INTRODUCTION
The Burning
Bush
At the heart of
Matter
A World-heart,
The Heart of a
God.
In spite of certain appearances of
strictly rigorous argument, the considerations that follow
make no attempt to work out a designedly coherent structure
- a philosophy of the real. Rather do they aim at describing
a direct psychological experience - with just that amount of
hard thinking behind it that will enable it to become
intelligible and communicable without losing the objective,
indisputable value of a document that reflects
life.
What I shall try to do in the pages
printed here (hoping that my own 'case' may make it possible
for many other similar cases to be recognized or even to be
brought into being) is quite simply this: to show how,
starting from the point at which a spark was first struck, a
point that was built into me congenitally, the World
gradually caught fire for me, burst into flames; how this
happened all during my life, and as a result of my whole
life, until it formed a great luminous mass, lit from
within, that surrounded me.
Within every being and every event
there was a progressive expansion of a mysterious inner
clarity which transfigured them. But, what was more, there
was a gradual variation of intensity and colour that was
related to the complex interplay of three universal
components: the Cosmic, the Human and the Christic - these
(at least the first and the last) asserted themselves
explicitly in me from the very first moments of my
existence, but it has taken me more than sixty years of
ardent effort to discover that they were no more than the
successive heraldings of, or approximate outlines of, one
and the same fundamental reality.
Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding
imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become
transformed into the incandescence of a Universe that is
Person - and through all this there blows, animating it and
spreading over it a fragrant balm, a zephyr of Union - and
of the Feminine.
The Diaphany of the Divine at the
heart of a glowing Universe, as I have experienced it
through contact with the Earth - the Divine radiating from
the depths of a blazing Matter: this it is that I shall try
to disclose and communicate in what follows.
Les Moulins, 1 August
1950
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I. THE
COSMIC, OR THE EVOLUTIVE
Preliminary Note: The
Sense of Plenitude
When I look for my starting point,
for a clue to lead the reader through these pages, for an
axis that will give continuity to the whole. I find that the
first thing I have to do is to give a picture of, and
briefly describe, a particular psychological disposition or
'polarization'; it is certainly common to all men (although
not always formally recognized by them), and for want of a
better name I shall call it the Sense of Plenitude. However
far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more
characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy
than the appetite or irresistible demand for some 'Unique
all-sufficing and necessary reality'. To be completely at
home and completely happy, there must be the knowledge that
'Something, essential by nature' exists, to which everything
else is no more than an accessory or perhaps an ornament. To
know and endlessly to enjoy the aware- ness of this
existence - I must indeed confess that if ever in past years
I have been able to recognize my own self and follow my own
development, it has been only by picking up this note or
tint, or particular flavour, 'which it is impossible (once
one has experienced it) to confuse with any other spiritual
emotion, whether joy in knowledge or discovery, joy in
creation or in loving: and this not so much because it is
different from all those emotions, but because it belongs to
a higher order and contains them all.
The Sense of Plenitude, the Sense
of Consummation and of Completion: the 'Pleromic
Sense'.
Throughout all that I shall call in
turn and indifferently 'Sense of Consistence', 'Cosmic
Sense', 'Sense of the Earth', 'Sense of Man', 'Christic
Sense', everything that follows will be simply the story of
a slow unfolding or evolving within me of this funda- mental
and 'Protean' element which takes on ever richer and purer
forms.
This is no fictitious or imaginary
story; it is a real process at work, biologically guided and
guaranteed for me as such by the identity my consciousness
can clearly apprehend beneath all the metamorphoses and
extensions of the operative psychological
substratum.
And, let me add, it is a singularly
significant operation in as much as, while destined to
culminate upon what is highest in the direction of Spirit,
it started in the first place (as I know by evidence and
direct proofs) from what is most tangible and most concrete
in the Stuff of Things, later to make its way into and
conquer everything.2
a. The Appeal of
Matter
I was certainly not more than six
or seven years old when I began to feel myself drawn by
Matter - or, more correctly, by something which 'shone' at
the heart of Matter. At the age when other children, I
imagine, experience their first 'feeling' for a person, or
for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even
pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother,
I was devoted to the Child Jesus. I shall return later, in
Part III, to the essential part that this element played
later in my life.
In reality, however, my real 'me'
was elsewhere.
And to see that 'me' properly, you
would have had to watch me as - always in secrecy and
silence - without even any idea that there could be anything
to say about it to anyone - I withdrew into the
contemplation, the possession, into the so relished
existence, of my 'Iron God'. Iron, mark you. I can still
see, with remarkable sharpness, the succession of my
'idols'. In the country there was the lock-pin of a plough
which I used to hide carefully in a corner of the yard. In
town, there was the hexagonal head of a metal bolt which
protruded above the level of the nursery floor, and. which I
had made my own private possession. Later, there were
shell-splinters lovingly collected on a neighbouring firing-
range... I cannot help smiling, today, when these childish
fancies come back to my mind; and yet I cannot but recognize
that this instinctive act which made me worship, in a real
sense of the word, a fragment of metal contained and
concentrated an intensity of resonance and a whole stream of
demands of which my entire spiritual life has been no more
than the development.
The real point, however, is: Why
Iron? and why, in particular, one special piece of iron? (It
had to be as thick and massive as possible.) It can only
have been because, so far as my childish experience went,
nothing in the world was harder, heavier, tougher, more
durable than this marvellous substance appre- hended in its
fullest possible form ... Consistence: that has un-
doubtedly been for me the fundamental attribute of Being.
When this initial apprehension of the Absolute in the form
of the Tangible is arrested prematurely in its growth, so
that it becomes barren, you get dwarfism, and it is this
that produces the miser or collector. Providentially, in my
case the seed was destined to grow. But until this very day
(and so, I feel, it will be until the end) this primacy of
the incorruptible, that is to say of the Irreversible, has
never ceased, and never will cease, indelibly to
characterize my predilection for the Necessary, the General,
the 'Natural' - as opposed to the Contingent, the Particular
and the
Artificial: and, as we shall be
seeing, this disposition for a long time obscured for me the
supreme values of the Personal and the Human.
Already this was the Sense of
Plenitude, sharply individualized and already seeking for
satisfaction in grasping a definite Object in which the
Essence of Things could be found concentrated.
It was precisely what, after many
years of experience and thought, I was to begin to discern
in an evolutive Pole to the World!
It is a long way, however, from a
piece of iron to Omega Point... And I was gradually to find,
to my cost, to what a degree the Consistence of which I then
dreamed is an effect not of 'substance' but of
'convergence'. I so well remember the pathetic despair of
the child who one day realizes that Iron can become
scratched and pitted - and can rust. 'Quo tinea non
corrunipit'.
And then, to comfort myself, I
looked for things that would take its place. Sometimes it
would be a blue flame (at once so material, so impossible to
grasp and so pure) flickering over the logs on the hearth;
more often some more transparent or more finely coloured
stone: quartz or amethyst crystals and, best of all,
glittering fragments of chalcedony such as I could pick up
in the countryside. On those occasions it was essential, of
course, that the cherished substance should be resistant,
impervious to attack and hard!
There was an imperceptible
transition, but one which was later to have an immense
importance for my spiritual evolution: for it was precisely
through the gateway that the substitution of Quartz for Iron
opened for my groping mind into the vast structures of the
Planet and of Nature, that I began, without realizing it,
truly to make my way into the World - until nothing could
satisfy me that was not on the scale of the
Universal.
This is how it happened.
b. The Appearance of
the Universal
At the very beginning of my
conscious life, let me repeat, in my efforts to attain and
grasp the 'solidity' to which my innate demand for Plenitude
impelled me, I tried above all to capture the essence of
Matter by looking for it in its most closely-defined and
concentrated, and heaviest, forms; in this attempt I clung,
of course, to what then seemed to me to be the queen of
substances (in that case, Iron) - but in so doing I was
greatly concerned to grasp this precious being in forms as
sharply demarcated and compact as possible.
Then it was that my newly born
attraction to the world of 'Rocks' began to produce the
beginning of what was to be a per- manent broadening of the
foundations of my interior life.
Metal (such metal as I could find
at the age of ten) tended to keep me attached to objects
that were manufactured and so mere pieces. Mineral, on the
other hand, set me on the road towards the 'planetary'. I
woke up to the notion of 'the Stuff of Things'. And that
famous Consistence, which I had hitherto looked for in the
Hard and the Dense, began in a subtle way to emerge in the
direction of an Elemental permeating all things - whose very
ubiquity would produce incorruptibility.
Later, when I was studying geology,
it might well have appeared that all I was doing was
seriously and successfully to consider the chances of a
career in science. In reality, however, during the whole of
my life there was but one thing which would irresistibly
bring me back (even at the expense of palaeontology) to the
study of the great eruptive masses and continental shelves:
that was an insatiable desire to maintain contact (a contact
of communion) with a sort of universal root or matrix of
beings.
The truth is that even at the peak
of my spiritual trajectory I was never to feel at home
unless immersed in an Ocean of Matter...
So it was that the Sense of
Consistence led to the awakening and expansion of a dominant
and triumphant Sense of the Whole.
Over about twenty years of my life
(from my leaving home for boarding-school until I began my
theology at Hastings in Sussex) I can distinctly recognize
in my memories the unbroken trail that marks this profound
transformation. During this time, as I shall have to
explain, the material object of my secret joy may well have
varied with my age; moreover, there was an important break
in my life: my entry into the Society of Jesus. But I now
see that these different events were no more than minor
superficial ripples on the fundamental current constituted
by my awakening to the Cosmic Sense and the Cosmic Life.
