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object:3.02 - Mysticism
book class:Let Me Explain
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter



2. Mysticism

It is upon this Physics that Pere Teilhard simultaneously
builds up, secondly, a Mysticism:

The whole of Evolution being reduced to a process of
union with God, it becomes, in its totality, loving and
lovable in the innermost and most ultimate of its develop-
ments.

I. THE ORIGIN OF MYSTICISM! THE COSMIC SENSE

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused
affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which en-
velops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and
apparently as old as the beginning of thought. . . .

The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found
himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars. And since
then we find evidence of it in all our experience of the great
and unbounded: in art, in poetry, in religion. Through it we
react to the world 'as a whole' 1 as with our eyes to light.
(H.E., p. 82.)

At the psychological root of all mysticism there lies, if I
am not mistaken, the more or less vague attraction or need
that urges every conscious element to become one with the
whole that encompasses it. This cosmic sense, which is un-
doubtedly akin to and as primordial as the sexual sense, but
has intermittently been very active in certain poets or seers,
has hitherto remained dormant or has at any rate been con-
fined (in an elementary and questionable form) to some
eastern centres. (Comment je vois, para. 35.)

1 Pere Teilhard uses the English phrase.

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Let Me Explain

In this context I mean by mysticism the need, the science
and the art of attaining the Universal and the Spiritual at
the same time and each through the other. Simultaneously,
and by the same significant act, to become one with All,
through emancipation from all multiplicity or material
gravity - that, deeper than any ambition for pleasure, wealth
or power, is the essential cream of the human soul. It is a
dream that as yet has been imperfectly or incompletely for-
mulated in the Noosphere, but one that can clearly be dis-
tinguished throughout the whole of the already long history
of Holiness. (Ibid., para. 32.)

II. TWO OPPOSED FORMS OF THE MYSTICAL SPIRIT

An effort to escape spiritually, through universalization,
into the inexpressible: mystics of all religions and of all
times are in complete agreement about this general orienta-
tion of the interior life in search of perfection. But I have long
been convinced that this superficial unanimity disguises a
serious opposition (or even a fundamental incompatibility)
which originates in a confusion between two symmetrical
but 'antipodal* approaches to the understanding, and hence
the pursuit of Unity of Spirit.

a. According to die first (to which I shall give the more or
less conventional name of 'the road of the East') spiritual
unification is conceived as being brought about through a
return to a common 'divine' basis that underlies all the
sensibly apprehended determined manifestations of the
Universe, and is more real than they are. From this first
point of view, mystical Unity appears and is attained
through direct suppression of the Multiple, in other words
through relaxation of the cosmic effort towards differ-

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Morality and Mysticism

entiation that is active in and around us. This is the pan-
theism of identification, the Spirit 'of release of tension'.

b. According to the second approach, on the contrary
(the road of the West), it is impossible to become one with
All without carrying to their extreme limit, in their simul-
taneous progress towards differentiation and convergence,
the dispersed elements that constitute us and surround us.
From this second point of view, the 'common basis' of the
eastern approach is mere illusion: all that there is is a central
focus to which we can make our way only if we extend the
countless directive forces of the Universe to the point at
which they meet. This is the pantheism of union (and so of
love), the Spirit 'of tension'. . . .

Here, indeed, we have a paradox. Although these two
attitudes are each the exact opposite of the other, it would
appear that no clear distinction has yet been made between
them. This accounts for the extreme confusion that runs
together or identifies the Ineffable of the Vedanta with that
of such mystics as St John of the Cross, and so not only
allows countless numbers of excellent souls to become help-
less victims of the most pernicious illusions that are produced
in the East, but, what is much more serious, delays a task
that is daily becoming more urgent - the individualization
and die full flowering of a worthy and powerful modern
Mysticism. (Comment je vois, para. 33.)

