object:2.03 - The Christian Phenomenon and Faith in the Incarnation
book class:Let Me Explain
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
3. The Christian Phenomenon and Faith
in the Incarnation
I. THE RELIGIOUS PHENOMENON
The idea came to be widely accepted during the nineteenth
century that religions express a primitive state of mankind
that has now been left behind. 'In former times men de-
veloped the concept of divinity in their imaginations in
order to account for natural phenomena of whose causes they
were ignorant. By discovering the empirical explanation of
these same phenomena, science has made God and religions
superfluous.' That sums up the new creed of many of our
contemporaries. (S.C., p. 98.)
Our generation and the two that preceded it have heard
little but talk of the conflict between science and faith; in-
deed it seemed at one moment a foregone conclusion that
the former was destined to take the place of the latter.
But, as the tension is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems
to need to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form
of equilibrium - not in elimination, or duality, but in
synthesis. After close on two centuries of passionate struggle,
neither science nor faith has succeeded in discrediting its
adversary. On the contrary it is becoming obvious that
neither can develop normally without the other. And the
reason is simple: the same life animates both . . . Religion and
science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and
the same complete act of knowledge - the only one which
can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contem-
plate, measure and fulfil them. (P.M., pp. 283-4, 2 $S-)
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Religion is not a strictly individual crisis - or choice or
intuition - but represents the long disclosure of God's being
through the collective experience of the whole of humanity,
God reflecting himself personally on the organized sum of
thinking monads, to guarantee an assured success and fix
precise laws for their hesitant activities - God bent over the
now intelligent mirror of Earth to impress on it the first
marks of his Beauty. (H.E., p. 47.)
II. COMPARISON OF RELIGIONS
The development of Mankind requires a religion that will
give form to the free psychic energy of the world: one, that
is to say, that makes itself felt as a process of construction and
conquest that leads up to some supreme unification of the
Universe. (S.C., p. 104).
The true God must therefore possess all the attributes ascribed to Omega
Point, and must in particular satisfy these two conditions: he must be:
a. A God of cosmic synthesis in whom we can be con-
scious of advancing and of joining together by spiritual
transformation of all powers of matter.
b. A supremely personal God, from whom we are the
more distinguishable the more we lose ourselves in Him.
(H.E., p. 109.)
If we apply this double criterion to the numerous types of
religious, and even secular moral systems, that have followed
one another uninterruptedly throughout history, they all go
up in smoke. Just as practically nothing survives factually
beyond its own time, so practically nothing can stand up
logically.
The first to be eliminated, at one sweep, are the various
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forms of agnosticism, explicit or implicit, that have tried to
base morality on a pure social empiricism or again on a pure
individual aestheticism, emphatically ruling out any faith in
some future consummation of the world. Apart from the
individual shortcomings of these various systems, they all
have the common fault of cutting off the flow of the life-sap
which they should direct into the proper channel and help to
rise. Neither Confucianism, which ensured the smooth
running of society without progress - nor the wisdom of
Marcus Aurelius, whose thought was a bright flower in the
garden of mankind - nor the cult, so popular again today, of
self-contained personal enjoyment and interior perfection -
none of these can any longer come up in any way to our ideal
of men as builders and conquerors. It is upon a heaven that
we must be urged to launch our attack: if not, we lay down
our arms.
If we turn to the group represented by Islam, nothing has
permanence; everything evaporates, and perhaps even more
completely. Islam has retained the idea of the existence and
the greatness of God. That, it is true, is the seed from which
everything may one day be born again; but at the same time
Islam has achieved the extraordinary feat of making this God
as ineffective and sterile as a non-being for all that concerns
the knowledge and betterment of the world. After destroy-
ing a great deal and creating locally an ephemeral beauty,
Islam offers itself today as a principle of fixation and stagna-
tion. An improvement upon this practical impotence would
be perfectly conceivable, and - basically amounting to a con-
vergence towards Christianity - already appears to be coming
about in a group of high-minded thinkers alive to modern
requirements. 1
1 Written in 1933.
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Next we turn to the imposing mass of Hindu and eastern
mystical systems. The East, the first shrine, and, we are as-
sured, the ever-living dwelling-place of the Spirit. The East,
where so many from the West still dream of finding shelter
for their faith in life. Let us take a closer look at those
mighty constructions; and, without even venturing into the
temple to savour what sort of incense still burns within it,
let us, not as archaeologists or poets, but as architects of the
future, examine the solidity of its walls. The very moment we
come into fundamental contact with Asia there can be no
question of doubt. Those impressive columns are utterly
incapable of supporting the drive of our world in these days.
