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object:3.01 - Hymn to Matter
book class:Hymn of the Universe
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
class:chapter




Hymn to Matter

"Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn
rock: you who yield only to violence, you who
force us to work if we would eat.



66 Hymn of the Universe

^Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, un-
tameable passion: you who unless we fetter you
will devour us.

"Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible
march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who,
by constantly shattering our mental categories,
force us to go ever further and further in our pur-
suit of the truth.

"Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable
time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and
atoms and generations: you who t>y overflowing
and dissolving our narrow standards or measure-
ment reveal to us the dimensions of God.

"Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who,
interposed between our minds and the world of es-
sences, cause us to languish with the desire to
pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.

"Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day
will undergo the process of dissolution within us
and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart
of that which exists.

"Without you, without your onslaughts, without
your uprootings of us, we should remain all our
lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of our-
selves and of God. You who batter us and then
dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to
us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and
liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the
flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

"I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as
the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers
depict you, debased, disfigured — a mass of brute
forces and base appetites — but as you reveal your-



The Spiritual Power of Matter 67

self to me today, in your totality and your true
nature.

"You I acclaim as the inexhaustible potentiality
for existence and transformation wherein the pre-
destined substance germinates and grows.

"I acclaim you as the universal power which
brings together and unites, through which the mul-
titudinous monads are bound together and in
which they all converge on the way of the spirit.

"I acclaim you as die melodious fountain of
water whence spring the souls of men* and as the
limpid crystal whereof is fashioned the new Jerusa-
lem.

"I acclaim you as the divine milieu, charged with
creative power, as the ocean stirred by the Spirit, as
the clay molded and infused with life by the incar-
nate Word.

"Sometimes, thinking they are responding to your
irresistible appeal, men will hurl themselves for
love of you into the exterior abyss of selfish pleas-
ure-seeking: they are deceived by a reflection or by
an echo.

"This I now understand.

If we are ever to reach you, matter, we must,
having first established contact with the totality of
all that lives and moves here below, come little by

* If the work of creation is seen as an evolutionary process,
then existence of matter is the necessary precondition for the
appearance, on earth, of spirit: elsewhere Pere Teilhard de
Chardin speaks of matter in more exact language as the
"matrix of spirit": that in which life emerges and is sup-
ported, not the active principle from which it takes its rise.
(Ed. note.)



68 Hymn of the Universe

little to feel that the individual shapes of all we
have laid hold on are melting away in our hands,
until finally we are at grips with the single essence
of all subsistences and all unions.

"If we are ever to possess you, having taken you
rapturously in our arms, we must then go on to
sublimate you through sorrow.

"Your realm comprises those serene heights
where saints think to avoid you— but where your
flesh is so transparent and so agile as to be no
longer distinguishable from spirit

"Raise me up then, matter, to those heights,
through struggle and separation and death; raise
me up until, at long last, it becomes possible for me
in perfect chastity to embrace the universe/' *

* It must be made quite clear that he who, not on the
fringe of the Christian mystical tradition but at its point of
fullest development, was able without imprudence to engage
in this formidable battle with matter had prepared himself
for it by the most rigorous asceticism: first, in childhood and
youth, the asceticism of an unwavering fidelity to the Chris-
tian ideal; later, that of a careful and constant obedience to
the exigencies of a vocation which would lead him on with-
out respite up the steeply climbing road to perfection till he
came to that solitude which he himself described: "he would
henceforth be for ever a stranger .-..-.', he would inevitably
speak henceforth in an incomprehensible tongue, he whom
the Lord had drawn to follow the road of fire." And else-
where he wrote: "It seems to me that the point of origin of
this invasion and envelopment of my being was the rapidly
increasing importance which the sense of God's will was as-
suming in my spiritual life." (Le Coeur de la Matidre.)

There was need of that long, heroic journey through the
mystical dark night, and of an exceptional development of
the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, before mat-
ter could become "diaphanous" to Pere Teilhard's eyes and



The Spiritual Power of Matter 68

Down below on the desert sands, now tranquil
again, someone was weeping and calling out: "My
Father, my Father! What wild wind can this he
that has borne him away?"

And on the ground there lay a cloak.



Jersey, 8th August 1919



could reveal to him within itself not only the hallowing
stream which flows from the Incarnation and the Eucharist
but also the radiant presence of Christ

For an exact understanding of the Hymn to Matter, there-
fore, we must place it at the end of the way of purgation and
looking on and up to the mountaintop where the heavenly
Jerusalem shines forth.

It follows that an inexperienced Christian would be mak-
ing a dangerous mistake if he thought to follow in Pere Teil-
hard's footsteps without first of all treading, like him, the
traditional paths of asceticsm. (Ed note.)



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