object:5.01 - EPILOGUE
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter
EPILOGUE
THE CHRISTIAN PHENOMENON
Neither in the play of its elemental activities, which can only
be set in motion by the hope of an ' imperishable ' ; nor in the
play of its collective affinities, which require for their coalescence
the action of a conquering love, can reflective life continue to
function and to progress unless, above it, there is a pole which
is supreme in attraction and consistence. By its very structure
the noosphcre could not close itself either individually or socially
in any way save under the influence of the centre we have
called Omega.
That is the postulate to which we have been led logically by
the integral application to man of the experimental laws of
evolution. The possible, or even the probable, repercussion of
this conclusion, however theoretical in the first approximation,
upon experience will now be obvious.
If Omega were only a remote and ideal focus destined to
emerge at the end of time from the convergence of terrestrial
consciousnesses, nothing could make it known to us but this
convergence. At the present time no other energy of a personal
nature could be detected on earth save that represented by the
sum of human persons.
If, on the other hand, Omega is, as we have admitted, already
in existence and operative at the very core of the thinking mass,
then it would seem inevitable that its existence should be mani-
fested to us here and now through some traces. To animate
evolution in its lower stages, the conscious pole of the world
could of course only act in an impersonal form and under the
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
veil of biology. Upon the thinking entity that we have become
by hominisation, it is now possible for it to radiate from the one
centre to all centres— personally. Would it seem likely that it
should not do so ?
Either the whole construction of the world presented here
is vain ideology or, somewhere around us, in one form or
another, some excess of personal, extra-human energy should be
perceptible to us if we look carefully, and should reveal to us
the great Presence. It is at this point that we see the importance
for science of the Christian phenomenon.
At the conclusion of a study of the human phenomenon I
have not chosen those words haphazardly, nor for the sake of
mere verbal symmetry. They are meant to define without
ambiguity the spirit in which I want to speak.
As I am living at the heart of the Christian world, I might be
suspected of wanting to introduce an apologia by artifice. But,
here again, so far as it is possible for a man to separate in himself
the various planes of knowledge, it is not the convinced believer
but the naturalist who is asking for a hearing.
The Christian fact stands before us. It has its place among
the other realities of the world.
I would like to show how it seems to me to bring to the
perspectives of a universe dominated by energies of a personal
nature the crucial confirmation we are in need of, firstly by the
substance of its creed, next, by its existence-value, and finally by
its extraordinary power of growth.
i. AXES OF BELIEF
To those who only know it outwardly, Christianity seems
desperately intricate. In reality, taken in its main lines, it con-
tains an extremely simple and astonishingly bold solution of the
world.
In the centre, so glaring as to be disconcerting, is the uncom-
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EPILOGUE
promising affirmation of a personal God : God as providence,
directing the universe with loving, watchful care ; and God the
revealer, communicating himself to man on the level of and
through the ways of intelligence. It will be easy for me, after
all I have said, to demonstrate the value and actuality of this
tenacious personalism, not long since condemned as obsolete.
The important thing to point out here is the way in which such
an attitude in the hearts of the faithful leaves the door open to,
and is easily allied to, everything that is great and healthy in
the universal.
In its Judaic phase, Christianity might well have considered
itself the particular religion of one people. Later on, coming
under the general conditions of human knowledge, it came to
think that the world around it was much too small. However
that may be, it was hardly constituted before it was ceaselessly
trying to englobe in its constructions and conquests the totality
of the system that it managed to picture to itself.
Personalism and universalism : in what form have these two
characters been able to unite in its theology ?
For reasons of practical convenience and perhaps also of
intellectual timidity, the City of God is too often described in
pious works in conventional and purely moral terms. God
and the world he governs are seen as a vast association, essen-
tially legalistic in its nature, conceived in terms of a family or
government. The fundamental root from which the sap of
Christianity has risen from the beginning and is nourished, is
quite otherwise. Led astray by a false evangelism, people often
think they are honouring Christianity when they reduce it to a
sort of gentle philanthropism. Those who fail to see in it the
most realistic and at the same time the most cosmic of beliefs
and hopes, completely fail to understand its ' mysteries '. Is the
Kingdom of God a big family ? Yes, in a sense it is. But in
another sense it is a prodigious biological operation — that of the
Redeeming Incarnation.
