Teilhard De Chardin Quotes

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We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Research is the highest form of adoration
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The most empowering relationships are those in which each partner lifts the other to a higher possession of their own being.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Hymn of the Universe)
We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The whole life lies in the verb seeing.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Hymn of the Universe)
The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man)
The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In the end, only the truth will survive.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis" -Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form. . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Teilhard de Chardin wrote that we must "trust in the slow work of God." Ours is a God who waits. Who are we not to? It takes what it takes for the great turnaround. Wait for it.
Greg Boyle (Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion)
Then he quoted from a French Jesuit named Teilhard de Chardin: “He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.
Matthew Thomas (We Are Not Ourselves)
The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon Of Man)
It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Hymn of the Universe)
The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Toward the Future)
I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man)
In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
French philosopher-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Oprah Winfrey (What I Know For Sure)
So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Hymn of the Universe)
We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of The Phenomenon of Man.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon Of Man)
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man)
As Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” He was right. If we recognize the soul lesson, we can grow beyond suffering, and there is no stress in this state of understanding.
Brian L. Weiss (Eliminating Stress, Finding Inner Peace)
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Dean Koontz (Watchers)
There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others that have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The day will come when, after harnessing the winds, the tides and graviation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
In no case does the energy required for synthesis appear to be provided by an influx of fresh capital, but by expenditure.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon Of Man)
The quintessential good and beauty in life is what each has to offer to others valuing the gesture ourselves into confluence with the Word of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(Evolution) general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man)
Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Hymn of the Universe)
He [Pierre Teilhard de Chardin] was thrilled with the idea that through work in the world human beings were participating in the ongoing extension and consecration of God's creation.
Robert Ellsberg (All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, & Witnesses for Our Time)
For brief as water falling will be death, and brief as flower falling, or leaf, brief as the taking, and the giving, breath; thus natural, thus brief, my love, is grief. —CONRAD AIKEN It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway. —PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water)
evolutionary phenomena (of course including the phenomenon known as man) are processus, they can never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or mainly in terms of their origins: they must be defined by their direction,
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon Of Man)
There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Our self-awareness impresses itself on us so cogently, as individuals and as a species, that we cannot imagine ourselves out of existence, even though for hundreds of millions of years humans played no part in the flow of life on the planet. When Teilhard de Chardin wrote, "The phenomenon of Man was essentially foreordained from the beginning," he was speaking from the depth of individual experience, which we all share, as much as from religious philosophy. Our inability to imagine a world without Homo sapiens has a profound impact on our view of ourselves; it becomes seductively easy to imagine that our evolution was inevitable. And inevitability gives meaning to life, because there is a deep security in believing that the way things are is the way they were meant to be.
Richard E. Leakey (The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind)
There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a “tale told by an idiot,” a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens—the “evolutionary goof.” Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.” In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all.
Jane Goodall (Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey)
In the presence of a reader of Teilhard De Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears.
Michel Houellebecq (The Possibility of an Island)
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. —Teilhard de Chardin
Lee Lipsenthal (Enjoy Every Sandwich: Living Each Day as If It Were Your Last)
As a result, man is the only successful type which has remained as a single interbreeding group or species, and has not radiated out into a number of biologically separated assemblages
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon Of Man)
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." Teilhard de Chardin - French geologist, Jesuit priest, philosopher, mystic (1881-1955)
Angela Jeffs
for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of fact never static:
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon Of Man)
But this quantum only takes on its full significance when we try to define it with regard to a concrete natural movement — that is to say, in duration.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon Of Man)
The history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Il fenomeno umano (Opere di Teilhard de Chardin n.1))
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.
in the course of the growth of research; so that, when they reach the end of their analyses they cannot tell with any certainty whether the structure they have reached is the essence of the matter they are studying, or the reflection of their own thought.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man)
There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Why
James Fadiman (The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys)
It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty." [Written from Peking, October 1945, on the eve of departure, after having been stuck there since the war began.]
