Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

THE TRUE TEILHARD AND THE ESSENTIAL

SRI AUROBINDO*

SOME GUIDE-LINES FOR THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE FUTURE

Teilhard de Chardin, throughout his life, stood at a critical crossroads and made moves in different directions at different times and held a complex vision from which it is not easy to arrive at a focus on fundamentals. He¹ declared that he had been "born with a 'naturally pantheist' soul"; but, brought up a Roman Catholic and trained to be a priest, he had a habitual reaction of vehement anti-pantheism. By profession and mental affinity he was a scientist drawn towards a secular humanist world-view based on the theory of evolution, from which the only religion that could be derived was the sense of an infinite and unitary universe moving forward with the drive of an immanent cosmic consciousness or world-soul. But his religious upbringing and discipline would not allow him to take physical reality as the changing and developing body of such a pantheos.

As a member of the Society of Jesus his aim was to "baptize" pantheism and humanism, whereas his innate temperament and modern turn of mind insisted on pan-theizing traditional Christianity and making it conform to the demands of what he termed "ultra-physics". His continual problem was: how to reconcile Christianity's transcendent personal God — "God Above", as he named Him — with the universal divinity posited by pantheism and the immanent "ultra-human" — "God Ahead" — that he considered to be implied by evolutionary humanism?

* Those parts of this essay which deal with Teilhard have appeared in the form of a separate article in an issue of the American Quarterly, Human Dimensions, devoted to Teilhard and guest-edited by Dr. Beatrice Bruteau. They are reproduced here with grateful acknowledgments to the Guest-Editor and the Publishers.

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Taking pantheism and evolutionary humanism to be exclusive of the transcendent personal God, he was at a loss to effect their harmonization. Yet, being equally drawn to both the sides, he could not help showing, at various places of his writings, diverse stresses and penchants, so that we are faced with conflicting statements which no interpreter of him has been able to overlook. His fellow-religionist admirers attempt to assimilate him into the tradition of the Church which suppressed him all through his life as dangerously heterodox if not perniciously heretical. Teilhard himself gives them a handle for this interpretation since he was always eager to be a part of the historic Church. What they forget is his ineradicable conviction that Teilhardism was the real essence of Christianity and that the Church, not he, needed to be "converted" or "transformed". On March 21, 1941 he² wrote from Peking to Lucille Swan: "According to my own principles I cannot fight against Christianity; I can only work inside it, by trying to transform and 'convert' it...I know that the tide is rising which supports me."

In the light of this attitude we must strive to disentangle the basic Teilhard from his own indecisions and ambivalences as well as from the facile one-sidedness of his co-religionist admirers. In particular, we need to set forth his concept of the cosmic Christ in all its far-reaching revolutionary implications and free it from two restrictive connections he gave to it. First, the conventional notion of cosmi-cality which goes with all ideas of Godhead and with which Teilhard often tried to identify it in order to link to St. Paul and St. John the " 'new' Christianity"³ he was fighting for. Secondly, the irrational idea that the cosmic Christ was necessarily a consequence and extension of the historic Jesus rather than the historic Jesus being a concentrated manifestation of the cosmic Christ.

As might be expected of so complex and tension-fraught a thinker, Teilhard himself comes to our help here. Piet Smul-ders,⁴ a fellow-Jesuit, notes a "typical exaggeration" on Teilhard's part: "the primacy of Christ over the whole of

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creation, hitherto thought of in an exclusively juridical and extrinsic fashion, can only become reality in an evolutionist notion of the world. As if St. Paul and the Fathers of the Church and indeed even the numerous contemporary theologians who highlight the cosmic role of Christ, had need of the evolutionist thesis!" This surprised exclamation from a most sympathetic commentator is enough to prove that the cosmicality of Christ a la Teilhard can never be equated to the cosmic role attributed to Christ by any other Catholic theological thinker past or present. If, according to Teilhard, Christ's cosmicality can become a reality only when modern evolutionism is accepted, it is impossible for his cosmic Christ to figure in whatever St. Paul or contemporary religion posits in non-scientific terms. By insisting on evolutionism, Teilhard makes himself irrevocably unorthodox.