As early as in St. Paul and St. John we read that to create, to
fulfil and to purify the world is, for God, to unify it by uniting it
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
organically with himself. 1 How docs he unify it ? By partially
immersing himself in things, by becoming ' element ', and then,
from this point of vantage in the heart of matter, assuming the
control and leadership of what we now call evolution. Christ,
principle of universal vitality because sprung up as man among
men, put himself in the position (maintained ever since) to
subdue under himself, to purify, to direct and superanimate the
general ascent of consciousnesses into which he inserted himself.
1111
By a perennial act of communion and sublimation, he aggre-
gates to himself the total psychism of the earth. And when he
has gathered everything together and transformed everything,
he will close in upon himself and his conquests, thereby rejoining,
in a final gesture, the divine focus he has never left. Then, as
St. Paul tells us, God shall be all in all. This is indeed a superior
form of ' pantheism '* without trace of the poison of adultera-
tion or annihilation : the expectation of perfect unity, steeped
in which each element will reach its consummation at the same
time as the universe.
The universe fulfilling itself in a synthesis of centres in perfect
conformity with the laws of union. God, the Centre of centres.
In that final vision the Christian dogma culminates. And so
exacdy, so perfecdy does this coincide with the Omega Point
that doubtless I should never have ventured to envisage the latter
or formulate the hypothesis rationally if, in my consciousness
as a believer, I had not found not only its speculative model
but also its living reality.
2. EXISTENCE VALUE
It is relatively easy to build up a theory of the world. But it is
beyond the powers of an individual to provoke artificially the
1 Following Greek thought — following all thought in fact — are not ' to be '
and ' to be one ' identical ?
8 ' En pasi pant a Theos.'
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EPILOGUB
birth of a religion. Plato, Spinoza and Hegel were able to
elaborate views which compete in amplitude with the per-
spectives of the Incarnation. Yet none of these metaphysical
systems advanced beyond the limits of an ideology. Each in
turn has perhaps brought light to men's minds, but without
ever succeeding in begetting life. What to the eyes of a ' natural-
ist ' comprises the importance and the enigma of the Christian
phenomenon is its existence-value and reality-value.
Christianity is in the first place real by virtue of the spon-
taneous amplitude of the movement it has managed to create
in mankind. It addresses itself to every man and to every class
of man, and from the start it took its place as one of the most
vigorous and fruitful currents the noosphere has ever known.
Whether we adhere to it or break off from it, we are surely
obliged to admit that its stamp and its enduring influence are
apparent in every corner of the earth today.
It is doubtless a quantitative value of life if measured by its
radius of action; but it is still more a qualitative value which
expresses itself— like all biological progress — by the appearance
of a specifically new state of consciousness.
I am thinking here of Christian love.
Christian love is incomprehensible to those who have not
experienced it. That the infinite and the intangible can be
lovable, or that the human heart can beat with genuine charity
for a fellow-being, seems impossible to many people I know
— in fact almost monstrous. But whether it be founded on an
illusion or not, how can we doubt that such a sentiment exists,
and even in great intensity ? We have only to note crudely the
results it produces unceasingly all round us. Is it not a positive
fact that thousands of mystics, ■ for twenty centuries, have
drawn from its flame a passionate fervour that outstrips by far in
brightness and purity the urge and devotion of any human
love? is it not also a fact that, having once experienced it, further
thousands of men and women are daily renouncing every other
ambition and every other joy save that of abandoning themselves
to it and labouring within it more and more completely ?
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
Lastly, is it not a fact, as I can warrant, that if the love of God
were extinguished in the souls of the faithful, the enormous
edifice of rites, of hierarchy and of doctrines that comprise
the Church would instantly revert to the dust from which it
rose ?
It is a phenomenon of capital importance for the science of
man that, over an appreciable region of the earth, a zone of
thought has appeared and grown in which a genuine universal
love has not only been conceived and preached, but has also
been shown to be psychologically possible and operative in
practice. It is all the more capital inasmuch as, far from decreas-
ing, the movement seems to wish to gain still greater speed and
intensity.
3. POWER OF GROWTH
For almost all the ancient religions, the renewal of cosmic
outlook characterising ' 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 mysticism,
they can adjust themselves neither to the precise immensities, nor
to die 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 dimensions
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.
