Teilhard: The Phenomenon of Man

THE PHENOMENON OF MAN [1]

of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

A Portion Briefly Presented and Commented on by

Leonard Swidler (dialogue@temple.edu) [2]

This book was written in the 1930s with Fascism (Italy), Falangism (Spain), Nazism (Germany), and Stalinism (Russia) raging, Teilhard offers an admonition not to be discouraged:

“Despite an almost explosive acceleration of noos-genesis [3] at our level, we cannot expect to see the earth transform itself under our eyes in the space of a generation. Let us keep calm and take heart.... Monstrous as it is, is not modern totalitarianism really the distortion of something magnificent, and thus quite near to the truth?”—Corruptio optimae, pessima. [4]

A. The Personal Universe

Teilhard indicates that the whole pattern discernible in evolutionary movement in the universe from the bottom up moves in the direction of consciousness, even of a supreme sort: “Evolution is an ascent towards consciousness.... Therefore, it should culminate forward in some sort of supreme consciousness.”

He then provides a brief analysis of the inner structure of consciousness which leads inevitably “upward”: Every consciousness is possessed by a three-fold property: “(1) of centering every-thing partially upon itself; (2) of being able to center itself upon itself constantly and increas-ingly; and (3) of being brought by this very super-centration into association with all the other centers surrounding it.”

Teilhard finds that the universe in the forms of space and time structurally move in a “curved,” “converging” fashion eventually leading to consciousness and beyond its primitive forms to an ultimately universalized Consciousness—Omega Point: “Because it contains and engenders consciousness, space-time is necessarily of a convergent nature. Accordingly, its enormous layers, followed in the right direction, must somewhere ahead become involuted to a point which we might call Omega, which fuses and consumes them integrally in itself. However immense the sphere of the world may be, it only exists and is finally perceptible in the directions in which its radii meet—even if this were beyond time and space altogether.”

This language and imagery reminds one of the image of Ultimate Reality being like the Horizon, always receding (which image was also used by two other Jesuits of an only slightly younger age: Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan), “luring” us forward (to use a Whiteheadian process-thought term for Ultimate Reality, “God”). As a humanist Marxist might say: Being human is a never-ending task.

Quite different from the advaita version of Hinduism, or of Buddhism, Teilhard insists on the person not being totally absorbed, obliterated or “blown out,” as in Nirvana: “It is therefore a mistake to look for the extension of our being or of the noosphere in the Impersonal. The Future-Universal could not be anything else but the Hyper-Personal–at the Omega Point.”

B. The Personalizing Universe

Teilhard stresses his vision that persons are the acme of the universe and that they can never disappear—this is the thrust of the evolution of the universe:

The universe is a collector and custodian of consciousness, the mere hoarding of these remains would be nothing but a colossal wastage. What passes from each of us into the mass of humanity by means of invention...is admittedly of vital importance.... But, far from transmitting the most precious, we are bequeathing, at the utmost, only the shadow of ourselves. Our works? But even in the interest of life in general, what is the worth of human works if not to establish, in and by means of each one of us, an absolutely original center in which the universe reflects itself in a unique and inimitable way? And those centers are our very selves and personalities. The very center of our consciousness, deeper than all its radii; that is the essence which Omega,[5] if it is to be truly Omega, must reclaim.... To communicate itself, my ego must subsist through abandoning itself, or the gift will fade away.”

The higher the development of consciousness, the more it must exist and persist in its own reality without absorption. This is the unavoidable pattern of the universe:

The conclusion is inevitable that the concentration of a conscious universe would be unthinkable if it did not reassemble in itself all consciousnesses as well as all the conscious; each particular consciousness remaining conscious of itself at the end of the operation, and even (this must absolutely be understood) each particular consciousness becoming still more itself and thus more clearly distinct from others the closer it gets to them in Omega.