This was a powerful interior process, in the course of which
I found that I was gradually being invaded, impregnated and
completely re- cast as the result of a sort of psychic
metamorphosis into which, it would seem, there passed the
brightest of the energies released by my arrival at
puberty.
It would be difficult for me to
work out again, or at least to explain in some detail, the
complicated story in which, at that time of my life, the
various threads were formed and began to be woven together
into what was one day to become for me the fabric of the
Stuff of the Universe.
Nevertheless, at this point in my
analysis I must enumerate the more important strata whose
successive individualization or accretion helped at that
time to provide my Sense of the Whole with its chief
components.
First of all, of course, and
forming the solid permanent core of the system, was my taste
for geology: the primacy of material matter,
'Matter-Matter', expressed in Mineral and Rock. I shall not
re-analyse here, what I have mentioned earlier, this
primordial modality of my Sense of Plenitude; but I could
not explain, or follow myself, the vicissitudes of my
psychic evolution if I did not emphasize once again the
central position invariably occupied by my passionate study
of the science 'of Stones', throughout the whole of my
spiritual embryo-genesis.
Thus, between the ages of ten and
thirty, at the heart of my absorbing interests and of my
secret delights lay a continued and increased contact with
the Cosmic 'in the solid state'. Already, however, in a
semi-subordinate way, there was the newly emerged attraction
towards vegetal and animal Nature; and, deep below, there
came one day, at the end of that period, my initiation into
the less tangible - but how stimulating! - magni- tudes
disclosed by the investigations of Physics. On either side
of Matter stood Life and Energy: the three columns that
supported my interior visions and felicity.
Because of its apparent fragility
(a point I shall have to return to when I speak of Man) the
living World greatly worried and disconcerted me as a child.
On the one hand, when I thought of Plants and Animals, to
the knowledge of which I was being initiated by my country
life and my father's taste for natural history, I felt quite
certainly drawn towards them by my con- stantly watchful
'Sense of Plenitude'. On the other hand, I had to justify to
myself the interest aroused in me by objects so shockingly
lacking in consistence and so perishable as a flower or an
insect,; and so I created for myself (or did I discover in
myself?) certain mysterious equivalent values whose
psychological connection is not perhaps immediately obvious
but which gave me just the same feeling of intense
satisfaction. For the Solid and In- corruptible, I
substituted the New and the Rare. So far was this carried
that for years, as I now smile to remember, the pursuit in
zoology and palaeontology of 'the new species' became one of
the most important pivots around which my interior life
revolved. It was a dangerous tendency, I must confess, for
there could have been a risk of being dragged into the
morass of collections and collecting for their own sake -
had it not been for two safe- guards: in the first place I
retained my dominant Sense of the Universal, and even as I
felt the glow of satisfaction as I put my hand upon a really
treasured specimen, that sense enabled me to experience
fundamentally only a delight in a more intimate contact (or
a contact I imagined to be such) with what would later
become for me 'the Biosphere'. Secondly, there was the
decisive effect made upon my mind, at the right moment, by
my introduction to physics and physicists.
It was only for three years, in
jersey - and then for another three years, in Cairo (1906-8)
that I studied (so far as I could) and taught (so far as my
incompetence allowed me) a pretty elementary physics: the
pre-quanta, pre-Relativity, pre-atomic- structure physics.
This means that in this field I am, so far as technical
knowledge goes, no more than an amateur - a layman. And yet
I find it difficult to express how much I feel at home in
precisely this world of electrons, nuclei, waves, and what a
sense of plenitude and comfort it gives me. The Consistent,
the Total, the Unique, the Essential of my childhood dreams
- the vast cosmic realities (Mass, Permeability, Radiation,
Curvatures, and so on) through which the Stuff of Things is
disclosed to our experience in a form which is patient at
the same time of being indefinitely reduced to elements and
indefinitely expressed in geometrical terms - that
mysterious Gravity (whose secret I ingenuously promised
myself, at the age of twenty-two, that I would one day
dedicate myself to unlocking): it was surely there that I
met those very 'archetypes' which, as we shall be seeing, I
still use, even when I come to the Christic itself, when I
try to express for my own satisfaction precisely what I
mean.
Linking the Animal World and the
Energy-World lies the common underlying foundation of the
Rock-World. From above this firmly cemented whole there
flooded over me a first wave of the exotic, which sometimes
affected me like a rich tapestry and sometimes seemed to
bring me an invigorating draught of a new atmosphere. This
was the East. I caught glimpses of it, and drank it in
avidly, with no concern for its peoples and their history
(which had not yet begun to interest me) but under the
attraction of its light, its vegetation, its fauna and its
deserts. Such, when I was about twenty-eight years of age,
was the some- what muddled spiritual complex within which my
passionate love of the Universe was smouldering without as
yet the power to burst into open flame.
The truth is that, without
realizing it, I had at that time come to a standstill in my
awakening to Cosmic Life, and I could not start again
without the intervention of a new force or a new
illumination. A dead end: or perhaps I should say a subtly
hidden tendency to drift towards a lower form (the
commonplace, facile form) of the pantheist Spirit, the
pantheism of effusion and dissolution. For, if the initial
call that I had heard was in fact coming from Matter, then
(someone kept whispering within me) why should I not look
for the essence of Matter, for its 'heart', precisely in
that direction in which all things are 'ultra-material-
ized': that is to say, look for it just where I had found
the incredibly simple and inclusive realities to the
discovery of which I had ultimately been led by the Physics
of Energy and the Ether (for we still retained that term in
those days) ? In other words, if I was to escape from the
ruthless fragility of the Multiple, why should I not take my
stance at an even deeper level and burrow, so to speak,
below it?
It was thus that there tended
insidiously to become rooted in me the concern and
preference (completely eastern, beneath their scientific
garb) for a common substratum of the Tangible - Element of
all elements - Support of all substances - which, by a
process of relaxation and diffusion, might be directly
grasped, beyond every determination and every
form.
This meant possession of the World
by self-surrender, by passivity, by disappearing within a
Formless that knows no boundaries - a movement that could be
seen as 'centrifugal communion', inspired by the instinct
for self-extension and self- distension, operating below all
particulate plurality and delimita- tion, on the scale of,
and homogeneous with, the total Sphere...
If I was to be All, I must be fused
with all.
Such was the mystical act to which,
following so many Hindu poets and mystics, I would logically
have been driven by an innate, ungovernable need to attain
self-fulfilment by accession not, indeed, to others, but to
become the Other - had it not been that just at the
appropriate moment the idea of Evolution ger- minated in me,
like a seed: whence it came I cannot say.
c. The Discovery of
Evolution
It was during the years when I was
studying theology at Hastings (that is to say, immediately
after I had experienced such sense of wonder in Egypt) that
there gradually grew in me, as a presence much more than as
an abstract notion, the consciousness of a deep-running,
ontological, total Current which embraced the whole Universe
in which I moved; and this consciousness con- tinued to grow
until it filled the whole horizon of my inner
being.
What were the influences or what
was the sudden jerk that caused this feeling to appear and
drive its roots so deeply into me; how did the process
develop and what were its stages? Those are questions that I
would find very difficult to answer. I can remem- ber very
clearly the avidity with which, at that time, I read
Bergson's Creative Evolution. But apart from my failure in
those days correctly to understand what he meant by
Duration,5 I can now see quite clearly that the only effect
that brilliant book had upon me was to provide fuel at just
the right moment, and very briefly, for a fire that was
already consuming my heart and mind. And that fire had been
kindled, I imagine, simply by the co- incidence in me, under
'monist' high tension, of the three in- flammable elements
that had slowly piled up in the depths of my soul over a
period of thirty years. These were the cult of Matter, the
cult of Life, and the cult of Energy. All three found a
potential outlet and synthesis in a World which had suddenly
acquired a new dimension and had thereby moved from the
fragmented state of static Cosmos to the organic state and
dignity of a Cosniogenesis.
At first, naturally enough, I was
far from understanding and clearly appreciating the
importance of the change I was under- going. All that I can
remember of those days (apart from that magic word
'evolution', which haunted my thoughts like a tune: which
was to me like an unsatisfied hunger, like a promise held
out to me, like a summons to be answered) - all that I can
remember is the extraordinary solidity and intensity I found
then in the English countryside, particularly at sunset,
when the Sussex woods were charged with all that 'fossil'
Life which I was then hunting for, from cliff to quarry, in
the Wealden clay. There were moments, indeed, when it seemed
to me that a sort of universal being was about to take shape
suddenly in Nature before my very eyes. Already, however, I
was no longer trying, as I had tried earlier, to apprehend
and pin down the Ineffable Ambience by looking towards some
'ultra-material'. I was already turning my eyes towards some
'ultra-living'. I had experienced a complete reversal of my
Sense of Plenitude, and since those days I have constantly
searched and progressed in that new direction.
Let me draw attention a little more
closely to this discovery and to the way in which I retraced
my steps.
Until that time my education and my
religion had always led me obediently to accept - without
much reflection, it is true - a fundamental heterogeneity
between Matter and Spirit, between Body and Soul, between
Unconscious and Conscious. These were to me two 'substances'
that differed in nature, two 'species' of Being that were,
in some incomprehensible way, associated in the living
Compound; and it was important, I was told, to maintain at
all costs that the first of those two (my divine Matter!)
was no more than the humble servant of the second, if not,
indeed, its enemy. Thus the second of the two (Spirit) was
by that very fact henceforth reduced for me to being no more
than a Shadow. In principle, it is true, I was compelled to
venerate this shadow but, emotionally and intellectually
speaking, I did not in fact have any live interest in it.