As for the historic Jesus in this context, his being subsequent and subordinate to the cosmic Christ cannot be denied the moment we correctly grasp Teilhard's identification of the latter with what he has made famous as Omega. Omega is the supreme focus of unity which draws the evolving world, through more and more complex organizations of structure and increasingly centred interiorizations of consciousness, towards a final collective unanimity of reflective beings. Teilhard arrives at the vision of Omega by his "ultra-physics" and then argues that at the human level of evolution Omega may be expected to communicate with us by means of religious messages and, for full effect, incarnate the divine Super-Person in humanity. Such a special act would give a great push to the work of world-unification, the gathering together of personal centres by a Super-Centre. The incarnate divinity is thus a step and a stage in the progressive history of a universal Soul of Evolution. And Teilhard, when he aligns his "ultra-physics" with his Christianity, speaks up for that religion on the strength of its close correspondence with his scientific vision. "What gives Christianity its peculiar effectiveness and sets it in a particular key," he⁵ informs us, "is the fundamental idea that the

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supreme focus of unity is not only reflected in each element of consciousness it attracts, but also, in order to produce final unification, has had to 'materialize' itself in the form of an element of consciousness (the Christic, historical 'I'). In order to act effectively, the Centre of centres reflected itself on the world in the form of a centre (Jesus Christ)." Obviously, if the cosmic Christ is Omega, he must precede and prepare the appearance of Jesus. What that appearance, with its life and death and resurrection and "glorified body", may be thought to bring about is a more dominant, a more trium-phant role played in the future by Christ-Omega.

How exactly should we characterize what Teilhard⁶ con-sidered his whole life's concern, "this half-scientific, half-religious faith", involving "a mutual form of love, based on the consciousness of a common Something (or rather Somebody) into which all together we converge"? He was frequently at pains to distinguish his faith from a "false pantheism" and to designate it as a "true pantheism". He could never get away from the pantheist nomenclature. The old Christian terms — "immanence" and "omnipresence" — did not satisfy him: they signified only God's Will sustaining the universe He had created as well as possessing the power to intervene in the universal process — both the sustenance and the intervention coming from a Being who is other than the world He has created not out of Himself but out of nothing. Concerning his "gospel" — "the feeling that the whole world is permeated by a creative love" — he⁷ wrote: "This is, of course, essentially the Christian attitude,but made richer by a confluence with the best and subtle essence of what is hidden behind the various pantheisms." To Teilhard there is a truth of indispensable value, beyond Christian "immanence" and "omnipresence", in the pan-theist experience. This truth, purified of a distortion he saw in that experience, he sought to catch in his cosmic Christ. "The 'universalised' Christ," he⁸ declared, "takes over, correcting and completing them, the energies that undoubtedly lie hidden in modern forms of pantheism.... If

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Christianity is to keep its place at the head of mankind, it must make itself explicitly recognisable as a sort of 'pan-Christism'...."

The falsehood that, in Teilhard's eyes, sullied pantheism was the absence he read in the latter of (1) a personal God transcendent of the cosmos and (2) an eternally subsisting individual element along with the All. The pantheist truth that filled a yawning gap in Christianity was a God intrinsic to the universe and co-extensive with it and inwardly energizing all evolution. This truth and its centrality to his life-work is perhaps best expressed in a letter of June 24, 1934:⁹ "What increasingly dominates my interest and my inner preoccupations...is the effort to establish within myself, and to diffuse around me, a new religion (let's call it an improved Christianity, if you like) whose personal God is no longer the great 'neolithic' landowner of times gone by, but the Soul of the world — as demanded by the cultural and religious stage we have now reached.... My road ahead seems clearly marked out; it is a matter not of superimposing Christ on the world, but of 'panchristising' the universe. The delicate point.. .is that, if you follow this path, you are led not only to widening your views, but to turning your perspectives upside down; evil (no longer punishment for a fault, but 'sign and effect' of progress) and matter (no longer a guilty and lower element, but 'the stuff of the Spirit') assume a meaning diametrically opposed to the meaning customarily viewed as Christian. Christ emerges from the transformation incredibly enlarged.... But is this Christ really the Christ of the Gospel? And if not, on what henceforward do we base what we are trying to build?.... One thing reassures me; it is that, in me, the increase of light goes hand in hand with love and with renouncement of myself in the Greater than me. This could not deceive."

