Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

The Vedantic Vision, the Historical Christ and Soul-Evolution

Thus the ancient Vedantic vision is inclusive of all possible aspects of divinity and can harmonise the diverse currents of thought running through Teilhard's philosophy. Even the idea of the Incarnation the historical Christ-figure, can be a part of it; for the Avatar stands out in the Bhagavad Gita, a development of the Ishwara-aspect. But, of course, the uniqueness, so dear to the Christian, of Christ's avatarhood would be set aside. Instead, we would have a divine phenomenon repeating itself at several stages of human history, a guiding companionship of God to man again and again.

"India," explains Sri Aurobindo,¹ "has from ancient times held strongly a belief in the reality of the Avatar, the descent into form, the revelation of the Godhead in humanity. In the West this belief has never really stamped itself upon the mind because it has been presented through exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma without any roots in the reason and general consciousness and attitude towards life. But in India it has grown up and persisted as a logical outcome of the Vedantic view of life and taken firm root in the consciousness of the race. All existence is a manifestation of God because He is the only existence and nothing can be except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in some way a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of name and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is a gradation between the supreme being of the Divine and the consciousness shrouded partly or wholly by ignorance of self in the finite. The conscious embodied soul is the spark of the divine Fire and that soul in man opens out to self-knowledge as it develops out of ignorance of self into self-being. The Divine also, pouring itself into the forms of the cosmic existence, is

1. Essays on the Gita (New York, 1950), pp. 12-13.

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revealed ordinarily in an efflorescence of its powers, in energies and magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force of being, in degrees and faces of its divinity. But when the divine Consciousness and Power, taking upon itself the human form and the human mode of action, possesses it not only by powers and magnitudes, by degrees and outward faces of itself but out of its eternal self-knowledge, when the Unborn knows itself and acts in the frame of the mental being and the appearance of birth, that is the height of the conditioned manifestation; it is the full and conscious descent of the Godhead, it is the Avatar."

And in the central scripture of Avatarhood, the Gita, whose composition all Indologists date to the pre-Christian period,² the divine Incarnation Krishna declares: "Many are my lives that are past... Whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma³ and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the Right, I am born from age to age" (4.5,7,8).⁴ Sri Aurobindo's comment⁵ runs:

"We have to remark carefully that the upholding of the Dharma in the world is not the only object of the descent of the Avatar, the great mystery of the Divine manifest in humanity; for the upholding of the Dharma is not an all-sufficient object in itself, not the supreme possible aim for the manifestation of a Christ, a Krishna, a Buddha, but is only the general condition of a higher aim and a more supreme and divine utility. For there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead

2.According to S. Dasgupta, it is even pre-Buddhistic (A History of Indian Philosophy, Cambridge, 1922-55, Vol, II, p. 551). R.C, Zaehner opines that it was composed in the third or fourth century B.C. {Hinduism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 93).

3.Dharma = right moral law.

4.The Message of the Gita, as interpreted by Sri Aurobindo, edited by Anilbaran Roy (George Allen & Unwin Ltd,, London, 1946), pp. 67, 68-69.

5.Ibid., p. 70, fn. 1 (Continued to p. 71).

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manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness...; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve. If there were not this rising of man into the Godhead to be helped by the descent of God into humanity, Avatarhood for the sake of the Dharma would be an otiose phenomenon, since mere Right, mere justice or standards of virtue can always be upheld by the divine omnipotence through its ordinary means, by great men or great movements, by the life and work of sages and kings and religious teachers, without any actual incarnation. The Avatar comes as the manifestation of the divine nature in the human nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood, in order that the human nature may by moulding its principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of that Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself into the divine. The law, the Dharma which the Avatar establishes is given for that purpose chiefly; the Christ, Krishna, Buddha stands in its centre as the gate, he makes through himself the way men shall follow. That is why each Incarnation holds before men his own example and declares of himself that he is the way and the gate; he declares too the oneness of his humanity with the divine being, declares that the Son of Man and the Father above from whom he has descended are one, that Krishna in the human body... and the supreme Lord and Friend of all creatures are but two revelations of the same divine Purushottama,⁶ revealed there in his own being, revealed here in the type of humanity."

