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to New Media Communications Home Page At the root of the major troubles in which nations are today involved, I believe that I can distinguish the signs of a change of age in mankind.
It took hundreds of centuries for man simply to people the earth and cover it with a first network: and further thousands of years to build up, as chance circumstances allowed, solid nuclei of civilizations within this initially fluctuating envelope, radiating from independent and antagonistic centres. Today, these elements have multiplied and grown; they have packed themselves closer together and forced themselves against one another -to the point where an over-all unity, of no matter what nature, has become economically and psychologically inevitable. Mankind, in coming of age, has begun to be subject to the necessity and to feel the urgency of forming one single body coextensive with itself. There we have the underlying cause of our distress.
Back to Theology IntroIn 1918, the nations had tried, in a supreme effort
of individualism, in an obscure instinct for conservation, to defend themselves
against this mass-concretion which they felt was coming. At that time we
witnessed the terrifying upsurge of nationalisms - the reactionary fragmentation
of ethnic groups in the name of history. And now once again the single
fundamental wave is mounting up and rolling forward, but in a form made
perilous by the particularist enthusiasms with which it is impregnated.
So it is that the crisis has burst upon us.
After identifying this cause of great unrest and psychological upheaval, Pierre proposes:
The more one considers this infinitely urgent problem
of finding an over-all plan for building up the earth, the clearer it
becomes that if we are to avoid the road of brute material force, there
is no way out ahead except the road of comradeship and brotherhood
- and that is as true of nations as it is of individuals: not jealous
hostility, but friendly rivalry: not personal feeling, but the team spirit.
Until man, it is true enough that living branches develop primarily by stifling and eliminating one another - the law, in fact, of the jungle. By contrast, starting with man and within the human group, this is no longer true: the play of mutual destruction ceases to operate. Selection, no doubt, is still at work and can still be recognized, but it no longer holds the most important place; and the reason for this is that the appearance of thought has added a new dimension to the Universe. Through spirit's irresistible affinity for its own kind, it has created a sort of convergent milieu within which the branches, as they are formed, have to come closer together in order to be fully living. In this new order of things, the whole balance is changed, though with no diminution of the system's energy. It is simply that force, in its earlier form, expresses only man's power over the extra- or the infra-human. It has been transformed, at the heart of mankind, among men, into its spiritual equivalent - an energy not of repulsion, but of attraction.
Bearing this in mind, the ultimate form to be assumed by mankind should not be conceived on the lines of a stem that is swollen with the sap of all the stems it killed as it grew. It will be born (for born it cannot but be) in the form of some organism in which, obeying one of the universe's most unmistakable laws, every blade and every fascicle, every individual and every nation, will find completion through union with all the others. No longer a succession of eliminations, but a confluence of energies -'synergy'. Such, if we have cars to hear, is the message of biology.
A first result of the 'mass-setting' which mankind is gradually undergoing at this moment is that every one of us, taken in isolation, is becoming less and less materially self-sufficient. A series of new needs, which it would be puerile and anti-biological to regard as superfluous and artificial, is continually making itself felt in us. It is no longer possible for us to live and develop without an increasing supply of rubber, of metals, oil, electricity and energy of all sorts. No individual could henceforth manage to produce his daily bread on his own. Mankind is more and more taking the form of an organism that possesses a physiology and, in the current phrase, a common 'metabolism'. We may, if we please, say that these ties are superficial, and that we will loose them if we wish.
Meanwhile, they are growing firmer every day, under the combined action of all the forces that surround us; and history shows that, as a whole, their network (woven under the influence of irreversible cosmic factors) has never ceased to draw tighter.
Thus a general human life is irresistibly being
constituted around our own private lives. This is not a matter of a vague
symbiosis' which would simply ensure, through mutual assistance, the continued
existence, as individuals, of the members of the community, or even their
further development. Certain 'effects' are already emerging from the association
that has been formed, and these are specifically proper to collectivity.
We take no notice of such effects, and yet we can see countless examples
of them on all sides. Take simply the case of an aircraft, or a radio,
or a Leica: and consider the physics, the chemistry and mechanics such
things presuppose for their existence - the n-Lines, laboratories, factories,
arms, brains, hands. By virtue of its construction (and this is undeniable)
each one of these devices is, and cannot but be, only the convergent result
of countless disciplines and techniques whose bewildering complexity could
be mastered by no single worker in isolation. In their conception and manufacture,
these familiar objects presuppose nothing less than a complex reflective
organism, acting per modum unius, as a single agent. Already
we see in them the work not simply of man, but of mankind. page 36 par1
Henceforth man is less capable than ever before of thinking
alone. We have only to consider the series of our modem concepts in
science, philosophy and religion, and it will be obvious that the more
general and fruitful any one of these notions is proving, the more it,
too, is tending to assume the form of a collective entity: we can, it is
true, individually cover one angle of it, we can make a portion of it our
own and develop it, but it rests in fact on a vault of mutually buttressed
thoughts. The idea of the electron or the quantum, or the cosmic ray -
the idea of the cell or of heredity - the idea of humanity or even the
idea of God -no single individual can claim these as his preserve or dominate
them. In such things, what is already thinking, just as what is already
working, through man and above man, is again mankind. And it is inconceivable,
in virtue of the very way in which the phenomenon works, that the movement
initiated should not continue in the same direction, tomorrow as today,
becoming more pronounced and increasing in speed.