Although his evolutionary pan-Christism opened for man's destiny "a new compartment or rather an additional dimension..., of which there is no explicit mention in the

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gospel",¹⁰ Teilhard felt that the spirit in which he was discovering "true pantheism" in terms of Christ was the spirit of the Gospel (love and self-renouncement in the Greater than one). There was also his conviction that, no matter what new shade he introduced into St. Paul, he was yet following "his line".¹¹ Hence his belief that Christianity could still serve and that in "the Christian stem...the sap of the religion of tomorrow is forming".¹² But neither his own innate pantheist turn to feel the world as divine in its depths and matter as "the stuff of the Spirit" nor the modern sense of a single colossal cosmic process inwardly moved to evolve "a kind of 'God of ahead' (in extension of the Human)"¹³ could be quite satisfied with Christian-sounding confessions of faith. On the other side, no Christian mind could find satisfaction in certain directions of Teilhard's thought and expression. Two remarks of Henri de Lubac are typical. "He tried to show in our Lord Jesus Christ 'the synthesis of the created Universe and its Creator': did he not sometimes seem to establish this synthesis at a too accessible level and thus, in spite of the qualifications and corrections we have noted, and against his unmistakable intention, to some degree naturalize Christ?"¹⁴ "We believe, as Pere Rabut does, that the elliptical form and the emphasis of some of Pere Teilhard's expressions would seem to suggest a sort of natural identity of Christ and the Universe."¹⁵ Teilhard's tendency to cosmi-calize Christ and Christify the universe while holding fast to a transcendent personal God could have found proper play only if he had built from his half-scientific half-religious faith an evolutionary Christ-coloured version of what he repeatedly misunderstood and condemned: the ancient Indian Vedanta, especially as disclosed in the Bhagavad Gita. This scripture combines a transcendent Person, a dynamic Pan-theos and a supreme Incarnation as well as a human soul-hood which is an eternal portion of the Divine Nature and called towards the Personal Divinity through an extreme of love and of self-renouncement in a Greater than it at the

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same time that the human realizes its essential oneness with the Divine, its inherent sameness of substance as the Absolute.

However, even as an evolutionary Vedantic Christianity, the Teilhardian Weltanschauung, , because of a number of shortcomings caused by its failure to rise to the full implications of blending modern evolutionism and the Gita's synthesis, cannot be the religion of tomorrow, the spirituality of the future. This spirituality is best recognized in the vision and work of Teilhard's contemporary, Sri Aurobindo, with whom he has often been compared but who goes far beyond him in mystical insight and experience no less than in bringing out the deepest significance of progressive evolutionism.

Sri Aurobindo's mystical insight and experience centre in what he calls the Supermind. The Supermind is not merely a magnified mind nor is it simply any faculty which is above mind. It is a specific supra-intellectual light — a hitherto unexplored dimension of the Divine Consciousness. It is a supreme dynamism which is originally creative and ultimately transformative of the space-time cosmos. It not only holds the perfect truth of all that evolves here — mind, life-force and body organized around an individual soul passing progressively from grade to grade of evolutionary existence through a series of rebirths: it also has the power to manifest that truth in all these terms here upon earth. And it manifests that truth not by a superimposition of the divine upon the earthly but by developing it as the very nature of those terms. For it is not just a realm of perfection high above, like the Platonic Ideas: it is simultaneously the perfection hidden below in what Plato labelled as the flux of phenomena and in what Sri Aurobindo names the Inconscience, an apparent negation of everything divine, where yet the full divinity lies "involved" as a prelude to its being "evolved" individually and collectively. Perfection is thus the inherent destiny of all evolving forces — a total fulfilment in the space-time cosmos itself by means of a push from the "involved" Supermind

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and a pull plus pressure from the Supermind eternally free in its transcendent status, which is personal God as well as All-Self.

