Activation of Energy

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Description

The renowned Jesuit thinker explores science, theology, and the course of human evolution.

Following in the footsteps of his earlier works, this collection of essays from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin brings greater clarity to the stunning potential of human energy if it is properly channeled, as he describes, “upward and outward.”
 
While energy wrongly directed appears as depression, drug addiction, and violence, this legendary scholar—a priest who earned a doctorate in geology and studied the sciences extensively—promises that spiritual energy channeled correctly will become a true force in the universe, far outdistancing the potential of technological advance.
 
“Like other great visionary poets—Blake, Hopkins, Yeats—Teilhard engages the reader both intellectually and sensually.” —The Washington Post Book World

Sujets

• Relationship between religion and science
• Christian Science
• Christian philosophy
• French philosophy
• Spiritual philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 1972
• Nombre de lectures: 14
• EAN13: 9780547536804
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Note
Epigraph
The Moment of Choice
The Atomism of Spirit
The Rise of the Other
Universalization and Union
Centrology
The Analysis of Life
Outline of a Dialectic of Spirit
The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind
On the Nature of the Phenomenon of Human Society, and its Hidden Relationship with Gravity
The Psychological Conditions of the Unification of Man
A Phenomenon of Counter-Evolution in Human Biology
The Sense of the Species in Man
The Evolution of Responsibility in the World
A Clarification: Reflections on Two Converse Forms of Spirit
The Zest for Living
The Spiritual Energy of Suffering
A Mental Threshold Across Our Path: From Cosmos to Cosmogenesis
Reflections on the Scientific Probability and the Religious Consequences of an Ultra-Human
The Convergence of the Universe
The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution
A Major Problem for Anthropology
The Reflection of Energy
Reflections on the Compression of Mankind
On Looking at a Cyclotron
The Energy of Evolution
The Stuff of the Universe
The Activation of Human Energy
The Death-Barrier and Co-Reflection
Index
About the Author
Footnotes
Copyright © 1976 by Editions du Seuil English translation copyright © 1978 by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd., London

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For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Originally published in France under the title L’Activation de l’Energie

ISBN 0-15-602817-4 (Harvest: pb.)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file.

e ISBN 978-0-547-53680-4
v4.1215
Note
As pointed out in the note at the beginning of Human Energy , 1 the writings still to be published (including this volume) were never revised by Père Teilhard de Chardin with a view to publication. There are a number of passages which, following his usual practice, he would no doubt have expressed more exactly or would have modified.

This collection, running on chronologically from Human Energy , progressively develops the title-theme of that volume. As Père Wildiers wrote in the introduction to the latter, the papers it contains ‘are perhaps some of the most original and valuable’ of Père Teilhard’s writings.
The notes to this volume are intended to prevent any danger of erroneous interpretation. For the most part they consist simply of summaries of some of Père Teilhard’s more elaborately worked out passages.
‘Hypothesis: a very poor choice of word to designate the supreme spiritual act by which the dust-cloud of experience takes on form and is kindled at the fire of knowledge.’
Père Teilhard de Chardin
The Moment of Choice
A possible interpretation of War
T HIS will be the second time, then, in the span of one human life that we shall have known War. The second time, did I say? Is it not, rather, worse than that? Is it not the same Great War that is still raging, the same single process: a world being re-cast—or disintegrating? In 1918 it seemed all over and done with, and now it is beginning all over again.
The same anguish, then, is making itself felt deep within each one of us, and there is not one of us but heaves the same deep sigh. We thought that we were rising up in freedom towards a better era: and now it would appear that we were quite mistaken, that some vast determinism is dragging us irresistibly round and round, or down to the depths. Is it not, we ask, a diabolical circle of incessantly renewed discords: is not the ground sliding back from under our feet at each step we take? The whirling wheel or the giddy slope? Were our hopes of progress, then, no more than an illusion?
Like everyone else, I felt the horror of this shocking trial when I landed in the Far East—flooded by nature and laid waste by an insidious invasion—and learnt that the West was ablaze.
Once again, therefore, I drew up the balance sheet of all I knew and all I believed, and examined it again. As unemotionally as possible I compared it with all that is now happening to us. And here, to put it frankly, is what I thought I saw.
∗
First and foremost: no, a thousand times no—however tragic the present conflict may be, it contains nothing that should shake the foundations of our faith in the future. I wrote this in this very journal 1 and I shall repeat it with all the conviction I felt two years ago. Where a group of isolated human wills might falter, the sum total of man’s free decisions could not fail to find its God. Consider: for hundreds of millions of years consciousness was unceasingly rising up to the surface of the earth—and could we imagine that the direction of this mighty tide would be reversed at the very moment when we were beginning to be aware of its flow? The truth is that our reasons, even our natural reasons, for believing in a final triumph for man are of an order that is higher than any possible occurrence. Whatever disorder we are confronted by, the first thing we must say to ourselves is that we shall not perish. This is not a mortal sickness: it is a crisis of growth. It may well be that the evil has never seemed so deep-rooted nor the symptoms so grave; but, in one sense, is that not precisely one more reason for hope? The height of a peak is a measure of the depths of the abysses it overtops. If, from century to century, the crises did not become more violent, then, perhaps, we might have cause for anxiety.

