The issue over the equation of the natural Omega with a natural Christ being settled, we may move on to the other -namely, that, like Pantheos, Teilhard's Cosmic Christ is a World-God who precedes his own particular concentrated historical manifestation known as Jesus. In short, what Teilhard is announcing is a genuine pantheism sub specie Christi. And such a thesis emerges if we rightly gauge several of his pronouncements:
"The concentration of the Multiple in the supreme organic unity of Omega represents a most arduous task. Every element, according to its degree, shares in this laborious synthesis, but the effort called for from the upper term of unification has necessarily to be the hardest of all. That is why the Incarnation of the Word was infinitely painful and mortifying - so much so that it can be symbolised by a cross.
"The first act of the Incarnation, the first appearance of the Cross, is marked by the plunging of the divine Unity into the ultimate depths of the Multiple. Nothing can enter into the universe that does not emerge from it. Nothing can be absorbed into things except through the road of matter, by ascent from plurality. For Christ to make his way into the world by any side-road would be incomprehensible. The Redeemer could penetrate into the life-blood of the universe, only by first dissolving himself in matter..."1
"It was because Christ was 'inoculated' in matter that he can no longer be dissociated from the growth of Spirit: that he is so engrained in the visible world that he could henceforth be torn away from it only by rocking the foundations of the universe.
"It is philosophically sound to ask of each element of the world whether its roots do not extend into the furthest limits of the past. We have much better reason to accord to Christ this mysterious pre-existence... The endless aeons that prece-
1. Science and Christ, "My Universe", p. 60.
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ded the first Christmas are not empty of Christ, but impregnated by his potent influx... When Christ appeared in the arms of Mary, what he had just done was to raise up the world.2
"Then there began for him a second phase of effort and suffering on the Cross... We would...be failing to understand his historical existence, we would be distorting and profaning it, if we did not see in it a vast hand to hand struggle between the principle of supreme unity and the Multiple it was engaged in unifying...
"That is the meaning of the ardent life of Christ, Christ the source of all our good, of Christ as he prays; and therein lies the unfathomable secret of his agony, and the incomparable virtue, too, of his death on the Cross...3
"And then Christ rose again. We are often too inclined to regard the Resurrection as an isolated event in time, with an apologetical significance, as some small individual triumph over the tomb won in turn by Christ. It is something quite other and much greater than that. It is a tremendous cosmic event. It marks Christ's effective assumption of his function as the universal centre. Until that time, he was present in all things as a soul that is painfully gathering together its embryonic elements. Now he radiates over the whole universe as a consciousness and activity fully in control of themselves...
"Like the Creation (of which it is the visible aspect) the Incarnation is co-extensive with the duration of the world..."4
Then Teilhard refers to the Catholic Church's rite of the Eucharist, in which bread and wine are taken to get transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Christ and thereby "here and now...the influence of the universal Christ" is "transmit-
2.The sense of this sentence goes home better in the translation we find in the "Pensees" at the end of the volume Hymn of the Universe, p. 77: "When Christ first appeared before men in the arms of Mary he had already stirred up the world."
3.Ibid., pp. 61-62.
4.ibid., pp. 62-63.
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ted to us".5 This is the rite of the sacred "Host". Teilhard6 says:
"The Host, it is true, is in the first place, and primarily, the fragment of matter to which, through transubstantiation, the Presence of the Incarnate Word attaches itself among us, that is to say in the human zone of the universe... Can Christ, however, remain contained in this primary Body? Clearly, he cannot. Since he is above all Omega, that is, the universal 'form' of the world, he can attain his organic balance and plenitude only by mystically assimilating...all that surrounds him... The world is the final, and the real. Host into which Christ gradually descends, until his time is fulfilled. Since all time a single word and a single act have been filling the universality of things... Nothing is at work in creation except in order to assist, from near or from afar, in the consecration of the universe."
What do we have in all these quotations? From the beginning of the world, the divine Unity, that is Christ, immersed itself in the utter Multiple that is, according to Teilhard, the "creatable nothingness" from which the universe of space and time has been gradually and laboriously brought forth by the working of that divine Unity. This Unity is the "form" animating and shaping and synthesising that universe, the organising World-Soul that travails to divinise its body. Creation is secret Incarnation and slow Redemption: neither Incarnation nor Redemption are events that occur later than Creation: what occurs later is that what is secret and slow becomes visible and rapid when Christ appears in a human shape, lives, dies and resurrects. He has always been the perfect Omega, the Divine Plenitude within and behind and beyond the cosmos, but as the creative, incarnate and redemptive Omega in the cosmos's evolutionary labour his turning-point comes with his birth and death and resurrection as Jesus and he continues the building of a new universe
5.Ibid.