Thus Sri Aurobindo drives towards consummating in the most integral sense both the Vedantic discovery, "All here is Brahman", and the perfectionist dream of modern science — a totally realised existence, both individual and collective, in the field of matter.

In this context arises, between Teilhard and Sri Aurobindo, the issue which Dr. Beatrice Bruteau has discussed in a penetrative article, "Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Char-din on the Problem of Action".¹⁶ She begins by stating the issue: "By the problem of action I mean the problem of justifying human efforts to improve the spatio-temporal environment and of motivating men to make such efforts." Whatever practical attention Hinduism and Christianity may have given to the world in relation to God, the eyes of both were ultimately fixed on the Beyond: "the paradigm of holiness...was the world-renouncing monk." Aware of the conflict between God and the world in their respective religious backgrounds, Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard set about resolving the conflict by "extending to the world the value traditionally accorded to God" — while never permitting "the value of the Transcendent to suffer the least dimi-nishment" by "their efforts to enhance the importance of the finite world". Each of them relates this world, with its imperfections, to the Absolute by means of "the perspective of evolution", the modern world-picture.

Teilhard, Bruteau tells us, visualizes evolutionary fulfilment in a sort of "super-organism" where the sovereign Centre which he calls Christ-Omega constitutes the converging point for a multitude of personal centres enjoying a "differentiating union", of love with it. When the peak of development is attained, there will be a breakthrough outside Time and Space by the very excess of unification and co-reflection of the numerous personal consciousnesses. There will be a final "critical point" of evolution at which mankind,

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its convergence complete, will detach itself from this planet and join the transcendent Christ-Omega. Bruteau well remarks: "At this point we may feel that somehow we have come full circle and that the finite, material, spatio-temporal world, whose value we were trying to justify, has quietly slipped through our fingers, leaving us with our supreme value again attached only to the spiritual realm."

Bruteau rightly traces Teilhard's self-contradiction to his failure to be thorough in putting God at the heart of the universe. Because he still held that "the world travails, not to bring forth from within itself some supreme reality, but to find its consummation through a union with a pre-existent Being", he was "obliged in the end to abandon the world of space, time, and matter for another world beyond". Sri Aurobindo's position is in contrast to this. "He announced from the outset that the absolute is transcendent, cosmic, and individual. The evolving temporal world is essentially nothing but the Absolute itself. So is every individual." Sri Aurobindo understood the true condition required for evolutionary fulfilment. "The world and the individual must be divine by right of nature; the evolving world must have all divine values involved in it awaiting unfoldment; evolution, both cosmic and individual, must infallibly attain its goal of perfect manifestation of the Godhead by continuous development...; and this manifestation, when complete, must include, not only the expansion of human consciousness to the awesome level of the supramental, but the impassibility, elevation, and immortality of the human body." Bruteau sums up: "If we are to hold all that we know of reality, and all that we can surmise, invent, or dream of reality, together in one, all of it having the maximum of meaning and value that we can find for it, then the way pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, or something very like it, would seem to be the only way."

According to Bruteau, while Teilhard's vision of the world evolving towards a single collective state of "super-humanity" with a "super-consciousness" does undoubtedly

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contain powerful sources of motivation for action in the world, especially for those who share his theological presuppositions, it does not thoroughly succeed in justifying the world and satisfactorily solving the problem of action in the space-time framework. Sri Aurobindo's vision, rooted not in Omega but in the Supermind, does so.