You can well imagine, accordingly, how strong was my inner
feeling of release and expansion when I took my first still
hesitant steps into an 'evolutive' Universe, and saw that
the dualism in which I had hitherto been enclosed was
disappearing like the mist before the rising sun. Matter and
Spirit: these were no longer two things, but two states or
two aspects of one and the same cosmic Stuff, according to
whether it was looked at or carried further in the direction
in which (as Bergson would have put it) it is becoming
itself or in the direction in which it is
disintegrating.
Those phrases, 'to become itself'
or 'to disintegrate', were still, of course, terribly vague,
and it would be several decades before they acquired a
precise meaning in my mind; but in their own way they
sufficed to confirm me permanently in an attitude or choice
which was to govern the whole of my interior develop- ment
and whose chief characteristics may be defined in these
simple words: the primacy of Spirit or, which comes to the
same thing, the primacy of the Future.
Strictly speaking, no doubt, the
mere fact of having seen the disappearance of the alleged
barrier that separates the Within of things from the Without
- or even of having realized that once we have knocked down
that wall we find that an experientially and tangibly
recognizable current runs from what is least conscious in
Nature to what is most conscious - that mere fact, I must
admit, would not by itself suffice to establish beyond
question an absolute superiority of the Animate over the
Inani- mate - of Psyche over Soma. Is there any reason, in
fact, why the Cosmos should not swing at will first to one
pole and then to the other? Or, after a certain number of
oscillations, why should it not finally and unalterably
settle down in the Matter position? . . . Surely these could
be two of any number of evolutionary formulas?
These various problems were
inevitably to present themselves to me later on, and I can
see that I solved them at least for my own personal needs.
What I fmd remarkable is that they did not occur to me at
the very beginning. It may have been the impact of the
clarity of my own instinct (for it seemed so obvious that I
could not be mistaken in attributing to the cosmic movement
that I had just discovered the highest degree of creative
value and permanence); or it may have been an ill-defined
anticipation of Evolution's psychic conditions or demands
(which I was to learn later from the study of Human Energy):
in any case, I never really paused for a moment to question
the idea that the progressive Spiritualization of Matter -
so clearly demonstrated to me by Palaeontology - could be
anything other, or anything less, than an irreversible
process. By its gravitational nature, the Universe, I saw,
was falling - falling forwards - in the direction of Spirit
as upon its stable form. In other words, Matter was not
ultra- materialized as I would at first have believed, but
was instead metamorphosed into Psyche. Looked at not
metaphysically, but genetically, Spirit was by no means the
enemy or the opposite pole of the Tangibility which I was
seeking to attain: rather was it its very heart.
It was to take me a whole lifetime
to appreciate (and even then, alas, by no means completely)
the unendingly constructive and at the same time
revolutionary effect this transposition of value (this
change in the very notion of Spirit) produced upon my
understanding, upon my prayer and action.
Meanwhile, my interior position was
as follows. By the direct leap I had taken from the old
static dualism, which I found para- lysing, to emerge into a
Universe which was in a state not merely of evolution but of
directed evolution (that is, of Genesis) I was obliged to
make a complete about-turn in my fundamental pur- suit of
Consistence. Until that time, as I said earlier, my guiding
Sense of Plenitude tended to point and settle down in the
direction of the 'extremely simple' (in other words, of what
cannot be broken down into physical components). In future,
since the unique and precious essence of the Universe had
assumed for me the form of an 'Evolutive' in which Matter
was transformed into Thought as an extended consequence of
Noogenesis. I found myself inevitably, and paradoxically,
obliged to identify the extreme Solidity of things with an
extreme organic complexity. Yet how could what was most
corruptible become, as a result of synthesis, the supremely
Indestructible? Because I had not yet perceived 'the
biological laws of Union' and recognized the amazing
attributes of a universal Curvature, I was still uncertain
of the solution to that problem; but I no longer doubted but
that the supreme happiness I had formerly looked for in
'Iron' was to be found only in Spirit.
Already, in fact, reassurance was
at hand: two immense living Unities were beginning to rise
over my inner horizon - unities of planetary dimensions in
which I could distinguish, precisely as an effect of an
excess of combination and organicity, the emergence within
the Stuff of the cosmos of an extraordinary capacity for
'consolidation by complexification'.
In one of these my many varied
experiences as a biologist in the field and in the
laboratory were gradually coming together to form a
naturally harmonious pattern. This was the Earth's living
envelope - the Biosphere.
And the other was totalized Mankind
- the Noosphere. But the price I would have to pay for this,
if I was to bring it finally and sharply into focus, was no
less than the spiritual shock of the War.
<Table>
THE
HUMAN, OR THE CONVERGENT
Today Man (or, to speak more
correctly, the Human) forms the pivot upon which the whole
structure of my interior Universe rests, around which its
links are formed and it coheres and moves. Yet the Human was
far from occupying this cardinal position in my picture of
the world immediately and without resistance.
As a result of the awakening in me
of the notion of Evolution, Spirit (as I have just related)
had, in my view, supplanted the Mineral and the Atomic in
their dignity as the immutable and all-embracing essence of
the Universe. But this Spirit, vaguely conceived as some
sort of opposite pole to the physicist's Energy, was still,
in my mind (and was so to remain for a long time) without
any precise structure: two innate and obstinate prejudices
prevented me from facing and coming to terms with the fact
(obvious though it was) that if the World does indeed
represent an organo-dynamic system which is in process of
psychic interiorization, then it is through the Flesh, by
process of Hominization, that Noogenesis
operates.
On the one hand there was the
reaction I mentioned earlier when I was speaking of my first
relationship with Nature: the physico-chemical instability
of organic substances in general, and of the human body in
particular, continued, in spite of all the intellectual
evidence to the contrary, to obscure emotionally my need for
consistence.
On the other hand there was a new
obstacle: the more the primacy of the Cosmic asserted itself
in my mind, and the more I felt its appeal, the more, by
contrast, did the Human confuse and disturb me by the
preponderance assumed at its level by 'the individual', 'the
accidental', 'the artificial' . . . In Man, did not the
Plural inevitably, and disastrously, break through and tear
apart the Universal and the Total? ... It was not merely
that the trees prevented me from seeing the wood - the wood
hardly even seemed to subsist behind them.
Putting it in rather cut and dried
terms, I can, I think, reduce to three the stages I had to
go through in turn, between the ages of thirty and fifty
years, before I could overcome these two forms of inner
reluctance and so at last become fully conscious of the
extraordinary cosmic wealth concentrated in the Phenomenon
of Man:
The first stage introduced me to
the notion of human Planetarity (the existence of a
Noosphere and the disposition of its contours).
The second disclosed to me more
explicitly the critical trans- formation undergone by the
Stuff of the cosmos at the level of Reflection.
And the third led me to the
recognition of the Noosphere's accelerated drift towards
ultra-human states, under the influence of psycho-physical
convergence (or Planetization).
a. The Reality of
the Noosphere
It was only, if I am not mistaken,
in an article on Man, written about 1927 (that is, after my
first visit to China), that I first allowed myself- on the
model of Suess's Biosphere - to use the term Noosphere for
the Earth's thinking envelope. But although the word
appeared in my writings at that comparatively late date, it
was ten years earlier that the vision itself had germinated
in my mind through prolonged contact with the huge masses of
man- kind that were then facing one another in the trenches
of France, from the Yser to Verdun.
The atmosphere of 'the Front': it
was, I am quite sure, from having plunged into that
atmosphere - from having been soaked in it for months and
months on end - and precisely where it was at its most dense
and heavily charged, that I ceased to notice any break (if
not any difference) between 'physical' and 'moral', between
'natural' and 'artificial'. The 'Human-million', with its
psychic temperature and its internal energy, became for me a
magnitude as evolutively, and therefore as biologically,
real as a giant molecule of protein. 1 was later to be
astonished on many occasions to find in my own circle that
those who could not agree with me suffered from a complete
inability to understand that precisely because the
individual human being represents a corpuscular magnitude he
must be subject to the same development as every other
species of corpuscles in the World: that means that he must
coalesce into physical relationships and groupings that
belong to a higher order than his. It is, of course, quite
impossible for him to apprehend these groupings directly as
such (because they are of the order of n+1), but there are
many indications that enable him to recognize perfectly well
their existence and the influences they exercise. This gift
or faculty of perceiving, without actually seeing, the
reality and organicity of collective magnitudes is still
comparatively rare:" but I have no doubt at all (as I said
earlier) that it was the experience of the War that brought
me this awareness and developed it in me as a sixth
sense.
Once I had acquired this
complementary sense, what emerged into my field of
perception was literally a new Universe. By the side of (or
above) the Universe of large Masses, I saw (what I shall
speak of later) the Universe of large Complexes. Looking at
the Earth, my first instinct would originally have been to
give particular consideration to what was most central and
heaviest (the Barysphere, we might say). As things were, my
attention and my interest (still guided by the same
fundamental need for Solidity and Incorruptibility) were
gradually and almost im- perceptibly climbing up from the
extremely simple central core of the Planet to its
ridiculously thin, but dauntingly active and complex,
peripheral layers. It was not merely that I found no
difficulty in apprehending, more or less intuitively, the
organic unity of the living membrane which is stretched like
a film over the lustrous surface of the star which holds us.
There was something more: around this sentient protoplasmic
layer, an ultimate envelope was beginning to become apparent
to me, taking on its own individuality and gradually
detaching itself like a luminous aura. This envelope was not
only conscious but thinking, and from the time when I first
became aware of it, it was always there that I found
concentrated, in an ever more dazzling and consistent form,
the essence or rather the very Soul of the Earth.
b. The Stuff of
the Noosphere
During a first phase of my
apprehension, the feature in the No- osphere which most
attracted my attention was what I would call, if I may, 'its
surface tension'. This is a most exceptional - indeed, a
unique - example in the field of our observation of a living
magnitude, planetary in dimensions, which is strictly and
exclusively self-totalizing. At the bottom we see (as we do
in every 'sphere') ubiquity and solidarity; but above there
is some- thing more, there is organic unity of
operation.