In recent times there has emerged in our interior vision a
Universe that has at last become knit together around itself
and around ourselves through the immensity of time and
space. As a result, it is quite evident that the passionate
awareness of a universal quasi-presence is tending to be
aroused, to become correctly adjusted and to be generalized
in human consciousness. The sense of Evolution, the sense of

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Let Me Explain

species, the sense of the Earth, the sense of Man: these are so
many different and preliminary expressions of one and the
same new thirst for unification - and, it goes without saying,
they all, by establishing a correct relation to the object that
gives rise to them and stimulates them, conform to the
western type of spiritualization and worship. Contradicting
the most obstinate of preconceived opinions, the Light is on
the point of appearing not from the East but here at home, in
the very heart and centre of Technology and Research.
(Comment je vois, para. 35.)

At this point, Pere Teilhard was in a position to return to the classifica-
tion of religions that, in his apologetics, led up to the demonstration that,
on the point of Faith and in what concerns our activity, only Chris-
tianity has the vocation to super-animate modern neo-humanism. To
this he adds an appeal, to all who are willing to listen, urging the 'neces-
sity to formulate as soon as possible a mysticism of the Wesf.

For centuries, Hindu mysticism of fusion and Christian
mysticism of the juridical' type have been the object of
countless descriptions and codifications; nevertheless it is
impossible at this moment to find a single printed work that
affirms the existence and describes the specific properties of
an interior attitude (the centric cosmic sense) in which,
through force of circumstances we are all, without it being
openly apparent, beginning to live. Our generation cannot
enter into an Ultra-human whose reality becomes every day
more evident except with the assistance of a new form of
psychic energy; in that energy the personalizing depth of
love is combined with the totalization of all that is most
essential and most universal in the stuff of the cosmic stream
- and yet we have no name for it!

The time has undoubtedly come when a new mysticism,

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Morality and Mysticism

at once fully human and Christian, must finally appear at the
opposite pole from an outworn orientalism: the road of the
West - the road of tomorrow's world. (A.E. (Oeuvres VH), p.
236.)

In a number of essays, Teilhard developed this mystical teaching of
impassioned work accomplished in a Christie Faith, writing with
precision and with a most authentic lyrical note. Among the most im-
portant are: Cosmic Life (1916) ; The Mystical Milieu (1917) ; The
Priest (191 8) (in Writings in Time of War); The Mass on the
World (1923) (in Hymn of the Universe) ; Le Milieu Divin (1927)
(English translation i960); Human Energy (1937) (in Human
Energy); Le Coeur de la Matiere (1950); Le Christique (1955).
The essence of this teaching follows in the next two sections and in the
last chapter, which brings out the final sacrifice that is called for from
our life, our work, and our love.

III. SUPER-CHARITY

'To love (with a true love) the Universe in process of forma-
tion, in its totality and in its detail', 'to love evolution - that
is the paradoxical interior act that can immediately be effected
in the Christie ambiance. (Comment je vois, para. 37.)

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolu-
tion, to say that he manifests himself as 'evolver', is implicitly
to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the
whole process of evolution. Let us examine the consequences
for our interior life of this amazing situation.

There are three, and they may be expressed as follows:
'Under the influence of the Super-Christ, our charity is
universalized, becomes dynamic and is synthesized.'

Let us look at each of the terms of this threefold transfor-
mation in turn.

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Let Me Explain

i. First, our charity is universalized. By definition, the
Christian is and always has been, the man who loves God,
and his neighbour as himself. But has not this love necessarily
remained hitherto particularist and extrinsic in its explicit
realization? For many who believe, Christ is still the mys-
terious personage who after having passed through history
two thousand years ago now reigns in a heaven that is
divorced from earth; and our neighbour is still a swarm of
human individuals, multiplied with no recognizable rule or
reason, and associated together by the arbitrary force of law
and convention, In such a view there is little or even no
place for the immensities of sidereal or animate matter, for
the multitude of the world's natural elements and events, for
the impressive unfolding of cosmic processes.

