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THE SPIRITUAL POWER OF
MATTER
And as they went on
walking and talking together, behold a fiery chariot and
fiery horses parted them both. asunder; and of a sudden
Elias was caught up by a whirlwind into heaven.THE
BOOK OF KINGS
The man was walking in the desert,
followed by his companion, when the Thing swooped down on
him.
From afar it had appeared to him,
quite small, gliding over the sand, no bigger than the palm
of a child's hand- as a pale, fleeting shadow like a
wavering flight of quail over the blue sea before sunrise or
a cloud of gnats dancing in the sun at evening or a
whirlwind of dust at midday sweeping over the
plain.
The Thing seemed to take no heed of
the two travellers, and was roaming capriciously through the
wilderness. Then, suddenly, it assumed a set course and with
the speed of an arrow came straight at them.
And then the man perceived that the
little pale cloud of vapour was but the centre of an
infinitely greater reality moving towards them without
restriction, formless, boundless. The Thing as it approached
them spread out- wards with prodigious rapidity as far as
his eye could reach, filling the whole of space, while its
feet brushed lightly over the thorny vegetation beside the
torrent, its brow rose in the sky like a golden mist with
the reddening sun behind it. And all about it the ether had
become alive, vibrating palpably beneath the crude substance
of rocks and plants as in summer the landscape quivers
behind the overheated soil in the foreground.
What was advancing towards them was
the moving heart of an immeasurable pervasive
subtlety.
The man fell prostrate to the
ground; and hiding his face in his hands he
waited.
A great silence fell around
him.
Then, suddenly, a breath of
scorching air passed across his forehead, broke through the
barrier of his closed eyelids, and penetrated his soul. The
man felt that he was ceasing to be merely himself; an
irresistible rapture took possession of him as though all
the sap of all living things, flowing at one and the same
moment into the too narrow confines of his heart, was
mightily refashioning the enfeebled fibres of his being. And
at the same time the anguish of some superhuman peril
oppressed him, a confused feeling that the force which had
swept down upon him was equivocal, turbid, the combined
essence of all evil and all goodness.
The hurricane was within
himself.
And now, in the very depths of the
being it had invaded, the tempest of life, infinitely
gentle, infinitely brutal, was murmuring to the one secret
point in the soul which it had not altogether
demolished:
' You called me: here I am. Driven
by the Spirit far from humanity's caravan routes, you dared
to venture into the untouched wilderness; grown weary of
abstractions, of attenuations, of the wordiness of social
life, you wanted to pit yourself against Reality entire and
untamed.
'You had need of me in order to
grow; and I was wasting for you its order to be made
holy.
Always you have, without knowing
it, desired me; and always I have been drawing you to
me.
'And now I am established on you
for life, or for death. You can never go back, never return
to commonplace gratifications or untroubled worship. He who
has once seen me can never forget me: he must either damn
himself with me or save me with himself.
'Are you coming?'
'O you who are divine and mighty,
what is your name? Speak.'
'I am the fire that consumes and
the water that over- throws; I am the love that initiates
and the truth that passes away. All that compels acceptance
and all that brings renewal; all that breaks apart and all
that binds together; power, experiment, progress-matter: all
this am I.
'Because in my violence I sometimes
slay my lovers; because he who touches me never knows what
power he is unleashing, wise men fear me and curse me. They
speak of me with scorn, calling me beggar-woman or witch or
harlot; but their words are at variance with life, and the
pharisees who condemn me, waste away in the outlook to which
they confine themselves; they die of inanition and their
disciples desert them because I am the essence of all that
is tangible, and men cannot do without me.
'You who have grasped that the
world -the world beloved of God- has, even more than
individuals, a soul to be redeemed, lay your whole being
wide open to my inspiration, and receive the spirit of the
earth which is to be saved.
'The supreme key to the enigma, the
dazzling utterance which is inscribed on my brow and which
henceforth will burn into your eyes even though you close
them, is this: Nothing is precious save what is yourself in
others and others in yourself In heaven, all things are but
one. In heaven all is one.