The oneness, or Unicity, of
man stretched like a veil over the confused multitude of
living beings: this astounding singleness in cohesion was in
itself sufficient to catch and fascinate my passion for the
Cosmic-apprehended-in-its-extreme-forms. Nevertheless it was
only a first approximation in the story of my discovery of
the Human - or (which may seem a better way of expressing
it) it was a first break-through which illuminated in three
stages the very nature of the Stuff of the Noosphere con-
sidered from the point of view of its underlying
structure.
Deep down, there is in the
substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui
generis, for self-arrangement and
self-involution.
As we proceed, we find that a
certain degree of vitalized Matter's physico-chemical
arrangement brings a critical point 'of Reflec- tion', which
releases the whole train of the specific properties of the
Human.
Finally, as a result of Reflection,
we find a demand for, and a germinating principle of,
complete and final incorruptibility, which permeates the
very marrow of the Noosphere.
I mentioned earlier the curiously
seductive power that the phenomena of gravity exerted on my
mind while I was still very young. Was it by mere chance
that the place of this mysterious energy, whose study was
technically beyond my powers, was taken by another entity,
as wide in its embrace and as powerful in its attraction,
which gradually became apparent to me in a field that was
both easier for me to work in and closer to the very axis of
Cosmogenesis? This was no longer universal 'attraction'
gradually drawing around itself the cosmic Mass - but that
as yet undiscovered and unnamed power which forces Matter
(as it concentrates under pressure) to arrange itself in
ever larger molecules, differentiated and organic in
structure. Beyond and above the concentration-curve I began
to distinguish the arrange- ment-curve ... not the gentle
drift towards equilibrium and rest, but the irresistible
'Vortex' which, spins into itself, always in the same
direction, the whole Stuff of things, from the most simple
to the most complex: spinning it into ever more
comprehensive and more astronomically complicated nuclei.
And the result of this structural torsion is an increase
(under the influence of interiorization) of consciousness,
or a rise in psychic temperature, in the core of the
corpuscles that are successively produced.
The fantastic whirl of electrons,
nuclei, atoms, extends into, ramifies and intensifies,
unseen, in the deepest recesses of cells and cellular
structure.
In that fundamental maelstrom I
have for thirty years always seen but one thing: the
deceptive superficial tranquillity of vitalized Matter
simplifying, developing its essence, becoming
transfigured.
Vitalized Matter: the fragile
thing, whose apparent insignificance had always until that
time disturbed and disappointed my yearning to
worship.
Vitalized Matter: the delicate foam
that floats precariously on the surface of the planetary
crucible...
...And then suddenly I saw in you
the very consistency of the world; it was welling up in you
like sap, through every fibre, it was leaping up like a
flame.
And as that happened, everything
was bathed in light; my eyes had acquired a new sensitivity
and I saw in things an ordered pattern which fitted the dual
scale of values and of Time.
For in the first place, if Life is
no longer what it might have appeared to be before this
change, an anomaly, an accident, an exception - if, instead,
it is simply the manifestation, reaching its peak in one
particular spot, of a fundamental tide inherent in Matter -
then, the minuteness of the quantity of organic substance at
present scattered throughout space ceases in any way to
detract from its quality. The rarity, in fact, of living
beings is of no import- ance, if that rarity is only the
effect and the visible expression of the difficulties which
the play of chance presents to the emergence ofa
complexiuication-force which is under pressure everywhere in
the Universe.
But there is a further point: as
soon as I had recognized and accepted the great bio-physical
principle of 'maximum arrange- ment' in Matter - which does
not contradict, but rather com- plements or even dominates
the mechanical principle of 'least effort' - as soon as I
had done that, I could see quite clearly that once life has
established a foothold somewhere in the World we might
expect to see it not only expand but (as a result of ultra-
complexifIcation) reach the highest degree of intensity upon
our vitalized planet. It was this that explained the
persistent and irreversible rise of Cerebration and
Consciousness over the surface of the Earth that runs
through the geological eras. It was this, again, that showed
me the full significance of the hominizing phenomenon of
Reflection: Reflection, the 'cosmic' critical point which at
a given moment is inevitably met and traversed by all Matter
as soon as it exceeds a certain degree of psychic
temperature and organization. Reflection: the transition
(which is like a second birth) from simple Life to 'Life
squared'. Reflection: the necessary and sufficient property
that explains the marked dis- continuity - the 'take-off' we
might almost say - that we can observe experientially
between Biosphere and Noosphere.
Matter is the matrix of Spirit.
Spirit is the higher state of Matter.
These two propositions became the
real axis of my inner vision and progress, and in them the
word spirit was henceforth to bear a precise and concrete
meaning. Spirit had become the clearly defined term of a
defined operation.
Nowadays I might well come up
against Freud's Unconscious or any one of the philosophical,
artistic or literary theories of intuition that have become
so fashionable since the First World War. At that time my
position was firmly and permanently established: I had seen,
once and for all, that when the World is left to itself it
does not fall in the direction of obscurity; with all its
vastness and all its weight it falls forward in equilibrium,
towards the light. And in future nothing can make me swerve
from this irrevocable conviction that it is in the form, I
do not say of Concepts, but of Thought that the Stuff of
things gradually concentrates in the pure state, in a cosmic
peak: and this it does in its most stable form, which means
in the form that has become the most completely
irreversible.
However, if this is to be correctly
understood, it calls for some elaboration; and for this I
must now turn not to some bygone period of my life but
rather to the most advanced stage of my inner exploration in
search of the Heart of things.
c. The Evolution
of the Noosphere
There is, fortunately, an ever
increasing number of persons who can overcome certain
ingrained intellectual habits and certain anatomical
illusions and are beginning to distinguish a Noosphere which
is like a halo around the Biosphere; but even among these,
agreement is far from being reached as yet on the question
of determining whether this 'corona' of reflective
pen-terrestrial substance has, or has not, finished its
planetary evolution.
Now, it is precisely on this
crucial question of a standstill in anthropogenesis that, in
the course of these last years, I have come to take up a
decisive attitude: driven to it by the full force of the
evidence I find within myself.
It is already a long time (cf., for
example, How I Believe) since I noted how clearly
Mankind (as we can see from the vestiges of its
non-organization) discloses the possibility, and so the
imminence of, some state of higher unification. Apriori
(judging, that is, from its potentiality for
ultra-arrangement) we could say that hominization is still
going on.
Very well: since 1939, it is the
reality of this organo-psychic current that has constantly
been apparent to me, in the light of the facts, with growing
clarity. And this has had the result of giving a definitive
form to, and a definitive goal for, my innate yearning for
Plenitude and Consistence.
If we were to believe those who
preach a certain sort of 'common sense', we would say that
the process of cosmic involution from which the human
zoological type emerged towards the end of the Tertiary came
to a complete standstill some thousands of years ago. Could
Mankind, they are continually asking us, produce anything
superior to Beethoven or Plato? On the contrary, is my
answer: how can we fail to see that the process of
convergence from which we emerged, body and soul, is
continuing to envelop us more closely than ever, to grip us,
in the form of- under the folds of; we might say - a
gigantic planetary contraction?
The irresistible 'setting' or
cementing together of a thinking mass (Mankind) which is
continually more compressed upon itself by the simultaneous
multiplication and expansion of its individual elements:
there is not one of us, surely, who is not almost
agonizingly aware of this, in the very fibre of his being.
This is one of the things that no one today would even try
to deny: we can all see the fantastic anatomical structure
of a vast phylum whose branches, instead of diverging as
they normally do, are ceaselessly folding in upon one
another ever more closely, like some monstrous inflorescence
- like, indeed, an enormous flower folding-in upon itself;
the literally global physiology of an organism in which
production, nutrition, the machine, research, and the legacy
of heredity are, beyond any doubt, building up to planetary
dimensions; the increasing impossibility of the individual's
attaining economic and intellectual self-sufficiency -
although we recognize all this, why is it that we are still,
for the most part, obstinately blind to the cosmogenic (or,
more correctly, 'noogenic') significance of the phenomenon?
Why, in other words, do we not recognize in the accelerating
totaiization against which we are struggling, sometimes so
desperately, simply the normal continuation at a level above
ourselves of that process which generates Thought on Earth?
Why do we not see that it is a continuing process of
Cerebration?
Technology and Socialization
combined have forced us to recognize that man's vision is
being enlarged in certain fields (particularly in that of
pure Science); but we are still refusing to accept the
possibility of continuing improvement, passed on from one
generation to another, in the actual organ of this vision.
It was from this obstinate prejudice, from this persistent
illusion, that I one day found I had completely shaken
myself free. That, thirty or forty thousand years ago, the
individual power to feel and think reached its peak - at
least for the time being - that is a possibility. But that
Hominization in its essence (that is, the concentration upon
itself of global terrestrial Psychism) should now have come
to a final halt: to my mind, that is formally contradicted
by the fantastic spectacle, staring us in the face, of a
rapidly rising collective Reflection, moving in step with an
increasingly unitary organization.
We have only to look around us to
see how complexity (under compression) and psychic
'Temperature' are still rising: and rising no longer on the
scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This
indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize
the objective, experiential, reality of a directionally
controlled transformation of the Noosphere 'as a
whole'.
Zoologically and psychologically
speaking, Man can at last be seen in the cosmic integrity of
his trajectory, on which, however, he is still at only an
embryonic stage - we look ahead we can already see the
outlines of a wide fringe of ULTRA-HUMAN.
