Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

FOREWORD

Part One "The Real Religion of Teilhard de Chardin - His Version of Christianity and Sri Aurobindo's Expose of the Ancient Vedanta" appears for the first time in print.

Part Two "The Basic Teilhard de Chardin and the Modern Religious Intuition" brings together the articles published in Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, an organ of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, from July 1973 to May 1974.

The two parts have as their starting-points either interpretative studies of Teilhard de Chardin or his own multi-aspected writings or else both at the same time. Their aim is to consider Teilhardism from all possible sides and converge upon a number of primary insights into its authentic heart of vision.

This heart is sought to be illumined in the context of past spiritual experience and tradition, the present world-view of the aspiring Western mind, and the trend today towards a future in which the human soul shall labour to build an earth rich and dynamic with life-values, yet all uplifted into

A larger ether, a diviner air

than any known and breathed until now.

The course of our quest is finger-posted by a few outstanding issues whose resolution alone can take us to the true Teilhard through the various thickets that are to be expected in the case of a priest-palaeontologist alive to all the crosscurrents of an age when science and religion cannot help playing upon and into each other's discoveries and disclosures.

Certain themes serve as leitmotifs in the articles. They entail a little repetition here and there. But new shades are always involved with it, and the themes in themselves too bear being repeated because they are mostly off the trade-routes of Teilhardian exegesis. Some have even the look of

paradoxes requiring justification time and again. The basic Teilhard de Chardin emerges with "a sea-change" not easily recognisable and acceptable by those who are content to take him one way or another at his variously flashing word instead of plumbing the deepest, the most hidden stretches of his wide-visioned genius.

June 24,1976

K. D. Sethna