object:1.08 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL REPERCUSSIONS OF THE ATOM BOMB
book class:The Future of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
CHAPTER 8
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE
SPIRITUAL REPERCUSSIONS OF
THE ATOM BOMB
ONE EARLY DAWN in the "bad lands" of Arizona,
something over a year ago, a dazzling flash of light,
strangely brilliant in quality, illumined the most dis-
tant peaks, eclipsing the first rays of the rising sun.
There followed a prodigious burst of sound. . . .
The thing had happened. For the first time on earth
an atomic fire had burned for the space of a second,
industriously kindled by the science of Man.
But having thus realized his dream of creating
a new thunderclap, Man, stunned by his success,
looked inward and sought by the glare of the light-
ning his own hand had loosed to understand its ef-
fect upon himself. His body was safe; but what had
happened to his soul?
I shall not seek to discuss or defend the essen-
tial morality of this act of releasing atomic energy.
There were those, on the morrow of the Arizona
experiment, who had the temerity to assert that the
physicists, having brought their researches to a suc-
cessful conclusion, should have suppressed and de-
134 THE FUTURE OF MAN
stroyed the dangerous fruits of their invention. As though it were
not every man's duty to pursue the creative forces of knowledge
and action to their uttermost end! As though, in any event, there
exists any force on earth capable of restraining human thought
from following any course upon which it has embarked!
Neither shall I here attempt to examine the economic and po-
litical problems created by the intrusion of nuclear energy upon
human affairs. How is the use of this terrifying power to be or-
ganized and controlled? This is for the worldly technicians to an-
swer. It is sufficient for me to recall the general condition which is
necessary for the solution of the problem: it must be posed on an
international scale. As the American journal, The New Yorker, ob-
served with remarkable penetration on August 18, 1945: "Political
plans for the new world, as shaped by statesmen, are not fantastic
enough. The only conceivable way to catch up with atomic energy
is with political energy directed to a universal structure."
The aim of these reflections — more narrowly concerned with
our separate souls, but for that reason perhaps going deeper — is
simply to examine, in the case of the atomic bomb, the effects of
the invention upon the inventor, arising out of the fact of the in-
vention. Each of our actions, and the more so the more novel the
action, has its deep-seated repercussions upon our subsequent in-
ner orientation. To fly, to beget, to kill for the first time — these, as
we know, suffice to transform a life. By the liberation of atomic en-
ergy on a massive scale, and for the first time, man has not only
changed the face of the earth; he has by the very act set in motion
at the heart of his being a long chain of reactions which, in the brief
flash of an explosion of matter, has made of him, virtually at least,
a new being hitherto unknown to himself.
Let me try, in a first approximation, to distinguish the main
links in this chain.
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL 135
a At that crucial instant when the explosion was about to
happen (or not happen) the first artificers of the atom bomb were
crouched on the soil of the desert. When they got to their feet af-
ter it was over, it was Mankind who stood up with them, instilled
with a new sense of power. Certainly the power was of a kind
which Man had many times felt emanating from himself, in great
pulsations, during the course of his history. He had felt it, for ex-
ample, in the darkness of the palaeolithic age when for the first
time he ventured to put fire to his own use, or accidentally discov-
ered how to produce it; in neolithic times when he found that by
cultivating thin ears of grass he could turn them into rice and mil-
let and corn; and much later, at the dawn of our industrial era,
when he found that he could tame and harness not only wild steeds
but the tireless energies of steam and electricity. Each of these new
conquests signified extensively and intensively, for Man and for the
earth, a total rearrangement of life, a change of epoch; but when
all is said they did not bring about any essential change of plane in
the depths of human consciousness. For in all these cases (even the
most beneficial, that of electricity), what did the discovery lead to
except the control and utilization of forces already at liberty in the
surrounding world? They called for ingenuity and adaptiveness
rather than any act of creation; they were no more, in each case,
than a new sail hoisted to catch a new wind. But the discovery and
liberation of atomic power bears quite another aspect and in con-
sequence has had a very different effect upon Man's soul. Here it
is no longer a question of laying hands upon existing forces freely
available for his use. This time a door has been decidedly forced
open, giving access to a new and supposedly inviolable compart-
ment of the universe. Hitherto Man was using matter to serve his
needs. Now he has succeeded in seizing and manipulating the
sources commanding the very origins of matter — springs so deep
136 THE FUTURE OF MAN
that he can release for his own purposes what seemed to be the ex-
clusive property of the sidereal powers, and so powerful that he
must think twice before committing some act which might destroy
the earth. In the glow of this triumph how can he feel otherwise
than exalted as he has never been since his birth; the more so since
the prodigious event is not the mere accidental product of a fu-
tureless chance but the long-prepared outcome of intelligently
concerted action?
b Therefore, a new sense of power: but even more, the sense
of a power capable of development to an indefinite extent. What
gripped the throats of those bold experimenters in Arizona, in that
minute before the explosion, must surely have been far less the
thought of the destruction it might lead to than of the critical test
which the pyramid of calculation and hypothesis culminating in
this solemn moment was about to undergo. The quicker ending of
the war, the vast sums of money spent — what did such things mat-
ter when the very worth of science itself was on trial? That vast
and subtle edifice of equations, experiments, interwoven calcula-
tions put together little by little in the laboratories, would it survive
the test of this culminating experiment which would make of it,
in everyday terms, something tangible, efficacious, unanswerable?