Here is a clear insight (i.e., center-to-center union intensifies the distinct being of each center in proportion as they unite) which connects the whole universe and points ineluctably to the perfection and continuance of all parts—in this case, individual conscious persons:

In any domain—whether it be the cells of a body, the members of a society or the elements of a spiritual synthesis—union differentiates. In every organized whole, the parts perfect themselves and fulfil themselves. Through neglect of the universal rule many a system of pantheism has led us astray to the cult of a great All in which individuals were supposed to be merged like a drop in the ocean or like a dissolving grain of salt. Applied to the case of the summation of consciousnesses, the law of union rids us of this perilous and recurrent illusion. No, following the confluent orbits of their centers, the grains of consciousness do not tend to lose their outlines and blend, but, on the contrary, to accentuate the depth and incommunicability of their egos. The more ‘other’ they become in conjunction, the more they find themselves as ‘self.’ How could it be otherwise since they are steeped in Omega? Could a center dissolve? Or rather, would not its particular way of dissolving be to super centralize itself?”

Teilhard then presents a vision of the ultimate goal of the universe, i.e., the gathering together of all being into the consciousnesses of persons who will be drawn to this culmination by distinct Consciousness at the center, as the dynamo from which all energy/being radiates—he says it better:

By its structure Omega, in its ultimate principle, can only be… a grouping in which personalization of the All and the personalizations of the elements reach their maximum, simultaneously and without merging, under the influence of a supremely autonomous focus of union.... called henceforward Omega Point”

Teilhard says that each individual’s natural tendency is to move more and more toward self-preservation and expansion by way isolation or domination—but that is a self-defeating strategy:

Egoism, whether personal or racial, is quite rightly excited by the idea of the element ascending through faithfulness to life, to the extremes of the incommuni-cable and the exclusive that it holds within it. It feels right.

But then he points out that it is not separateness as such that is important, but the person. However, one becomes person only by way of mutuality, center to center union—this is the law of the evolving universe:

Its only mistake, but a fatal one, is to confuse individuality with personality. In trying to separate itself as much as possible from others, the element individualizes itself; but in so doing it becomes retrograde and seeks to drag the world backwards towards plurality and into matter.... To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction...that we must advance —toward the “other.” The goal of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together.... The true ego grows in inverse proportion to “egoism.” Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalizes itself.... Since it is a question of achieving a synthesis of centers, it is center to center that they must make contact and not otherwise.

“Which brings us to the problem of love….”

[1] The Phenomenon of Man (1959 ed.) Book Four, Chapter Two, (Beyond the Collective: The Hyper-Personal)

[2] I found this on the hard drive of my laptop as distilled for a graduate seminar in 1996 from my reading Teilhard’s Magnum Opus, The Phenomenon of Man, 1958 edition,.

[3] Nous (Greek, “thought.”

[4] Latin, “Corruption of the best is the worst.”

[5] Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet; therefore, a symbol of the Ultimate.

Searching - Finding/Not-Finding - Still Searching

1/30/2020 

By Leonard Swidler

Updated 1/26/21

I don't know: If there is “Something” out there that is so super-wonderful, but reveals Her/His/It/self only to a rather select few, “It” doesn't seem to be even as loving as I am – and have many shortcomings therein.

Maybe, however, there is a sort of Alpha/Omega that is evolving in Existence ever “greater” (not in the quantitative sense, but qualitative), an infinitely ahead of me/us Source/Goal of all Energy, Power, Consciousness, not static but dynamic – Be-ing, ing, ing…...?

After all, we know that our Cosmos started out 13. Billion years ago tinier than an atom (!),  exploded (Big Bang!) and is still expanding-ing,ing,ing…. at the speed of light (186,000/miles per second!!!).

However, while we are here – now! – why don’t we each – individually and together – work as intensely as possible to make ourselves personally and communally, as loving as possible. 

For my part, rather than looking “over there,” I prefer to put out my hand and heart to the ones I can reach, touch, somehow, here and now. 

