object:2.03 - The Pyx
book class:Hymn of the Universe
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
class:chapter
The Pyx
As I listened to my friend my heart began to burn
within me and my mind awoke to a new and higher
vision of things. I began to realize vaguely that the
multiplicity of evolutions into which the world
process seems to us to be split up is in fact funda-
mentally the working out of one single great mys-
tery; and this first glimpse of light caused me, I
know not why, to tremble in the depths of my soul.
But I was so accustomed to separating reality into
different planes and categories of thought that I
soon found myself lost in this spectacle, still new
and strange to my tyro mind, of a cosmos in which
the dimensions of divine reality, of spirit, and of
matter were also intimately mingled
Seeing that I was waiting anxiously for further
enlightenment, my friend went on:
"The last story I would like to tell you concerns
an experience which happened to me just recently.
This time, as you 11 see, it was not a question of vi-
sion properly so called: it was a more general im-
pression which affected, and still affects, my whole
being.
"This is what happened.
"At that time my regiment was in line on the
Avocourt plateau. The German attack on Verdun
was still going on, and fighting was heavy on this
46 Hymn of the Universe
side of the Mease, So, like many priests during bat-
tle, I was carrying on me the eucharistic Species in
a little pyx shaped like a watch.
"One morning, when there was an almost com-
plete lull in the trenches, I went down into my dug-
out and there, as I withdrew into a sort of medita-
tion, my thoughts very naturally turned to the
treasure I was carrying on me, with nothing but the
thin gilt of the pyx between it and my breast. Many
times already I had derived joy and sustenance
from the fact of this divine presence. But this time
a new idea dawned on me, which soon drove out
all other preoccupations whether of recollection or
of adoration: I suddenly realized just how extraor-
dinary and how disappointing it was to be thus
holding so close to oneself the wealth of the world
and the very source of life without being able to
possess it inwardly, without being able either to
penetrate it ox to assimilate it. How could Christ be
at once so close to my heart and so far from it, so
closely united to my body and so remote from my
soul?
"I had the feeling that an intangible but invinci-
ble barrier separated me from him with whom
nevertheless I could hardly be in closer contact
since I was holding him in my hands. I fretted at
the thought of holding Happiness in a sealed
receptacle. I was reminded of a bee buzzing round
a pot filled with nectar but tightly closed. And im-
patiently I pressed the pyx against me, as though
this instinctive action could cause Christ to enter
more deeply into me. Finally, feeling I could not
continue thus any longer, and it being now the
Christ in the World of Matter 47
hour when I usually said Mass when things were
quiet, I opened the pyx and gave myself Holy
Communion.
a But now it seemed to me that in the depths of
my being, though the Bread I had just eaten had
become flesh of my flesh, nevertheless it remained
outside of me.
"I then summoned to my aid all my powers of
recollection. I concentrated on the divine particle,
the deepening silence and mounting love of my
mind and heart. I made myself limitlessly humble,
as docile and tractable as a child, so as not. to run
counter in any way to the least desires of my heav-
enly guest but to make myself indistinguishable
from him, and through my submission to him, to
become one with the members of the physical
organism which his soul so completely directed. I
went on and on without respite trying to purify my
heart so as to make my inmost being ever more
transparent to the light which I was sheltering
within me.
"Vain yet blessed attempt!
"Still the host seemed to be always ahead of me,
always further on in a more complete concentration
and opening out of my desires, further on in a
greater permeability of my being to the divine in-
fluences, further on in a more absolute limpidity of
my affective powers. By my withdrawal into myself
and my continual purification of my being I was
penetrating ever more deeply into it: but I was like
a stone that rolls down a precipice without ever
reaching the bottom. Tiny though the host was, I
was losing myself in it without ever being able to
48 Hymn of the Universe
grasp it or to coincide with it: its center was reced-
ing from me as it drew me on.
"Since I could never reach the inmost depths of
the host, it struck me that I might at least manage
to grasp it by its whole surface. For that surface
was very smooth and very small. I tried therefore
to coincide with it externally, to correspond exactly
to its contours.
"But there a new infinity awaited me; which
dashed my hopes.