Now, it is precisely this pluralism, emotionally so confus-
ing, which vanishes under the rays of the Super-Christ, to
make way for a warm and resplendent unity.

Since, in fact, everything in the Universe ultimately pro-
ceeds towards. Christ-Omega; since the whole of Cosmo-
genesis is ultimately, through Anthropogenesis, expressed
in a Christogenesis, it follows that, in the integral totality of
its tangible strata, the Real is charged with a divine Presence.
As the mystics felt instinctively, everything becomes physi-
cally and literally lovable in God; and God, in return, be-
comes intelligible and lovable in everything around us. In
the breadth and depth of its cosmic stuff, in the bewildering
number of the elements and events that make it up, and in
the wide sweep, too, of the overall currents that dominate it
and carry it along as one single great river, the world, filled
by God, appears to our enlightened eyes as simply a setting
in which universal communion can be attained and a con-
crete expression of that communion.

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Morality and Mysticisn

2. Secondly, our charity is energized. Hitherto, to love God
and one's neighbour might have seemed no more than an
attitude of contemplation and compassion. Was not to love
God to rise above human distractions and passions in order
to find rest in the light and unvarying warmth of the divine
Sun? And was not to love one's neighbour primarily to
bind up the wounds of one's fellow-men and alleviate their
suffering? Detachment and pity - escape from the world and
mitigation of evil - in the eyes of the Gentiles could not
those two notes be legitimately regarded as the Christian
characteristics of Charity?

Here again we find a complete change: our whole outlook
widens and is vitalized to the scale of the universalized Christ.

If, let me repeat, the whole progress of the world does
indeed conform to a Christogenesis (or, which comes to
the same thing, if Christ can be fully attained only at the
term and peak of cosmic evolution) then it is abundantly
clear that we can make our way towards him and apprehend
him only in the effort to complete and synthesize everything
in him. In consequence, it is the general ascent of life to-
wards fuller consciousness, it is man's effort in its entirety,
diat are now organically and with full justification once more
included among the things with which charity is concerned
and which it hopes to achieve. If we are to love the Super-
Christ we must at all costs see to it that the Universe and
mankind push ahead, in us and in each of our co-elements -
in particular in the other 'grains of thought', our fellow-men.

To co-operate in total cosmic evolution is the only act that
can adequately express our devotion to an evolutive and
universal Christ.

3. By that very fact, our charity is synthesized. At first that
expression may seem obscure, and it should be explained.

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Let Me Explain

In the detail, and on the scale of 'ordinary' life, much that
we do is independent of love. To love (between 'persons') is
to be drawn together and brought closer centre-to-centre. In
our lives, the 'centric' condition is seldom achieved. It may
be that we are dealing with objects (material, at a lower level
than the living, or intellectual) which are by their nature
non-centred and impersonal; it may be that in our human
inter-relationships we come into contact with our fellows
only 'tangentially', through our interests, through our func-
tions, or for business dealings - in either case, we are gener-
ally working, or seeking, enjoying ourselves or suffering,
without loving - without even suspecting that it is possible
for us to love - the thing or person with which we are con-
cerned. Thus our interior life remains fragmented and plural-
ized.

Consider, on the other hand, what happens if above (or
rather at the heart of) this plurality there rises the central
reality of Christ the Evolver. In virtue of his position at the
Omega of the World, Christ, we have seen, represents the
focus-point towards which and in which all things converge.
In other words, he appears as a Person with whom all
reality (provided we understand that in the appropriate
positive sense) effects an approach and a contact in the only
direction that is possible: the line in which their centres lie.

This can mean but one thing, that every operation, once it
is directed towards him, assumes, without any change of its
own nature, the psychical character of a centre-to-centre
relationship, in other words, of an act of love.

Eating, drinking, working, seeking; creating truth or
beauty or happiness; all these things could, until now, have
seemed to us heterogeneous, disparate activities incapable
of being reduced to terms of one another - loving being no

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more than one of a number of branches in this divergent
psychical efflorescence.

