object:4.01 - The Presence of God in the World
book class:Hymn of the Universe
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
class:chapter
PENSEES
In cordis
jubilo
Christum
natum
adoremus
cum novo
cantico
THE PRESENCE OF GOD
IN THE WORLD*
Let us prays
Lord Jesus Christ, you truly contain within your
gentleness, within your humanity, all the unyield-
ing immensity and grandeur of the world. And it is
because of this, it is because there exists in you this
ineffable synthesis of what our human thought and
experience would never have dared join together in
order to adore them — element and totality, the one
and the many, mind and matter, the infinite and the
personal; it is because of the indefinable contours
which this complexity gives to your appearance
and to your activity, that my heart, enamoured of
cosmic reality, gives itself passionately to you.
I love you, Lord Jesus, because of the multitude
who shelter within you and whom, if one clings
closely to you, one can hear with all the other
beings murmuring, praying, weeping. . . .
I love you because of the transcendent and inex-
orable fixity of your purposes, which causes your
gentle friendship to be colored by an intransigent
• Selected by Fernande Tardivel from Pere Teilhard's pub-
lished and unpublished works.
74 Hymn of the Universe
determinism and to gather us all ruthlessly into the
folds of its will.
I love you as the source, the activating and life-
giving ambience, the term and consummation, of
flie world, even of the natural world, and of its
process of becoming.
You the Center at which all things meet and
which stretches out over all things so as to draw
them back into itself: I love you for the extensions
of your body and soul to the farthest corners of cre-
ation through grace, through life, and through
matter.
Lord Jesus, you who are as gentle as the human
heart, as fiery as the forces of nature, as intimate as
life itself, you in whom I can melt away and with
whom I must have mastery and freedom: I love
you as a world, as this world which has captivated
my heart; — and it is you, I now realize, that my
brother-men, even those who do not believe, sense
and seek throughout the magic immensities of the
cosmos.
Lord Jesus, you are the center toward which all
things are moving: if it be possible, make a place
for us all in the company of those elect and holy
ones whom your loving care has liberated one by
one from the chaos of our present existence and
who now are being slowly incorporated into you in
the unity of the new earth.
2
The prodigious expanses of time which preceded
the first Christmas were not empty of Christ: they
Pensies 75
were imbued with the influx of his power. It was
the ferment of his conception that stirred up the
cosmic masses and directed the initial develop-
ments of the biosphere. It was the travail preceding
his birth that accelerated the development of in-
stinct and the birth of thought upon the earth. Let
us have done with the stupidity which makes a
stumbling-block of the endless eras of expectancy
imposed on us by the Messiah; the fearful, anony-
mous labors of primitive man, the beauty fashioned
through its age-long history by ancient Egypt, the
anxious expectancies of Israel, the patient distilling
of the attar of Oriental mysticism, the endless
refining of wisdom by the Greeks: all these were
needed before the Flower could blossom on the rod
of Jesse and of all humanity. All these preparatory
processes were cosmically and biologically neces-
sary that Christ might set foot upon our human
stage. And all this labor was set in motion
by the active, creative awakening of his soul inas-
much as that human soul had been chosen to
breathe life into the universe. When Christ first
appeared before men in the arms of Mary he had
already stirred up the world.
Like a river which, as you trace it back to its
source, gradually diminishes till in the end it is lost
altogether in the mud from which it springs, so ex-
istence becomes attenuated and finally vanishes
away when we try to divide it up more and more
minutely in space or — what comes to the same — to
76 Hymn of the Universe
drive it further and further back in time. The gran-
deur of the river is revealed not at its source but at
its estuary. In the same way man's secret is to be
sought not in the long-outgrown stages of his em-
bryonic life, whether individual or racial, but in the
spiritual nature of his soul. Now this soul, whose
activity is always a synthesis, in itself eludes the in-
vestigations of science, the essential concern of
which is to analyze things into their elements and
their material antecedents; it can be discovered
only by inward vision and philosophic reflection.
Those thinkers are absolutely mistaken, there-
fore, who imagine they can prove man s nature to
be purely material simply by uncovering ever
deeper and more numerous roots of his being in the
earth. Far from annihilating spirit, they merely
show how it mingles with and acts upon the world
of matter like a leaven. Let us not play their game
by supposing as they do that for a being to come
from heaven we must know nothing of the earthly
conditions of his origin.
4
When your presence, Lord, has flooded me with its
light I hoped that within in it I might find ultimate
reality at its most tangible.
But now that I have in fact laid hold on you, you
who are utter consistency, and feel myself borne by
you, I realize that my deepest hidden desire was
not to possess you but to be possessed.
