Hymn of the Universe by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Author:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: matter, mass, teilhard de chardin, christ, spirit

If on the other hand the world is in truth a battlefield whereon victory is in the making—and if we are in truth thrown at birth into the thick of the battle—then we can at least vaguely see how, for the success of this universal struggle in which we are both fighters and the issue at stake, there must inevitably be suffering. Seen from the viewpoint of our human experience and drawn to our human scale, the world appears as an immense groping in the dark, an immense searching, an immense onslaught, wherein there can be no advance save at the cost of many setbacks and many wounds. Those who suffer, whatever form their suffering may take, are a living statement of this austere but noble condition: they are simply paying for the advance and tiie victory of all. They are the men who have fallen on the battlefield.

43

Then it is really true, Lord? By helping on the spread of science and freedom I can increase the density of the divine atmosphere, in itself as well as for me, that atmosphere in which it is always my one desire to be immersed. By laying hold on the earth I enable myself to cling closely to you.

May the kingdom of matter, then, under our scrutinies and our manipulations, surrender to us

118 Hymn of the Universe

the secrets of its texture, its movements, its history.

May the world's energies, mastered by us, bow down before us and accept the yoke of our power.

May the race of men, grown to fuller consciousness and greater strength, become grouped into rich and happy organisms in which life shall be put to better use and bring in a hundredfold return.

May the universe offer to our gaze the symbols and the forms of all harmony and all beauty.

I must search: and I must find.

What is at stake, Lord, is the element wherein you will to dwell here on earth.

What is at stake is your existence amongst us.

44

Let us just consider whether we might not be able to escape from the anxiety into which the dangerous power of thought is now plunging us—simply by improving our thinking still more. And to do this let us begin by climbing up till we tower over the trees which now hide the forest from us; in other words let us forget for a moment the details of the economic crises, the political tensions, the class struggles which block out our horizon, and let us climb high enough to gain an inclusive and impartial view of the whole process of hominization*

* Hominlzation is Pere Teilhard's term for what Sir Julian Huxley has called "progressive psychosocial evolution," i.e., the process whereby mankind's potentialities are more and more fully realized in the world, and all the forces contained in the animal world are progressively spiritualized in human civilization. (Tr. note.)

as it has advanced during the last fifty or sixty years.

From this vantage point what do we first notice? And if some observer were to come tons

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