In my youth, in the monastery, and afterward, I strove mightily to attain some inner taste of that Alpha/Omega. Now at age ninety-two, I am no longer excited by the prospect of grasping/being-grasped-by “Being/Goodness/Truth/Beauty.” Rather, I am content with, each moment, being the recipient of all the being, truth, beauty, goodness in the now increasingly touchable global being. I embrace the persons I meet and engage, both those in front of me, and those also truly present to me via the internet, and whatever else is being developed in the coming cascade of ever more rapidly newly developed means to embrace each other in love: in Philia, Agape, and Eros – each in her/his individually profound ways.

*******
I don’t know. But I do feel there is Being out there, and here – super wonderful, who reveals Her/Himself to all beings capable of loving. She/He seems to be much more loving than I am since Love is what He/She is said to be. She/He is called the Source of all Being, who says, “I am who I am,” or, newly understood, “I will be who I will be.” Thus, when I embrace the persons I meet, and engage those in front of me, I somehow touch and feel Alpha/Omega that is all-loving. I somehow enter into Being, into Agape, Philia, Eros, Love. I can sing, dance (now, only haltingly), shout, praise, give thanks with the whole universe… 
Agape, 

Friend!    

Leonard Swidler, dialogue@temple.edu

The Meaning Of Love—a Reflection

1/10/2020

By ​Leonard Swidler

Updated 1/30/2021

The Meaning of Love: A Reflection 

Leonard Swidler (dialogue@temple.edu) 

O Theophila*, you ask about the meaning of love.
Limitless words have been spoken and written to try to grasp the meaning of that word, and the reality it tries to name. 

You ask, “What do I think it means?” Let me take your question seriously and try to lay out my understanding as clearly as I can. This will be longish, and in the beginning, mostly “dry,” but “feeling” will creep in gradually.

First, at the most fundamental level: “What do we mean when we use the word ‘good’”?  

—That was “good” ice cream.  

—That was a “good” performance of Mozart;  

—George is a “good” friend…. 

We all understand when someone makes those statements. But what does “love” mean in those very different statements?  

I understand it to mean: “I wish to become one with” Mozart, ice cream, George….  

Whenever we perceive the “good” we want to become one, united, with it.

That then raises the question: What do we mean by the word “good”? 

I think we have in our minds: An idea of what something should do, and when it does that, we say that it is “good.”  

Thus, we think that ice cream should be, for example, sweet, cool, soft…., and to the extent the ice cream we are eating does those things, we think/say that it is “good,” or “not good,” or “very good”….

Of course, different people might have different understandings of what ice cream should be like: It should be very soft, or, medium soft, or, almost hard, or, very sweet, or, slightly sweet…. To the extent that this ice cream does what I/you think ice cream should do, I/you say that it is “good,” “very good,” “not so good,” “bad.”….

The same is true of music: We think that this sound should “calm our feelings,” or “arouse our feelings,” or “be pleasing to hear,” or….. To the extent it does those, and/or things, we say that it is “good,” “not so good,” “bad.”…. Because different persons might have similar, or very different, ideas about what music should do, we have differing judgments as to whether Mozart’s music is “good” or “not.”…. 

When I say that George is a “good” friend, we understand that a friend is a person who “we can depend on,” “will sympathize with us when we are sad.”…. If George does that a lot, we say he is a “very good friend.”….or not such a good friend….

Again, when we use the word “good” we mean that this “thing”—ice cream, Mozart, George…is doing what we understand ice cream, Mozart, friend should do.

Here is where “love” comes in:  

Love fundamentally means, “We want to become ‘one’ with what we perceive as ‘good.’”  

Thus, I want to become one with ice cream by eating it. I don’t want to “eat” Mozart, but I want to “become one” with him by “listening” to his music. I want to “become one” with George, not by “eating him,” or by sitting quietly with my eyes closed and listening to him endlessly; I want to “be one” with him by talking together with him, sharing his joys and sorrows, helping him when he is in need….