It is not as a radiation of light nor as subtilized
matter that I desire you; nor was it thus that I de-
PensSes 77
scribed you in my first intuitive encounter with
you: it was as fire. And I can see I shall have no
rest unless an active influence, coming forth from
you, bears down on me to transform me.
The whole universe is aflame.
Let the starry immensities therefore expand into
an ever more prodigious repositoiy of assembled
suns;
let the light-rays prolong indefinitely, at each end
of the spectrum, the range of their hues and their
penetrative power;
let life draw from yet more distant sources the
sap which flows through its innumerable branches;
and let us go on and on endlessly increasing our
perception of the hidden powers that slumber, and
the infinitesimally tiny ones that swarm about us,
and the immensities that escape us because they
appear to us simply as a point.
From all these discoveries, each of which plunges
him a little deeper into the ocean of energy, the
mystic derives an unalloyed delight, and his thirst
for them is unquenchable; for he will never feel
himself sufficiently dominated by the powers of the
earth and the skies to be brought under God's yoke
as completely as he would wish.
It is in fact God, God alone, who through his
Spirit stirs up into a ferment the mass of the uni-
verse.
A limpid sound rises amidst the silence; a trail of
pure color drifts through the glass; a light glows for
78 Hymn of the Universe
a moment in the depths of the eyes I love.
Three things, tiny, fugitive: a song, a sunbeam, a
glance.
So, at first, I thought they had entered into me in
order to remain there and be lost in me.
On the contrary: they took possession of me, and
bore me away.
For if this plaint of the air, this tinting of the
light, this communication of a soul were so tenuous
and so fleeting it was only that they might pene-
trate the more deeply into my being, might pierce
through to that final depth where all the faculties
of man are so closely bound together as to become
a single point Through the sharp tips of the three
arrows which had pierced me the world itself had
invaded my being and had drawn me back into
itself.
We imagine that in our sense-perceptions exter-
nal reality humbly presents itself to us in order to
serve us, to help in the building up of our integrity.
But this is merely the surface of the mystery of
knowledge; the deeper truth is that when the world
reveals itself to us it draws us into itself: it causes
us to flow outwards into something belonging to it
everywhere present in it and more perfect than it.
The man who is wholly taken up with the de-
mands of everyday living or whose sole interest is
in the outward appearances of things seldom gains
more than a glimpse, at best, of this second phase
in our sense-perceptions, that in which the world,
having entered into us, then withdraws from us and
bears us away with it: he can have only a very dim
awareness of that aureole, thrilling and inundating
Pensies 79
our being, through which is disclosed to us at every
point of contact the unique essence of the universe.
6
Like those materialistic biologists who think they
can do away with the soul by dismantling the
physico-chemical mechanisms of the living cell,
zoologists are persuaded they have done away with
the necessity for a first Cause simply because they
have discovered a little more about the general
structure of his work. It is time we set aside once
and for all a problem so invalidly stated. No;
strictly speaking, scientific transformism can prove
nothing for or against the existence of God. It sim-
ply establishes as a fact the concatenation of real-
ity. It offers us an anatomy of life, not an ultimate
explanation of life. It affirms that something has
become organism, something has developed; but to
discern the ultimate conditions of that development
is beyond its competence. To decide whether the
evolutionary process is self-explanatory or whether
it demands for its explanation a progressive and
continuous act of creation on the part of a first
Mover: this falls within the domain not of physics
but of metaphysics.
The theory of transformism, it must be said again
and again, does not of itself involve the acceptance
of any particular philosophy. Does that mean that
it offers no hint in favor of one rather tiian another?
No, indeed. But it is interesting to note that the sys-
tems of thought which are best adapted to it would
seem to be precisely those which at first regarded it
80 Hymn of the Universe
as a menace to them. Christianity, for example, is
essentially based on the twofold belief that man is
in a special sense an object of pursuit to the divine
power throughout creation, and that Christ is the
terminal point at which, supernaturally but also
physically, the consummation of humanity is des-
tined to be achieved. Could one desire an
experiential view of things more in keeping with
these doctrines of unity than that which shows us
living beings, not artificially set side by side in pur-
suit of some doubtful utility or amenity, but bound
together by virtue of the physical conditions of
their existence, in the real unity of a shared strug-
gle towards greater being?
7
Where at first glance we could see only an incoher-
ent arrangement of different altitudes, of land-
masses and of waters, there we later established a
solid network of real relationships: we animated
the earth by communicating to it something of our
own unity.