"When I tried to envelope the sacred particle in
my love, so jealously that I clung to it without los-
ing an atom's breadth of precious content with it,
what happened was, in effect, that each touch pro-
duced a new differentiation, a new complexity, so
that each time I thought to have encompassed it I
found that what I was holding was not the host at
all but one or other of the thousand entities which
make up our lives: a suffering, a joy, a task, a friend
to love or to console. . • •
"Thus, in the depths of my heart, through a mar-
velous substitution, the host was eluding me by
means of its own surface, and leaving me at grips
with the entire universe which had reconstituted it-
self and drawn itself forth from its sensible appear-
ances.
"I will not dwell on the feeling of rapture
produced in me by this revelation of the universe
placed between Christ and myself like a magnifi-
cent prey. I will only say, returning to that special
impression of "exteriority" which had initiated the
vision, that I now understood the nature of the in-
visible barrier which stood between the pyx and
Christ in the World of Matter 49
myself. From the host which I held in my fingers I
was separated by the full extent and the density of
the years which still remained to me, to be lived
and to be divinized."
"Here my friend hesitated a moment. Then he
added:
"I don't know why it is, but for some time now
I have had the impression, as I hold the host in my
hands, that between it and me there remains only a
thin, barely-formed film, « « o
"I had always," he went on, "been by tempera-
ment a 'pantheist/ * I had always felt the pan-
theist's yearnings to be native to me and unargua-
ble; but had never dared give full rein to them
because I could not see how to reconcile them with
my faith. Now, since these various experiences
(and others as well) I can affirm that I have found
my interest in my existence inexhaustible, and my
peace indestructible.
"I live at the heart of a single, unique Element,
the Center of the universe and present in each part
of it: personal Love and cosmic Power.
"To attain to him and become merged into his
• Taking "pantheism" in a very real sense, indeed in the ety-
mological sense of the word (En pasi panta Theos, i.e.» in
St Paul's phrase, God "all in all") but at the same time in
an absolutely legitimate sense: for if in the last resort Chris-
tians become "one with God" this unity is achieved not by
way of identification, God becoming all things, but by the
action — at once differentiating and unifying-— of love, God
being all in all, which latter concept is strictly in accord
with Christian orthodoxy. (Author's note.)
50 Hymn of the Universe
life I have before me the entire universe with its
noble struggles, its impassioned quests, its myriads
of souls to be healed and made perfect I can and I
must throw myself into the thick of human en-
deavor, and with no stopping for breath. For the
more fully I play my part and the more I bring my
efforts to bear on the whole surf ace of reality, the
more also will I attain to Christ and cling close to
him.
"God, who is eternal Being-in-itself, is, one might
say, everywhere in process of formation for us.
"And God is also the heart of everything; so
much so that the vast setting of the universe might
be engulfed or wither away or be taken from me by
death without my joy being diminished. Were crea-
tion's dust, which is vitalized by a halo of energy
and glory, to be swept away, the substantial Reality
wherein every perfection is incorruptibly contained,
and possessed would remain intact: the rays would
be drawn back into their Source, and there I should
still hold them all in a close embrace.
"This is why even war does not disconcert me. In
a few days' time we shall be thrown into battle for
the recapture of Douaumont: a grandiose, almost a
fantastic exploit which will mark and symbolize a
definitive advance of the world in the liberation of
souls. And I tell you this: I shall go into this en-
gagement in a religious spirit, with all my soul,
borne on by a single great impetus in which I am
unable to distinguish where human emotions end
and adoration begins.
"And if I am destined not to return from those
heights I would like my body to remain there,
Christ in the World of Matter 51
molded into the clay of the fortifications, like a liv-
ing cement thrown by God into the stonework of
the New City."
Thus my dear friend spoke to me, one October
evening: he whose soul was instinctively in com-
munion with the life, the one life, of all reality and
whose body rests now, as he wished, somewhere m
the wild countryside around Thiaumont *
Written before the Douaumont engagement
( Nant-le-Grand, October 14, 1916 )
* Thiaumont, a farm near Douaumont. (Ed. note.)
THE SPIMTUAL POWER
OF MATTER
0&i
^3#
And as they went on walking and talking together, be-
hold a fiery chariot and fiery horses parted them both
asunder; and of a sudden Elias was caught up by a
whirlwind into heaven.
THE BOOK OF KINGS
The man was walking in the desert, followed by his
companion, when the Thing swooped down on
him.
