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object:1.18 - THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM
book class:The Future of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter


CHAPTER 18

THE HEART OF
THE PROBLEM

Some say, "Let us wait patiently until the Christ returns."

Others say, "Let us rather finish building the Earth."

Still others think, "To speed the Parousia,

let us complete the making of Man on Earth."

Introduction

among the MOST disquieting aspects of the
modern world is its general and growing state of
dissatisfaction in religious matters. Except in a hu-
manitarian form, which we shall discuss later, there
is no present sign anywhere of Faith that is expand-
ing: there are only here and there, creeds that at the
best are holding their own, where they are not pos-
itively retrogressing. This is not because the world
is growing colder: never has it generated more psy-
chic warmth! Nor is it because Christianity has lost
anything of its absolute power to attract: on the
contrary, everything I am about to say goes to
prove its extraordinary power of adaptability and
mastery. But the fact remains that for some obscure
reason something has gone wrong between Man
and God as in these days He is represented to Man. Man



260 THE FUTURE OF MAN

would seem to have no clear picture of the God he longs to wor-
ship. Hence (despite certain positive indications of rebirth which
are, however, still largely obscured) the persistent impression one
gains from everything taking place around us is of an irresistible
growth of atheism — or more exactly, a mounting and irresistible
de-Chris tianization.

For the use of those better placed than I, whose direct or indi-
rect task it is to lead the Church, I wish to show candidly in this
paper where, in my view, the root of the trouble lies, and how, by
means of a simple readjustment at this particular, clearly localized
point, we may hope to procure a rapid and complete rebound in
the religious and Christian evolution of Mankind.

I say "candidly." It would be presumptuous on my part to de-
liver a lecture, and criticism would be out of place. What I have to
offer is simply the testimony of my own life, a testimony which I
have the less right to suppress since I am one of the few beings who
can offer it. For more than fifty years it has been my lot (and my
good fortune) to live in close and intimate professional contact, in
Europe, Asia and America, with what was and still is most hu-
manly valuable, significant and influential — "seminal" one might
say — among the people of many countries. It is natural that, by
reason of the unusual and exceptional contacts which have en-
abled me, a Jesuit (reared, that is to say, in the bosom of the
Church) to penetrate and move freely in active spheres of thought
and free research, I should have been very forcibly struck by things
scarcely apparent to those who have lived only in one or other of
the two opposed worlds, so that I feel compelled to cry them aloud.

It is this cry, and this alone, which I wish to make heard here —
the cry of one who thinks he sees.



THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM 261

7. A Major Event in Human Consciousness:
The Emergence of the "Ultra-Human"

ANY EFFORT TO understand what is now taking place in human
consciousness must of necessity proceed from the fundamental
change of view which since the sixteenth century has been steadily
exploding and rendering fluid what had seemed to be the ultimate
stability — our concept of the world itself To our clearer vision the
universe is no longer an Order but a Process. The cosmos has be-
come a Cosmogenesis. And it may be said without exaggeration
that, directly or indirectly, all the intellectual crises through which
civilization has passed in the last four centuries arise out of the
successive stages whereby a static Weltanschauung has been and is
being transformed, in our minds and hearts, into a Weltanschauung
of movement.

In the early stage, that of Galileo, it may have seemed that the
stars alone were affected. But soon the Darwinian stage showed
that the cosmic process extends from sidereal space to life on earth;
with the inevitable result that, in the present phase, Man finds him-
self overtaken and borne on the whirlwind which his own science
has discovered and, as it were, unloosed. From the time of the Re-
naissance, in other words, the cosmos has looked increasingly like
a cosmogenesis; and now we find that Man in his turn is tending
to be identified with an anthropogenesis. This is a major event
which must lead, as we shall see, to the profound modification of
the whole structure not only of our Thought but of our Beliefs.