More vigorous. To live and develop the Christian outlook needs
an atmosphere of greatness and of coherence. The bigger the
world becomes and the more organic become its internal con-
nections, the more will die perspectives of the Incarnation
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EPILOGUE
triumph. That is what believers are beginning, much to their
surprise, to find out. Though frightened for a moment by evolu-
tion, the Christian now perceives that what it offers him is
nothing but a magnificent means of feeling more at one with
God and of giving himself more to him. In a pluralistic and static
Nature, the universal domination of Christ could, strictly speak-
ing, still be regarded as an extrinsic and super-imposed power.
In a spiritually converging world this ' Christie ' energy acquires
an urgency and intensity of another order altogether. If the world
is convergent and if Christ occupies its centre, then the Christo-
genesis of St. Paul and St. John is nothing else and nothing less
than the extension, both awaited and unhoped for, of that noo-
genesis in which cosmogenesis — as regards our experience —
culminates. Christ invests himself organically with the very
majesty of his creation. And it is in no way metaphorical to say
that man tmds himself capable of experiencing and discovering
his God in the whole length, breadth and depth of the world in
movement. To be able to say literally to God that one loves him,
not only with all one's body, all one's heart and all one's soul,
but with every fibre of the unifying universe — that is a prayer
that can only be made in space-time.
More necessary. To say of Christianity that, despite appear-
ances to the contrary, it is acclimatising itself and expanding
in a world enormously enlarged by science, is to point to no
more than one half of the picture. Evolution has come to infuse
new blood, so to speak, into the perspectives and aspirations
of Christianity. In return, is not the Christian faith destined,
is it not preparing, to save and even to take the place of evolu-
tion ?
I have tried to show that we can hope for no progress on
earth without the primacy and triumph of the personal at the
summit of mind. And at the present moment Christianity
is the unique current of thought, on the entire surface of the
noosphere, which is sufficiently audacious and sufficiently pro-
gressive to lay hold of the world, at the level of effectual practice,
in an embrace, at once already complete, yet capable of indefinite
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
perfection, where faith and hope reach their fulfilment in love.
Alone, unconditionally alone, in the world today, Christianity
shows itself able to reconcile, in a single living act, the All and
the Person. Alone, it can bend our hearts not only to the service
of that tremendous movement of the world which bears us along,
but beyond, to embrace that movement in love.
In other words can we not say that Christianity fulfils all the
conditions we are entitled to expect from a religion of the
future ; and that hence, through it, the principal axis of evolution
truly passes, as it maintains ?
Now let us sum up the situation :
i. Considered objectively asa phenomenon, the Christian move-
ment, through its rootedness in the past and ceaseless develop-
ments, exhibits the characteristics of a phylum.
ii. Reset in an evolution interpreted as an ascent of consciousness,
this phylum, in its trend towards a synthesis based on love, pro-
gresses precisely in the direction presumed for the leading-shoot
of biogenesis.
iii. In the impetus which guides and sustains its advance, this
rising shoot implies essentially the consciousness of being in actual
relationship with a spiritual and transcendent pole of universal
convergence.
To confirm the presence at the summit of the world of what
we have called the Omega Point, 1 do we not find here the very
cross-check we were waiting for ? Here surely is the ray of
sunshine striking through the clouds, the reflection onto what is
ascending of that which is already on high, die rupture of our
solitude. The palpable influence on our world of an other and
supreme Someone ... Is not die Christian phenomenon, which
1 To be more exact, ' to confirm the presence at the summit of the world
of something in line with, but still more elevated than, the Omega point '.
This is in deference to the theological concept of the ' supernatural ' according
to which the binding contact between God and the world, hk el nunc inchoate,
attains to a super-intimacy (hence also a super-gratuitousness) of which man
can have no inkling and to which he can lay no claim by virtue of his ' nature '
alone.
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rises upwards at the heart of the social phenomenon, precisely
that?
In the presence of such perfection in coincidence, even if I
were not a Christian but only a man of science, I think I would
ask myself this question.
Peking, June 1938-June 1940
299
SUMMING UP OR POSTSCRIPT
THE ESSENCE OF
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
Since this book was composed, I have experienced no change in
the intuition it seeks to express. Taken as a whole, I still see
man today exactly as I saw him when I first wrote these pages.