From afar it had appeared to him, quite small,
gliding over the sand, no bigger than the palm of a
child's hand— as a pale, fleeting shadow like a wa-
vering flight of quail over the blue sea before sun-
rise or a cloud of gnats dancing in the sun at eve-
ning or a whirlwind of dust at midday sweeping
over the plain.
The Thing seemed to take no heed of the two
travelers, and was roaming capriciously through
the wilderness. Then, suddenly, it assumed a set
course and with the speed of an arrow came
straight at them.
And then the man perceived that the little pale
cloud of vapor was but the center of an infinitely
greater reality moving towards them without re-
striction, formless, boundless. The Thing as it ap-
proached them spread outwards with prodigious
rapidity as far as his eye could reach, filling the
whole of space, while its feet brushed lightly over
56 Hymn of the Universe
the thorny vegetation beside the torrent, its brow
rose in the sky like a golden mist with the redden-
ing sxm behind it. And all about it the ether had be-
come alive, vibrating palpably beneath the crude
substance of rocks and plants as in summer the
landscape quivers behind the overheated soil in the
foreground.
What was advancing towards them was the mov-
ing heart of an immeasurable pervasive subtlety.
The man fell prostrate to the ground; and hiding
his face in his hands he waited
A great silence fell around him.
Then, suddenly, a breath of scorching air passed
across his forehead, broke through the barrier of
his closed eyelids, and penetrated his soul. The
man felt that he was ceasing to be merely himself;
an irresistible rapture took possession of him as
though all the sap of all living things, flowing at
one and the same moment into the too narrow
confines of his heart, was mightily refashioning the
enfeebled fibers of his being. And at the same time
the anguish of some superhuman peril oppressed
him, a confused feeling that the force which had
swept down upon him was equivocal, turbid, the
combined essence of all evil and all goodness.
The hurricane was within himself.
And now, in the very depths of the being it had
invaded, the tempest of life, infinitely gentle, infi-
nitely brutal, was murmuring to the one secret
point in the soul which it had not altogether
demolished:
"You called me: here I am. Driven by the Spirit
r-
The Spiritual Power of Matter 57
far from humanity's caravan routes, you dared to
venture into the untouched M&lderness; grown
weary of abstractions, of attentuations, of the
wordiness of social life, you wanted to pit yourself
against Reality entire and untamed
"You had need of me in order to grow; and I was
waiting for you in order to be made holy.
"Always you have, without knowing it, desired
me; and always I have been drawing you to me.
"And now I am established on you for life, or for
death. You can never go back, never return to com-
monplace gratifications or untroubled worship. He
who has once seen me can never forget me: he
must either damn himself with me or save me with
himself.
"Are you coming?"
"O you who are divine and mighty, what is your
name? Speak."
"I am the fire that consumes and the water that
overthrows; I am the love that initiates and the
truth that passes away. All that compels accept-
ance and all that brings renewal; all that breaks
apart and all that binds together; power, experi-
ment, progress — matter: all this am I.
"Because in my violence I sometimes slay my
lovers; because he who touches me never knows
what power he is unleashing, wise men fear me and
curse me. They speak of me with scorn, calling me
beggar-woman or witch or harlot; but their words
are at variance with life, and the Pharisees who
condemn me, waste away in the outlook to which
they confine themselves; they die of inanition and
58 Hymn of the Universe
their disciples desert them because I am the essence
of all that is tangible, and men cannot do without
me.
"You who have grasped that the world — the
world beloved of God — has, even more than indi-
viduals, a soul to be redeemed,* lay your whole
being wide open to my inspiration, and receive the
spirit of the earth which is to be saved.
'The supreme key to the enigma, the dazzling ut-
terance which is inscribed on my brow and which
henceforth will burn into your eyes even though
you close them, is this: Nothing is precious save
what is yourself in others and others in yourself. In
heaven, all things are but one. In heaven all is one.
"Come, do you not feel my breath uprooting you
and carrying you away? Up, man of God, and make
haste. For according to the way a man surrenders
himself to it, the whirlwind will either drag him
down into the darkness of its depths or lift him up
into the blue skies. Your salvation and mine hang
on this first moment."
"O you who are matters my heart, as you see, is
trembling. Since it is you, tell me: what would you
have me do?"