Writing in the year 1950, I can say
that the evolution of my inner vision culminates in the
acceptance of this evident fact, that there is a 'creative'
tide which (as a strict statistic consequence of their
increasing powers of self-determination) is carrying the
human 'mega-molecules' towards an almost unbelievable quasi
'mono-molecular' state; and in that state, as the biological
laws of Union' demand, each ego is destined to be
forced convulsively beyond itself into some mysterious
super-ego.
For a long time now (in fact, ever
since the moment when I saw the balance of the World
reversed from what lies behind to what lies ahead) I have
always had a feeling that at the head of Cosmogenesis there
stands a Pole, not simply of attraction, but of
consolidation - and that means a Pole which imparts the
quality of irreversibility.
And so finally this mysterious
focal point - which is made possible or even demanded by a
maturing of man that cannot biodynamically reach its final
critical point of Ultra-Reflection unless it is fostered and
carried along by a growing hope of immortality - this
mysterious focal point of Noogenesis became experientially
real for me. In one single and irresistible movement, as the
result of convergence, the Incorruptible of which I had
always dreamed was simultaneously becoming universalized and
personalized.
The 'piece of iron' of my first
days has long been forgotten. In its place it is the
Consistence of the Universe, in the form of Omega Point,
that I now hold, concentrated (whether above me or, rather,
in the depths of my being, I cannot say) into one single
indestructible centre, WHICH I CAN LOVE.
<Table>
III.
THE CHRISTIC, OR THE CENTRIC
Preliminary Note: the Reflection or
Revelation of Omega Point
The discovery of Omega brings to a
close what I might call the
natural branch of the inner trajectory I followed. in my
search for the ultimate consistence of the Universe. As we
have just seen, it was not
simply in the vague direction of 'Spirit' but in the
form of a well-defined supra-personal
focal point that a Heart of total Matter was disclosed. to
my experiential quest. Had I been an unbeliever and left
entirely to the promptings of my Sense of Plenitude, I think
that my inner exploration would. have led me
to the same spiritual peak; and it is
even possible that a close rational study of the cosmic
properties of Omega ('the complex
unit in which the organic sum of the
reflective elements of the
World becomes irreversible within a
transcendent Super-ego') would belatedly have led. me, in a
fmal stage, to recognize in an incarnate God. the true
Reflection, on our Noosphere, of the
ultimate nucleus of totalization and
consolidation that is bio-psychologically demanded. by the
evolution of a reflective living
Mass.
To be completely Man, it may well
be that I would. have been
obliged to become
Christian.
But all this is gratuitous
assumption.
The fact is, fortunately for me, I
was born right 1l1to the
Catholic 'phylum'; and that means into
the very centre of the
privileged zone in which the ascending
cosmic force of 'Complexity-Consciousness' joins the
descending (and so drawing up to itself) flood of personal
and personalizing attraction which is introduced between
Heaven and Earth by the influence of
Hominization.
The result of this was that in step
with the spontaneous evolution in me of the innate (or'
chromosomic') cosmic sense analysed above (Sections I and
2), another process (inaugurated in this instance by
upbringing) has never ceased to operate in my mind and
heart: by this I mean the awakening of a certain Christie
Sense. In recording, as I now must, the phases of this
process I shall have once again to return to my childhood
memories.
The cosmic sense and the christic
sense: these two axes were born in me quite independently of
one another, it would seem, and it was only after a long
time and a great deal of hard work that I finally came to
understand how, through and beyond the Human, the two were
linked together, converged upon one another, and were in
fact one and the same
a. The Heart
oJJesus
For all its unitive and
'communicant' power, and for all the emotional charge that
from the very beginning resulted from that power, my contact
with, and consciousness of the Universe was bound, if left
on its own, never to go beyond a certain comparatively low
degree of intimacy and warmth. Moving along the cosmic and
biological road, Omega Point always lay just outside my
grasp; this was because of a logical reconstruction which
presented me with a 'deduced and conjectural' Entity rather
than one entered into and experienced. A meeting of Centre
with Centre, of Heart with Heart, these were anticipated
rather than realized. On my part, no doubt, there was an
effort of passionate intensity - but as yet there was no
real love. In consequence there was a whole world between
the two con-cerned.
It called for a spark to fall upon
me, if the glow was to burst into flame.
That spark, through which 'my
Universe', as yet but half personalized, was to
attain centricity by being amorized, that spark
undoubtedly came to me through my mother: it was through her
that it reached me from the current of Christian mysticism
and both illuminated and inflamed my childish
soul.
Later, I was often to be astonished
at seeing the extreme diffi-culty that many well disposed
minds (many hungry minds, even) found in conceiving the mere
possibility of a super-hominized love.
This was far from being the case
with me.
Was this simply the effect of my
earliest upbringing? Or was it, perhaps, the result of a
certain 'psychic mutation' which gradually makes the
Noosphere sensitive to the influences of Omega in the
vicinity of the Christian axis? Or was it both at the same
time?
Those are questions I cannot
answer.
All I know is, that thanks to a
sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have
never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least
difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme
SOMEONE. So true is this that I now understand that a
certain 'love of the Invisible' has always been active in
me, parallel to the 'congenital' cosmic sense which, as we
have seen, is the 'backbone' of my inner life.
This appetite was a gift to me from
Heaven, and after it had first, working undetected,
nourished my innate appetite for the Earth it
ultimately came out into the open and effected a confluence
with it. And this it did through a process of
universalization, whose first two phases may be described,
as I remember them, as a 'materialization', soon to be
followed by an 'energizing', of the notion of divine
Love.
To take the 'materialization' of
Divine Love first.
Biologically speaking, how could it
have been otherwise in my case?
Sucked in with my mother's milk, a
'supernatural' Sense of the Divine had flowed into me side
by side with the 'natural' Sense of Plenitude. Each of these
two appetites strove to be exclusive, but neither could wipe
out the other. The only conceivable result of their
conflict, therefore, was an assimilation of the supernatural
(the less primitive and, genetically speaking, the more
external) by the natural. And the only way in which the
assimilation could be effected was by an interior adjustment
of the Divine to the Evolutive: that is to say, an
adjustment to the psychological law, proper to my nature, of
being unable to worship anything except from a
starting-point in the Tangible and Resistant.
My progress in this direction was
made easier by the fact that 'my mother's God' was
primarily, for me as much as for her, the incarnate Word.
This sufficed for the establishment of a first contact,
through the Humanity of Jesus, between the two halves of my
fundamental being, the 'Christian' and the 'pagan'. It was
precisely in that contact, however, that there reappeared
the difficulty I have already mentioned of perceiving 'the
Con-sistence of the Human'.
How strange and ingenuous are the
reactions that take place in the brain of a child I I can
remember so well (see below, note 8) witnessing for the
fIrst time the distressing sight of a lock of hair being
burnt up in the fIre, and how my disappointment with the
Organic instantaneously reacted on the very person of
Christ. . . If I was to be able fully to worship Christ, it
was essential that as a first step I should be able to give
him 'solidity'.
And it was at this point in the
story of my spiritual life that there emerged (and now I
must beg my reader to suppress his smile) the central,
seminal, part played by the 'devotion' with which my mother
constantly sustained me: devotion to the Heart of Jesus,
little though she suspected the transformations that were to
be effected in it by my insatiable yearning for cosmic
Organicity.
Everybody knows the historical
background of the cult of the Sacred Heart (or of the Love
of Christ): how it was always latent in the Church and then
in the France of Louis XIV assumed an astonishingly vigorous
form, which was at the same time oddly limited both in the
object to which it was directed ('Reparation') and in its
symbol (tle heart of our Saviour, depicted with curjously
anatomical realism !).
The remains of this narrow view can
still, unfortunately, be seen today, both in a form of
worship which is always obsessed by the idea of sin and in
an iconography which we must needs deplore without too much
vexation. For my own part, however, I can say that at no
time has its influence held the least attraction for my
piety.
For the pious person of the
seventeenth century the 'Sacred Heart' was, in effect, 'a
part' (both material and formal) of Jesus a selected,
detached, part of the Redeemer: as happens when we isolate
and enlarge some detail of a picture in order to be able to
admire it more conveniently. My own experience was quite
different. The moment I saw a mysterious patch of crimson
and gold delineated in the very centre of the Saviour's
breast, I found what I was looking for a way of finally
escaping from everything that so distressed me in the
complicated, fragile and
individual organization of the Body
of Jesus. It was an astounding release! Not by a mere
adjustment of the aperture (as in a camera), but as an
effect of convergence and concentration, the
whole
physical and spiritual reality of
Christ was visibly condensed for me into a well-defmed,
compact object from which all accidental and restrictive
particularity disappeared: the fIrst approach of a Christie
beyond Christ, disclosing a remarkable homology between this
new 'milieu' and the Metallic or Mineral which,
at
that very same time, were dominant
in me on the other side of the walJ that still ran across my
soul.
It would be difficult for me to
convey how deeply and force-fully, and with what continuity
(long before the notion of the 'Universal-Christ' became
explicitly coherent in me) my religious life in the pre-war
years developed under the sign of the Heart of Jesus,
understood in this way, and with the sense of wonder it
aroused in me. At that time, the more I tried to pray, the
more deeply did God 'materialize' for me in a reality that
was at once spiritual and tangible; in that reality, though
as yet I hardly guessed it, the great synthesis was
beginning to be effected in which my life's whole effort was
to be summed up: the synthesis of the Above with the
Ahead.
It was the immersion of the Divine
in the Corporeal: and an inevitable reaction brought the
transfiguration (or transmutation) of the Corporeal into an
incredible Energy of Radiation.