Yet the basic vision has not remained — it could not remain —
stationary. By the irresistible deepening of reflection, by the
decantation and automatic patterning of associated ideas, by the
discovery of new facts and by the continual need to be better
understood, certain new formulations and articulations have
gradually occurred to me in the last ten years. They tend to
emphasise, and at the same time to simplify, the main lines of
my earlier draft.
It is this unchanged, though recogitated, essence of the Pheno-
menon of Man which I think it will be useful to set out here as
a summing-up or conclusion under three inter-related headings :
i. A WORLD IN INVOLUTION,
OR THE COSMIC LAW
OF COMPLEXITY-CONSCIOUSNESS
The astronomers have lately been making us familiar with the
idea of a universe which for the last few thousand million years
has been expanding in galaxies from a sort of primordial atom.
This perspective of a world in a state of explosion is still debated,
but no physicist would think of rejecting it as being tainted with
300
POSTSCRIPT
philosophy or finalism. The reader should keep this example
before him when he comes to weigh up the scope, the limita-
tions and the perfect scientific legitimacy of the views I have
here put forward. Reduced to its ultimate essence, the substance
of these long pages can be summed up in this simple affirma-
tion : that if the universe, regarded sidereally, is in process of
spatial expansion (from the infinitesimal to the immense), in the
same way and still more clearly it presents itself to us, physico-
chemically, as in process of organic involution upon itself (from
the extremely simple to the extremely complex) — and, moreover,
this particular involution ' of complexity ' is experimentally
bound up with a correlative increase in interiorisation, that is to
say in the psyche or consciousness.
In the narrow domain of our planet (still the only one within
the scope of biology) the structural relationship noted here
between complexity and consciousness is experimentally incon-
testable and has always been known. What gives the standpoint
taken in this book its originality is the affirmation, at the outset,
that the particular property possessed by terrestrial substances — of
becoming more vitalised as they become increasingly complex —
is only the local manifestation and expression of a trend as
universal as (and no doubt even more significant than) those
already identified by science : those trends which cause the
cosmic layers not only to expand explosively as a wave but
also to condense into corpuscles under the action of electro-
magnetic and gravitational forces, or perhaps to become de-
materialised in radiation : trends which are probably stricdy
inter-connected, as we shall one day realise.
If that be so, it will be seen that consciousness (defined
experimentally as the specific effect of organised complexity)
transcends by far the ridiculously narrow limits within which
our eyes can directly perceive it.
On the one hand we are logically forced to assume the
existence in rudimentary form (in a microscopic, i.e. an infinitely
diffuse, state) of some sort of psyche in every corpuscle, even
in those (the mega-molecules and below) whose complexity is
301
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
of such a low or modest order as to render it (the psyche) imper-
ceptible—just as the physicist assumes and can calculate those
changes of mass (utterly imperceptible to direct observation)
occasioned by slow movement.
On the other hand, there precisely in the world where various
physical conditions (temperature, gravity, etc.) prevent com-
plexity reaching a degree involving a perceptible radiation of
consciousness, we are led to assume that the involution, tem-
porarily halted, will resume its advance as soon as conditions
are favourable.
Regarded along its axis of complexity, the universe is, both
on the whole and at each of its points, in a continual tension of
organic doubling-back upon itself, and thus of interiorisation.
Which amounts to saying that, for science, life is always under
pressure everywhere ; and that where it has succeeded in breaking
through in an appreciable degree, nothing will be able to stop
it carrying to the uttermost limit the process from which it has
sprung.
It is in my opinion necessary to take one's stand in this actively
convergent cosmic setting if one wants to depict the phenomenon
of man in its proper relief and explain it fully and coherently.
2. THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF MAN,
OR THE INDIVIDUAL THRESHOLD
OF REFLECTION
So as to overcome the improbability of arrangements leading
to units of ever increasing complexity, the involuting universe,
considered in its pre-reflective zones, 1 proceeds step by step by
dint of billion-fold trial and error. It is this process of groping,
combined with the two-fold mechanism of reproduction and
heredity (allowing the hoarding and the additive improvement
1 Once the threshold of reflection is crossed, the play of ' planned ' or
' invented ' combinations come into the picture, and to some extent supplants
that of fortuitous combinations that 'just happen '. See below.
302
POSTSCRIPT
of favourable combinations obtained, without the diminution,
indeed with the increase, of the number of individuals engaged),
which gives rise to the extraordinary assemblage of living stems
forming what I have called the tree of life — though I could
equally well have chosen another image, that of the spectrum,
in which each wavelength would correspond to a particular
shade of consciousness or instinct.