Many biologists, and not the least eminent among them (all be-
ing convinced, moreover, that Man, like everything else, emerged
by evolutionary means, i.e., was born in Nature) undoubtedly still
believe that the human species, having attained the level of Homo
sapiens, has reached an upper organic limit beyond which it cannot



262 THE FUTURE OF MAN

develop, so that anthropogenesis is only of retrospective interest in
the past. But I am convinced that, in opposition to this wholly il-
logical and arbitrary idea of arrested hominization, a new concept
is arising, out of the growing accumulation of analogies and facts,
which must eventually replace it. This is that, under the combined
influence of two irresistible forces of planetary dimensions (the
geographical curve of the Earth, by which we are physically com-
pressed, and the psychic curve of Thought, which draws us closer
together), the power of reflection of the human mass, which
means its degree of humanization, far from having come to a stop, is
entering a critical period of intensification and renewed growth.

What we see taking place in the world today is not merely the
multiplication of men but the continued shaping of Man. Man, that
is to say, is not yet zoologically mature. Psychologically he has not
spoken his last word. In one form or another something ultra-
human is being born which, through the direct or indirect effect of
socialization, cannot fail to make its appearance in the near future:
a future that is not simply the unfolding of Time, but which is be-
ing constructed in advance of us . . . Here is a vision which Man,
we may be sure, having first glimpsed it in our day will never lose
sight of.

This having been postulated, do those in high places realize
the revolutionary power of so novel a concept (it would be better
to use the word "doctrine") in its effect on religious Faith? For the
spiritually minded, whether in the East or the West, one point has
hitherto not been in doubt: that Man could only attain to a fuller
life by rising "vertically" above the material zones of the world.
Now we see the possibility of an entirely different line of progress.
The long dreamed-of Higher Life, the Union, the consummation
that has hitherto been sought Above, in the direction of some kind
of transcendent (see OY, diagram p. 269): should we not rather look



THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM 263

for it Ahead, in the prolongation of the inherent forces of evolution
(see OX, diagram p. 269)?

Above or ahead — or both? . . .

This is the question that must be forced upon every human
conscience by our increasing awareness of the tide of anthropogen-
esis on which we are borne. It is, I am convinced, the vital ques-
tion, and the fact that we have thus far left it unconfronted is the
root cause of all our religious troubles; whereas an answer to it,
which is perfectly possible, would mark a decisive advance on the
part of Mankind toward God. That is the heart of the problem.



2. At the Source of the Modern Religious Crisis:
A Conflict of Faith Between the Above and the Ahead

ARISING OUT OF what I have said, the diagram at the end of this
chapter represents the state of tension which has come to exist
more or less consciously in every human heart as a result of the
seeming conflict between the modern forward impulse (ox), in-
duced in us all by the newly born force of transhominization, and
the traditional upward impulse of religious worship (oy). To ren-
der the problem more concrete it is stated in its most final and
recognizable terms, the coordinate OY simply representing the
Christian impulse and OX the Communist or Marxist impulse 1 as
these are commonly manifest in the present-day world. The ques-
tion is, how does the situation look, here and now, as between these
opposed forces?

1 An unfavorable simplification where OX is concerned, inasmuch as Marxism
and Communism (the latter a thoroughly bad, ill -chosen word, it may be said
in passing) are clearly no more than an embryonic form, even a caricature, of
a neohumanism that is still scarcely born.



264 THE FUTURE OF MAN

We are bound to answer that it looks like one of conflict that
may even be irreconcilable. The line OY, faith in God, soars up-
ward, indifferent to any thought of an ultra-evolution of the hu-
man species, while the line OX, faith in the World, formally denies
(at least in words) the existence of any transcendent God. Could
there be a greater gulf, or one more impossible to bridge?

Such is the appearance: but let me say quickly that it cannot
be true, not finally true, unless we accept the absurd position that
the human soul is so badly devised that it contradicts within itself
its own profoundest aspirations. Let us look more closely at OX and
OY and see how these two vectors or currents appear and are at
present behaving in their opposed state. Is it not apparent that both
suffer acutely from their antagonism, and therefore that there must
be some way of overcoming their mutual isolation?