In a first stage, my mother's
Christ was in some way' de-individualized' for me into a
form that was 'substantially' hardly representational. But
then came a second stage when this humano-divine 'solid'
(like my earlier piece of iron, and under the same psychic
pressure) lit up and exploded from within. There was no
longer a patch of crimson in the centre of Jesus, but a
glowing core of fire, whose splendour embraced every contour
first those of the God-Man and then those of all things that
lay within his ambience.
I was still not yet 'in theology'
when, through and under the symbol of the 'Sacred Heart',
the Divine had already taken on for me the form, the
consistence and the properties of an ENERGY, of a FIRE: by
that I mean that it had become able to insinuate itself
everywhere, to be metamorphosed into no matter what; and so,
in as much as it was patient of being universalized, it
could in future force its way into, and so amorize, the
cosmic Milieu in which at exactly the same moment I was
(through another half of myself) engaged in making my
home.
b. The Universal
Christ
On one side - in my 'pagan' ego - a
Universe which was becoming personalized through
convergence.
And on the other side - in my
Christian ego - a Person (the Person of Christ) who was
becoming universalized through Radiation.
By each of these two roads, that is
to say, the Divine was joining itself, through all Matter,
to all the Human, in the direction of the infinity of the
ages lying ahead…
It is in this confluence, through
complementary channels, of Heaven and the World, that the
advances (and, I must not forget to add, the conflicts) of
my interior life have continually been realized: always,
moreover, as the years go by, with ever greater clarity and
passion.
Let us try, then, to understand
both the advances and the conflicts.
1. The
Conflicts
Speaking in general terms we may
say that until quite recent times, and in the West,
mysticism (even Christian mysticism) has never doubted but
that God must be looked for only 'in heaven', that is to say
in more or less direct and profound dis-continuity with
'here below'.
To be spiritualized = to be
de-materialized.
Such was (and such, in a static
Cosmos, had to be) the basic equation that expresses
Holiness.
Yet all the time (as we have seen)
the natural movement of my thought had been carrying me not,
indeed, in the opposite direction to, but athwart this
traditional orientation. For me, Matter was the matrix of
Consciousness ; and, wherever we looked, Consciousness, born
of Matter, was always advancing towards some Ultra-Human. In
other words, a second species of Spirit was emerging and
this species was no longer directly above our heads it lay
transversely, appearing, we might say, on the horizon. . .
In the inmost depths of my soulls a struggle, between the
God of the Above and a sort of new God of the Ahead was,
through structural necessity, being produced by the
definitive co-existence and the irresistible meeting in my
heart of the cosmic Sense and the Christie Sense.
I can look back and distinguish the
first traces of this opposition in my years at school, when
I remember my pathetic attempts to reconcile the evangelism
(over-narrow, we must admit) of the Imitation, on which I
drew for my morning prayers, with the attraction I found in
Nature. Later, as a 'junior' in Jersey, I seriously
considered the possibility of completely giving up the
'Science of Rocks', which I then found so exciting, in order
to devote myself entirely to so-called 'supernatural'
activities. And if I did not at that time 'run off the
rails', it is to the robust common sense of Pere T. (the
novice-master) that I owe it. In the event, Pere T. confined
himself to assuring me that what the God of the Cross was
looking for in me was the 'natural' expansion of my being as
well as its sanctification - without explaining how or why.
What he said, however, was enough to leave me with a firm
grasp of both ends of the line. And so I emerged from that
trial unscathed. Gradually, through the synthesis which is
effected. by experience, detachment and attachment,
renunciation and development, automatically came together as
one within me: and this was realized in a deliberate change
of direction to the transverse. I explained the theory of
this, about 1927, in the first chapter of Le Milieu
Divin. Nevertheless, theory is still a long way from
practice. Even today I am still learning by experience the
dangers to which - by an inner law and necessity - he is
exposed who finds himself led away from the well-beaten but
now under-humanized path of a certain traditional ascesis,
as he seeks in the direction of Heaven for a road (a road
which is not a mean but a synthesis) where the whole
dynamism of Matter and Flesh is directed into the genesis of
Spirit.
Supposing a man, in all sincerity
of heart, has one day made up his mind to do what every man
who seeks for holiness will increasingly find himself
obliged to do: that is, to allow the ascensional Faith in
God and the forward-driving Faith in the Ultra-human to
react freely upon one another in the depths of his being -
then such a man will at times be unable to shake off a
feeling of terror. He will not be able to hold back, but he
will be frightened by the novelty, the boldness and at the
same time the paradoxical potentialities of attitudes that
he finds himself, intellectually and emotionally, obliged to
adopt if he is to be faithful to his fundamental aim: which
is to attain Heaven by bringing Earth to its
fulfilment.
To Christify Matter: that sums up
the whole venture of my innermost being. . . a grand and
glorious venture; (and I still tremble often, even as I
pursue it) - but I found it impossible not to hazard myself
in it, so powerful was the force with which the levels of
the Universal and the Personal came together and gradually
closed up, over my head, to form one single
vault.
2. Conflict becomes
Progress
Christ. His Heart. A Fire: a fire
with the power to penetrate all things - and which was now
gradually spreading unchecked.
At the root of this invasion and
envelopment I can distinguish, I believe, the rapidly
increasing importance that was being assumed in my spiritual
life by the Sense of 'the Will of God' : fidelity to the
divine Will, by which I mean fidelity to a directed and
realized omnipresence, which can be apprehended both
actively and passively in every element of the W orId and in
all its events. Although at first I did not precisely
realize the bridge by which this eminently Christian
attitude connected my love of Christ and my love of Things,
nevertheless I have always, ever since the first years of my
religious life, gladly surrendered myself to this active
feeling of communion with God through the Universe. It was a
decisive emergence of this 'pan-Christic' mysticism, finally
matured in the two great atmospheres of Asia and the War,
that was reflected in 1924 and 1927 by The Mass on the
World and Le Milieu Divin.
A decisive emergence, let me repeat
- and one that I could at that time regard as complete. In
fact, however, it still lacked something that was needed for
its full release.
Let me explain what this
was.
Today, when I re-read the so
undisguisedly fervent pages of Le Milieu Divin, I am
astonished to find how fully all the essential features of
my Christo-cosmic vision were already determined at the time
I wrote the book. On the other hand, I note with some
surprise the vagueness and fluidity of the picture of the
Universe that I still had in those days.
It is true that as a basis for the
pan-communion by which I was then obsessed and intoxicated,
I already possessed a World made up of organically woven
elements and organically linked layers. But this enveloping
organicity, the specific foundation of the Christie
Diaphany, still existed for me, both spiritually and
sensibly, in a form that I can only describe as diffuse. At
that time, about 1930, the Convergence of the cosmos, with
its whole train of consequent ideas (the Law of
Complexity-Consciousness, the Confluence of human branches,
the existence of an Omega Point at the head of Noogenesis) -
none of that had as yet become distinctly clear to me. My
then 'Weltanschauung' did not go far beyond a vast
Plurality, whose nebula was illuminated by, but not yet
concentrated in, the rays of the divine Star.
It was to be the task and the
never-ending delight of the next twenty years to see, as I
looked around me, how - step by step, and in step with one
another - the two Densities came to reinforce one another:
the Christie Density, and the cosmic Density of a World
whose 'communicant power' I could see constantly rising as
its 'convergent power' also rose.
At first, if! was to 'mould and
experience' Christ in all things, all that I had at hand for
this purpose was only the detail of events and beings.
Gradually, as my mind came to understand the reality of the
one vast psychogenic involution of the whole of Matter upon
itself, so each new circle that I traced out in this
fantastic spiral was to give solidity to the divine
Ascendancy and to make me more tangibly conscious of its
grasp.
Not in a metaphysical but in a
physical sense, the Energy of Incarnation was to flow into,
and so illuminate and give warmth to, ever wider and more
tightly encircling forms of embrace.
And this led up to the moment when
the upper term of that movement was reached, and it became
possible to discern a wonderful confluence: no longer merely
in a vague way between Christ and Matter, but between a
Christ who was distinctly seen as 'evolver' and a cosmic
Centre which was positively attributed to
Evolution.
Thus I reached the Heart of the
universalized Christ coinciding with the heart of amorized
Matter.
c. The Divine
Milieu
As a result of the particular
structure of a mind polarized simultaneously in the plane of
Heaven and in that of Earth, there was a danger, as we have
seen, that two tendencies might cause the progress of my
evolution to deviate as it advanced. If I followed the
eastern and pagan line, I might allow my being to relax and
dissolve into the universal Sphere. Or I might do the exact
opposite and try to escape from that Sphere by tearing
myself away or making a sharp cleavage. These were my Scylla
and Charybdis, retrogressive materialization or dehumanizing
spiritualization; and if, by the grace of God, I managed to
avoid them both, it was because the day came when I saw that
a W orId which had already been recognized as essentially
convergent offered a third road towards Unity: and the right
road, too. This consisted in reaching, at the heart of the
cosmic Sphere, the mysterious double point where the
Multiple, now completely ordered in its own organic
structure, is reflected upon itself and so emerges from
within into a Transcendent.
Here we move into what is indeed a
remarkable, an astonishing, region where the Cosmic, the
Human and the Christie meet and so open up a new domain, the
Centric; and there the manifold oppositions which constitute
the unhappiness and anxieties of our life begin to
disappear.