Now, however, that it is directed towards the Super-
Christ, the fascicle draws itself together. Like the countless
shades that combine in nature to produce a single white
light, so the infinite modalities of action are fused in one
single colour under the mighty power of the universal
Christ; and it is love that heads this movement: love, not
simply the common factor through which the multiplicity
of human activities attains its cohesion, but love, the higher,
universal, and synthesized form of spiritual energy ; in which all
the other energies of the soul are transformed and sublim-
ated, once they fall within 'the field of Omega'.

Originally, the Christian had no desire except to be able
to love, at all times and whatever he was doing, at the same
time as he was acting. Now he sees that he can love by his
activity, in other words he can directly be united to the divine
centre by his very action, no matter what form it may take.

In that centre, if I may use the phrase, every activity is
'amorized'. (S.C., pp. 167-71.)

IV. CHRISTIAN ASCESIS: ATTACHMENT AND
DBTACHMENT

The law and the ideal of all good (whether moral or physical)
are expressed in a single rule (which is also a hope) : 'in all
things to work for, and accept, the organic unity of the
world.' To work for it, in as much as it requires for its con-
summation the co-operation of its elements: to accept it, in
as much as its realization is primarily the effect of a synthetic
domination, superior to our own power. Confirmed, ex-
actly defined, and transfigured by faith in the Incarnation,

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Let Me Explain

this rule of action takes on incomparable urgency and de-
lightfulness: and it is readily expressed, too, in any number
of immediate and practical obligations. We shall see that for
the Christian who is dedicated to the unification of the world
in Christ, the whole task of the interior moral and mystical
life may be reduced to two essential and complementary
processes: to conquer the world, and to escape from it.
Each is a natural consequence of the other, and they represent
two allied forms of one and the same urge: to come together
with God through the world. (S.C., p. 66)

a. The Conquest of the World

Every process of material growth in the Universe is ulti-
mately directed towards spirit, and every process of spiritual
growth is ultimately directed towards Christ. From this it
follows that whether the work to which I am tied by the
circumstances of the present moment be commonplace or
sublime, tedious or enthralling, I have the happiness of being
able to think that Christ is waiting to receive its fruit: and
that fruit, we must remember, is not only the intention be-
hind my action but also the tangible result of my work.
'Opus ipsum, et non tantum operatio', the work itself and not
simply its doing.

If this hope is justified, the Christian must be active, and
busily active, working as earnestly as the most convinced of
those who work to build up the earth, that Christ may con-
tinually be born more fully in the world around him. More
than any unbeliever, he must respect and seek to advance
human effort - effort in all its forms - and above all the
human effort which is aimed more directly at increasing the
consciousness (that is, the being) of mankind; by that I mean

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Morality and Mysticism

the scientific quest for truth, and the organized attempt to
develop a better social nexus. In those aims, those who love
the universal Christ should never let themselves be out-
stripped in hope and boldness. No one, in fact, has so many
reasons as they have for believing in the universe, and for
launching an assault upon it in order to make it their own.
(S.C., p. 68.)

May the time come when men, having been awakened
to a sense of the close bond linking all the movements of
this world in the single all-embracing work of the Incarna-
tion, shall be unable to give themselves to any one of their
tasks without illuminating it with the clear vision that their
work - however elementary it may be - is received and put
to good use by a divine Centre of the Universe.