6.Ibid., pp. 65-66.
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as his Mystical Body through the rite of the Eucharist. We must not, however, restrict the Eucharistic rite: it merely carries on in a visible manner a process of universe-consecration that Christ as the World-Soul has always carried on.
The antecedence of Christ-Omega to Christ Jesus is plain in several words of Teilhard. He has written:7 "the 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)." The same idea is repeated from another angle:8 "If we recognize that the true universal (the centre of the universe) cannot, by nature, but be hyperpersonal, then its historical manifestation in a personal form becomes logically comprehensible again, subject to correcting certain of our representations in detail."
A straightforward declaration too is available from as early as February 2,1918, when he9 wrote in connection with the problem of other heavenly bodies than the earth being inhabited ones: "It is astonishing that it is only two days back that I have been vividly struck by the difficulty of reconciling my doctrine of the cosmic Christ with the plurality of worlds.
-Since the Cosmos is certainly indivisible, and Christianity is not smaller than the Cosmos, one must admit a certain
7.Ibid., p. 136.
8.Ibid.
9.Teilhard de Chardin: Lettres intirnes A Auguste Valensin, Bruno de Solages, Henri de Lubac, Andre Ravier, 1919-1955. Introduction et notes par Henri de Lubac (Aubier Montaigne, Paris—IV, 1974), p. 40, note 7. The original French runs: "li est curieux que je n'ai ete vivement frappe que depuis deux jours de la difficulty de concilier ma doctrine du Christ cosmique et la Pluralite des Mondes.-Elant donne que le Cosmos est certainement inseparable, et que le Christianisme n'est pas plus petit que le Cosmos, il faut admettre une certaine manifestation 'potymorphe' du Christ cosmique sur divers mondes, suivant I'aptitude de ces mondes a etre integres dans l'Univers celeste. Le Christ humain ne serait alors qu'une face du Christ cosmique. - Autrement, le Christ (s'il ne soutenait que la Terre) serail plus petit que le Monde."
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'polymorphous' manifestation of the cosmic Christ upon various worlds, according to the aptitude of these worlds for being integrated into the celestial Universe. The human Christ then would be but one aspect of the cosmic Christ. -Otherwise, Christ (if he upheld only the earth) would be smaller than the World."
On the universal Eucharist going with a universal Incarnation and preceding Jesus as well as succeeding him we have also Teilhard's explicit pronouncement:10 "In fact, from the beginning of the Messianic preparation, up till the Parousia, passing through the historical manifestation of Jesus and the phases of growth of His Church a single event has been developing in the world: the Incarnation, realised in each individual, through the Eucharist."
There is no doubt that the Cosmic Christ with his Eucha-ristic work is both anterior and posterior to Jesus as well as passing through him. But there is a subtle point accompanying this conception, which we must note. It comes out in the following statement11 which affirms that conception: "Even before the Incarnation became a fact, the whole history of the universe (in virtue of a pre-action of the humanity of Christ, mysterious, but yet known to us through revelation) is the history of the progressive information of the universe by Christ."
Pre-action of Christ's humanity: there is the subtlety we have alluded to. Teilhard12 has written: "...timid minds...may maintain that the cosmic attributes of the Pauline Christ to the Godhead alone; ...all I need to do is to refer to the context, which is categorical: even in Col. l:15ff, St. Paul quite obviously has in mind the theandric Christ; it was in the Incarnate Christ that the universe was pre-formed." Christopher Mooney13 comments in relation to the text in the Colos-sians: "Paul seems clearly to affirm a pre-existence of Christ
10.The Divine Milieu, p. 102.
11.Prayer of the Universe, p. 102.
12.Science and Christ, pp. 54-55.
13.Teilhard de chardin and the Mystery of Christ (Collins, London, 1966), p. 170.
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and apparently it is always the concrete, historical God-Man of whom he is thinking, never the Word independent of his humanity. How this is to be explained theologically is a question for which there is as yet no satisfactory answer."