Take up your arms, O Israel, and do battle
boldly against me."
The wind, having at first penetrated and per-
vaded him stealthily, like a philter, had now be-
come aggressive, hostile.
* The soul of the pleroma, i.e. of the consummation, in
Christ, of the travail of creation; cf . The Future of Man, p.
308. (Ed. note.)
The Spiritual Power of Matter 59
From within its coils it exhaled now the acrid
stench of battle. - r ..
The musky smell of forests, the feverish atmos-
phere of cities, the sinister, heady scent that rises
up from nations locked in battle: all this writihed
within its folds, a vapor gathered from the four cor-
ners of the earth.
The man, still prostrate, suddenly started, as
though his flesh had felt the spur: he leapt to his
feet and stood erect, facing the storm.
It was the soul of his entire race that had shud-
dered within him: an obscure memory of a first
sudden awakening in the midst of beasts stronger,
better-armed than he; a sad echo of the long strug-
gle to tame the corn and to master the fire; a ran-
corous dread of the maleficent forces of nature, a
lust for knowledge and possession. . . *
A moment ago, in the sweetness of the first con-
tactj he had instinctively longed to lose himself in
the warm wind which enfolded him.
Now, this wave of bjiss in which he had all but
melted away was changed into a ruthless determi-
nation towards increased being.
The man had scented the enemy, his hereditary
quarry.
He dug his feet into the ground, and began his
battle.
He fought first of all in order not to be swept
away; but then he began to fight for the joy of
fighting, the joy of feeling his own strength. And
the longer he fought, the more he felt an increase
of strength going out from him to balance the
strength of the tempest, and from the tempest there
60 Hymn of the Universe
came forth in return a new exhalation which flowed
like fire into his veins.
As on certain nights the sea around a swimmer
will grow luminous, and its eddies will glisten the
more brightly under the sturdy threshing of his
limbs, so the dark power wrestling with the man
was lit up with a thousand sparkling lights under
the impact of his onslaught
In a reciprocal awakening of their opposed pow-
ers, he stirred up his utmost strength to achieve the
mastery over it, while it revealed all its treasures in
order to surrender them to him,
"Son of earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter,
bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your
life and your youthfulness.
"You thought you could do without it because
the power of thought has been kindled in you? You
hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the
tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you
would be more divine if you lived in the world of
pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled
the corporeal? Well, you were like to have perished
of hunger*
"You must have oil for your limbs, blood for your
veins, water for your soul, the world of reality for
your intellect: do you not see that the very law of
your own nature makes these a necessity for you?
"Never, if you work to live and to grow, never
will you be able to say to matter, "I have seen
enough of you; I have surveyed your mysteries and
have taken from them enough food for my thought
to last me for ever." I tell you: even though, like
The Spiritual Power of Matter 61
the Sage of sages, you carried in your memory the
image of all the beings that people the earth or
swim in the seas, still all that knowledge would be
as nothing for your soul, for all abstract knowledge
is only a faded reality: this is because to under-
stand the world knowledge is not enough, you must
see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the
vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality.
"Never say, then, as some say: "The kingdom of
matter is worn out, matter is dead"? till the very
end of time matter will always remain young, exu-
berant, sparkling, newborn for those who are will-
ing.
"Never say, ^Matter is accursed, matter is evil':
for there has come one who said, *You will drink
poisonous draughts and they shall not harm you,*
and again, TLife shall spring forth out of death,'
and then finally, the words which spell my
definitive liberation, This is my body/
"Purity does not lie in separation from, but in a
deeper penetration into the universe. It is to be
f ound in the love of that unique, boundless Essence
which penetrates the inmost depths of all things
and there, from within those depths, deeper than
the mortal zone where individuals and multitudes
struggle, works upon them and molds them. Purity
lies in a chaste contact with that which is 'the same
in all/
"Oh, the beauty of spirit as it rises up adorned
with all the riches of the earth!
"Son of man, bathe yourself in the ocean of mat-
ter; plunge into it where it is deepest and most vio-
lent; struggle in its currents and drink of its waters.
62 Hymn of the Universe
For it cradled you long ago in your preconscious
existence; and it is that ocean that will raise you up
toGod."
Standing amidst the tempest, the man turned his
head, looking for his companion.
