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Before the world was made, he chose us, chose us in Christ, to be holy and
spotless, and to live through love in his presence, determining that we should
become his adopted sons, through Jesus Christ. (Eph. I, 4-5). These powerful
words of St. Paul in his first letter to the Ephesians, I think, best
characterize the spirit of Teilhard the Chardin, his idea of man and man's place
in the universe, and of the common goals of humanity. Just imagine somebody…
Somebody, whose whole life was a continuous prayer to God, a prayer, in which he
constantly asked to break through the seal of traditional authority and common
ignorance, and explore the depth of reality, the ultimate beginning and the
ultimate end, and the reasons behind the emergence of life and conscious beings
in the universe.
Of course, that means that your books are put on the Index and you are almost
made into a heretic by the True and Holy Catholic Church. But he didn't give up.
He clearly saw his goals, his purpose. It was his life's work, to trace back the
origins of mankind, and to speculate of its goals and ultimate outcome. It was
his type of spirituality, scientific spirituality, that drove him incessantly to
spend sleepless nights trying to make sense out of scientific facts, to tie them
together with what seemed apparent, and with that which didn't seem so apparent.
And the best he came up with was a simple statement, We Are All One. Life is
eternal, love is immortal, and death is but a horizon. Life Is, he would say if
someone would have asked him, what is life? Life Is, and ever was, and forever
will be - world without end.
Composite matter dies and falls apart, but spirit remains. And with it - that
indelible part of it, the nuclei of personality, the individual particles which
have been with us from the very beginning, which grow and evolve with us, and
which strive towards common union into a whole, with God as the center… In my
paper, I will discuss Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's idea of man's place in the
universe, as presented in a variety of his works. I will be using mostly primary
sources for my research, as well as talks delivered at the Centennial Teilhard
de Chardin Symposium at Georgetown University, and books written by Teilhard's
friends or contemporaries. In most of his works, Teilhard establishes a link
between anthropology and metaphysics, between science and religion.
They are an attempt to understand the universe through man, who is very much
part of it. In them, we can see Teilhard's vision of harmony of duality of the
universe, which is composed of matter and spirit. Union of matter and mind, of
the cosmos and the spirit of the universe, and the evolving of one into the
other is one of the main ideas behind all of Teilhard's works. He tries to prove
that life didn't emerge by accident, but was a product of evolution. And man has
his own place in the evolution of the universe. First of all, universe is not
static. That is, there is no permanence in it. Everything is in the constant
process of change, and a particular kind of change - evolution. How did man come
to be, asks de Chardin. And the only plausible conclusion he can make is, that
human being is a link in a chain of evolution. What was before man? And how does
God fit into the whole picture? Let us follow Teilhard in his understanding of
the universe through ourselves, human beings.
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