Thus the proper Teilhardian vision would be: the Cosmic Christ who precedes and exceeds the historic human Jesus is still a human Christ, a God-Man, a theandric Being, though above historicity - a non-historic universal Jesus having not only a human soul but also a human body co-extensive with all space and time. Hence Christ-Omega is Jesus-Omega too, non-historic yet with a human cosmic body no less than a human cosmic soul. It is in reference to this incarnate universal humanity of Omega, stamped from the beginning with the features of the historic Jesus Christ, that we have to understand Teilhard's frequent description of the Cosmic Christ as animating all things and not only being "organically the prime mover and controller, the 'soul' of evolution",14 but also "exerting a supreme physical influence on every cosmic reality without exception".15 The Cosmic Christ is both "organic" and "physical" because he is an Omega that is a mystery of human incarnation on a universal scale.
Keeping in view the Cosmic Christ as both anterior and posterior to Jesus as well as passing through him, the Cosmic Christ as identical with the immanent evolving Omega no less than with the transcendent evolver Omega, the Cosmic Christ as the universal Soul and Body which are perfect at the same time that he is the universal Soul and Body which are growing towards perfection, the Cosmic Christ who is Matter side by side with being Spirit because Spirit is not non-material but hyper-material - keeping in sight all these shades of the Cosmic Christ we must pierce to the true intent of expressions where Teilhard seems to drive a wedge between God and the world, Christ and the cosmos, even while holding them tightly together.
14.Christianity and Evolution, p. 180,
15,Science and Christ, p. 57.
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Thus he16 writes: "So the basic mystical intuition issues in the discovery of a supra-real unity diffused throughout the immensity of the world." The term "supra-real" does not signify a negating or contradicting opposite of the immense world: it simply connotes a higher extension or dimension of the real that we know as the physical universe. By defining the Divine as "supra-real" Teilhard wants to stress the Omega who is already existent and eternally emerged, in distinction from the Omega who is still in the process of forming and emerging. He has no intention to cut them radically apart.
Similarly have we to take that lyrical vision:17 "A Being was taking form in the totality of space; a Being with the attractive power of a soul, palpable tike a body, vast as the sky; a Being which mingled with things yet remained distinct from them; a Being of a higher order than the substance of things with which it was adorned, yet taking shape within them." What Teilhard drives at is that God must not be limited to an identity with the substance of things: he must be greater than it, he must be a "supra-real unity", a Real "of a higher order". Not to be distinct from things would prevent him from enjoying a free transcendence, an achieved perfection. But, granted this self-completeness, he can be as one with the universe as we could wish: he is interfused with the universe, developing himself in it, rendering it expressive of him, giving it his own shape. In short, we can say that God is the universe, provided we add that he is also more. To formulate this double truth is Teilhard's repeated endeavour - as when he transposes his congenital love and adoration of the universe into terms at once scientific and Christian and says18 that with "cosmogenesis being transformed into Christogenesis...it is becoming not only possible but imperative literally to love evolution".
Thus we may say about Teilhard's religion: "It exceeds in favour of pantheism the orthodox omnipresence of God as
16.Hymn of the Universe, "Pensees", p. 91.
17.ibid., "The Spiritual Power of Matter", p. 68.
18.Christianity and Evolution, p. 184.
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well as the old idea of Christ's Mystical Body and simultaneously it exceeds in favour of Christian transcendentalism as well as personalism the traditional Pantheos." But obviously the primary crucial step is the consubstantiality of God and the world, Christ and the cosmos: that is, in the pantheist direction.
And, although this direction does not quite bear us to the philosophy usually passing under the designation "pantheism", several pronouncements of Teilhard's in the course of his story of the developing "within" of panpsychism strike us even with some straightforward resemblances. According to Teilhard, as we have already noted from Wildiers, "spiritual perfection (or conscious 'centreity') and material synthesis (or complexity) are but the two aspects or connected parts of one and the same phenomenon."19 Further: "in the last analysis, somehow or other, there must be a single energy operating in the whole."20 Finally: "To avoid a fundamental dualism, at once impossible and anti-scientific, and at the same time to safeguard the natural complexity of the stuff of the universe,...we shall assume that, essentially, all energy is psychic in nature; but add that in each particular element this fundamental energy is divided into two distinct components: a tangential energy which links the elements with all others of the same order (that is to say, of the same complexity and the same centricity) as itself in the universe; and a radial energy which draws it towards ever greater complexity and centricity - in other words forwards."21 As a supplement to this formulation, we may mark, in Teilhard's system, "the primacy accorded to the psychic and to thought in the stuff of the universe, and...the 'biological' value attributed to the social fact around us",22 a value presaging a collective and co-reflective super-evolution
19.The Phenomenon of Man, p. 60.
20.Ibid., p. 63.