From one point of view, the various stems of this psychical
fan may seem (indeed they are often so regarded by science) to
be vitally equivalent — -just so many instincts, so many equally
valid solutions to a given problem, comparison between which
is futile. A second original point in my position in The Pheno-
menon of Man — apart from the interpretation of life as a universal
function of the cosmos — lies, on the contrary, in giving the
appearance on the human line of the power of reflection the
value of a ' threshold ' or a change of state. This affirmation is
far from being an unwarranted assumption or based initially on
any metaphysics of thought. It is a choice depending experi-
mentally on the curiously underestimated fact that, from the
threshold of reflection onwards, we are at what is nothing less
than a new form of biological existence, 1 characterised, amongst
other peculiarities, by the following properties :
a. The decisive emergence in individual life of factors of internal
arrangement (invention) above the factors of external arrange-
ment (utilisation of the play of chance).
b. The equally decisive appearance between elements of true
forces of attraction and repulsion (sympathy and antipathy),
replacing the pseudo-attractions and pseudo-repulsions of pre-life
or even of the lower forms of life, which we seem to be able to
refer back to simple reactions to the curves of space-time in the
one case, and of the biosphere in the other.
1 In exactly the same way as physics changes (with the introduction and
dominance of certain new terms) when it passes from the scale of the medium-
sized to that of the immense or, on the other hand, to that of the infinitesimal.
It is too often forgotten that there should be, and is, a special biology of the
' infinitely complex '.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
c. Lastly, the awakening in the consciousness of each particular
element (consequent upon its new and revolutionary aptitude
for foreseeing the future) of a demand for ' unlimited survival '.
That is to say, the passage, for life, from a state of relative irre-
versibility (die physical impossibility of the cosmic involution
to stop, once it has begun) to a state of absolute irreversibility
(the radical dynamic incompatibility of a certain prospect of
total death with the continuation of an evolution that has become
reflective).
These various properties confer on the zoological group
possessing them a superiority that is not only quantitative and
numerical, but functional and vital— an indisputable superiority,
I maintain, provided that we make up our minds to apply relent-
lessly and to the bitter end the experimental law of Complexity-
Consciousness to the global evolution of the entire group.
3. THE SOCIAL PHENOMENON OR THE
ASCENT TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE
THRESHOLD OF REFLECTION
As we have seen, from a purely descriptive point of view, man
was originally only one of innumerable branches forming the
anatomic and psychic ramifications of life. But because this
parucular stem, or radius, alone among others, has succeeded,
thanks to a privileged structure or position, in emerging from
insunct into thought, it proves itself capable of spreading out
m its turn, within this still completely free zone of the world
so as to form a spectrum of another order-the immense variety"
of anthropological types known to us. Let us take a glance at
this second fanning-out. In virtue of the particular form of
cosmogenesis adopted here, the problem our existence sets
before our science is plainly the following : To what extent and
eventually under what form does the human layer still obey
(or is exempt from) the forces of cosmic involution which gave
it birth ? &
304
POSTSCRIPT
The answer to this question is vital for our conduct, and
depends entirely on the idea we form (or rather ought to form)
of the nature of the social phenomenon as we now see it in
full impetus around us.
As a matter of intellectual routine and because of the positive
difficulty of mastering a process in which we are ourselves
swept along, the constantly increasing auto-organisation of the
human myriad upon itself is still regarded more often than not as a
juridical or accidental process only superficially, ' extrinsically ',
comparable with those of biology. Naturally, it is admitted,
mankind has always been increasing, which forces it to make
more and more complex arrangements for its members. But
these modus vivendi must not be confused with genuine onto-
logical progress. From an evolutionary point of view, man has
stopped moving, if he ever did move.
And this is where, as a man of science, I feel obliged to make
my protest and object.
A certain sort of common sense 1 tells us that with man
biological evolution has reached its ceiling : in reflecting upon
itself, life has become stationary. But should we not rather say
that it leaps forward ? Look at the way in which, as mankind
technically patterns its multitudes, pari passu the psychic tension
within it increases, with the consciousness of time and space
and the taste for, and power of, discovery. This great event
we accept without surprise. Yet how can one fail to recognise
this revealing association of technical organisation and inward
spiritual concentration as the work of the same great force
(though in proportions and with a depth hitherto never attained),
the very force which brought us into being ? How can we fail
to see that after rolling us on individually — all of us, you and
me — upon our own selves, it is still the same cyclone (only now
on the social scale) which is still blowing over our heads, driving
us together into a contact which tends to perfect each one of us
by linking him organically to each and all of his neighbours ?