The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies
in their having been second to none in vibrating with the
passion for unity. This note, which is essential to every form
of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find
ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names
of their Gods. However, the Hindu sages thought that if
man is to attain this unity he must renounce the earth, its
passions and cares, and the effort it demands. (S.C., pp. 104-
For the Hindu sage, spirit is the homogeneous unity in
which the complete adept is lost to self, all individual
features and values being suppressed. All quest for know-
ledge, all personalization, all earthly progress are so many
diseases of the soul, Matter is dead weight and illusion. {How I
Believe, p. 33.)
It is, logically, a doctrine of passivity, of relaxation of ten-
sion, of withdrawal from things. A doctrine, in fact, that is
totally ineffective and dead. It is precisely the reverse of what
true human mysticism, born in the West, looks for if it is to
be able to develop itself fully. For the western mystic the
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unity that demands our worship is to be found at the term
not of a suppression or attenuation of the real but of an effort
of universal convergence. God is arrived at not in a negation,
but in an extension, of the world. (S.C., p. 106.)
Unlike the venerable cosmogonies of Asia which I have
just dismissed, the humanist pantheisms represent in our world
an extremely youthful form of religion. It is a religion which
(apart from Marxism) as yet knows little or no codification,
a religion with no apparent god, and with no revelation.
But it is religion in the true sense of the word, if by that
word we mean contagious faith in an ideal to which a man's
life can be given. In spite of many differences in detail, a
rapidly increasing number of our contemporaries is hence-
forth agreed in recognizing that the supreme value of life
consists in devoting oneself body and soul to universal
progress - this progress being expressed in the tangible
developments of mankind. It is a very long time since the
world has witnessed such an effect of 'conversion'. This,
surely, can only mean that in forms that vary (Communist
or nationalist, scientific or political, individual or collective)
we have without any doubt been watching for the last
century the birth and establishment of a new faith: the
religion of evolution .
I rejected the East because it left no logical place or value
for the developments of nature. In humanisms, on the other
hand, I find the genesis of the greatest measure of conscious-*
ness, with its essential accompaniment of creation and re-
search of every kind erected into a sort of absolute. In this
I see a stimulation to unlimited efforts to conquer time and
space. This, I feel, is the natural interior climate to develop
and evolve in which I am made. I can find no other explana-
tion for the immediate sympathy and profound agreement
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I have always noted between myself and the most emanci-
pated servants of the earth. I have often been beguiled,
accordingly, by dreams of venturing in their footsteps,
curious to discover how far our paths might coincide. But
on each occasion, I have very soon been disappointed. What
I found was that after a fine start the worshippers of progress
immediately come to a halt, without the desire or ability
to go beyond the second stage in my individual belief.
They set out eagerly, it is true, towards faith in spirit (the
true spirit of sublimation and synthesis), but at the same
time they hold back frominvestigating whether, to justify the
gift they make of themselves, this spirit must be seen by
them as endowed with immortality and personality. Much
more often than not they deny it these two properties, which,
in my view, are essential to the justification of man's effort;
or, at any rate, they try to build up the body of their religion
without reference to those properties. This very soon pro-
duces a feeling of insecurity, of incompleteness, and of
suffocation.
The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well
into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of
the sun. When I turn to the humanist pantheisms of today I
feel that the lowering sky is pressing down on me and stifling
me. (How I Believe, pp. 34-5.)
When, finally, we turn to Christianity, two observations
must be made, one affirmative, one a restrictive qualification,
if we are to cover the situation.
First, and most important, it is clear that by its very struc-
ture Christianity has always found its proper balance by
directing itself towards the Spirit that unifies and synthesizes.
God finally becomes all in all in an atmosphere of pure char-
ity (sola caritas). That magnificent definition of the pantheism
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of differentiation expresses in unmistakable terms the very
substance of Christ's message.
That, however, is far from meaning that, whether in its
mystical expression or in its dogmatic formulation, the
centric and centrifying character of the movement can yet
be regarded as perfecdy defined
Is it not obvious that Christianity will be able to breathe
freely and spread its wings wide only if it can look forward
in the end to the full realization of its spiritual potentialities,
and that this calls for a true philosophy not simply of the
Whole but of a convergent Whole?
The time has undoubtedly come when a new mysticism,
at once fully human and Christian, must finally appear, at
the opposite pole from an outworn orientalism: that is the
road of the West, the road of tomorrow's World. (A.E.
(Oeuvres VIIJ, pp. 234-6.)
This Christian renaissance, which Teilhard called for with all his
faith, is the subject of Chapter 5. The very dynamism of the 'Christian
phylum', of which the Council provided a telling example, is an over-
powering proof of the truth of Christianity.
First, however, we must see how this singular 'Christian phenome-
non' can be described from without.