21.Ibid., pp. 64-65. By oversight the word "psychic" in this passage has been printed as "physical" in the 1960 edition.
22.Ibid., p.30.
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which would unfold the original plenitude acting in the welt-staff.
Here the new pantheism joins hands with the old. To shirk the pantheism of the Cosmic Christ is merely to quibble. No doubt, the Cosmic Christ is a Person or Super-Person who conserves the inmost personality, the soul, of the human being even in the union with him; but Teilhard's personalism cannot be a substitute for his pantheism: it has, by some means, to be reconciled with it. Pantheism must be accepted as basic to his scientific-spiritual world-view and we have to understand it as something irreducible to the vision of orthodox Christianity. In Teilhard's system it would need to be brought into rapport with that vision, yet it must also retain an essential shade of what is usually taken to stand sharply over against Christian theology.
It is in the light of this double truth that we have to look into the heart of a well-known passage in Teilhard where he brings the "Christian phenomenon" face to face with "the renewal of cosmic outlook characterising 'the modem mind' " and its call to "the ancient religions" to "adjust themselves" to "the precise immensities" and "the constructive requirements of space-time".23 The passage24 runs:
"Though frightened for a moment by evolution, the Christian now perceives that what it offers him is nothing but a magnificent means of feeling more at one with God and of giving himself more to him. In a pluralistic and static Nature, the universal domination of Christ could, strictly speaking, still be regarded as an extrinsic and super-imposed power. In a spiritually converging world this 'Christie' energy acquires an urgency and intensity of another order altogether. If the world is convergent and if Christ occupies its centre, then the Christogenesis of St. Paul and St. John is nothing else and nothing less than the extension, both awaited and unhoped for, of that noogenesis in which cosmogenesis - as regards our
23.Ibid., p. 296.
24.Ibid., p. 297.
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experience - culminates. Christ invests himself organically with the very majesty of his creation. And it is in no way metaphorical to say that man finds himself capable of experiencing and discovering his God in the whole length, breadth and depth of the world in movement. To be able to say literally to God that one loves him, not only with all one's body, all one's heart and all one's soul but with every fibre of the unifying universe - that is a prayer that can only be made in space-time."
The need, in Teilhardism, to accord Christian theology "literally", non-metaphorically, with what the latter has most feared in philosophies of the World-Soul like Bruno's and Spinoza's and Hegel's, is borne in upon us even by the fact that not only in Teilhard's stories but also in his direct utterances we have time and again the use of the terms "pantheistic", "pantheist" and "pantheism" as inseparable from his temperament and message, no less than from the religious or the scientific consciousness in general. We have already cited instances of them. We may adduce some more.
Thus we hear:25 "Pantheistic aspirations towards a universal communion are as old in man as his 'spiritualistic' attempts to conquer matter. But only lately, thanks to the precise data provided by science concerning the unity of matter and energy and the reality of cosmogenesis, have these desires begun to take the rational form of definite intellectual discoveries. In every realm we are beginning habitually to live in the presence of the Ail and with some attention to it. Nothing seems to me more vital, from the point of view pf human energy, than the spontaneous appearance and, eventually, the systematic cultivation of such a 'cosmic sense'." Teilhard26 also speaks of the generation, to which he belonged and whose conviction of the evolutionary process in Nature he fully shared, as "our generation, essentially pantheist, because evolutionist". Certainly, he was at pains to show that
25.Human Energy, pp. 130-31.
26.Ibid., p. 67.
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pantheism need not be what it was in a philosophy and science which he saw continuing from a completely anti-Christian past. He felt Christianity to have a deeply modifying bearing upon it and thus saving his own natural proclivities from outright heresy. He27 tells us: "Far from contradicting my own profound tendencies towards pantheism, Christianity, rightly understood, has unceasingly, precisely because it is the saviour of personality, guided, clarified and also confirmed them by supplying a precise object and a starting point for experimental verification." Teilhard28 is referring to the composite religion at which he has arrived and which has "two associated characteristics which seemed, to their mutual detriment, destined to be perpetual opposites in religious systems: personalism and pantheism".