Under the irresistible pressure of
a planet that is contracting upon itself, we constantly
feel, in ourselves and all around ourselves, a heightening
of the antagonism between the 'tangential' forces that make
us dependent upon one another, and the 'radial' aspirations
that urge us towards attaining the incommunicable core of
our own person. We recoil from the prospect of an inevitable
totalization which threatens to imprison us in a sort of
'secondary Matter' made up of a mass of accumulated
determinisms. We are terrified, too, when we see that
mechanization may bring an end that is as much to be dreaded
as a death through disintegration and return to 'Prime
Matter'.
It is like a dream; we feel that we
are caught up in the gyrations of some infernal
circle.
And yet, it is from this very
nightmare, in fact, that we are awoken by the first rays of
a universal Centre of convergence and attraction, in which
the bonds that make us one whole reach the upper limit of
their complexity and then tend to merge into the magnetic
force that pulls our ego ever more rapidly into what lies
ahead. This is the miraculous effect that is specific to the
Centric, which docs not dissolve nor subordinate the
elements it brings together, but personalizes them. And this
because its way of absorbing them is constantly to
'centrify' them more and more. We may, indeed, say that at
these high latitudes of the Universe Totalization reduces
the Multiple to the One by synthesis, and so acts as a
liberating agent. In other words, Matter becomes Spirit at
just the same pace as love begins to spread
universally.
From the first moment, of course,
when, to my inner eye, 'the Gold of Spirit' replaced 'the
Crimson of Matter' and started to swing towards 'the
Incandescence of Some One', the WorId had begun, at least as
a logical consequence, to affect me emotionally as a blaze
of fire. By the mere appearance at the peak of Evolution of
the Personal, the Universe was potentially becoming for me
something that loved and could be loved. Even so, it called
for nothing short of the coincidence of Christ with Omega
Point for my eyes to be opened, in an explosion of dazzling
flashes, to the astonishing phenomenon of a general global
conflagration - the effect of total amorization.
Love. . . since all time, this
strange force has puzzled and fascinated the masters of
human thought by its ubiquity, its fiery vigour and the
infinitely variegated spectrum of the forms it assumes; but
I now see that it is only in the Christo-centric area of a
noogenetic Universe that it is released in the pure state
and so displays its astonishing power to transform
everything and replace everything.
From the point of view of the
convergent Evolution to which sixty years of varied
experience and of thought has introduced me and in which I
am now at home, the whole cosmic Event may be reduced in its
essence to one single vast process of arrangement, whose
mechanism (that is, the use of the effects of Large Numbers
and the play of Chance) is governed by statistical
necessity: so that at every moment it releases a given
quantity of events that cause distress (failures,
disintegrations, death. . . ) There are two sides to this
operation, the constructive and the destructive; and when
Christ is installed at Omega Point it is both these two
sides that are covered and permeated by a flood of unitive
force. In one great surge, Cosmogenesis becomes
personalized, both in the things it adds, which centrify us
for Christ, and in the things it subtracts, which draw us
out of our own centres onto him; thus it suddenly takes on,
even in its most inexorable and most veiled determinisms,
the form of a contact at innumerable points with a supreme
Pole of attraction and completion. A current of love is all
at once released, to spread over the whole breadth and depth
of the W orId: and this it does not as though it were some
super-added warmth of fragrance, but as a fundamental
essence which will metamorphose all things, assimilate and
take the place of all . . .
For a long time Science has made us
familiar with the idea that all physical energy, if traced
back evolutively 'to the bottom', tends to dissipate into
heat within a WorId that has lost tension and vitality. Is
it not most remarkable that an integral Energetics of the
Universe should lead us in the end to a concept that exactly
matches and complements our former idea? If it is taken to
its limit in the direction of a cosmic pole of unification,
everything we experience and even everything we see displays
a singular 'bias' for transforming itself into love.
This means that while love seemed initially to be no more
than the charm, the allure, and then, later, the operative
essence of all spiritual activity, it tends gradually, as
experienced by us, to become the chief part of that activity
- and finally its only, and supreme, form.
Sola caritas . .
.
When all is said and done, I can
see this: I managed to climb up to the point where the
Universe became apparent to me as a great rising surge, in
which all the work that goes into serious enquiry, all the
will to create, all the acceptance of suffering, converge
ahead into a single dazzling spear-head - now, at the end of
my life, I can stand on the peak I have scaled and continue
to look ever more closely into the future, and there, with
ever more assurance, see the ascent of God.
d. Towards the
Discovery of God, or an Appeal to Him who
Comes
For a long time, absorbed in the
delight of seeing how every single thing around me was
simultaneously centred, consolidated and amorized, I
confined my attention to one thing only in the vast
phenomenon of Classification which the coincidence of the
World and God disclosed to me; and that was the rise within
my own self of the forces of Communion. Everything was
directed towards the intensification of the Stuff of the
cosmos, so that in that Stuff the Presence of God might be
intensified for me. I can see quite clearly how the
inspiration behind 'The Mass on the W orId' and Le Milieu
Divin and their writing belong to that somewhat self-centred
and self-enclosed period of my interior life.
The reason for this was that by one
of those odd effects of inhibition that so often prevent us
from recognizing what is staring us in the face, I failed to
understand that as God 'meta-morphized' the W orId from the
depths of matter to the peaks of Spirit, so in addition the
World must inevitably and to the same degree 'endomorphize'
God. As a direct consequence of the unitive process by which
God is revealed to us, he in some way 'transforms himself'
as he incorporates us. So, it is no longer a matter of
simply seeing Him and allowing oneself to be enveloped and
penetrated by Him - we have to do more: we have pari
passu (if not first of all) to disclose Him (or even, in
one sense of the word, 'complete' Him) ever more fully.
Such, today, seems to me the essential step to be taken by
hominized Evolution, and such its essential
concern.
All around us, and within our own
selves, God is in process of 'changing', as a result of the
coincidence of his magnetic power and our own Thought. As
the 'Quantity of cosmic Union' rises, so his brilliance
increases and the glow of his colouring grows richer. There
at last we recognize, and can express in words, the Great
Event, the Great Tidings.
Ever since my childhood an
enigmatic force had been impelling me, apparently in
conflict with the 'Supernatural', towards some Ultra-human;
and in trying to pin it down I had become accustomed to
regard it as emanating not from God but from some rival
Star. All I had to do, then, was to bring that Star into
conjunction with God and dependence upon Him.
The time had now come when I could
see one thing: that, from the depths of the cosmic future as
well as from the heights of Heaven, it was still God, it was
always the same God, who was calling me. It was a God
of the Ahead who had suddenly appeared athwart the
traditional God of the Above, so that henceforth we can
no longer worship fully unless we superimpose those two
images so that they form one.
A new Faith in which the
ascensional Faith that rises up towards a Transcendent, and
the propulsive Faith that drives towards an Immanent, form a
single compound - a new Charity in which all the Earth's
dynamic passions combine as they are divinized: it is this,
I now see with a vision that will never leave me, that the
World is desperately in need of at this very moment, if it
is not to collapse.
Classical metaphysics had
accustomed us to seeing in the World - which it regarded as
an object of 'Creation' - a sort of extrinsic product which
had issued from God's supreme efficient power as the fruit
of his overflowing benevolence. I find myself now
irresistibly led - and this precisely because it enables me
both to act and to love in the fullest degree - to a view
that harmonizes with the spirit of St Paul: I see in the
World a mysterious product of completion and fulfilment for
the Absolute Being himself. It is no longer participated
Being of extraposition and divergence, but participated
Being of pleromization and convergence. It is the
effect, no longer of creative Causality, but of creative
Union.
At the same time, too, I see that
it is Christ who first makes himself 'cosmic' and then in
some way makes himself 'absolute'.
There is an objection that we more
and more often hear raised by Gentiles against Christians:
that, by the very fact of the interposition of Jesus between
Man and God, our notion of God is arrested and, we might
say, atrophied in its developments. As a result, they say,
Christianity no longer stimulates the need to worship, for
the modern mind, but rather paralyses it. How often have I
myself come close to believing this - and how often, quite
apart from that, have I not heard it said!
It is as though we believed in a
Christ who diminished the stature of God. . .
How quickly, however, and how
permanently, that fatal suspicion vanishes the very moment
we become sensitive to the mysticism of today and so
perceive that precisely because of those characteristics
that would at first appear to confine him too strictly to
the particular, an historically incarnate God is on
the contrary the only God who can satisfy not only the
inflexible laws of a Universe in which nothing is produced
or appears except by way of birth, but also the
irrepressible aspirations of our own mind.
For the basic truth is:
If we say 'God of the Above' + 'God
of the Ahead', what does this new equation, fundamental to
all Religion in the future, give us if not an ultimate whose
dimensions are 'theocosmic', that is christic?
In a system of Creative Union, it
is not only the Universe but God himself who is necessarily
'Christified' in Omega, at the upper limits of Cosmogenesis.
In other words, 'evolved' Monotheism, around which all that
is best in the Earth's religious energies undoubtedly seems
to be concentrating, is moving to its logical and biological
fulfilment in the direction of some
Pan-Christism.
With no limit to his capacity for
being extended and adapted to theW orId's new dimension and,
in addition, with an inexhaustible charge of evolutive
energy for our hearts - so there is growing in our
firmament, to the scale of and at the demand of the
Ultra-human, a true Super-Christ, in all the
radiance of Super-Charity.
Prayer to the Ever-Greater
Christ
Because, Lord, by every innate
impulse and through all the hazards of my life I have been
driven ceaselessly to search for you and to set you in the
heart of the universe of matter, I shall have the joy, when
death comes, of closing my eyes amidst the splendour of a
universal transparency aglow with fire. . .
It is as if the fact of bringing
together and connecting the two poles, tangible and
intangible, external and internal, of the world which bears
us onwards had caused everything to burst into flames and
set everything free.