So, to my Beloved: I perceive you as a “good” friend, and thus, I want to talk with you, share my joys and sorrows with you…. I want to become “one” with you in endless ways… 

Because you and I are “persons,” my love for you means that I want to be “one” with you in the endless ways that only persons can be one with each other. All those different ways are endless because Persons are made “In the Image of God” (Gen 1:27), who is endless.  

Even if a person doesn’t believe that “God” exists (historically, we humans have had such wildly contradictory understandings of “god” that it is understandable that many find the idea of “God” unacceptably confused), there is in us humans an “endless” quality. We reach out endlessly in every direction—wider, wider, deeper, deeper…. without end. 

Even when the body ceases to exist; even when there doesn’t appear to be a separate “soul” in us humans (Where was my beloved Andie’s “soul” when she slowly disintegrated from Alzheimers before my eyes for seventeen years!? I don’t know; Ich Weiss es nicht; Je ne se pas; Io non so…). Still: There is this endless, “infinite” quality that exists in each human person. What it might be after the death of the body, we don’t know.  

Nevertheless, we have this endless yearning. For us humans, reality is endless, not only in “time,” but also in “space,” that is, we endlessly reach out to Become one with—Love—all “Being,” which we come to know endlessly, and hence, move to become “one with….” 

Thus, my “loving” you means that I am yearning to, moving toward, becoming one with you more and more…. endlessly. At the same time, my perception of you, my loving you, my becoming one with you continually expands/deepens so that mysteriously you grow ever greater. Somehow this loving you, this moving to become one with you, draws more and more of reality to be one with you—and me. Thus, endlessly all becomes One, Good….You—and I move to become with You, and you are endlessly expanding. 

Is this what we mean—or, perhaps, better, somehow “experience,” yearn for—when we read and make our own in the New Testament “Letter of John” (1. Jn 4:8): ho theos agape estin, “God is love.” Or, maybe, yet deeper in the inverse: he agape theos estin: “Love is God!” 

Love, Len                                                                                                                           1/30/2021 

***** 

* Acts of the Apostles, 1:1. Ho Theolophile (Greek,  Ho, “Oh”; phile, “love”; theos, “God”). 

Summer Reflections About the Meaning of Christmas

7/1/2019

by Leonard Swidler, dialogue@temple.edu

About timing: I find Christmas a most enjoyable time of the year—cool but not miserably cold. July, on the other hand, can be miserably hot and humid. So, why not think about Christmas in July?!

About location: Two of the most Christmas-decorated cities I have ever experienced were not New York, Paris, or some other Western city, but Tokyo (a Secular/Buddhist/Shinto city), and Kuala Lumpur, overwhelmingly a Muslim city)—and neither of them had a “White Christmas” while I was there. So, why not enjoy a reflection about cool Christmas in hot Philadelphia in July?

If we are going to talk about a particular subject, probably the first thing we should focus on is the “meaning” of the subject. What we are going to focus on today is Christmas. The first thing to note about Christmas is that the word in English refers to celebration of the “Mass at Christ-mas” time. However, if we look at the name in different European languages, we find  that the name used is quite different. For example, in German, the term is Weihnachten, which literally means “Holy Night.” In Latin, the name used is simply, Dies Natalis, “The Birth Day.” Noel in French is derived from Natalis, and hence also simply means “birth.” Looking at all the different names for Christmas, interesting as it may be, nevertheless, does not tell us very much about what we are focusing on.

Of course we are focusing on the celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. We might ask, “What is so important about the birth of anybody? In fact, the birth of a new human being seems to always create a sense of awe, and positive feelings in general. So, in this case, we are dealing with the firstborn child of an unimportant, presumably, very young woman (in that culture girls usually married at 14!). However, even with the birth of such a seemingly unimportant baby, it makes one think of a later saying in Jewish writings, the Talmud, where it is written “Whoever saves a single human life, it is as if he saved a whole universe.” (Mishnah: Aboth Rabbi Nathan 31) It is also interesting to note that the same idea, and almost the very same words, were also many centuries later attributed to Mohammad: “Whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as saving all mankind.” (Qur’an: 5:32). Thus seen: Every person’s birth, and death, are each a whole universe!