Only four further observations we may offer a propos of Bruteau's essay. As in most other respects, Teilhard is double-voiced even about what the world travails for. He could not help feeling that a super-humanity with a super-consciousness expressing itself in a super-organism is in fact some supreme reality which the world would be evolving from within itself. No doubt, something more is there, a pre-existent Being; but is not the same Being brought forth gradually in the evolutionary process? What Teilhard¹⁷ says about Omega is: "While being the last term of its series, it is also outside all series." In noting the underlined facet of Omega, that in which it is seen as already present or emerged, we must not overlook its "evolutive facet",¹⁸ in which we see "that it emerges from the rise of consciousness"¹⁹ and "is discovered to us at the end of the whole processus, inasmuch as in it the movement of synthesis culminates".²⁰ Omega's two-facetedness is also brought home in religious language. "God, the eternal being-in-itself, is, one might say, everywhere in process of formation for us."²¹ These are words of Teilhard's at almost the start of his career. They are echoed in his old age: "God for himself ever complete and yet for us ever and endlessly being born."²² The full implication of such statements should take Teilhard alongside Sri Aurobindo, and here and there we do find him talking of "another mankind" that "must inevitably emerge"²³ and establish on earth a sovereignty of universal love. De Lubac²⁴ is puzzled and wonders whether "even in such rare passages" Teilhard, "without making it quite clear", was not speaking of the end of the world, a supernatural terminus. But these passages have no reference to any eschatological breakthrough into a Beyond.

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And what clinches their this-worldliness is a merger of two important expressions. De Lubac has often insisted that the "ultra-human" of Teilhard's evolutionary perspective coincides with the "trans-human" of his eschatology, so that the final "critical threshold" marks an extra-cosmic movement. But here Teilhard does not merely mention "an ultra-human synthesis":²⁵ he also goes on to characterize this "further degree of organization and therefore of consciousness and therefore of freedom"²⁶ as the actualized "possibility" and "potentiality" of "a further trans-human syn-thesis of organic matter".²⁷ The "trans-human", like the "ultra-human", is now an earthly vision. Nor is this fusion of the two terms the aberrancy of a single occasion. Elsewhere too Teilhard fuses them, as, for instance, when he poses "the problem of knowing whether, and up to what point, it is physically (planetarily) possible for man to trans- or ultra-hominize himself".²⁸ However, the grip of the traditional Christian hope proves too strong for Teilhard in the main and cuts short his Aurobindonian tendency, the true trend of his evolutionist religion.

Our second observation concerns a gap in Teilhard's view of the evolutionary process. Like Sri Aurobindo he evaluates evolution in terms of growth of consciousness. And he is particular about the ultimate value of the personal. Evolution aims at the production of persons, reflective intensely inte-riorized selves. Again, it is because the further line of evolution passes through the personal human that Teilhard envisages the fullness of evolutionary achievement as a centring of personal consciousnesses on a supreme Person. But what is the medium through which the personal human comes into its own? Each of us, in Teilhard's thought, has an individual "soul" but he has no answer to the question: how has the soul-individuality come up? He does not subscribe to the orthodox theory that each soul is newly created by God at the birth of a body. He²⁹ says of the man deeply convinced of the evolutionary viewpoint: "Body and soul, he is the product of a huge creative work with which the totality of

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things has collaborated from the beginning." And he also believes³⁰ that the personal consciousnesses can leave their bodily vehicles when the latter dissolve: they detach themselves and collect around the pre-existent Omega. Bruteau quotes him as declaring: "All around us, 'souls' break away, carrying upwards their incommunicable load of consciousness." But, if the soul can survive physical death and has not been Christianly new-created at physical birth, how can it not have a pre-existence of its own as the ground of its individual personality? And, if it pre-exists, must we not posit a series of births for it, contributing to its development? It would be logical to assent to Sri Aurobindo's argument:³¹ "...if there is an evolution of consciousness in an evolutionary body and a soul inhabiting the body, a real and conscious individual, then it is evident that it is the progressive experience of that soul in Nature which takes the form of this evolution of consciousness: rebirth is self-evidently a necessary part, the sole possible machinery of such an evolution."