And now, through a gushing forth of vitality in
the reverse direction, this life infused by the human
mind into the greatest material mass with which we
have contact tends to flow back into us under a
new guise. When, through our vision of it, we have
endowed our earth of iron and stone with "person-
ality," then we find ourselves infected by the desire
to build for ourselves in our turn, out of the sum
total of all our souls, a spiritual edifice as vast as
the one we contemplate, the one brought forth out
Pensfas 81
of the travail of the geogenetic processes. Around
the sphere of the earth's rock-mass there stretches a
real layer of animated matter, the layer of living
creatures and human beings, the biosphere. The
great educative value of geology consists in the fact
that by disclosing to us an earth which is truly one,
an earth which is in fact but a single body since it
has a face, it recalls to us the possibilities of estab-
lishing higher and higher degrees of organic unity
in the zone of thought which envelops the world
In truth it is impossible to keep one's gaze con-
stantly fixed on the vast horizons opened out to us
by science without feeling the stirrings of an ob-
scure desire to see men drawn closer and closer to-
gether by an ever-increasing knowledge and sym-
pathy until finally, in obedience to some divine
attraction, there remains but one heart and one soul
on the face of the earth.
8
Because of the fundamental unity of the world,
every phenomenon, if it is adequately studied even
though under one single aspect, reveals itself as
being ubiquitous alike in its import and in its roots.
Where does this proposition lead us if we apply it
to human "self-awareness?"
We might have been tempted to say: "Conscious-
ness manifests itself indubitably only in man; there-
fore it is an isolated event of no interest to science."
But no, we must correct this, and say rather:
"Consciousness manifests itself indubitably in man
and therefore, glimpsed in this one flash of light, it
82 Hymn of the Universe
reveals itself as having a cosmic extension and con-
sequently as being aureoled by limitless prolonga-
tions in space and time/'
This conclusion is big with consequences; but I
cannot see how it can be denied if sound analogy
with all the rest of science is to be preserved.
It is a fact beyond question that deep within
ourselves we can discern, as though through a rent,
an "interior' at the heart of things; and this glimpse
is sufficient to force upon us the conviction that in
one degree or another this "interior" exists and has
always existed everywhere in nature. Since at one
particular point in itself, the stuff of the universe
has an inner face, we are forced to conclude that in
its very structure — that is, in every region of space
and time — it has this double aspect, just as, for in-
stance, in its very structure it is granular. In all
things there is a Within, coextensive with their
Without
9
Let us ponder over this basic truth till we are
steeped in it, till it becomes as familiar to us as our
awareness of shapes or our reading of words: God,
at his most vitally active and most incarnate, is not
remote from us, wholly apart from the sphere of
the tangible; on the contrary, at every moment he
awaits us in the activity, the work to be done,
which every moment brings. He is, in a sense, at
the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my
needle — and my heart and my thought It is by
carrying to its natural completion the stroke, the
PensSes 83
line, the stitch I am working on that I shall lay hold
on that ultimate end toward which my will at its
deepest levels tends. Like those formidable physi-
cal forces which man has so disciplined that they
can be made to carry out operations of amazing
delicacy, so the enormous might of God's magne-
tism is brought to bear on our frail desires,
our tiny objectives, without ever breaking their
point. For it endues us with supervitality; and
therefore introduces into our spiritual life a higher
principle of unity, the specific effect of which can
be seen — according to one's point of view— as ei-
ther to make human endeavor holy or to make the
Christian life fully human,
10
Yes, Lord God, I believe that — and believe all the
more readily since it is a question not merely of my
being consoled but of my being completed — that it
is you who stand at the source of that impulse and
at the end point of that magnetic attraction to
which all my life long I must be docile, obedient to
the initial impulsion and eager to promote its de-
velopments. It is you too who quicken for me by
your omnipresence — far more effectively than my
spirit quickens the matter it animates — the myriad
influences which at every moment bear down upon
me. In the life springing up within me, in the mate-
rial elements that sustain me, it is not just your gifts
that I discern: it is you yourself that I encounter,
you who cause me to share in your own being, and
whose hands mold me. In the initial ordering and
84 Hymn of the Universe
modulating of the life force which is in me, and in
the continuous, helpful action upon me of second*
ary causes, I am in very truth in contact — and the
closest possible contact— with the two aspects of
your creative activity; I encounter and I kiss your
two wonderful hands: the hand that lays hold on us
at so deep a level that it becomes merged, in us,
with the sources of life, and the hand whose grasp
is so immense that under its slightest pressure all
the springs of the universe respond harmoniously
together. Of their very nature those blessed passivi-
ties which are my will to be, my inclination to be
thus or thus, and the chances given me to attain to
my own completion in the way I desire, all are
charged with your influence — an influence which I
shall come before long to see more clearly as the
organizing force of your mystical Body, And if I
would enter into communion with you in these
passivities — a frontal communion, a communion in
the sources of life — I have but to recognize you
within them and to beg you to be ever more and
more fully present in them.