What brings us to focus on the birth of Jesus is, of course, what happened with him in his ensuing 30-some years, and even more than that, what has happened in the 2000 years since then.

Jesus grew to adulthood in the area that today we call Galilee, which is a part of present-day Israel. Now we should remember that Galilee was thought of as rather second-class Judaism by the inhabitants of Judea. In any case, he apparently grew to young manhood, and as young boys in the Jewish world at the time, he studied the Scriptures. He seems to have done so in an extraordinarily deep manner.

How do we know this? Because there is a passage in the Gospel of Luke which relates how Jesus along with his mother and father went to Jerusalem for a large celebration, and when his father and mother returned to their home, they walked separately—Mary the mother with the women, and Joseph the father with the men. It is related in Luke’s Gospel that after a day’s journey the mother and father met again, each one assuming that Jesus was with the other one. When they discovered that he was not with either of them, they returned to Jerusalem and spent apparently quite some time searching for him. When they did finally find him, it is recorded in the Gospel that he was discussing deep religious issues with the rabbis. My suspicion is, that among these rabbis were quite possibly the leaders of the two major rabbinical “schools,” namely, Hillel and Shammai. Luke records that the rabbis were extremely impressed with the knowledge of the scriptures on the part of 12-year old Jesus. As one might expect from anxious parents, it is noted that Joseph and Mary scolded Jesus, saying that he caused them a great deal of anxiety. However, Jesus is reported to have said something rather imperious: “I must be about the work of my father.”

Luke also notes at that point that “Mary kept all of these events in her heart and pondered upon them.” This line suggests quite strongly, that Luke as a writer of a Gospel, one way or another had access to these thoughts that Mary pondered in her heart. The chances are that Luke never met Mary herself (Luke’s Gospel was written about 85 C.E.; hence Mary would have been over a hundred!), but somehow had access to things that she may have said to others, who then wrote them down eventually.

Might this “Proto-Evangelist” have been Mary Magdalen (to whom the risen Jesus first appeared and commissioned to “instruct the apostles”), or Mary of Bethany (who “chose the better part and sat at the Master’s feet…. ”)? The chances that Mother Mary could read and write are quite slim. Such was not expected of young girls in that culture, or in hardly any cultures, for that matter!

Of course, Luke must have had access to some of the experiences and thoughts of Mary, for he is the one who most of all writes about them. As I said, we have no idea about how he had access to the sources, whether they were spoken and he just heard them from living persons (who would have been quite elderly), or that they had been written down, and he had access to the written material.

In any case, as we know, Jesus grew to manhood and in the process he must have learned to read and write and studied with the rabbi's, for at one place in the Gospels it is written that he was invited to come to the front and read from the Scriptures at the synagogue service in Galilee, after which it is also recorded that the people spoke among themselves, asking “Where did he get all that knowledge? Is he not the son of Joseph, a Carpenter?”

An interesting question to ask at this point would be, “Who might have been the rabbis that Jesus studied with, there north of Judea, in the province of Galilee? Well, we have evidence elsewhere that both Shammai and Hillel had spent time teaching in Galilee, and that Hillel, the older of the two, died around the year 10. We also know that Jesus probably as born around the year 4 BCE. That would mean that, if the dates are reasonably accurate, Jesus would have been 14 years old when Hillel died. He would certainly have been old enough for him to have been studying with Hillel for two years or more. As far as Shammai is concerned, he lived several decades longer than did Hillel.

Whole libraries have been written about Christmas and about Jesus. May this brief reflection add a few details to the reader’s reflection at Christmas time in July.