1 The same ' common sense ' which has again and again been corrected
beyond all question by physics.
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
' Through human socialisation, whose specific effect is to
involute upon itself the whole bundle of reflexive scales and
fibres of the earth, it is the very axis of the cosmic vortex of
interiorisation which is pursuing its course ' : replacing and
emending the two preliminary postulates stated above (the one
concerning the primacy of life in the universe, the other the
p/imacy of reflection in life) this is the third option — the most
d,!cisive of all — which completes the definition and clarification
o I my scientific position as regards the phenomenon of man.
This is not the place to show in detail how easily and co-
herently this organic interpretation of the social phenomenon
explains, or even in some directions allows us to predict, the
course of history. Let it merely be stated that, if above the
elementary hominisation that culminates in each individual, there
is really developing above us another hominisation, a collective
one of the whole species, then it is quite natural to observe,
parallel with the socialisation of humanity, the same three
psycho-biological properties rising upwards on the earth that
the individual step to reflection originally produced.
a. Firstly the power of invention, so rapidly intensified at the
present time by the, rationalised collaboration of all the forces of
research that it is already possible to speak of a human rebound of
evolution.
b. Next, capacity for attraction (or repulsion), still operating
in a chaotic way throughout the world but rising so rapidly
around us that (whatever be said to the contrary) economics will
soon count for very little in comparison with the ideological
and the emotional factors in the arrangement of the world.
c. Lasdy and above all, the demand for irreversibility. This
emerges from the still somewhat hesitating zone of individual
aspirations, so as to find categorical expression in consciousness
and through the voice of the species. Categorical in the sense
that, if an isolated man can succeed in imagining that it is pos-
sible physically, or even morally, for him to contemplate a
complete suppression of himself— confronted with a total anni-
hilation (or even simply with an insufficient preservation)
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POSTSCRIPT
destined for the fruit of his evolutionary labour — mankind, in
its turn, is beginning to realise once and for all that its only
course would be to go on strike. For the effort to push the earth
forward is much too heavy, and the task threatens to go on
much too long, for us to continue to accept it, unless we are to
work in what is incorruptible.
These and other assembled pointers seem to me to constitute
a serious scientific proof that (in conformity with the universal
law of centro-complexity) the zoological group of mankind —
far from drifting biologically, under the influence of exaggerated
individualism, towards a state of growing granulation ; far from
turning (through space-travel) to an escape from death by
sidereal expansion ; or yet again far from simply declining
towards a catastrophe or senility — the human group is in fact
turning, by planetary arrangement and convergence of all
elemental terrestrial reflections, towards a second critical pole
of reflection of a collective and higher order ; towards a point
beyond which (precisely because it is critical) we can see nothing
direcdy, but a point through which we can nevertheless prog-
nosticate the contact between thought, born of involution upon
itself of the stuff of the universe, and that transcendent focus we
call Omega, the principle which at one and the same time makes
this involution irreversible and moves and gathers it in.
It only remains for me, in bringing this work to a close, to define
my opinion on three matters which usually puzzle my readers :
(a) what place remains for freedom (and hence for the possi-
bility of a setback in the world) ? (b) what value must be given
to spirit (as opposed to matter) ? and (c) what is the distinction
between God and the World in the theory of cosmic involution ?
