Christianity and Evolution by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Author:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Evolution, Christ, God, Original Sin, Pantheism, Christianity, Mysticism, conscious evolution, teilhard de chardin, Adam & Eve

In short, hell is an 'indirect* reality which we cannot help feeling intensely, but without it being either profitable or possible for us to perceive it and take a straight look at it-we are like the mountaineer who is all the time aware of the colossal drop behind him, while the essence of his tactics and the success of his climb depends on keeping his back turned to it.

I would not go so far as to say that the views put forward here are as yet generally accepted by the theoreticians of the Christian faith; but they are even so gaining ground among believers and becoming established as a practical answer. There is every likelihood, accordingly, that they will express the living orthodoxy of tomorrow.

7. The Eucharist

From the realistic point of view which is universally characteristic of Catholic Christianity, the sacraments are more than a symbolic rite. What they stand for, they effect biologically in the domain of the life of personal union with God. Nowhere does this idea of the organic function of the sacrament stand out more clearly than in the eucharist (mass and communion). To read the catechisms, one might imagine that all the sacraments were equally important, and that the eucharist was one of a number of sacraments, just like the others. In reality the eucharist belongs to an order of its own among the sacraments. It is the first of the sacraments, or rather it is the one sacrament to which all the others are related; and this for the

CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION

good reason that the axis of the Incarnation, that is to say of creation, runs directly through the eucharist.

Consider, still from the CathoHc-Christian point of view, what happens when we go to communion.

In the first place, and immediately, we enter personally into physiological contact, at the moment of communion, with the assimilative power of the incarnate Word. What is more, however, this particular contact - our nth communion, say-does not follow on discontinuously from the n communions which preceded it in our life; it combines organically with the earlier communions in the unity of a single spiritual development, co-extensive with the whole duration of our life. All the communions of our life are, in feet, only successive instants or episodes in one single communion - in one and the same process of Christification.

Even this is not the whole story.

What is true of me is true of every other Christian, living, dead, or still to be born; further, both reason and faith tell us that all these Christians make up, in mankind and in God, but one whole, organically linked in a common super-life. If, then, all my own communions form but one single great communion, then all the communions of all men of all times, taken as one great whole, also add up to but one single and even vaster communion, co-extensive in this case with the history of mankind. This amounts to saying that when the eucharist is considered in the complete effecting

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