Thirdly, we may probe the content of Omega Point. Teilhard has written, as we have seen, of "God, the eternal being-in-itself,...everywhere in process of formation for us". But what do we actually have at the climax of Teilhardian evolution? When Omega serves as the supreme evolutionary Pole, it is figured as an infinite divine reality, to be approached through an inward resonance to the All and an outward pooling of progressive enterprises. But, when evolving humanity reaches Omega Point, can we say that its maturation is equal to the cosmic "Within" coming into its own and revealing its transcendence? There is only a certain expansion of consciousness in the human degree. Teilhard calls it a "planetization" of "co-reflection": all reflective units of the earth cohere and there emerges a single human consciousness thinking collectively on a planetary scale. What we may call in Indian nomenclature the Vishwa Manava, the World-Man, in complete unitary and multiple thought-expression, is evolved. To dub this earthly "totalization" of Mental Mankind the cosmic consciousness, the

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realization of the All, the God Ahead joining with the God Above — as Teilhard does — would be an exaggeration. No supreme divine reality is here. However magnified into something "super" or "ultra", as compared with the present reflective rather than co-reflective condition that is ours, we are still in the sphere of the "human, all too human". To take this race-wide state of harmonious religion and research and relationship to be the term of evolution is logically inconsistent with the original vision of Omega.

Hence the fulfilled humanity it will constitute — glorious though it might be — would be far indeed from that complete divinisation of mind, life and body, which Sri Aurobindo names "Supramental Transformation".

Even the cosmic consciousness, the realisation of the All, the God Ahead joining with the God Above — even Omega figured as an infinite divine reality would not be able to effectuate that transformation; for, it would not answer to the Aurobindonian Supermind. Bruteau, for all the comparable factors she may discern in the two, never identifies them, but less knowledgeable commentators might easily do so. They would be committing a capital mistake. The Teilhardian Omega would only bring about in a Christianised evolutionary mode an approximation to the manifold Theophany invoked by the Gita. And the Gita does no more than magnificently prepare the ground for Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga.

Our last query vis-a-vis Teilhardism is: can there be at all a term to evolution? Is not "God ... for us ever and endlessly being born"? Omega Point, whether viewed as an earthly transformation in its own right or as a passing of the ultra-human into the trans-human outside space-time, negates this concept of Teilhard himself. But, unlike the grandiose dead-stop that is Omega Point, the Supramental Transformation is not the end of evolutionary history. In accord with the modern perspective, though in a much more profound sense than any that the scientific world-picture carries, Sri Aurobindo looks forward to a continuing progression. Fol-

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lowing upon Supramentalisation there will be the embodiment of a still deeper aspect of Divine Existence — what Sri Aurobindo, employing the ancient Indian terminology, would call the Bliss-state, the Ananda-aspect, of the Absolute, which is behind the supramental Truth-consciousness, the Vijnana-aspect. Behind the Bliss-state there will be something else — and so on, as it should be when we are dealing with the Absolute and His manifestation. For, to use Meredith's phrase,

His touch is infinite and lends

A yonder to all ends.

Notes and References

1.Quoted in Henri de Lubac's The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin

2.Letters to Two Friends (Collins, The Fontana Library, Theology and Philosophy, London, 1972), p. 155.

3.Ibid.,

4.The Design of Teilhard de Chardin:

5.Christianity and Evolution

6.Letters to Two Friends,

7.Ibid.,

8.Science and Christ

9.Letters to Leontine Zanta

10.Christianity and Evolution,

11.See de Lubac's Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning

12.Letters to Two Friends,

13.Ibid.,

14.The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin,

15.Ibid.,

16.International Philosophical Quarterly

17.The Phenomenon of Man

18.Ibid.

19.Ibid.,

20.Ibid.,

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21.Hymn of the Universe (Collins, Fontana Books, London, 1971), p. 51.

22.Le coeur de la Matiere, quoted in Emile Rideau's Teilhard de Chardin: A Guide to HisThought (Collins, London, 1967), p. 502.

23.Activation of Energy (Collins, London, 1971), p. 74.

24.The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin, p. 358,note 67.

25.Activation of Energy, p. 69.

26.Ibid.

27.Ibid., p. 68.

28.Ibid., p. 369.

29.The Vision of the Past (Collins, London, 1966), p. 137.

30.The Phenomenon of Man, p. 272.

31.The Life Divine (The Sri Aurobindo Library, The Greystone Press, New York,1949), pp. 680-681.

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