In the guise of a tiny babe in its
mother's arms, obeying the great law of birth, you came,
Lord Jesus, to swell in my infant soul; and then, as you
re-enacted in me - and in so doing extended the range of -
your growth through the Church, that same humanity which
once was born and dwelt in Palestine began now to spread out
gradually everywhere like an iridescence of un-numbered hues
through which, without destroying anything, your presence
penetrated - and endued with supervitality - every other
presence about me.
And all this took place
because, in a universe which was disclosing itself to me as
structurally convergent, you, by right of your resurrection,
had assumed the dominating position of all-inclusive Centre
in which everything is gathered together.
A fantastic molecular swarm which -
either falling like snow from the inmost recesses of the
Infinitely Diffuse - or on the other hand surging up like
smoke from the explosion of some Infinitely Simple - an
awe-inspiring multitude, indeed, which whirls us around in
its tornado! . . . It is in this terrifying granular Energy
that you, Lord - so that I may be able the better to touch
you, or rather, who knows? to be more closely embraced by
you - have clothed yourself for me: nay, it is of this that
you have formed your very Body. And for many years I saw in
it no more than a wonderful contact with an already
completed Perfection. . .
Until that day, and it was only
yesterday, when you made me realize that when you espoused
Matter it was not merely its Immensity and its Organicity
that you had taken on: what you did was to absorb,
concentrate, and make entirely your own, its unfathomable
reserves of spiritual energies.
So true is this that ever since
that time you have become for my mind and heart much more
than He who was and who is; you have become He who shall
be.
For some of your servants, Lord,
the World, our New World - the world of nuclei, of atoms and
genes - has become a source of constant anxiety: because it
seems to us now so mobile, so irresistible, and so big! The
increasing probability (to which we conspire to close our
eyes) of other thinking planets in the firmament. . . the
unmistakable rebound of an evolution that has become
capable, through planetary effort, of governing its own
direction and speed. . . the rising over our horizon, as an
effect of ultra-reflection, of an Ultra-human. . . all this
seems frightening to a man who, as he still shrinks from
flinging himself into the great ocean of Matter, is afraid
that he may see his God burst asunder in the acquisition of
a new dimension. . .
Yet can anything, Lord, in fact do
more for my understanding and my soul to make you an object
of love, the only object of love, than to see that you - the
Centre ever opened into your own deepest core - continue to
grow in intensity, that there is an added glow to your
lustre, at the same pace as you pleromize yourself by
gathering together the Universe and subjecting it ever more
fully at the heart of your being ('until the time for
returning, You and the World in You, to the bosom of Him
from whom You came') ?
The more the years go by, Lord, the
more I believe that I can see that in myself and in the
world around me the most important though unvoiced concern
of modern Man is much less a struggle for the possession of
the W orId than a search for a way of escaping from it. The
agony of feeling that one is imprisoned in the cosmic
Bubble, not so much spatially as ontologically! The fretful
hunt for a way out for Evolution - or, more exactly, for its
point of focus! In the modern world, that is the sorrow, the
price to be paid for a growing planetary Reflection, that
lies heavy, but as yet hardly recognized, on the soul of
both Christian and Gentile.
As mankind emerges into
consciousness of the movement that carries it along, it has
a continually more urgent need of a Direction and a Solution
ahead and above, to which it will at last be able to
consecrate itself.
Who, then is this God, no longer
the God of the old Cosmos but the God of the new
Cosmogenesis - so constituted precisely because the effect
of a mystical operation that has been going on for two
thousand years has been to disclose in you, beneath the
Child of Bethlehem and the Crucified, the moving Principle
and the all-embracing Nucleus of the World itself? Who is
this God for whom our generation looks so eagerly? Who but
you, Jesus, who represent him and bring him to
us?
Lord of consistence and union, you
whose distinguishing mark and essence is the power
indefinitely to grow greater, without distortion or loss of
continuity, to the measure of the mysterious Matter whose
Heart you fill and all whose movements you ultimately
control - Lord of my childhood and Lord of my last days -
God, complete in relation to yourself and yet, for us,
continually being born - God, who, because you offer
yourself to our worship as 'evolver' and' evolving', are
henceforth the only being that can satisfy us - sweep away
at last the clouds that still hide you - the clouds of
hostile prejudice and those, too, of false
creeds.
Let your universal Presence spring
forth in a blaze that is at once Diaphany and Fire.
O ever-greater Christ!
<Table>
CONCLUSION
The Feminine, or
the Unitive
The living heart of the Tangible is
the Flesh. And for Man the Flesh means Woman.
Ever since my childhood I had been
engaged in the search for the Heart of Matter, and so it was
inevitable that sooner or later I should come up against the
Feminine. The only curious thing is that in the event it was
not until my thirtieth year that this happened: so powerful
was the fascination that the Impersonal and the Generalized
held for me.
It was, therefore, a strange
time-lag.
On the other hand, it was
rewarding, because the new energy entered into my soul at
the very moment, on the eve of the war, when my Sense of the
Cosmos and Sense of Man were emerging from their childhood;
thus there was no longer any danger that it might divert or
dissipate my forces. Instead, it was super-imposed, at just
the right moment, on a world of spiritual aspirations whose
vastness, still a little lacking in warmth, needed only that
energy in order to ferment and become com-pletely
organized.
As I tell the story in these pages
of my inner vision, I would b leaving out an essential
element, or atmosphere, if I did not add in conclusion that
from the critical moment when I rejected many of the old
moulds in which my family life and my religion had formed me
and began to wake up and express myself ir terms that were
really my own, I have experienced no form of
self-development without some feminine eye turned on me some
feminine influence at work.
When I say this, you will
understand, of course, that I mean simply that general,
half-worshipping, homage which sprang from the depths of my
being and was paid to those women whose warmth and charm
have been absorbed, drop by drop, into the life-blood of my
most cherished ideas.
In such a matter it is impossible
for me to use exact language or to draw an exact picture, -
on the other hand, what I can speak about with certainty is
a double conviction that progressively asserted itself in me
from my contact with facts; let me, now that I can write
with all the serenity and impartiality that come with years,
tell you about this.
In the first place, it seems to be
indisputable (both logically and factually) that there can
be for man - even if he be devoted to the service of a Cause
or of a God, and however great that devotion -no road to
spiritual maturity or plenitude except through some
'emotional' influence, whose function is to sensitize his
under. standing and stimulate, at least initially, his
capacity for love Every day supplies more irrefutable
evidence that no man at al can dispense with the Feminine,
any more than he can dispense with light, or oxygen, or
vitamins.
Secondly, however primordial in
human psychism the plenifying encounter of the sexes may be,
and however essential to its structure, there is nothing to
prove (indeed, the opposite is much more true) that we yet
have an exact idea of the functioning of this fundamental
complementarity or of the best forms in which i1 can be
effected. We have a marriage that is always polarized,
socially, towards reproduction, and a religious perfection
that is always represented, theologically, in terms of
separation: and there can be no doubt but that we lack a
third road between the two. I do not mean a middle road, but
a higher, a road that is demanded by the revolutionary
transformation that has recently been effected in our
thought by the transposition of the notion of 'spirit'. For
the spirit that comes from dematerialization, we have seen,
we have substituted the spirit that comes from synthesis.
Materia matrix. It is no longer a matter of retreating (by
abstin-ence) from the unfathomable spiritual powers that
still lie dor-mant under the mutual attraction of the sexes,
but of conquering them by sublimation. Such, I am ever more
convinced, is the hidden essence of Chastity, and such the
magnificent task that awaits it.
Both those assertions fall into
place and are justified if we look at them from the
following point of view:
In my interpretation of Noogenesis,
I have so far emphasized the phenomenon of individual
super-centration, which causes the consciousness of the
corpuscular to fold back upon itself and thence rebound in
the form of Thought. But now an essential complement to this
great cosmic event of Reflection becomes apparent to the
informed eye, and it takes the form of what we might call
'the Break-through into Amorization'. Even after the flash
of illumination in which the individual is suddenly revealed
to himself, elementary Man would remain but half complete if
he did not come into contact with the other sex and so,
under the centric attraction of person-to-person, explode
into flame.
First, we have the appearance of a
reflective monad, and then, to complete it, the formation of
an affective dyad.
And, after that, and only after
that (that is, starting from this first spark) all that we
have described follows in sequence - the gradual and
majestic development of a Neo-cosmic, of an Ultra-human, and
of a Pan-Christie. . .
All three not only illuminated in
their very roots by Intelli-gence, but also impregnated
throughout their entire mass,
as though bonded by a unifying
cement,
by the Universal
Feminine.
Paris, 30 October
1950
<Table>
HYMN TO
MATTER
'Blessed be you, harsh matter,
barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence,
you who force us to work if we would eat.
'Blessed be you, perilous matter,
violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we fetter
you will devour us.
'Blessed be you, mighty matter,
irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you
who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force
us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the
truth.
'Blessed be you, universal matter,
immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars
and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and
dissolving our narrow standards or measure-ment reveal to us
the dimensions of God.
'Blessed be you, impenetrable
matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world
of essences, cause us to languish with the desire to pierce
through the seamless veil of phenomena.
'Blessed be you, mortal matter: you
who one day will undergo the process of dissolution within
us and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart of
that which exists.
'Without you, without your
onslaughts, without your up-rootings of us, we should remain
all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of
ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our
wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and
build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls,
the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter,
that 1 bless.
'I bless you, matter, and you 1
acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing
preachers depict you, debased, dis-figured - a mass of brute
forces and base appetites - but as you reveal yourself to me
today, in your totality and your true nature.'You 1 acclaim
as the inexhaustible |