Was it a dream or reality? This was the moment of truth. In a few
instants they would know. . . .
And the flame truly sprang upward at the place and time pre-
scribed, energy did indeed burst forth from what, to ordinary per-
ception, was inert, noninflammable matter. Man at that moment
found himself endowed not merely with his existing strength but
with a method which would enable him to master all the forces sur-
rounding him. For one thing he had acquired absolute and final
confidence in the instrument of mathematical analysis which for
the past century he had been forging. Not only could matter be ex-
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL 137
pressed in terms of mathematics, it could be subjugated by math-
ematics. Perhaps even more important, he had discovered, in
the unconsidered unanimity of the act which circumstances had
forced upon him, another secret pointing the way to his omnipo-
tence. For the first time in history, through the nonfortuitous con-
junction of a world crisis and an unprecedented advance in means
of communication, a planned scientific experiment employing
units of a hundred or a thousand men had been successfully com-
pleted. And very swiftly. In three years a technical achievement
had been realized which might not have been accomplished in a
century of isolated efforts. Thus the greatest of Man's scientific tri-
umphs happens also to be the one in which the largest number of
brains were enabled to join together in a single organism, at the
same time more complex and more centered, for the purpose of
research. Was this simply coincidence? Did it not rather show that
in this as in other fields nothing in the universe can resist the
converging energies of a sufficient number of minds sufficiendy
grouped and organized?
Thus considered, the fact of the release of nuclear energy,
overwhelming and intoxicating though it was, began to seem less
tremendous. Was it not simply the first act, even a mere prelude, in
a series of fantastic events which, having afforded us access to the
heart of the atom, would lead us on to overthrow, one by one, the
many other strongholds which science is already besieging? The vi-
talization of matter by the creation of supermolecules. The re-
modeling of the human organism by means of hormones. Control
of heredity and sex by the manipulation of genes and chromo-
somes. The readjustment and internal liberation of our souls by
direct action upon springs gradually brought to light by psy-
choanalysis. The arousing and harnessing of the unfathomable in-
tellectual and effective powers still latent in the human mass. ... Is
not every kind of effect produced by a suitable arrangement of
138 THE FUTURE OF MAN
matter? And have we not reason to hope that in the end we shall
be able to arrange every kind of matter, following the results we
have obtained in the nuclear field?
c It is thus, step by step, that Man, pursuing the flight of his
growing aspirations, taught by a first success to be conscious of his
power, finds himself impelled to look beyond any purely mechan-
ical improvement of the earth's surface and increase of his exter-
nal riches, and to dwell upon the growth and biological perfection of
himself. A vast accumulation of historical research and imaginative
reconstruction already existed to teach him this. For millions of
years a tide of knowledge has risen ceaselessly about him through
the stuff of the cosmos; and that in him which he calls his "I" is
nothing other than this tide atomically turning inward upon itself.
This he knew already; but without knowing to what extent he
could render effective aid to the flood of life pouring through
him. But now, after that famous sunrise in Arizona, he can no
longer doubt. He not only can but, of organic necessity, he must
for the future assist in his own genesis. The first phase was the
creation of mind through the obscure, instinctive play of vital
forces. The second phase is the rebounding and acceleration of
the upward movement through the reflexive play of mind itself,
the only principle in the world capable of combining and using
for the purpose of Life, and on the planetary scale, the still-dispersed
or slumbering energies of matter and of thought. It is broadly in
these terms that we are obliged henceforth to envisage the grand
scheme of things of which, by the fact of our existence, we find
ourselves a part.
