PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDiN 1

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution: Reflections on Science and Religion, translated from the French by Rene Hague (New York: A Harvest Book/A Helen and Kurt Woolf Book/Harcourt, 1974) (From "How I Believe": "The great appeal of the Eastern religion . . . is that they are supremely universal and cosmic. Never perhaps has the sense of the Whole, which is the life-blood of all mysticism, flowered more exuberantly than in the plains of India. It is there, when a synthetic history of religions comes to be written, that we shall have to locate, some centuries before Christ, the birth of pantheism. It is there again, when the expectation of a new revelation is growing more intense, that in our days the eyes of modern Europe are turned. Governed . . . by love of the world, my own individual faith was inevitably peculiarly sensitive to Eastern influences; and I am perfectly conscious of having felt their attraction, until the day came when it became clear to me that by the same words the East and I understood different things. For the Hindu sage, spirit is the homogeneous unity in which the complete adept is lost to self, all individual features and values being suppressed. All quest for knowledge, all personalization, all earthly progress are so many diseases of the soul. Matter is dead weight and illusion. By contrast, spirit for me . . . the unity by synthesis in which the saint realizes his full being, carrying to the furthest possible point what differentiates its nature, and the particular resources it possesses. Knowledge and power--that is the only road that leads to freedom. Matter is heavy loaded, throughout, with sublime potentialities. Thus the East fascinates me by its faith in the ultimate unity of the universe; but the fact remains that the two of us, the East and I, have two diametrically opposed conceptions of the relationship by which there is communication between the totality and its elements. For the East, the One is seen as a suppression of the multiple; for me, the One is born from the concentration of the multiple. Thus, under the same monist appearances, thee are two moral systems, two metaphysics and two mysticisms. Once the ambiguity is made plain, no more will be needed I think (since Eastern religions logically lead to passive renunciation) for our modern world, eager as it is to find above all a religious vindication for its achievements, to reject them. For me, in any case, their current has ipso facto lost it power. The God whom I seek must reveal himself to me as a savior of man's work. I thought that I could discern him n the East. But it is clear that he awaited me at the other end of the horizon in those areas more recently opened to human mysticism by the 'road of the West'.  Id. at 96, 121-123.").