Teilhard on several occasions attempts so to Christianise pantheism as if to exorcise the true differentia of pantheism -namely, the single God-substance of all reality. But that differentia remains unexorcised. We observe it even when he is not talking of Christ's cosmicity as such. For, the Cosmic Christ is, as Teilhard29 avers, the Christ of Evolution, and pantheism demands to be recognised when Teilhard30 lets himself declare: "Spirit and matter are contradictory if isolated and symbolised in the form of abstract fixed notions of pure plurality and pure simplicity... In a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit. All that exists is matter becoming spirit. There is neither spirit nor matter in the world: the 'stuff of the universe' is spirit-matter." The same evolutionary pantheism stares at us in Teilhard's assertion:31 "For some, heirs to almost all the spiritualist philosophies of former times, the spirit is something so special and so high that it could not possibly be confused with the earthly and material forces which it animates... For others on the contrary, more or
27.Ibid., p. 91.
28.Ibid., p. 90.
29.Christianity and Evolution, p. 95.
30.Human Energy, pp 57-58.
31.Ibid., p. 45.
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less belated representatives of nineteenth-century thought, spirit seems something so small and frail that it becomes accidental and secondary.,. I propose...to develop a third view-point towards which a new physical science and a new philosophy seem to be converging at the present day: that is to say that spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call for want of a better name, the 'stuff of the universe'."
Looking back to pierce the secret of this stuff that has produced man out of blind-seeming primal matter and that pushes beyond him to a super-humanity, Teilhard32 concludes: "Gladly, the 'unbelievers' of our time bow before the god 'energy'. But it is impossible to stop at this somewhat vague stage of materialistic pantheism. Under penalty of being less evolved than the ends brought about by its own action universal energy must be a thinking energy. Consequently,...the attributes of cosmic value, with which it is irradiated to our modern eyes, in no way abolish our need to recognise it as a transcendent form of personality." The same grand note33 is heard again: "If the cosmos were basically material, it would be physically incapable of containing man. Therefore, we may conclude...that it is in its inner being made of spiritual stuff." Face to face with such stuff, Teilhard34 could well say: "...humanity has reached the biological point where it must either lose all belief in the universe or quite resolutely worship it. This is where we must look for the origin of the present crisis in morality. But it is necessary also for the religions to change themselves in order to meet this new need. The time has passed in which God could simply impose Himself on us from without, as master of the estate. Henceforth the world will only kneel before the organic centre of its evolution."
32.Ibid.
33.Ibid., p. 120.
34.Ibid., pp. 109-10.
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Worship of the universe - a universe where not only is all existence regarded as "matter becoming spirit"35 but where "spirit is considered at the same time as matter",36 an evolving continuum of space-time which is primarily "a universe of 'spiritual' stuff"37 - this attitude is at its heart unashamed pantheism, imbued though it may be with personalism. And, if Teilhard's system has an unavoidably pantheistic element, it cannot be assimilated into current Christianity.
However, there are other elements - several strong links with Roman Catholic Christianity on the one hand and on the other with what we have designated the "evolutionary garb" in which Christianity's bugbear, pantheism, appears in Teilhard's worship of the universe. Unless we take both into consideration his Weltanschauung will not come into absolute focus.
Teilhard's Omega is not only Pantheos plus Super-Person: it is also the term of a process in which Godhead is being formed. As S.N. Daecke38 puts the point, "Omega is both still 'virtual' and already 'real'." Daecke39 speaks, too, of Teilhard's "dialectic of the simultaneous presentness and futurity of Omega" and, transposing this truth into religious language, he continues: "the cosmic Christ, that is, the personal unity of God's reality and the world, is for ever already realised and perfected." The latter aspect Daecke40 throws into relief by means of a quotation from Teilhard: "God is waiting for us at the end of evolution." The paradox of this aspect Teilhard enunciates by fusing the old religious doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ which will be formed by Christ's ultimate gathering together all his followers into himself and
35.Ibid., p. 57.
36.ibid., p. 162.
37.ibid., p. 23.
38."Teilhard de Chardin and Protestant Theology", translated from the German by W.E. O'Hea, in The Teilhard Review, London, Summer, 1969, Vol, 4, No. 1, p. 11.
39.Ibid.
40.Ibid., p. 12.
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the new scientific-spiritual doctrine of Christ-Omega or Cosmic Christ who is the evolutionary Super-Personal Pantheos drawing the universe forward to the collective co-reflection of a unified humanity. We may requote Teilhard:41
"Since Jesus was born and grew to his full stature, and died, everything has continued to move forward because Christ is not yet fully fanned: He has not yet gathered about him the last folds of his robe of flesh and of love which is made up of his faithful followers. The mystical Christ has not yet attained to his full growth; and therefore the same is true of the cosmic Christ, Both of these are simultaneously in the state of being and becoming; and it is from the prolongation of this process of becoming that all created activity ultimately springs. Christ is the end-point of the evolution, even the natural evolution, of all beings; and therefore evolution is holy."