And in that same moment he perceived a strange
metamorphosis: the earth was simultaneously van-
ishing away yet growing in size.
It was vanishing away, for here, immediately be-
neath him, the meaningless variations in the terrain
were diminishing and dissolving; on the otter hand
it was growing ever greater, for there in the dis-
tance the curve of the horizon was climbing cease-
lessly higher.
The man saw himself standing in the center of an
immense cup, the rim of which was closing over
him.
And then the frenzy of battle gave place in his
heart to an irresistible longing to submit: and in a
flash he discovered, everywhere present around
him, the one thing necessary.
Once and for all he understood that, like the
atom, man has no value save for that part of him-
self which passes into the universe. He recognized
with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even
the noblest theorizings as compared with the defini-
tive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its
total, concrete reality.
He saw before his eyes, revealed with pitiless
clarity, the ridiculous pretentiousness of human
claims to order the life of the world, to impose on
The Spiritual Power of Matter 63
the world the dogmas, the standards, the conven-
tions of man.
He tasted, sickeningly, the triteness of men's joys
and sorrows, the mean egoism of their pursuits, the
insipidity of their passions, the attenuation of their
power to feel.
He felt pity for those who take fright at the span
of a century or whose love is bounded by the fronr
tiers of a nation.
So many things which once had distressed or re-
volted him — the speeches and pronouncements of
the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions,
their refusal to allow the universe to move — all
seemed to him now merely ridiculous, nonexistent,
compared with the majestic reality, the flood of en-
ergy, which now revealed itself to him: ominpres-
ent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its devel-
opment, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and
unfailing in its protectiveness.
Thus at long last he had found a point (Fapput,
he had found refuge, outside the confines of human
society.
A heavy cloak slipped from his shoulders and fell
to the ground behind him: the dead weight of all
that is false, narrow, tyrannical, all that is artifi-
cially contrived, all that is merely human in human-
fly.
A wave of triumph freed his soul.
And he felt that henceforth nothing in the world
would ever be able to alienate his heart from the
great reality which was now revealing itself to him,
nothing at all: neither the intrusiveness and indi-
64 Hymn of the Universe
vidualist separatism of human beings (for these
qualities in them he despised) nor the heavens and
the earth in their height and breadth and depth
and power (for it was precisely to these that he
was now dedicating himself for ever ) .
A deep process of renewal had taken place
within him: now it would never again be possible
for him to be human save on another plane. Were
he to descend again now to the everyday life of
earth — even though it were to rejoin his faithful
companion, still prostrate over there on the desert
sand — he would henceforth be for ever a stranger.
Yes, of this he was certain: even for his brothers
in God, better men than he, he would inevitably
speak henceforth in an incomprehensible tongue,
he whom the Lord had drawn to follow the road of
fire. Even for those he loved the most his love
would be henceforth a burden, for they would
sense his compulsion to be for ever seeking some-
thing behind themselves.
Because matter, throwing off its veil of restless
movement and multiplicity, had revealed to him its
glorious unity, chaos now divided him from other
men. Because it had for ever withdrawn his heart
from all that is merely local or individual, all that is
fragmentary, henceforth for him it alone in its total-
ity would be his father and mother, his family, his
race, his unique, consuming passion.
And not a soul in the world could do anything to
change this.
Turning his eyes resolutely away from what was
receding from him, he surrendered himself, in
The Spiritual Power of Matter 65
super-abounding faith, to the wind which was
sweeping the universe onwards.
And now in the heart of the whirling cloud a
light was growing, a light in which there was the
tenderness and the mobility of a human glance;
and from it there spread a warmth which was not
now like the harsh heat radiating from a furnace but
like the opulent warmth which emanates from a
human body. What had been a blind and feral im-
mensity was now becoming expressive and per-
sonal; and its hitherto amorphous expanses were
being molded into features of an ineffable face.
A Being was taking form in the totality of space;
a Being with the attractive power of a soul, pal-
pable like a body, vast as the sky; a Being which
mingled with things yet remained distinct from
them; a Being of a higher order than the substance
of things with which it was adorned, yet taking
shape within them.
The rising Sun was being born in the heart of the
world.
God was shining forth from the summit of that
world of matter whose waves were carrying up to
him the world of spirit.
The man fell to his knees in the fiery chariot
which was bearing him away.
And he spoke these words:
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