From all this we can draw only one conclusion, that the quantity of activity and consciousness contained in mankind, taken as a whole, is greater than the mere sum of individual activity and consciousness. Progress in complexity is making itself felt in a deepening of centricity. It is not simply a sum, but synthesis. And this is precisely what we were justified in expecting, if, in the domain of the social, the forward march of universal moleculization is indeed being continued (as my thesis maintained) to a point beyond our present brains.
Until man, we may say that nature was working to construct
'the unit or grain of thought'. It would now seem undeniable that, obeying
the laws of some gigantic hyperchemistry, we are now being launched towards
'edifices made up of grains of thought', towards 'a thought made up of
thoughts' - traveling ever deeper into the abyss of the infinitely complex.
P38
Page 39 "to discover which of the various possible forms of collectivization open to him is the good form, in other words, the form that most directly prolongs the psychogenesis (or noogenesis) from which he emerged."
Page 40 "a spirit of the earth…………In just what form
are we to picture this spirit…………?"
Following is a Good summary of Theistic Evolution of TDC:
As soon as we recognize such a centre, which I shall call
Omega, it becomes reasonable to conclude that the grains of consciousness
produced evolutively by noogenesis (once the 'human' point of reflection
has been passed) fall into a new field of attraction: the pull is exercised
on the basic foundation of the grains, and it now acts not only
on the complexity of their structure but directly on their centre, independently
of the structure. From this point of view, what we have called 'moleculization'
is thus seen to be a more complicated but at the same time more
radical process than we thought. In a first stage (up to hominization)
there is a succession of fragile units, suspended over the void
that lies behind them: there is a rising centration, but no true
centre as yet perfected in nature. In a second stage (after hominization)
there is a mixed state; there is a continued progress of
external complexity and beneath this the universe, which henceforth carries
grains of thought, begins to be inverted upon itself - like a cone
that has reached its apex. An intangible physics of centres succeeds the
tangible physics of centration. Lastly, in a third and final phase, there
is the complete turning back of spirit (now collectively centred) upon
an interior pole of consistence and total unification: hyper-centration
following upon centration.
"Centre to Centre" Love
As I pointed out, for one form of synthesis that brings
freedom there are hundreds of others that lead only to the vilest forms
of bondage. We are only too conscious of this; but how can we come together
in such a way as to free ourselves? In virtue of the laws of moleculization,
the problem obviously consists in finding the way of grouping ourselves
together not 'tangentially', in the nexus of an extrinsic activity or function,
but radially', centre to centre; how to associate in such a way
as, by synthesis, to stimulate deep within ourselves a progress that is
directly centric in nature. In other words, what we have to do is
to love one another because love is equally by definition the name we give
to 'inter-centric' actions. By its nature, love is the only synthesizing
energy whose differentiating action can super-personalize us. But just
how can one ever contrive to love a multitude? if we set the two words
side by side, love and multitude, surely they enclose a contradiction?
In a universe that is in course of centration (provided the centration
be carried out in the right way) the individual and the collectivity never
cease to reinforce and complete one another. The more the individual on
his side associates himself in an appropriate way with other individuals,
the more, as an effect of synthesis, does he enter deeper into his own
being, become conscious of himself, and in consequence personalize himself.
And the more the collectivity on its side concentrates itself, in an appropriate
way, upon elements for whose fuller personalization it is itself responsible,
the more, again, is it 'humanized' and personalized, and the more does
it allow Omega point to be divined. The two terms are equally essential:
they are inseparable.
Already, in the social and biological field, the fact of our recognizing that, as a result of the properties of love, the universe becomes personalized as it concentrates, was enabling us to avoid both fragmentation through individualization and mechanization through collectivism. Now, in the domain of mysticism, the same light shows us the channel between two equally dangerous reefs. Ever since man, in becoming man, started on his quest for unity, he has constantly oscillated, in his visions, in his ascesis, or in his dreams, between a cult of the spirit which made him jettison matter and a cult of matter which made him deny spirit: omegalization allows us to pass between this Scylla and Charybdis of rarefaction or the quagmire. Detachment now comes not through a severance but through a traversing and a sublimation; and spiritualization not by negation of the multiple or an escape from it, but by emergence. This is the via tertia that opens up before us as soon as spirit is no longer the opposite extreme but the higher pole of matter in course of super-centration. It is not a cautious and neutral middle course, but the bold, higher road, in which the values and properties of the two other roads are combined and correct one another.
From this, as a final summary, I draw the following conclusion. To have become conscious of our condition as 'atoms patient of synthesis' is not merely to have attained a new vision of the general relationship which links matter to thought, and thought to God. It is in addition, and by that very fact, to redefine the line followed by the immutable axis of, and by that very holiness.
A neo-spirituality for a neo-spirit, in a universe whose convergent nature has been recognized.
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