U
The mystic only gradually becomes aware of the
faculty he has been given of perceiving the indefi-
nite fringe of reality surrounding the totality of all
created things, with more intensity than the pre-
cise, individual core of their being.
For a long time, thinking he is the same as other
men, he will try to see as they do, to speak their
PensSes 85
language, to find contentment in the joys with
which they are satisfied.
For a long time, seeking to appease his mysteri-
ous but obsessive need for plenitude of being, he
will try to divert it on to some particularly stable or
precious object to which, among all the accessory
pleasures of life, he will look for the substance and
overflowing richness of his joy.
For a long time he will look to the marvels of art
to provide him with that exaltation which will give
him access to the sphere— his own sphere — of the
extra-personal and the suprasensible; and in the un-
known Word of nature he will strive to hear the
heartbeats of that higher reality which calls him by
name.
Happy the man who fails to stifle his vision.
Happy the man who will not shrink from a pas-
sionate questioning of the Muses and of Cybele
concerning his God.
But happy above all he who, rising beyond es-
thetic dilettantism and the materialism of tie lower
layers of life, is given to hear the reply of all
beings, singly and all together: "What you saw
gliding past, like a world, behind the song and be-
hind the color and behind the eyes* glance does not
exist just here or there but is a Presence existing
equally everywhere: a presence which, though it
now seems vague to your feeble sight, will grow in
clarity and depth. In this presence all diversities
and all impurities yearn to be melted away,"
86 Hymn of the Universe
12
For Christian humanism — faithful in this to the
most firmly established theology of the Incarnation
— there is no real independence or discordance but
a logical subordination between the genesis of hu-
manity in the world and the genesis of Christ,
through his Church, in humanity. Inevitably the
two processes are structurally linked together, the
second needing the first as the material on which it
rests in order to supervitalize it. This point of view
fully respects the progressive experimental concen-
tration of human thought in a more and more lively
awareness of its unifying role; but in place of the
undefined point of converg®nce required as term
for this evolution it is the clearly defined personal
reality of the incarnate Word that is made manifest
to us and established for us as our objective, that
Word "in whom all things subsist"
Life for Man: Man for Christ: Christ for God.
And to ensure the psychic continuity of this vast
development in all its phases, extending to the myr-
iads of elements scattered through the immensities
of all the ages, there is but one mechanism: educa-
tion.
Thus all the lines converge, complete one an-
other, interlock. All things are now but one.
13
) Without any doubt there is something which links
material energy and spiritual energy together and
makes them a continuity. In the last resort there
Pensies 87
must somehow be but one single energy active in
the world. And the first idea that suggests itself to
us is that the soul must be a center of transforma-
tion at which, through all the channels of nature,
corporeal energies come together in order to attain
inwardness and be sublimated in beauty and in
truth.
But however attractive at first sight we may find
this idea of a direct transformation of one of the
two types of energy into the other, a moment's in-
spection will force us to abandon it. For as soon as
we try to couple them together their independence
of one another becomes as evident as their inter-
connection.
"To think, we must eat/* Yes, but what diverse
thoughts may spring from the same crust of bread!
Just as the same letters of an alphabet can be
turned either into nonsense or into the most beauti-
ful of poems, so the same calories seem as indif-
ferent as they are necessary to the spiritual valmes
they nourish.
14
What would become of our souls, Lord, if they
lacked the bread of earthly reality to nourish them,
the wine of created beauty to intoxicate them, the
discipline of human struggle to make them strong?
What puny powers and bloodless hearts your crea-
tures would bring to you were they to cut them-
selves off prematurely from the providential setting
in which you have placed them! Show us, Lord,
how to contemplate the Sphinx without being be-
88 Hymn of the Universe
guiled into error; how to grasp the mystery hidden
here on earth in the womb of death, not by refine-
ments of human learning but in the simple concrete
act of your redemptive immersion in matter.
Through the sufferings of your incarnate life reveal
to us, and then teach us to harness jealousy for
you, the spiritual power of matter.
