, the community of nations.
With human beings, conscious love has a life giving role to play,
that is, love understood as willing the good of the other(s).
Love gives the human person the greatest chance of coming to maturity.

A community sustained by such love is par excellence the milieu in which the
human person can develop to their best.
Socialisation is the beginning of the “era of the person.”

“We are one, after all, you and I.
Together we suffer, together exist,
and forever will recreate each other.”

So the ‘planetisation’ of humanity is well under way.
To what mysterious final point must this process eventually lead?
“The future, however, is finer than any past”.
As we unify and concentrate more, humanity will build itself into ever higher
complexity and consciousness, a psychic ‘high tension’ of unprecedented
power. Humanity will continue to grow more unified, making us see
that the world has a convergent structure.
.

Surely then these converging lines
will ultimately come together at a specific point,
at a centre where the whole movement merges into one,
a point we may name as the Omega point,
the furthest point of the whole of biological evolution,
of the whole cosmic process:
a final point where the law of universal love will have reached its climax
and its crown.
.

As Teilhard sees it, therefore, the future of humanity lies on the social plane.
Like cells combining to form a brain, so many people combine with one another
to form a kind of communal consciousness, a supra-personal unity.
Yet one where the human being, reflectively conscious,
keeps its individual freedom and existence.
According to Teilhard, the source of this collective super-consciousness would lie
in the moral solidarity and union of all people. [Many today see the internet as
the great tool of this communal consciousness]
We can expect the apex of this upward movement
to surpass in splendour and value all that precedes it.

Without this super-personal centre, toward which all forces converge,
Teilhard believes we will collapse into egoism and selfishness,
and never come together as a unified humanity.

Are we going to reach this ultimate completion?
That will largely depend on our cooperation and choice.
We have to take control of evolution and carry it forward
to its ultimate point. It’s all up to us.
For this we must commit to perfecting evolution with all our hearts.
To that end we must believe in humanity, believe in the world,
and believe in our ultimate destination.

But can we love this future centre enough, if it seems an abstraction or a“thing”?
Is not all real love, in the end,
focused on a person, on a Someone?
If we see the Omega point as a Someone,
there is a chance that love may tide us
over every obstacle,
and that we shall indeed find the strength
to bring evolution to its final term.
In addition and above all, the Omega point itself is active,
attracting the whole cosmos towards itself.

This extrapolation is not derived from philosophy or theology, but built from
science. However, it has provided a structure that philosophy and theology
must work on.
Teilhard’s world view has many implications.
It is also meant to guide our conduct,
leading us into an attitude of deep cooperation.
It directs our gaze to the future
and fills our hearts with hope
and expectation.

Thousands of years, may still lie ahead for the human species.
Our efforts in science, tech, the arts, international affairs,
- all have their place in this great enterprise of building unity.
Therefore, above all, it is our task in this world
to promote and foster concord, unity and love.
These are the great constructive forces of the future.
The future of humankind stands or falls
by the amount of love that we are going to invest.

Teilhard teaches us love of life
and love for the world.
His Human Phenomenon
has been described as
“an act of spiritual liberation.”

Teilhard speaks to us of being
faithful to the earth,
to the mighty work proceeding in the cosmos-
an ascent to mind and spirit,
a consummation through love and union,
a collective movement
toward the supra-personal centre
on which the whole of evolution converges.

Teilhard de Chardin 1.pptx

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