We may throw a glance at what the Avatar Krishna reveals of his Godhead in the Gita. He is the Personal God par excellence, yet although a Person he says that the whole universe is secretly he - Vasudevah sarvam iti (7.9), which can be rendered "The son of Vasudeva is all" as well as "The

6. Purushottama = supreme Being.

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omnipresent Being is all". A Personal Pantheos meets us in clear-cut terms as in no other scripture; but this Personal Pantheos is also, on the one hand, the single undifferentiated Self of all and, on the other, the Master and Lord seated in the heart of every creature and - beyond the Universal Person, the common Self of selves and the Inner Presence - he is the Supracosmic, the Transcendent Being. Again, while creatures are projections of himself, they are in a certain aspect distinct from him and granted various relationships with him as his knowers and lovers and doers. We may put together a few stanzas in Sri Aurobindo's translation⁷ to illustrate some of our points:

"He is called the unmanifest immutable; him they speak of as the supreme soul and status,.. But that supreme Purusha has to be won by a bhakti⁸ which turns to him alone in whom all beings exist and by whom all this world has been extended in space" (8.21,22). "By Me all this universe has been extended in the ineffable mystery of My being; all existences are situated in Me, not I in them.... All existences...return into my divine Nature...in the lapse of the cycle; at the beginning of the cycle I loose them forth" (9.4.7). "I am here in this world and everywhere, I support this entire universe with an infinitesimal portion of Myself" (10.42). "It is an eternal portion of Me that becomes the Jiva⁹ in the world of living creatures..." (15.7). "His hands and feet are on every side of us, his heads and eyes and faces are those innumerable visages which we see wherever we turn, his ear is everywhere, he immeasurably fills and surrounds all this world with himself, he is the universal Being in whose embrace we live.... He is indivisible and the One, but seems to divide himself in forms and creatures and appears as all the separate existences.... He is the light of all lights and luminous beyond all the darkness of our ignorance. He is knowledge and the object of knowledge. He is seated in the hearts of all" (13.14,17,18). "His supreme

7.The Message of the Gita, pp. 131-32,137-38,163, 215,194-95,167,

8.Bhakti = devotion.

9.Jiva = individual soul.

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Form...is that of the infinite Godhead...who multiplies unendingly all the many marvellous revelations of His being... Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods" (11.9,13).

Some words of Teilhard's may well be juxtaposed with these stanzas. Teilhard¹⁰ writes:

"If we look at this world, we see that the fundamental substances within which souls are formed, the highest environment in which they evolve - what one might call their own particular Ether - is the Godhead, at once transcendent and immanent, in quo vivimus et movemur et sumus - in whom we live and move and have our being. God cannot in any way be intermixed with or lost in the participated being which he sustains and animates and holds together, but he is at the birth, and the growth, and the final term of all things. Everything lives, and everything is raised up - and everything in consequence is one - in Him and through Him.

"Worthily to describe the rapture of this union and this unification, the pantheists' most impassioned language is justified...: and to that rapture is added the ecstatic realization that the universal Thing from which everything emerges and to which everything returns... is a living, loving Being, in which the individual consciousness, when it is lost, attains an accentuation and an illumination that extends to the furthest limit of what is contained in its own personality. God, who is as immense and all-embracing as matter, and at the same time as warm and intimate as a soul, is the Centre who spreads through all things; his immensity is produced by an extreme of concentration, and his rich simplicity synthesizes a culminating paroxysm of accummulated virtues. No words can describe the bliss of feeling oneself possessed, absorbed, without end or limit by an Infinite that is not rarefied and

10. Writings in Time of War, p, 48.

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colourless, but living and luminous, an Infinite that knows and attracts."

Yes, in diverse ways Teilhard's Christ affines himself to the Gita's Krishna. But the background of this Christ is a static universe which Teilhard's evolutionary vision has to struggle against and at times the victories of that vision are pyrrhic: the old background refuses to let the new vision have its full play. Neither the Divine Incarnation nor the human soul is allowed to stretch its history beyond one life-time. In Indian thought both the Avatar and the human soul can stretch their histories not only beyond one life-time but even outside the human formula itself. Here is indeed evolution with a vengeance. Rebirth, which is a cardinal tenet of Indian thought, carries one not only through a long series of human embodiments towards a divine outflowering in the terms of manhood: it also implies a non-human past preparing for the status of humanity. Sri Aurobindo11 writes: "A Upanishad declares that the Self or Spirit after deciding on life creation first formed animal kinds like the cow and horse, but the gods, - who are in the thought of the Upanishads powers of Consciousness and powers of Nature, - found them to be insufficient vehicles, and the Spirit finally created the form of man which the gods saw to be excellently made and sufficient and they entered into it for their cosmic functions. This is a clear parable of the creation of more and more developed forms until one was found that was capable of housing a developed consciousness. In the Puranas it is stated that the tamasic animal creation was the first in time. Tamas is the Indian word for the principle of inertia of consciousness and force... The animal, in whom there is this less developed force of consciousness, is prior in creation; the more developed human consciousness, in which there is a greater force of kinetic mind-energy and,light of perception, is a later creation. The Tantra speaks of a soul fallen from its status passing through many lacs of births in plant and animal forms before