15
Like those translucent materials which can be
wholly illumined by a light enclosed within them,
the world manifests itself to the Christian mystic as
bathed in an inward light which brings out its
structure, its relief, its depths. This light is. not the
superficial coloring that a crude hedonism might
discern; nor is it the violent glare that annihilates
objects and blinds the eyes; it is the tranquil,
mighty radiance born of the synthesis, in Jesus, of
all the elements of the world. The more completely
the beings thus illumined attain to their natural
fulfillment, the closer and more perceptible this ra-
diance will be; and on the other hand the more per-
ceptible it becomes, the more clearly the contours
of the objects which it bathes will stand out and
the deeper will be their roots.
16
If one considers, however briefly, what conditions
will make possible the flowering in the human
heart of this new universal love, so often vainly
PensSes 89
dreamed of but now at last leaving the realm of the
Utopian and declaring itself as both possible and
necessary, one notices this: that if men on earth, all
over the earth, are ever to love one another it is not
enough for them to recognize in one another the
elements of a single something; they must also, by
developing a "planetary" consciousness, become
aware of the fact that without loss of their individ-
ual identities they are becoming a single somebody*
For there is no total love — and this is writ large in
the gospel — save that which is in and of the per-
sonal.
And what does this mean if not that, in the last
resort, the "planetizatkm" of humanity presupposes
for its proper development not only the contracting
of the earth, not only the organizing and condens-
ing of human thought, but also a third factor: the
rising on our inward horizon of some psychic cos-
mic center, some supreme pole of consciousness,
towards which all the elementary consciousnesses of
the world shall converge and in which they^shall be
able to love one another: in other words, the rising
of a God.
forces, all these sweep away ruthlessly, in an in-
stant, what we had labored with mind and heart to
build up and make beautiful.
Lord God, my dignity as a man forbids me to
shut my eyes to this, like an animal or a child;
therefore, lest I succumb to the temptation t® curse
the universe, and the Maker of the universe, teach
me to adore it by seeing you hidden within it. Say
once again to me, Lord, those great and liberating
words, the words which are at once revealing light
and effective power: hoc est Corpus meum* In
very truth, if only we will it to be so, the immense
and somber Thing, the specter, the tempest — is
you. Ego sum, nolite timere** All the things in life
that fill us with dread, all that filled your own heart
with dismay in the garden of agony: all, in the last
resort, are the species or appearances, the matter,
of one and the same sacrament
We have only to believe; and to believe all the
more firmly, all the more desperately, as the fearful
reality which confronts us appears more menacing
and more invincible. For then, little by little, we
shall see the universal horror lose something of its
rigidity, and begin to smile upon us, and finally
gather us into its super-human arms.
It is not the rigidity of material or mathematical
determinisms that gives the universe its consist-
ency, but the supple orderings of spirit. To those
who believe, the innumerable accidents of chance,
* "This is my Body." (Matt. 26.28; Mark 14.22.)
** "It is I, fear not." (Luke 24.36.)
PensSes 91
the boundless blindness of the world, are but illu-
sion: fides substantia return?
18
Lord, it is you who, through the imperceptible
goadings of sense beauty, penetrated my heart in
order to make its life flow out into yourself. You
came down into me by means of a tiny scrap of cre-
ated reality; and then, suddenly, you unfurled your
immensity before my eyes and displayed yourself
to me as Universal Being.
So the basic mystical intuition issues in the dis-
covery of a suprareal unity diffused throughout the
immensity of the world.
In that milieu, at once divine and cosmic, in which
he had at first observed only a simplification and as
it were a spiritualization of space, the seer, faithful
to the light given him, now perceives the gradual
delineation of the form and attributes of an ulti-
mate element in which all things find their defini-
tive consistency.
And then he begins to measure more exactly the
joys, and the pressing demands, of that mysterious
presence to which he has surrendered himself .
19
Give me to recognize in other men, Lord God, the
radiance of your own face. The irresistible light of
* "Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for/' (Heb.
11J.)
92 Hymn of the Universe
your eyes, shining in the depths of things, has al-
ready driven me into undertaking the work I had
to do and facing the difficulties I had to overcomes
grant me now to see you also and above all in the
most inward, most perfect, most remote levels of
the souls of my brother-men.
The gift you ask of me for these brothers of
mine— the only gift my heart can give them — is not
the overflowing tenderness of those special, prefer-
ential loves which you implant in our lives as the
most powerful created agent of our inward growths
it is something less tender but just as real and of
even greater strength. Your will is that, with the
help of your Eucharist, between men and my
brother-men there should be revealed that basic at-
traction (already dimly felt in every love once it
becomes strong) which mystically transforms the
myriads of rational creatures into (as it were) a
single monad in you, Christ Jesus.
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