So that today there exists in each of us a man whose mind has
been opened to the meaning, the responsibility and the aspirations
of his cosmic function in the universe; a man, that is to say, who
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL 139
whether he likes it or not has been transformed into another man,
in his very depths.
d The great enemy of the modern world, "Public Enemy No.
i," is boredom. So long as Life did not think, and above all did not
have time to think — that is to say, while it was still developing and
absorbed with the immediate struggle to maintain itself and ad-
vance — during all that time it was untroubled by questions as to
the value and interest of action. Only when a margin of leisure for
reflection came to intervene between the task and its execution did
the workman experience the first pangs of taedium vitae. But in these
days the margin is immeasurably greater, so that it fills our hori-
zon. Thanks to the mechanical devices which we increasingly
charge with the burden not only of production but also of calcu-
lation, the quantity of unused human energy is growing at a dis-
turbing rate both within us and around us; and this phenomenon
will reach its climax in the near future, when nuclear forces have
been harnessed to useful work. I repeat: despite all appearances,
Mankind is bored. Perhaps this is the underlying cause of all our
troubles. We no longer know what to do with ourselves. Hence in
social terms the disorderly turmoil of individuals pursuing con-
flicting and egoistical aims; and, on the national scale, the chaos of
armed conflict in which, for want of a better object, the excess of
accumulated energy is destructively released . . . "Idleness, mother
of all vices."
But these lowering storm clouds are what the Sense of Evolu-
tion, arising in human consciousness, is destined to disperse. What-
ever may be the future economic repercussions of the atom bomb,
whether over- or underestimated, the fact remains that in laying
hands on the very core of matter we have disclosed to human ex-
istence a supreme purpose: the purpose of pursuing ever further,
140 THE FUTURE OF MAN
to the very end, the forces of Life. In exploding the atom we took
our first bite at the fruit of the great discovery, and this was enough
for a taste to enter our mouths that can never be washed away: the
taste for supercreativeness. It was also enough to ensure that the
nightmare of bloody combat must vanish in the light of some form
of growing unanimity. We are told that, drunk with its own power,
mankind is rushing to self-destruction, that it will be consumed in
the fire it has so rashly lit. To me it seems that thanks to the atom
bomb it is war, not mankind, that is destined to be eliminated, and
for two reasons. The first, which we all know and long for, is that
the very excess of destructive power placed in our hands must ren-
der all armed conflict impossible. But what is even more impor-
tant, although we have thought less about it, is that war will be
eliminated at its source in our hearts because, compared with the
vast field for conquest which science has disclosed to us, its tri-
umphs will soon appear trivial and outmoded. Now that a true ob-
jective is offered us, one that we can only attain by striving with all
our power in a concerted effort, our future action can only be con-
vergent, drawing us together in an atmosphere of sympathy. I re-
peat, sympathy, because to be ardently intent upon a common
object is inevitably the beginning of love. In affording us a biolog-
ical, "phyletic" outlet directed upward, the shock which threatened
to destroy us will have the effect of giving us a sense of direction
and a dynamic force and finally (within certain limits) of making
us of one mind. The atomic age is not the age of destruction but
of union in research. For all their military trappings, the recent ex-
plosions at Bikini herald the birth into the world of a Mankind
both inwardly and outwardly pacified. They proclaim the coming
of the Spirit of the Earth.
e We are at the precise point where, if we are to restore com-
plete equilibrium to the state of psychic disarray which the atomic
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRITUAL 141
shock has induced in us, we must sooner or later (sooner?) decide
upon our attitude to a fundamental choice; the point where our
conflicts may begin again, and fiercely, but by other means and on
a different plane.
I spoke of the Spirit of the Earth. What are we to understand
by that ambiguous phrase?
Is it the Promethean or Faustian spirit: the spirit of autonomy
and solitude; Man with his own strength and for his own sake op-
posing a blind and hostile Universe; the rise of consciousness con-
cluding in an act of possession?
Is it the Christian spirit, on the contrary: the spirit of service
and of giving; Man struggling like Jacob to conquer and attain a
supreme center of consciousness which calls to him; the evolution
of the earth ending in an act of union?
Spirit of force or spirit of love? Where shall we place true
heroism, where look for true greatness, where recognize objective
truth?
It would take too long, and it is outside the scope of this paper,
to discuss the comparative worth of two opposed forms of adora-
tion, the first of which may well have attracted poets, but only the
second of which, I think, presents itself to the reflective mind as
capable of conferring upon a universe in motion its full spiritual
coherence, its full consistence in its passage through death, and fi-
nally its whole message for our hearts. 1
What does matter here, on the other hand, is to note that
Mankind cannot go much further along the road upon which it has
embarked through its latest conquests without having to settle (or
be divided intellectually on) the question of which summit it must
seek to attain.
1 Witnesses of that experiment in Arizona found, in the anguish of the last in-
stants, that in the depths of their hearts they were praying. (Official Report: ap-
pendices.)
142 THE FUTURE OF MAN
In short, the final effect of the light cast by the atomic fire into
the spiritual depths of the earth is to illumine within them the
overriding question of the ultimate end of Evolution — that is to
say, the problem of God.
ETUDES, SEPTEMBER 1946.
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