a. As regards the chances of success of cosmogenesis, my con-
tention is that it in no way follows from the position taken up
here that the final success of hominisation is necessary, inevitable
and certain. Without doubt, the ' noogenic ' forces of com-
pression, organisation and interiorisation, under which the bio-
logical synthesis of reflection operates, do not at any moment
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
relax their pressure on the stuff of mankind. Hence the possi-
bility of foreseeing with certainty ([fall goes well) certain precise
directions of the future. 1 But, in virtue of its very nature, as
we must not forget, the arrangement of great complexes (that
is to say, of states of greater and greater improbability, even
though closely linked together) does not operate in the universe
(least of all in man) except by two related methods : (i) the
groping utilisation of favourable cases (whose appearance is
provoked by the play of large numbers) and (ii) in a second
phase, reflective invention. And what docs that amount to if
not that, however persistent and imperious the cosmic energy
of involution may be in its activity, it finds itself intrinsically
influenced in its effects by two uncertainties related to the double
play — chance at the bottom and freedom at the top ? Let me add,
however, that in the case of very large numbers (such, for instance,
as the human population) the process tends to ' unfallibilise '
itself, inasmuch as the likelihood of success grows on the lower
side (chance) while that of rejection and error diminishes on the
other side (freedom) with the multiplication of the elements
engaged. 2
b. As regards the value of the spirit, I would like to say that
from the phenomenal point of view, to which I systematically
confine myself, matter and spirit do not present themselves as
' things ' or ' natures ' but as simple related variables, of which
it behoves us to determine not the secret essence but the curve
in function of space and time. And I recall that at this level of
reflection ' consciousness ' presents itself and demands to be
treated, not as a sort of particular and subsistent entity, but as
an ' effect ', as the ' specific effect ' of complexity.
1 This for instance; that nothing could stop man in his advance to social
unification, towards the development of machinery and automation (liberators
of the spirit), towards ' trying all ' and ' thinking aJJ " right to the very end.
2 For a Christian believer it is interesting to note that the fuial success of
hominisation (and thus cosmic involution) is positively guaranteed by the
' redeeming virtue ' of the God incarnate in his creation. But this takes us
beyond the plan of phenomenology.
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POSTSCRIPT
Now, within these limits, modest as they are, something very
important seems to me to be furnished by experience in favour of
the speculations of metaphysics.
On one side, when once we have admitted the above-
mentioned transposition of the concept of consciousness, nothing
any longer stops us from prolonging downwards towards the
lower complexities under an invisible form the spectrum of the
' within '. In other words, the ' psychic ' shows itself subtending
(at various degrees of concentration) the totality of the pheno-
menon.
On the other side, followed upward towards the very large
complexes, the same ' psychic ' element from its first appearance
in beings, manifests, in relation to its matrix of ' complexity ',
a growing tendency to mastery and autonomy. At the origins
of life, it would seem to have been the focus of arrangement
(F 1) which, in each individual element, engenders and controls
its related focus of consciousness (F 2). But, higher up, the
equilibrium is reversed. Quite clearly, first from the ' individual
threshold of reflection ' — if not before — it is F 2 which begins
to take charge (by ' invention ') of the progress of F 1. Then,
higher still, that is to say at the approaches (conjectured) of
collective reflection, we find F 2 apparently breaking away
from its temporo-spatial frame to join up with the supreme
and universal focus Omega. After emergence comes emersion.
In the perspectives of cosmic involution, not only does con-
sciousness become co-extensive with the universe, but the uni-
verse rests in equilibrium and consistency, in the form of thought,
on a supreme pole of interiorisation.
What finer experimental basis could we have on which to
found metaphysically the primacy of the spirit ?
c. Lastly, to put an end once and for all to the fears of
' pantheism ', constantly raised by certain upholders of traditional
spirituality as regards evolution, how can we fail to see that, in the
case of a converging universe such as I have delineated, far from
being bom from the fusion and confusion of the elemental centres
it assembles, the universal centre of unification (precisely to
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THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
fulfil its motive, collective and stabilising function) in use be
conceived as pre-existing and transcendent. A very real ' pan-
theism ' if you like (in the etymological meaning of the word)
but an absolutely legitimate pantheism — for if, in the last resort,
the reflective centres of the world are effectively ' one with
God ', this state is obtained not by identification (God becoming
all) but by the differentiating and communicating action of love
(God all in everyone). And that is essentially orthodox and
Christian.
3io
APPENDIX
SOME REMARKS ON
THE PLACE AND PART OF EVIL
IN A WORLD IN EVOLUTION
Throughout the long discussions we have been through, one
point may perhaps have intrigued or even shocked the reader.
Nowhere, if I am not mistaken, have pain or wrong been spoken
of. Does that mean that, from the point of view I have adopted,
evil and its problem have faded away and no longer count in the
structure of the world ? If that were so, the picture of the uni-
verse here presented might seem over-simplified or even faked.