When that comes to pass, there will be little to separate
the life of the cloister from the life of the world. And only
then will the action of the children of heaven (at the same
time as the action of the children of the world) have attained
the required plenitude of its humanity. (M.D., p. 40.)

b. Detachment from the World
1. By action

Nothing is more excruciating than effort, and that is true of
spiritual effort too. If you ask the masters of the ascetical life
what is the first, the most certain, and the most sublime of
mortifications, they will all give you the same answer: it is
the work of interior development by which we tear ourselves
away from ourselves, leave ourselves behind, emerge from
ourselves. Every individual life, if lived loyally, is strewn with
the outer shells discarded by our successive metamorphoses -
and the entire Universe leaves behind it a long series of states

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Let Me Explain

in which it might well have been pleased to linger with de-
light, but from which it has continually been torn away by
the inexorable necessity to grow greater. This ascent in a
continual sloughing off of the old is indeed a way of the
Cross. (S.C., p. 69.)

2. By passivity

It is an infinite delight, no doubt, to the Christian, to grow
greater for Christ (and the more 50 in that it is Christ him-
self, in the very depths of our being, who seeks to be born
and grow greater in our bodies and souls: our ardour, our
zest for life, is itself, indeed, a passivity). But this growth has
ultimately no meaning or value except in so far as it allows
us to provide the divine contact with a firmer grip. It is that
contact we now have to effect. Where shall we find it? Is it,
as we no doubt wonder, mysterious, infrequent, grudging,
distant? If we are to offer ourselves to it, must we make our
way into some area far above us on some extremely deep
zone? The reality is much simpler and lovelier than we ima-
gine.

'In eo vivimus, movemur, et sumus' - in him we live and
move and have our being (St Paul). Christ operates, he
exerts his living pressure, on the believer who can act and
believe rightly, through all the surface and depth of the
world. It is he who encompasses us and moulds us, at every
moment, through all the passivities and restrictions of our
lives.

This is the most magnificent of the prerogatives of the
Universal Christ: the power to be operative in us, not only
through the natural impulses of life but also through the
shocking disorders of defeat and death.

This wonderful transformation, let me insist, is not effected

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Morality and Mysticism

immediately or without our co-operation. We are justified in
resigning ourselves to evil only when we have first resisted
it with all the strength at our command. If we are to succeed
in submitting ourselves to the will of God, we must first make a
very great effort God is not to be found indiscriminately in
the things that thwart us in life or the trials we have to
suffer - but solely at the point of balance between our desper-
ate efforts to grow greater and the resistance to our domina-
tion that we meet from outside. In that area of equilibrium,
moreover, he is born only in so far as we believe that he is:
'Diligentibus, omnia convertuntur in bonum -for those who love,
all things are transformed into good.

. . . The world can attain God, in Jesus Christ, only by a
complete recasting in which it must appear to be entirely
lost, with nothing (of the terrestrial order) that our experience
could recognize as compensation. When such a death, whether it
be slow or rapid, takes place in us, we must open our hearts
wide to the hope of union: never, if we so will it, will the
animating power of the word have mastered us so fully.

(S.Cpp.71-3.)

It was a joy to me, O God, in the midst of the struggle,
to feel that in developing myself I was increasing the hold
that you had upon me; it was a joy to me, too, under the
inner thrust of life or amid the favourable play of events, to
abandon myself to your Providence. Now that I have found
the joy of utilizing all forms of growth to make you, or to
let you, grow in me, grant that I may without distress attain
this last phase of communion in the course of which I shall
possess you by diminishing in you.

After having perceived you as he who is 'a greater myself',
grant, when my hour comes, that I may recognize you under
the species of each alien or hostile force that seems bent upon

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Let Me Explain

destroying or uprooting me. When the signs of age begin to
mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind) ;
when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes
from without or is born within me; when the painful mo-
ment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I
I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive in
the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me;
in all those dark moments, grant, O God, that I may under-
stand that it is you (provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being in order to
penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me
away within yourself.

The more deeply and incurably the evil is incrusted in
my flesh, the more it will be you that I am harbouring - you
as a loving, active principle of purification and detachment.
The more the future opens before me like some dizzy abyss
or dark tunnel, the more confident I may be - if I venture
forward on the strength of your word - of losing myself and
surrendering myself in you, of being assimilated by your
body, Jesus. (M.D., pp. 69-70.)



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