Thus, even if the present cataclysm were impossible to understand, we should still, on principle, have to cling tenaciously to our belief and continue to press on. It is enough, surely, for us (particularly if we are Christians) to know that from the most distant reaches in which life appears to us, it has never succeeded in rising up except by suffering, and through evil—following the way of the Cross.
But is it really so impossible for us to understand the meaning of what is going on?
At the root of the major troubles in which nations are today involved, I believe that I can distinguish the signs of a change of age in mankind.
It took hundreds of centuries for man simply to people the earth and cover it with a first network: and further thousands of years to build up, as chance circumstances allowed, solid nuclei of civilizations within this initially fluctuating envelope, radiating from independent and antagonistic centres. Today, these elements have multiplied and grown; they have packed themselves closer together and forced themselves against one another—to the point where an over-all unity, of no matter what nature , has become economically and psychologically inevitable. Mankind, in coming of age, has begun to be subject to the necessity and to feel the urgency of forming one single body coextensive with itself. There we have the underlying cause of our distress.
In 1918 the nations had tried, in a supreme effort of individualism, in an obscure instinct for conservation, to defend themselves against this mass-concretion which they felt was coming. At that time we witnessed the terrifying upsurge of nationalisms—the reactionary fragmentation of ethnic groups in the name of history. And now once again the single fundamental wave is mounting up and rolling forward, but in a form made perilous by the particularist enthusiasms with which it is impregnated. So it is that the crisis has burst upon us.
∗
What, then, do we see?
At a number of points on the earth, sections of mankind are simultaneously isolating themselves and drawing themselves up in readiness, logically impelled by ‘universalization’ of their nationalism to set themselves up as the exclusive heirs of life’s promises. Life, they proclaim from where they stand, can attain its term only by following exactly the road it took at the very beginning. Survival of the fittest: a pitiless struggle for domination between individual and individual, between group and group. Who is going to devour whom? . . . Such is the fundamental law of fuller being. In consequence, overriding every other principle of action and morality, we have the law of force, transposed unchanged into the human sphere. External force: war, therefore, does not represent a residual accident which will become less important as time goes on, but is the first agent of evolution and the very form in which it is expressed. And, to match this, internal force: citizens welded together in the iron grip of a totalitarian regime. All along the road we find coercion, continually obliged to turn the screw tighter. And, as a climax, one single branch stifling all the others. The future awaits us at the term of a continuous series of selections. Its crown is destined for the strongest individual in the strongest nation: it is in the smoke and blood of battles that the superman will appear.
It is against this barbaric ideal that we have spontaneously rebelled: and it is to escape slavery that we too have had to have recou