"Christ", we may observe, is the refrain, the leitmotif, of all Teilhardian articulation. The name keeps recurring in the midst of all his pantheism and evolutionism. It demands that, though Roman Catholic orthodoxy cannot really accord with them, Christianity in some shape has to be assimilated into Teilhard's message. The shape will depend on what this message looks like when it is freed of its own conflicts and ambiguities and formulated as an ensemble in which its pantheistic element lying at the back of its evolutionary vision has a legitimate logical place in the very front.
Is there any religious philosophy which makes room for the essence of pantheism and even gives it prominence while yet transcending it in the direction of Super-personalism as well as allowing a possible development towards an evolutionary vision?
When we cast our eyes over the long stretch of Western thought we cannot but pause at the system of Karl C.F. Krause (1781-1832) constructed to reconcile pantheism with theism and called "panentheism", meaning "ail in God". The
41. Hymn of the Universe, "Pensees", p. 133,
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first implication of panentheism is: "God neither is the world nor stands outside the world but has the world in himself and extends beyond it."42 The second implication is: "God interpenetrates everything without cancelling the relative independent existence of the world of entities."43 This implication is the converse corollary of the first. Thus panentheism means not only that all is in God but also that God is in all and leaves the human soul unsubmerged. It is pantheistic in the sense that God is ultimately the stuff of everything: it is theistic in the sense that God is not exhausted by being this stuff and is "transcendent in the sense that though the created is dependent upon the Creator, the Creator is not dependent upon the created. God thus is held to be the highest type of Unity, viz., a Unity in Multiplicity".44
Teilhard's system can legitimately be summed up as panentheism with regard to the core we have perceived of its spiritual insight. However, panentheism a la Krause does not throw its net widely or deeply enough to catch everything of spiritual moment in Teilhardism. It has no sense of the evolutionary gradation in manifested Reality or of a future fulfilment on earth in a Kingdom of God. We have to cast our eyes farther for what we want.
And we are unmistakably directed to our wider and deeper goal by a remark of Sri Aurobindo's in criticism of a view of Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer, says Sri Aurobindo,45 has made a miscalculation, "moved by the associations of Western philosophy to read a merely pantheistic sense into the more subtle and complex thought of the ancient Vedanta". And Sri Aurobindo's remark gets an added relevance from the fact that the home of this more subtle and
42.Richard Falckenberg, History of Modern Philosophy (Calcutta, 1953), pp. 471-72.
43.The Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Dagobert D. Runes (]aico Books, Bombay, 1957), p. 223, "Panentheism".
44.Ibid.
45.The Life Divine (New York, 1949), p. 671, fn, 6.
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complex thought has been suggested - as Louis Renou46 reminds us - to have had among its various turns towards the Divine "an undeniable tendency...towards panentheism".
A brief look, therefore, at the ancient Vedanta through the eyes of Sri Aurobindo will best shape for us the Christianity which Teilhard, often at cross-purposes with himself, was striving to set forth.
The essential attitude on his part in this respect is caught in many of his statements. But it wore various faces. At its most conservatively revolutionary, if we may so put the matter, it found expression thus:47 "According to my own principles, I cannot fight against Christianity; I can only work inside it, by trying to transform and 'convert' it." A little less uninhibitedly, Teilhard48 aimed at "modernizing and giving a fresh start to Christianity". Still more outspokenly his attitude was:49 "I remain rather (with a few others) at the spearhead of the fight for a 'new' Christianity." Perhaps he was truest to himself and most encouraging to our venture when he50 wrote at some length in a letter of June 24, 1934: "What increasingly dominates my interest and my inner preoccupations, as you already know, 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 Cod 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 'pan-christising' the universe. The delicate point..is that, if you follow this path, you are held 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
46.Hinduism (A Washington Square Press Book, New York, 1963), p. 10.
47.Utters to Two Friends 1926-1952, p. 155.
48.christianity and Evolution, p. 160, fn. 4.
49.Letters to Two Friends 1926-1952, p. 171.
50.Letters to Leontine Zanta, pp. 114-15.
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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 (at least that is my opinion - and all the uneasy contemporaries with whom I have spoken about it think like me). 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? I don't know whether, among the many of my colleagues who are in front of me or behind me on' the road I am travelling, there are any (or even a single one!...that seems incredible) who realise the importance of the step that all are taking. But I'm beginning to see it very clearly. 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''
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