object:2.01 - The Attributes of Omega Point - a Transcendent God
book class:Let Me Explain
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
2.00
Part Two
Apologetics
Pere Teilhard de Chardin regarded apologetics as a dialectical process
aimed at identifying the cosmic Christ of Christian revelation with
Omega Point arrived at by phenomenological extrapolation (and
thereby providing a proof and defence of the truth of Christianity).
Such is the definition he gives in the summary of his thought (p. 145):
It is upon this 'Physics' that, in a 'second phase', Pere
Teilhard builds first an apologetics: under the illuminating
influence of Grace, our minds recognize in the unifying
properties of the Christian phenomenon a manifestation of
Omega, a reflection of Omega upon human consciousness,
and so identify the Omega of reason with the Universal
Christ of revelation.
One can hardly bring a charge of Concordism against such an
approach. A little later, Pere Teilhard makes this perfectly clear:
. • . Concordism and coherence should not be confused.
Religion and science obviously represent two different
meridians on the mental sphere, and it would be wrong not
to keep them separate (that is the concordist mistake); but
these meridians must necessarily meet somewhere at a
pole of common vision (that is, coherence). Otherwise all
that is ours in the domain of consciousness collapses.
Finally, in his Outline of a Dialectic of Spirit (1946, in A. E.
(Oeuvres VHJJ, Pere Teilhard defines with remarkable clarity the
different steps in this apologetics. It emerges as a dialectic, in other
words a dialogue in which the intelligence reflects alternately on what it
already knows (phenomenology) and what it seeks to know (hypothe-
ses, in the domain of energetics and philosophy, relating to Omega). It
is from this essay that we have taken the structural arrangement of this
second part.
In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I think I shall
do well to set out my apologetics, clearly broken down into
its successive phases. (A.E. (Oeuvres VII), p. 149.)
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i. The Attributes of Omega Point: a Transcendent God
I. IRREVERSIBILITY
One point at least seems capable of being established by
analysis of the present facts; and this is that unless we make up
our minds to admit that the cosmos is intrinsically an ab-
surdity, the growth of the spirit must be taken as irreversible.
"The spirit as a whole will never fall back/ In other words, 'In an
evolutionary universe, the existence of spirit by its nature
rules out the possibility of a death in which the achievements
of the spirit will totally disappear or, to be more precise, in
which they will not survive in the form of their flowering. 9
Such is the infinitely comforting guarantee afforded us by
these few words which express a stroke of immediate and
fondamental intuition:
'The world would justifiably and infallibly cease to act -
out of discouragement - if it became aware (in its thinking
zones) that it is going to be a total death. Therefore total
death does not exist. 9
This argument will, I know, appear suspect to many. Many
thinkers, after the example of H. Poincar£, accepting a fash-
ionable agnosticism or seduced by the false lure of stoicism
or a very fine altruism, believe that they can accept without
weakening the idea that thought on earth will last only a
moment, and that we must devote everything to that
moment, which is 'a lightning-flash in the night*. These
thinkers have, I believe, deluded themselves by not follow-
ing to its conclusion the significance of this phrase: total
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Let Me Explain
death of the universe. Unconsciously, I am certain, they stop
short of finding the full meaning of the words they use. They
are assuming that some trace of this 'lightning-flash' will
remain; something will be preserved by a consciousness, a
memory, a glance. But even this last hope must be aban-
doned if the idea of absolute death (probably as absurd as
the idea of nothingness) is to be given its full force. No, not
even a trace. (It would still mean everything to the Universe
even for an instant to have cast its spell on an observer who
will retain that vision for ever!) Around us total, impene-
trable darkness, which will let nothing of all we have understood
and achieved filter through to anyone. Then why make
efforts ? Why follow the orders and expectations of evolu-
tion? Out of supreme altruism? But there is no virtue in
sacrifice when no higher interest is at stake. A universe
which would continue to act laboriously in the conscious ex-
pectation of absolute death would be a stupid world, a
spiritual monstrosity, in fact a chimera. Now since in fact
the world appears before us here and now as one huge action
perpetually taking place with formidable assurance, there
can be no doubt at all that it is capable of nourishing
indefinitely in its offspring an appetite for life, which
is continually growing more critical, exacting and
refined. It must carry within it the guarantees of ulti-
mate success. From the moment that it admits thought, a universe
can no longer be simply temporary or of limited evolution: it
must by its very structure emerge into the absolute. 1 (H.E., pp.
40-1.)
To ward off the threat of disappearance, incompatible
with the mechanism of reflective activity, man tries to
bring together in an ever vaster and more permanent sub-
1 Editor's italics.
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Apologetics
ject the collective principle of his acquisitions - civilization,
humanity, the spirit of the earth. Associated in these enor-
mous entities, with their incredibly slow rhythm of evolu-
tion, he has the impression of having escaped the destructive
action of time.
But by doing so he has only pushed back the problem.