11. Vie Life Divine, pp. 74546.

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it can reach the human level and be ready for salvation. Here, again, there is implied the conception of vegetable and animal life-forms as the lower steps of a ladder, humanity as the last or culminating development of the conscious being, the form which the soul has to inhabit in order to be capable of the spiritual motive and a spiritual issue out of mentality, life and physicality."

A soul-evolution and a qualitative time-gradation in the appearance of species, though not explicitly a change of one species into another, are part of ancient as well as mediaeval thought in India. Both are necessary for the Teilhardian philosophy of world-evolution. Particularly is the former needed, if there is a distinct individual soul active in the evolutionary scheme and if the future of this soul is of extreme evolutionary importance. A soul which existed before its present body and which inhabited other bodies earlier and which not only survives the death of its present body but also will inhabit new bodies in the future - such a soul Teilhard should logically envisage instead of the one he does, with no before and no after in earth-evolution. And the Vedanta's soul-evolutionary conception through various species increasing in complexity with time emerges most markedly in relation to the Avatar, thus joining up the Indian theory of the "Incarnate Word", as Teilhard would phrase it, directly with his philosophy of Christogenesis along with cosmogenesis. Apropos of the Avatar-tradition preserved in the Puranas Sri Aurobindo¹² writes in a letter:

"The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is..., as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal [Tortoise] between land and water, then the land animal [Boar], then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the...Avatars leading to the human development from the vital [Rama of the Axe],..to the

12. On Yoga 11, Tome One, p. 405,

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mental man [Rama, son of Dasaratha] and again the over-mental man [Krishna]. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development -Krishna opens the possibility of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing... forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable."

All this should seem like an unfolding, along a special line, of the implications held by excerpts like those from a passage of Teilhard's13 we have reproduced earlier: "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... It is because Christ was 'inoculated' in matter that he can no longer be dissociated from the growth of Spirit... It is philosophically sound to ask of each element 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 preceded the first Christmas are not empty of Christ, but impregnated by his potent influx. It is the ferment of his conception that sets the cosmic masses in motion and controls the first currents of the biosphere. It is the preparation for his birth that accelerates the progress of instinct and the full development of thought on earth... All these preparations were cosmically, biologically, necessary if Christ was to gain a footing on the human scene. And all this work was set in motion by the active and creative awakening of this soul, in as much as that human soul of his was chosen to animate the universe..."

Implications in tune with the Hindu procession of the Avatars could not be brought out by Teilhard from his philosophy, nor could any other open correspondence with the Vedanta be established by him in spite of his philosophy

13. Science and Christ, pp. 60-61,

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approaching suggestively close to it - the natural sense of his intuitions could not emerge because it could have no fitness in current Christianity. The Christianity which can grow out of Teilhardism will thus have to be considerably different from the religion to which he tried to conform his intuitions. Understood in the true light, the Cosmic Christ who is central to his thought must lead to an Indianised Christianity giving prominence to Pantheos but holding the transcendent Divine as its prime concept - affirming in the midst of Pantheos the Personal Godhead and, along with him, the human soul as an eternal portion of the ultimate Reality and as an evolutionary adventurer through a series of births - positing a meaningful succession of Avatars until the spiritual consciousness is founded in man, with the last Avatar unifying the world in an earthly Kingdom of God - and, from among the Avatars, turning to the historical Jesus as the chosen object of worship, ista devata, as Hinduism would put it, and looking forward to his universal mystical Body's final plenitude of a humanity gathered together in a Superconscious Super-organism.

Formulated wholly from within outward in a spontaneous fashion instead of partially from without inward with the Roman Catholic Church now and again in view, the real religion of Teilhard de Chardin would be this Indianised Christianity as modified and modernised by his brilliant many-faceted reading of biological fact.

Such a Christianity would perhaps be opened by that reading to see, in the unknown face of the future, greater possibilities than all past ones of embodied epiphany -possibilities akin to what Sri Aurobindo himself has envisioned as the divine destiny even of man's physical being by the very logic of Evolution.¹⁴

19.6.1974

14. The Life Divine, pp. 3-7.

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