Teilhard and the Future of Humanity

Chapter 3: The Personalization of the Universe; or, The Era of the Person

c h a p t e r 3 The Personalization of the Universe; or, The Era of the Person Henri Madelin, S.J. Teilard de Chardin did not use the word ‘‘globalization’’ when he wrote about the future of humanity. His vision is neither a utilitarian nor a quietist one, based on renunciation, nor is it full of an exacerbated form of piety. It is centered on a Christic perspective that accompanies evolution from the beginning to the end. From inchoative matter to the noosphere, the Spirit draws all forward . A goal of ‘‘amorization’’ emerges and grows in the heart of matter itself. Amorization is a word derived from the Latin, which can be understood as an ever-increasing openness to ‘‘the other,’’ in the entire scale of being. It is a concept that implies a movement from a merely exterior to an interior relationship with other beings and entities: from the dominance of instinct to relationship with others, from the struggle for self-preservation to a growth in capacity for love. A final focusing is in the making, the famous ‘‘omega point.’’ Teilhard wrote in the singular, referring to a single person to differentiate from ‘‘massification,’’ or confusion in anonymity. He 29 30 Henri Madelin described a process that brings about ‘‘personalization’’ and respect for each individual. But the adventure may fail if humans retreat into a kind of frozen self-absorption and are no longer stimulated and motivated to grow. Teilhard hoped that humanity would converge so that little by little it would meet the ultimate goal: resolving differences so as to succeed in bringing about a more humane existence. Teilhard wrote, ‘‘Matter, the matrix of the Spirit. The Spirit, a higher state of Matter’’1 —these are concepts that are central to his thought. 1. A Growing Humanity The experience of the 1914–18 war was decisive for Teilhard, and where he came to know an intense sensation of freedom, the headiness of brotherhood, and the loss of earlier certitudes that were too simple. Teilhard always kept a certain nostalgia for this confrontation with death which was experienced simultaneously with an affirming liberty. 1. The Atmosphere on the Front Teilhard had written for the Jesuit review Études (November 1917) about this ‘‘nostalgia for the front.’’ Later, in ‘‘The Heart of The Matter,’’ he returned to the atmosphere he found there, where millions of men gathered together developed an ‘‘internal energy’’ bringing about the raising of its ‘‘psychic temperature.’’ A new sense emerged: Is it not for having been immersed—for being permeated month after month—exactly there where it was at its highest charge, its highest density that decidedly I ceased to make out any rupture between all things ‘‘physical’’ or ‘‘moral,’’ ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘artificial,’’ (if not any differences): the ‘‘Million Men’’ with its psychic temperature and its internal energy became for me a notion whose evolution was as real, biologically speaking, as that of 31 The Personalization of the Universe a gigantic protein molecule. Following this I have often been surprised to see around me, in my opponents, a complete inability to conceive that the human individual, as he represents a corpuscular notion, must, just like any other corpuscular species in the World, become engaged in links and physical groups that are superior to him, groupings that he cannot understand directly as such— because they are of an n1 order—but whose existence and whose influence are well known to him, through different pieces of evidence. This gift, or faculty, still rather rare, of being able to perceive without seeing the reality and the organicity of collective concepts is indubitably, I must repeat, due to the experience of the Great War, which allowed me to become aware of it and develop it in me as another sense.2 2. An Ultimate Envelope As the war experience subsided, Teilhard became certain that an ‘‘envelope’’ exists, that is both conscious and thinking: ‘‘Not only did I no longer harbor any difficulty in understanding, in an intuitive way, the organic unity of the living membrane, spread like a film over the illuminated surface of the star that carries us. But also, in an individualizing process, detaching itself little by little, like a luminous aura, all around this sensitive protoplasmic layer, an ultimate envelope began to appear to me—not only a conscious envelope but a thinking one—where henceforth it...