Main Feature
Teilhard de Chardin: Adoration or Suicide
Margaret Walters, Victoria
Volume 29 Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: December 15, 2015
Some people accuse Teilhard de Chardin of being overly optimistic about the direction that life is going toward – the Omega of fulfilment where the great journey of the cosmos finally finds its home in communion with the divine heart, overcoming division and plurality and finding its true identity in Oneness.
However, Teilhard’s optimism would more rightly be called a great faith in the power of love made manifest – within his Christian synthesis, the Christ. Although he strongly affirmed the role of humans as co-evolvers of the world, Teilhard knew that they could never achieve the fullness of their own destiny without Christ Omega drawing them from the future and gracing their every becoming moment with divine fire.
Some people accuse Teilhard de Chardin of being overly optimistic about the direction that life is going toward – the Omega of fulfilment where the great journey of the cosmos finally finds its home in communion with the divine heart, overcoming division and plurality and finding its true identity in Oneness.
However, Teilhard’s optimism would more rightly be called a great faith in the power of love made manifest – within his Christian synthesis, the Christ. Although he strongly affirmed the role of humans as co-evolvers of the world, Teilhard knew that they could never achieve the fullness of their own destiny without Christ Omega drawing them from the future and gracing their every becoming moment with divine fire.
Teilhard’s vision is Good News – because inevitably any cosmology flowing from Love will always be Good News. But, the pattern repeats itself over and over in the history of the great mystics – it is only in learning to see past the pain to the depths of reality that the ultimate triumph of love emerges.
On the surface what is visible is often struggle, violence, chaos and ugliness. Julian of Norwich lived in the time of the Great Plague and probably lost family members to this terrible disease, and yet she was graced with a vision of the great unity of being with love at its centre and could only sing, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
OMEGA
Teilhard’s triumphant song of Omega only emerged at great cost to him as he struggled all his life not to be overwhelmed with a sense of the brutality and absurdity of life. Teilhard scholar Christopher Mooney wrote that Teilhard had an “intense sense of anxiety before the mystery and apparent futility of human life . . .
“The evident optimism of his later years was in no way the result of a pleasant disposition or a happy unconcern for the harsh realities of life. It was in every sense a victory of faith, and the price he paid was high.”
It is important to remember that Teilhard lived through two world wars, serving as a stretcher bearer in the horrors of World War I, and although, paradoxically, his vision of a universe evolving toward love was born in the trenches, he personally suffered great trauma from what he experienced there. In a wartime letter he wrote, “You have to have felt the shadow of death pass over you to realize all that is lonely in man’s advance towards the future, all that is hazardous and frightful in starting out again . . .
“Those who have never barely escaped death have no idea what is ahead of them . . . I felt pressing upon me the weight of an isolation that was final and definitive, the affliction of those who have gone all around their prison and found no way out . . . the moment they look up at the total shape of the world and see themselves shut in!”
PSYCHOLOGY
The psychology of a person determines in many ways how his or her life is shaped. Teilhard’s particular anxieties and longings became the source and motivation for his theological writing. From a child he suffered from a kind of intense claustrophobia about being trapped in an absurd and futile existence where everything moves gradually and inevitably toward dissolution and decay.
He longed with every fibre of his being for the Absolute, the one unchanging essential thing within which the ever-changing world could find its ultimate resolution. In The Heart of Matter, his spiritual autobiography, Teilhard speaks of his childhood yearning for something that was not subject to the law of entropy:
“I was happy only in the possession, or thought of, some rarer, more consistent, more immutable object . . . to find unending rest in Some Thing that was tangible and definitive.” He loved the hardness of iron until he found out that it rusted and then he became obsessed with rocks. The following fragments from The Heart of Matter reveal his passion:
“Fundamentally, my underlying innate tendency . . . has remained absolutely inflexible, ever since I have been aware of myself . . . I found every individual form of existence to be unstable and subject to decay . . .
“At all times, and in all I have done, I am conscious that my aim has been to attain the Absolute . . . both [science and religion] have been . . . the pursuit of one and the same object . . . the sense of plenitude . . .the demand for, some ‘unique all-sufficing and necessary reality’ . . . Something essential by nature . . . nothing could satisfy me that was not on the scale of the universal insatiable desire to maintain contact with a sort of universal root or matrix of being.”
DIVINE MILIEU
They say it takes great love or great suffering to be able to surrender our egoic grip on the control of our lives to the great love that surrounds and upholds us. Teilhard experienced both of these in his life and perhaps the deep friendship and intimacy he felt with his close friends helped him through the suffering of being silenced by the Church and his own fearful anxieties.
Over the course of his life, he became gradually immersed in The Divine Milieu where he found his Absolute. His personal evolution taught him that suffering and chaos lay only at the surface of life and if we “without leaving the world . . . plunge into God” we will discover divine love radiating from the fiery centre to suffuse all manifest reality and direct its course.
Teilhard had days (as we all do) when he saw only the surface of things and felt a grey wash of discouragement coat his mind: “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.”
He told his friends he wanted to end well, still faithful to his vision of the triumph of Love. Toward the end of his life Teilhard was able to say in a letter, “I can tell you that I now live permanently in the presence of God.”
If Teilhard was here with us today, what would he say to us when we want to lose heart in the face of our personal struggles and the great troubles of our planet? He would say – never lose your zest for life. Choosing zest means not allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by fear, cynicism or disillusionment which would cause an inability to act.
We must stay tuned in to the “fundamental driving force which impels and directs the universe.” He would tell us to hold onto faith in divine cosmogenesis and faith in ourselves who have been entrusted with the evolution of our world: “In a world which has become conscious of its own self and provides its own force, what is most vitally necessary to the thinking earth is a faith – and a great faith – and ever more faith.”
(Zest for Living) Like ancient prophets of old Teilhard places before us a choice – ‘adoration or suicide.’ We either surrender to the energy of love which carries the world forward toward communion or we force a path against the tide into the dissolution of multiplicity and division. “I set before you life and death, blessing or curse – choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Margaret’s Litany
The world-zest
The essence of all energy
The cosmic curve
The heart of God
The issue of cosmogenesis
The tide of cosmic convergence
The God of evolution
The Universal Jesus . . .
Focus of ultimate and universal energy
Center of the cosmic sphere of cosmogenesis
Heart of Jesus,
Heart of evolution,
Unite me to yourself.
Margaret Walters, Victoria