My answer (or, if you like, my excuse) to this frequent
reproach of naive or exaggerated optimism is that, as my aim
in this book has been limited to bringing out the positive essence
of the biological process of hominisation, I have not (and this
in the interests of clarity and simplicity) considered it necessary
to provide the negative of the photograph. What good would it
have done to have drawn attention to the shadows on the
landscape, or to stress the depths of the abysses between the
peaks ? Surely they were obvious enough. I have assumed that
what I have omitted could nevertheless be seen. And it would
be a complete misunderstanding to interpret the view here
suggested as a sort of human idyll rather than as the cosmic
drama that I have attempted to present.
True, evil has not hitherto been mentioned, at least explicitly.
But on the other hand surely it inevitably seeps out through
every nook and cranny, through every joint and sinew of the
system in which I have taken my stand.
First : evil of disorder and failure. Right up to its reflective
3ii
THE PHENOMENON OF MAN
zones we have seen the world proceeding by means of groping
and chance. Under this heading alone — even up to the human
level on which chance is most controlled — how many failures
have there been for one success, how many days of misery for
one hour's joy, how many sins for a solitary saint ? To begin
with we find physical lack-of-arrangement or derangement on
the material level ; then suffering, which cuts into the sentient
flesh ; then, on a still higher level, wickedness and the torture
of spirit as it analyses itself and makes choices. Statistically, at
every degree of evolution, we find evil always and everywhere,
forming and reforming implacably in us and around us. Neces-
sarium est ut scandala eveniant. This is relentlessly imposed by the
play of large numbers at the heart of a multitude undergoing
organisation.
Second : evil of decomposition. This is no more than a form
of the foregoing, for sickness and corruption invariably result
from some unhappy chance. It is an aggravated and doubly
fatal form, it must be added, inasmuch as, with living creatures,
death is the regular, indispensable condition of the replacement
of one individual by another along a phyletic stem. Death — the
essential lever in the mechanism and upsurge of life.
Third : evil oj solitude and anxiety. This is the great anxiety
(peculiar to man) of a consciousness wakening up to reflection
in a dark universe in which light takes centuries and centuries
to reach it — a universe we have not yet succeeded in under-
standing either in itself, or in its demands on us.
Lastly, the least tragic perhaps, because it exalts us, though
none the less real : the evil of growth, by which is expressed in
us, in the pangs of childbirth, the mysterious law which, from
the humblest chemism to the highest syntheses of the spirit,
makes all progress in the direction of increased unity express
itself in terms of work and effort.
Indeed, if we regard the march of the world from this stand-
point (i.e. not that of its progress but that of its risks and the
efforts it requires) we soon see, under the veil of security and
harmony which — viewed from on high — envelop the rise of
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APPENDIX
man, a particular type of cosmos in which evil appears neces-
sarily and as abundantly as you like in the course of evolution
— not by accident (which would not much matter) but through
the very structure of the system. A universe which is involuted
and interioriscd, but at the same time and by the same token a
universe which labours, which sins, and which suffers. Arrange-
ment and centration : a doubly conjugated operation which,
like the scaling of a mountain or the conquest of the air, can
only be effected objectively if it is rigorously paid for — for
reasons and at charges which, if only we knew them, would
enable us to penetrate the secret of the world around us.
Suffering and failure, tears and blood : so many by-products
(often precious, moreover, and re-utilisable) begotten by the
noosphere on its way. This, in final analysis is, what the spectacle
of the world in movement reveals to our observation and
reflection at the first stage. But is that really all ? Is there
nothing else to see ? In other words, is it really sure that, for an
eye trained and sensitised by light other than that of pure science,
the quantity and the malice of evil hie et nunc, spread through
the world, does not betray a certain excess, inexplicable to our
reason, if to the normal effect of evolution is not added the extra-
ordinary effect of some catastrophe or primordial deviation ?
On this question, in all loyalty, I do not feel I am in a position
to take a stand : in any case, would this be the place to do so ?
One point, however, seems clear to me, and it is sufficient for
the moment as an orientation : that hi this case (just as in that
of the ' creation ' of the human soul — see note p. 169), complete
liberty is not only conceded but offered by the phenomenon to
theology, so that it may add precision and depth (should it wish
to) to the findings and suggestions — always ambiguous beyond
a certain point — furnished by experience.
In one manner or the other it still remains true that, even
in the view of the mere biologist, the human epic resembles
nothing so much as a way of the Cross.
Rome, October 28, 1948
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