object:2.05 - The Religion of Tomorrow
book class:Let Me Explain
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
5. The Religion of Tomorrow
I. TOWARDS A CHRISTIAN REVIVAL
For almost all the ancient religions, the renewal of cosmic
outlook characterizing 'the modern mind* has occasioned a
crisis of such severity that, if they have not yet been killed by
it, it is plain they will never recover. Narrowly bound to
untenable myths, or steeped in a pessimistic and passive mys-
ticism, they can adjust themselves neither to the precise
immensities nor to the constructive requirements of space-
time. They are out of step both with our science and with our
activity.
But under the shock which is rapidly causing its rivals to
disappear, Christianity, which might at first have been
thought to be shaken too, is showing, on the contrary, every
sign of forging ahead. For by the very fact of the new dimen-
sions assumed by the universe as we see it today, it reveals
itself both as inherently more vigorous in itself and as more
necessary to the world than it has ever been before. (P.M.,
p. 296.)
What is finally the most revolutionary and fruitful aspect
of our present age is the relationship it has brought to light
between matter and spirit: spirit being no longer independent
of matter, or in opposition to it, but laboriously emerging
from it under the attraction of God by way of synthesis and
centration.
But what is the effect, for Christian faith and mysticism,
of this redefinition of Spirit? It is simply to confer reality
and absolute urgency upon the double dogma on which the
whole of Christianity rests, and by which it is summed up:
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the physical primacy of Christ and the moral primacy of
charity. (F.M., pp. 93-4-)
In this connection, see the preceding chapter, with its treatment of the
universal dimensions of Christ-Omega and its definition of mysticism
from the more inclusive angle of Super-charity.
Christianity, by its very essence, is much more than a
fixed system, formulated once and for all, of truths that must
be accepted and preserved literally. For all its basis in a nu-
cleus of 'revelation, it constitutes in fact a spiritual attitude
that is continually developing: it represents the development
of a Christie consciousness that keeps pace with and is re-
quired by the growing consciousness of mankind. It behaves,
biologically, like a phylum. By biological necessity, there-
fore, it must have the structure of a phylum; in other words
it must form a coherent and progressive system of spiritual
elements collectively associated.
Once tha: is accepted, it becomes clear that, here anc^now,
nothing within Christianity except Catholicism possesses
these characteristics.
There are, no doubt, numerous individuals outside Cath-
olicism who see and love Christ and are therefore united to
him as closely as Catholics (and even more closely). These,
however, are not grouped together in the 'cephalized' unity
of a body which reacts vitally, as an organic whole, to the
combined forces of Christ and Humanity.
They are fed by the sap that flows in the trunk without
sharing in its elaboration and in its youthful surge at the
very heart of the tree. Experience is at hand to prove that
this is so. Not only logically but as a matter of fact it is only
in Catholicism that new dogmas continue to germinate -
and, more widely, that those new attitudes are produced
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which, by a constant synthesis of the age-old Creed and
the views newly emerged in man's consciousness, are pre-
paring in our world of today the coming of a Christian
humanism.
It is abundantly clear that if Christianity (as it professes
and feels itself to be) is indeed destined to be the religion of
tomorrow, it can only be through the living, organic, axis
of its Roman Catholicism that it can hope to be a match for,
and assimilate to itself, the great modern currents of humani-
tarianism.
To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and com-
pletely Christian. (Introduction a la Vie chretienne (Oeuvres X),
pp. 196-7.)
As soon as, indeed instead of isolating it and opposing
it to what has motion, we resolutely 'plug it into' the for-
ward moving world, Christianity - however worn out
it may appear to our modern Gentiles - immediately and
completely regains its original power of activating and
attracting.
And this is because, of all the forms of worship produced
in the course of man's history, only Christianity, once this
'connection' has been made, shows the astonishing power of
energizing to the maximum, by 'amorizing', both the forces
of growth and life and those of diminishment and death,
within and during the Noogenesis in which we are involved.
It is still Christianity, I repeat, and Christianity it will
always be: but it is a 're-born' Christianity, as certain of vic-
tory tomorrow as it was in its first days - because it alone
(through the twofold virtue, now at last understood in its total
truth, of its Cross and Resurrection) is capable of becoming
the religion that provides the specific motive force for evolu-
tion. (Le Christique, unpublished.)
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II. TOWARDS THE ABOVE THROUGH THE AHEAD
Without a 'convergent' view of the world, of which the
Christian type is an example, the structure built up by human
action is in danger of collapsing for lack of a keystone to set
in the arch. (S.C., p. 108.)
It used to appear, with almost geometric certainty, that
only two attitudes were possible for man: either loving
heaven or loving the earth. With a new view of space, a
third road opens up: to make our way to heaven through
the earth. Communion (the true communion) with God can
be attained through the world; and to adopt that road is
not to take the impossible step of trying to serve two masters.
Such a Christianity is still in real fact the true application
of the Gospel, since it represents the same force applied to
the elevation of mankind, in a common love, above the
tangible.
At the same time such evangelical teaching no longer
smacks of the opium for dispensing which to the masses we
are so bitterly (and with some justification) reproached.
Nor is it merely the soothing oil poured into the wounds -
the lubricant for the labouring machinery - of mankind.
The truth is that it comes to us as the animator of human
action, to which it offers the sharply defined ideal of a divine
figure glimpsed in history, a figure in whom all that is essen-
tially most precious in the Universe is concentrated and
preserved.
It is the exact answer to all the doubts and aspirations of an
age that has suddenly woken into consciousness of its future.
That teaching, and that alone, so far as we can judge, is
showing itself capable of justifying and maintaining in the
world the fundamental zest for life.
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Apologetics
It is the very Religion of Evolution. (Christologie et Evolu-
tion, 1933 (OeuvresX), pp. 111-12.)
To sum up, in order to match the new curve of time,
Christianity is led to discover the values of this world below
the level of God, while Humanism finds room for a God
above the level of this world. Inverse and complementary
movements: or rather, the two faces of a single event which
perhaps marks the beginning of a new era for mankind.
This double transformation is something more than a
speculation of my own. Throughout the world at this
moment, without distinction of country, class, calling or
creed, men are appearing who have begun to reason, to act
and to pray, in terms of the limidess and organic dimensions
of Space-time. To the outside observer, such men may still
seem isolated. But they are aware of one another among
themselves, they recognize each other whenever their paths
cross. They know that tomorrow, rejecting old concepts,
divisions and forms, the whole world will see what they see
and think as they do. (F.M., p. 96.)
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 : let this belief burst forth, as it is ineluctably
in process of doing under the pressure of those 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 re-
born) containing and embracing all others - and inevitably
it is the strongest Faith which sooner or later must possess the
earth. (F.M., pp. 268-9.)
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