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Letters Of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan)
For in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
man's evolution was unique in showing the dominance of convergence over divergence:
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon Of Man)
Or you agree with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin when he said, ‘We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Jane Goodall (The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times)
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves”—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Dean Koontz (Watchers)
I learned that after the first English translation of The Divine Comedy, the word did not resurface in the language until the mid-twentieth century, in the work of the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Meghan O'Gieblyn (God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning)
We must not forget that the human soul, however independently created our philosophy represents it as being, is inseparable in its birth and in its growth from the universe into which it is born. —TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
Dan Simmons (Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3))
We must not forget that the human soul, however independently created our philosophy represents it as being, is inseparable in its birth and in its growth from the universe into which it is born. - Teilhard de Chardin
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.” Anyone who has unselfishly helped another person knows this to be true.
John C. Maxwell (The Maxwell Daily Reader: 365 Days of Insight to Develop the Leader Within You and Influence Those Around You)
Why does our world feel so very crazy? Why do mental and emotional illnesses emerge more rapidly than we can educate psychiatrists, psychologists, addiction specialists, and mental health counselors to diagnose and treat them? We are marinating in the soup of collective madness, cruelty, selfishness, and lies, the soup of spiritual toxicity.
Albert J. LaChance (The Third Covenant: The Transmission of Consciousness in the Work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Albert J. LaChance)
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness . . . the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Brian L. Weiss (Miracles Happen: The Transformational Healing Power of Past-Life Memories)
By upbringing and intellectual training, I belong to the “children of heaven”; but by temperament, and by my professional studies, I am a “child of the earth”. Situated thus by life at the heart of two worlds with whose theory, idiom and feelings intimate experience has made me familiar, I have not erected any watertight bulkhead inside myself. On the contrary, I have allowed two apparently conflicting influences full freedom to react upon one another deep within me. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
Valentin Tomberg (Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism)
Since once again, Lord - though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia - I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the Real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world. Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labour. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits. My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those whom the light is now awakening to the new day . . . Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say again the words: ‘This is my Body’. And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: ‘This is my Blood’.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Divine Milieu)
The most influential author for me is Teilhard de Chardin, the French anthropologist and theologian. He believed, as I do, that the world is evolving toward a pleroma or fullness. Each human act contributes to this grand evolution and therefore does not cease to exist when it is completed.
Jeffrey A. Kottler (On Being a Master Therapist: Practicing What You Preach)
(“Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves”—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. And “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends”—The Gospel According to Saint John.)
Dean Koontz (Watchers)
What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step— because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end. The day will come when, after mastering the ether, the winds, the tides, gravity, we shall master the energies of love, for God. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have made fire his servant.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (On Love & Happiness)
El pasado me ha revelado la estructura del futuro
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
If there is one thing that has always plunged me into sadness or compassion, I mean into a state that excludes all manner of nastiness or irony, it is the existence of Teilhard de Chardin - not only his existence, but the fact that he has, or could have had, readers, however small the number. In the presence of a reader of Teilhard de Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears.
Michel Houellebecq (The Possibility of an Island)
His understanding of the method by which organisms become first individualised and then personalised gave him a number of valuable insights. Basically, the process depends on cephalisation — the differentiation of a head as the dominant guiding region of the body, forwardly directed, and containing the main sense-organs providing information about the outer world and also the main organ of co-ordination or brain.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon Of Man)
[Davidson] Black procured cadavers for research, obtained from the Peking police department. These cadavers were mostly of people who had been executed for various crimes; the police regularly sent Black truckloads of the bodies of the executed convicts. Execution in China was by beheading, and thus the cadavers Black received lacked heads and had mutilated necks. After some time, he asked the police whether there was any possibility of getting better dead bodies for research - corpses that were intact. The next day, he received a shipment of convicts, all chained together, with a note from the police asking him to kill them in any way he chose.
Amir D. Aczel (The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man)
A huge shift in consciousness is underway in our time. A sea change from the “I and it” marketplace conception of the world to an “I and thou” sense of communal identity. Joanna Macy describes it as a “Great Turning” an ecological revolution widening our awareness of the intricate web that connects us. Teilhard de Chardin called it an evolution of consciousness, an emergence of the “planetization” of humankind. We have to think now like a planet, not like separate individuals. We need a “psyche the size of the earth,” James Hillman says, “the greater part of the souls lies outside the body.