For after all, however large the radius traced within time and
space, does the circle ever embrace anything but the perish-
able? So long as our constructions rest with all their weight
on the earth, they will vanish with the earth. The radical de-
fect in all forms of belief in progress, as they are expressed in
positivist credos, is that they do not definitively eliminate
death. What is the use of detecting a focus of any sort in the
van of evolution, if that focus can and must one day disinte-
grate? To satisfy the ultimate requirements of our action,
Omega must be independent of the collapse of the forces
with which evolution is woven. (P.M., pp. 269-70.)
II. PERSONALITY
If human particles are to group themselves 'centrically they
must ultimately - in unison and simultaneously - love one
another; for there is no true love in an atmosphere of col-
lectivity, that is to say, that is impersonal.
Love cannot be born, and take permanent root, unless it
finds a heart, a face. (Comment je vois, para. 20 c.)
The personality of God (together with the survival of the
'soul') calls out the greatest opposition and antipathy from
contemporary scientific thought. The origin of this dislike
is to be found in the intellectual contempt which has re-
jected as 'anthropocentric all attempts to understand the
Universe through man. Let us once more put the fact of man
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Let Me Explain
in its true place. Let us recognize, not out of vanity or idle-
ness but on scientific evidence, that no phenomenon has had
more preparation, or is more axial and characteristic than
this. And at the same time we are compelled to admit that
even (and particularly) today, because of the new value Man
is assuming in Nature, the idea of a God conceived as a dis-
tinct and animate centre of the world, is necessarily in full
growth. Let us say, in fact, substituting one equivalent for-
mula for another, that by the capital event of hominization,
the most advanced portion of the cosmos has become per-
sonalized. This simple change of variable brings in sight, for
the future, a double condition of existence which is quite in-
evitable.
First of all, since everything in the Universe beyond man
takes place within personalized being, the final divine term of
universal convergence must also (eminently) possess the
quality of a Person (without which it would be inferior to
the elements it governs). But there is a further observation to
be made, a little subtler but no less certain. To the idea of a
personal (or rather super-personal) centre emerging from
Multiplicity, we at first react by imagining this centre as
forming itself from the legacy or 'remains' of inferior centres
of personality which surrender their progress to it. Now this
is an inaccurate view, and arises from the fact that we trans-
fer unaltered into the personalized sphere of the World a type
of heredity peculiar to infra-personal zones of the cosmos.
Let us reflect further, and we shall recognize that a person
can only transmit (and can only have the vital desire to trans-
mit) its own personality to evolution. We imagine that by the
progress of cosmic Being, this person becomes 'super-
centred', or centred not on itself but on a higher being. But it
would not be possible for it to pass to this centre as a gift
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Apologetics
presented by itself, which would not be itself. For its whole
quality lies in being itself- the incommunicable expression of
a conscious observation point upon the universe. If this is the
case, the final summit of the perfected - that is to say per-
sonalized - World (that is to say God) can in no way be con-
ceived as born of a sort of aggregation of elementary per-
sonalities (since these are, by nature, irremovable from their
own centres). In order to super-animate without destroying a
Universe formed of personal elements, it must be a special
Centre itself. 1 (H.E., pp. 45-6.)
III. REALITY AND ACTUALITY
Love, I said, dies in contact with the impersonal and the
anonymous. With equal infallibility, it becomes impoverished
with remoteness in space - and still more, much more, with
difference in time. For love to be possible, there must be co-
existence. Accordingly, however marvellous its foreseen
figure, Omega could never even so much as equilibrate the
play of human attractions and repulsions if it did not act
with equal force, that is to say with the same stuff of prox-
imity. With love, as with every other sort of energy, it is
within the existing datum that the lines of force must at
every instant come together. Neither an ideal centre, nor
a potential centre could possibly suffice. An actual and
real noosphere goes with a real and actual Centre. To be
supremely attractive Omega must already be supremely
present. (P.M., p. 269.)
1 i.e. a Person.
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Let Me Explain
IV. AUTONOMY, TRANSCENDENCE
While being the last term of the evolutionary series, Omega
is also outside all series. Not only does it crown, but it closes.
Otherwise the sum total of the process would collapse upon
itself - in organic contradiction with the whole operation.
When, going beyond the elements, we come to speak of the
conscious Pole of the world, it is not enough to say that it
emerges from the rise of consciousness : we must add that from
this genesis it has already emerged; without which it could
neither subjugate into love nor fix in incorruptibility. If by
its very nature it did not escape from the time and space
which gathers it together, it would not be Omega. (P.M., pp.
270-1.)
It is impossible to justify evolution through increasing complexity -
the laborious climb towards the improbable - without imagining that
somewhere, making itself felt in the very heart of evolution, there is 'a
centre that is sufficiently independent and active to force, when it
so requires, the whole of the cosmic layer to centre (i.e. to com-
plexify) itself in the likeness of that centre*. (Comment je vois f para.
20 b.)
Unless Omega were in some way emancipated from time
and space, it could not already be present for us nor could
it be the basis for our hopes of irreversibility. Thus, in one
of its aspects, different from that in which we are witnessing
its formation, it has always been emerging above a world
from which, seen from another angle, it is, at the same time,
in process of emergence. (A.E. (Oeuvres VII), p. 119.)
Multiplicity ascends, attracted and engulfed by something
which is 'already One'. This is the secret and guarantee of
the irreversibility of life. (H.E., p. 46.)
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