III. THE CHRISTIAN PHENOMENON
Historically, starting with the man Jesus Christ, a phylum
of religious thought appeared within the human mass, and
its presence has continually influenced more and more
widely and deeply the development of the Noosphere. No-
where, outside this remarkable current of consciousness, has
the idea of God and the significant act of worship attained
such clarity, such richness, such coherence and flexibility.
And all this has been maintained and fed by the conviction
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that it is the answer to an inspiration and a revelation from on
high. (A.E. (Oeuvres VII), p. 154.)
From the supremely realist and biological point of view
adopted by Catholic dogma, the Universe represents:
(1) the arduous, personalizing, unification in God of a
tenuous mass of souls which are distinct from God and at
the same time in suspension from him; (2) by incorporation
in Christ (incarnate God), (3) through the building up of the
collective humano-Christian unit (the Church).
'When Christ has assimilated all things unto himself, then
he will himself also be subject unto him who put all things
under him, that God may be all in all/ (St Paul.)
From this it follows that a threefold faith is the essential
and sufficient basis of the Christian attitude:
1. Faith in the Personality (the personalizing personality
of God, the focus of the World).
2. Faith in the divinity of the historical Christ (not only
as prophet and perfect man, but as an object also of love and
worship).
3 . Faith in the reality of the Church-p/iy /i*m (in which, and
centred on which, Christ continues to develop, in the World,
his total personality). (Introduction a la Vie chretienne, 1944,
Oeuvres X, pp. 179-80.)
Since the Christian Universe consists, structurally, in the
unification of elementary persons in a supreme Personality
(which is God's), the ultimate dominating energy of the
whole system can only be an interpersonal attraction: in
other words it must be one of love.
In consequence, God's love for the world and for each of
the elements of the world, and the love, too, that the ele-
ments of world have for one another and for God, are more
than a secondary effect attached to the process of creation:
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they represent also both its operative factor and its basic
dynamism. (Ibid.)
In the first place, whatever may be said, a love - a true
love - of God is perfectly possible. If it were not, all the
monasteries and churches in the world would empty over-
night; and Christianity, in spite of its framework of ritual,
teaching and hierarchy, would inevitably collapse into
nothingness.
Secondly, there is no doubt that this love finds greater
strength in Christianity than anywhere else. If that were not
so, then, in spite of all the excellences and all the appeal of the
kindly Gospel teaching, the doctrine of the Beatitudes and
of the Cross would long ago have been replaced by some
Creed with more emphasis on mastery - and, more par-
ticularly, some form of humanism or what we might call
'terrenism'.
Whatever may be the merits of the other religions, it is
an undeniable fact, explain it how you will, that the most
ardent collective focus of love that has yet appeared in the
world, burns here and now at the heart of God's Church.
(Le Christique, unpublished, 1955.)
Must we not recognize, at the source of this mystical
current that has such remarkable vitality, the creative flood
at the peak of its intensity - the spark that leaps the gap
between God and the Universe through a personal milieu -
the message, precisely, which we were justified in expecting?
(A.E. (Oeuvres VII), p. 154.)
IV. THE ACT OF FAITH
Here, indeed, is the crucial choice upon which everything
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else depends. Just, in fact, as the refusal to recognize the or-
ganic value of the social fact would leave us (at the first
stage of this dialectic) no reason to believe in an ultra-human
extension of evolution, so now the refusal to recognize the
Christian fact would mean that we saw the vault of the
Universe, after momentarily opening out above us, again
hermetically sealed.
On the other hand, if we take the step - if, that is to say,
we are prepared (as reasonable probability suggests) to see in
the living thought of the Church the reflection, adapted to
our evolutionary condition, of the divine thought - then
our spirit can resume its forward advance. And, if we make
our way for a third time to the summit of all things we shall
see it not simply as the centre of consistence, nor simply as
a psychical prime mover, nor even simply as a being that
addresses us, but as a Word that is incarnate. If, then, the
Universe rises up progressively towards unity, this is not
merely due to some external force; it is because the transcen-
dent becomes to some degree immanent in it. There we have
the lesson of Revelation.
At this point, however, before going any further, we
should stop for a moment and note what is presupposed by
the step we have just taken and what new contribution, also,
it adds to the nature of our adherence. Hitherto we have ad-
vanced, in our looking forward to fuller being, only along
the road of reason, each of our successive intuitions operating
within the scientific framework of 'hypothesis'. From the
moment we admit the reality of an answer that comes to
us from on high, we in some way enter into the order of
certainty. This, however, is effected only through a mechan-
ism not simply of confrontation of subject with object but
of contact between two centres of consciousness. It is no
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longer an act of cognition but of recognition; it is the com-
plex interaction of two beings who freely open themselves
and give themselves to one another - the emergence, under
the influence of grace, of theological Faith. (A.E. (Oeuvres
Vn), pp. 154-5.)
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