Where OX is concerned the social experiment now in progress
abundantly demonstrates how impossible it is for a purely immanent
current of hominization to live wholly, in a closed circuit, upon it-
self. With no outlet ahead offering a way of escape from total
death, no supreme center of personalization to radiate love among
the human cells, it is a frozen world that in the end must disinte-
grate entirely in a Universe without heart or ultimate purpose.
However powerful its impetus in the early stages of the course of
biological evolution into which it has thrust itself, the Marxist an-
thropogenesis, because it rules out the existence of an irreversible
Center at its consummation, can neither justify nor sustain its mo-
mentum to the end.

Worldly faith, in short, is not enough in itself to move the earth
forward: but can we be sure that the Christian faith in its ancient
interpretation is still sufficient of itself to carry the world upward?

By definition and principle it is the specific function of the
Church to Christianize all that is human in Man. But what is likely
to happen (indeed, is happening already) if at the very moment



THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM 265

when an added component begins to arise in the anima naturaliter
Christiana, and one so compelling as the awareness of a terrestrial
"ultra-human," ecclesiastical authority ignores, disdains and even
condemns this new aspiration without seeking to understand it?
This, and simply this, that Christianity will lose, to the extent that
it fails to embrace as it should everything that is human on earth, the
keen edge of its vitality and its full power to attract. Being for the
time incompletely humanized it will no longer fully satisfy even its own
disciples. It will be less able to win over the unconverted or to re-
sist its adversaries. We wonder why there is so much unease in the
hearts of religious and of priests, why so few deep conversions are
effected in China despite the flood of missionaries, why the Chris-
tian Church, with all its superiority of benevolence and devotion,
yet makes so little appeal to the working masses. My answer is sim-
ply this, that it is because at present our magnificent Christian
charity lacks what it needs to make it decisively effective, the sensi-
tizing ingredient of Human faith and hope without which, in rea-
son and in fact, no religion can henceforth appear to Man other
than colorless, cold and inassimilable.

OY and OX, the Upward and the Forward: two religious forces,
let me repeat, now met together in the heart of every man; forces
which, as we have seen, weaken and wither away in separation . . .
Therefore, as it remains for me to show, forces which await one
thing alone — not that we should choose between them, but that we
should find the means of combining them.



3. The Rebound of the Christian Faith:
Upward by Way of Forward

IT is generally agreed that the drama of the present religious
conflict lies in the apparent irreconcilability of two opposed kinds



266 THE FUTURE OF MAN

of faith — Christian faith, which disdains the primacy of the ultra-
human and the Earth, and "natural" faith, which is founded upon
it. But is it certain that these two forces, neither of which, as we
have seen, can achieve its full development without the other, are
really so mutually exclusive (the one so antiprogressive and the
other so wholly atheist) as we assume? Is this so if we look to the
very heart of the matter? Only a little reflection and psychological
insight is required to see that it is not.

On the one hand, neo-human faith in the World, to the extent
that it is truly a Faith (that is to say, entailing sacrifice and the final
abandonment of self for something greater) necessarily implies an
element of worship, the acceptance of something "divine." 2 Every
conversation I have ever had with communist intellectuals has left
me with a decided impression that Marxist atheism is not absolute,
but that it simply rejects an "extrinsicist" form of God, a dens ex
machina whose existence can only undermine the dignity of the
Universe and weaken the springs of human endeavor — a "pseudo-
God," in short, whom no one in these days any longer wants, least
of all the Christians.

And on the other hand Christian faith (I stress the word Chris-
tian, as opposed to those "oriental" faiths for which spiritual as-
cension often expressly signifies the negation or condemnation of
the Phenomenon), by the very fact that it is rooted in the idea of
Incarnation, has always based a large part of its tenets on the tan-
gible values of the World and of Matter. A too humble and subor-
dinate part, it may seem to us now (but was not this inevitable in
the days when Man, not having become aware of the genesis of
the Universe in progress, could not apprehend the spiritual possi-

2 As in the case of biological evolutionary theory which also bore a materialist
and atheist aspect when it appeared a century ago, but of which the spiritual
content is now becoming apparent.



THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM 267

bilities still buried in the entrails of the Earth?) yet still a part so in-
timately linked with the essence of Christian dogma that, like a liv-
ing bud, it needed only a sign, a ray of light, to cause it to break
into flower. To clarify our ideas let us consider a single case, one
which sums up everything. We continue from force of habit to
think of the Parousia, whereby the Kingdom of God is to be con-
summated on Earth, as an event of a purely catastrophic nature —
that is to say, liable to come about at any moment in history,
irrespective of any definite state of Mankind. This is one way of
looking at the matter. But why should we not assume, in accor-
dance with the latest scientific view of Mankind in an actual state
of anthropogenesis, 3 that the parousiac spark can, of physical and
organic necessity, only be kindled between Heaven and a Mankind
which has biologically reached a certain critical evolutionary point
of collective maturity?

For my own part I can see no reason at all, theological or tra-
ditional, why this "revised" approach should give rise to any seri-
ous difficulty. And it seems to me certain, on the other hand, that
by the very fact of making this simple readjustment in our "escha-
tological" vision we shall have performed a psychic operation
having incalculable consequences. For if truly, in order that the
Kingdom of God may come (in order that the Pleroma may close
in upon its fullness), it is necessary, as an essential physical condi-
tion, 4 that the human Earth should already have attained the nat-
ural completion of its evolutionary growth, then it must mean that
the ultra-human perfection which neo-humanism envisages for

3 And. it may be added, in perfect analogy with the mystery of the first Christ-
mas which (as everyone agrees) could only have happened between Heaven
and an Earth which was prepared, socially politically and psychologically to re-
ceive Jesus.

4 But not, of course, sufficient in itself!



268 THE FUTURE OF MAN

Evolution will coincide in concrete terms with the crowning of the
Incarnation awaited by all Christians. The two vectors, or compo-
nents as they are better called, veer and draw together until they
give a possible resultant. The supernaturalizing Christian Above is
incorporated (not immersed) in the human Ahead! And at the
same time Faith in God, in the very degree in which it assimilates
and sublimates within its own spirit the spirit of Faith in the World,
regains all its power to attract and convert!

I said at the beginning of this paper that the human world of
today has not grown cold, but that it is ardently searching for a
God proportionate to the new dimensions of a Universe whose ap-
pearance has completely revolutionized the scale of our faculty of
worship. And it is because the total Unity of which we dream still
seems to beckon in two different directions, toward the zenith and
toward the horizon, that we see the dramatic growth of a whole
race of the "spiritually stateless" — human beings torn between a
Marxism whose depersonalizing effect revolts them and a Chris-
tianity so lukewarm in human terms that it sickens them.

But let there be revealed to us the possibility of believing at the
same time and wholly in God and the World, the one through the
other;5 let this belief burst forth, as it is ineluctably in process of
doing under the pressure of these seemingly opposed forces, and
then, we may be sure of it, a great flame will illumine all things: for
a Faith will have been born (or reborn) containing and embracing
all others — and, inevitably, it is the strongest Faith which sooner or
later must possess the Earth.

UNPUBLISHED. LES MOULINS (PUY-DE-DOME) , SEPTEMBER 8, 1949.



5 In a Christ no longer seen only as the Savior of individual souls, but (precisely
because He is the Redeemer in the fullest sense) as the ultimate Mover of an-
thropogenesis. (see diagram, p. 269).



THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM



269



DIAGRAM ILLUSTRATING THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE
TWO KINDS OF FAITH IN THE HEART OF MODERN MAN



R



O



■X



OY: Christian Faith in a personal transcendent, aspiring upward

toward the Above.
ox: Human Faith in an ultra-human, driving forward toward

the Ahead.
OR: Christian Faith, "rectified" or "made explicit," reconciling

the two: salvation (outlet) at once Above and Ahead in a

Christ who is both Savior and Mover, not only of individual

men but of anthropogenesis as a whole.



Let it be noted that by its construction OR is not a half-
measure, a compromise between Heaven and Earth, but a resul-
tant combining and fortifying, each through the other, two forms
of detachment — that is to say, of "sacrifice to that which is greater
than self."




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