Belden C. Lane (The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul)
Teilhard de Chardin—usually referred to by the first part of his last name, Teilhard, pronounced TAY-yar—was one of those geniuses who, in Nietzsche’s phrase (and as in Nietzsche’s case), were doomed to be understood only after their deaths. Teilhard, died in 1955. It has taken the current Web mania, nearly half a century later, for this romantic figure’s theories to catch fire. Born in 1881, he was the second son among eleven children in the family of one of the richest landowners in France’s Auvergne region. As a young man he experienced three passionate callings: the priesthood, science, and Paris. He was the sort of worldly priest European hostesses at the turn of the century died for: tall, dark, and handsome, and aristocratic on top of that, with beautifully tailored black clerical suits and masculinity to burn. His athletic body and ruddy complexion he came by honestly, from the outdoor life he led as a paleontologist in archaeological digs all over the world. And the way that hard, lean, weathered face of his would break into a confidential smile when he met a pretty woman—by all accounts, every other woman in le monde swore she would be the one to separate this glamorous Jesuit from his vows.
Tom Wolfe (Hooking Up (Ceramic Transactions Book 104))
I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history. ... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20... This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued. Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.
Umberto Eco (Belief or Nonbelief?)
Ultimately, we are much more addicted than the junkie because we are responsible for not only our own demise, but the breakdown of the entire natural world. There is no other appropriate response to a situation this grave, this utterly overwhelming, than powerlessness. It has taken countless generations to arrive in this predicament; a solution cannot arise overnight. It will take work. It will take time.
Albert J. LaChance (The Third Covenant: The Transmission of Consciousness in the Work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Albert J. LaChance)
What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of courage. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly; and we can now see that it is biologically undeniable that unless we harness passion to the service of spirit there can be no progress. Sooner or later, then, and in spite of all our incredulity, the world will take this step— because the greater truth always prevails and the greater good emerges in the end.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (On Love & Happiness)
...The very fact of our becoming aware of this profound ordering of things will enable human collectivization to pass beyond the enforced phase, where it now is, into the free phase: that in which (men having at last understood that they are inseparably joined elements of a converging Whole, and having learnt in consequence to love the preordained forces that unite them) a natural union of affinity and sympathy will supersede the forces of compulsion.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
There was something more: around this sentient protoplasmic layer, an ultimate envelope was beginning to become apparent to me, taking on its own individuality and gradually detaching itself like a luminous aura. This envelope was not only conscious but thinking, and from the time when I first became aware of it, it was always there that I found concentrated, in an ever more dazzling and consistent form, the essence or rather the very Soul of the Earth.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Heart of Matter)
Saint John Paul II wrote, “when its concepts and conclusions can be integrated into the wider human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value.”7 Religion, too, develops best when its doctrines are not abstract and fixed in an ancient past but integrated into the wider stream of life. Albert Einstein once said that “science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind.”8 So too, John Paul II wrote: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”9 Teilhard de Chardin saw that dialogue alone between the disciplines is insufficient; what we need is a new synthesis of science and religion, drawing insights from each discipline into a new unity. In a remarkable letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II wrote: The church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. Each of these members should become not less itself but more itself in a dynamic interchange, for a unity in which one of the elements is reduced to the other is destructive, false in its promises of harmony, and ruinous of the integrity of its components. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. . . . Unity involves the drive of the human mind towards understanding and the desire of the human spirit for love. When human beings seek to understand the multiplicities that surround them, when they seek to make sense of experience, they do so by bringing many factors into a common vision. Understanding is achieved when many data are unified by a common structure. The one illuminates the many: it makes sense of the whole. . . . We move towards unity as we move towards meaning in our lives. Unity is also the consequence of love. If love is genuine, it moves not towards the assimilation of the other but towards union with the other. Human community begins in desire when that union has not been achieved, and it is completed in joy when those who have been apart are now united.10 The words of the late pope highlight the core of catholicity: consciousness of belonging to a whole and unity as a consequence of love.
Ilia Delio (Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness (Catholicity in an Evolving Universe Series))