'Come, do you not feel my breath
uprooting you and carrying you away? Up, man of God, and
make haste. For according to the way a man surrenders
himself to it, the whirlwind will either drag him down into
the darkness of its depths or lift him up into the blue
skies. Your salvation and mine hang on this first
moment,'
'O you who are matter: my heart, as
you see, is trembling. Since it is you, tell me: what would
you have me do?'
'Take up your arms, O Israel, and
do battle boldly against me.'
The wind, having at first
penetrated and pervaded hint stealthily, like a philtre, had
now become aggressive, hostile.
From within its coils it exhaled
now the acrid stench of battle.
The musky smell of forests, the
feverish atmosphere of cities, the sinister, heady scent
that rises up from nations locked in battle: all this
writhed within its folds, a vapour gathered from the four
corners of the earth.
The man, still prostrate, suddenly
started, as though his flesh had felt the spur: he leapt to
his feet and stood erect, facing the storm.
It was the soul of his entire race
that had shuddered within him : an obscure memory of a first
sudden awakening in the midst of beasts stronger,
better-armed than he; a sad echo of the long struggle to
tame the corn and to master the fire; a rancorous dread of
the maleficent forces of nature, a lust for knowledge and
possession ...
A moment ago, in the sweetness of
the first contact, he had instinctively longed to lose
himself in the warm wind which enfolded him.
Now, this wave of bliss in which he
had all but melted away was changed into a ruthless
determination towards increased being.
The man had scented he enemy, his
hereditary quarry.
He dug his feet into the ground,
and began his battle.
He fought first of all in order not
to be swept away; but then he began to fight for the joy of
fighting, the joy of feeling his own strength. And the
longer he fought, the more he felt an increase of strength
going out from him to balance the strength of the tempest,
and from the tempest there came forth in return a new
exhalation which flowed like fire into his veins.
As on certain nights the sea around
a swimmer will grow luminous, and its eddies will glisten
the more brightly under the sturdy threshing of his limbs,
so the dark power wrestling with the man was lit up with a
thousand sparkling lights wider the impact of his
onslaught.
In a reciprocal awakening of their
opposed powers, he stirred up his utmost strength to achieve
the mastery over it, while it revealed all its treasures in
order to surrender them to hint.
'Son of earth, steep yourself in
the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the
source of your life and your youthfulness.
'You thought you could do without
it because the power of thought has been kindled in you? You
hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible,
the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more
divine if you lived in the world of pure thought, or at
least more angelic if you fled the corporeal? Well, you were
like to have perished of hunger.
'You must have oil for your limbs,
blood for your veins, water for your soul, the world of
reality for your intellect: do you not see that the very law
of your own nature makes these a necessity for
you?
'Never, if you work to live and to
grow, never will you be able to say to matter, "I have seen
enough of you; I have surveyed your mysteries and have taken
from them enough food for my thought to last me for ever." I
tell you: even though, like the Sage of sages, you carried
in your memory the image of all the beings that people the
earth or swim in the seas, still all that knowledge would be
as nothing for your soul, for all abstract knowledge is only
a faded reality: this is because to understand the world
knowledge is not enough, you must see it, touch it, live in
its presence and drink the vital heat of existence in the
very heart of reality.
'Never say, then, as some say: "The
kingdom of matter is worn our, matter is dead": till the
very end of time matter will always remain young, exuberant,
sparkling, new-born for those who are willing.
'Never say, ''Matter is accursed,
matter is evil": for there has come one who said, "You will
drink poisonous draughts and they shall not harm you", and
again, "Life shall spring forth out of death", and then
finally, the words which spe11 my definitive liberation,
"This is my body".
'Purity does not lie in separation
from, but in a deeper penetration into the universe. It is
to be found in the love of that unique, boundless Essence
which penetrates the inmost depths of all things and there,
from within those depths, deeper than the mortal zone where
individuals and multitudes struggle, works upon them and
moulds them. Purity lies in a chaste contact with that which
is "the same in all".
'Oh, the beauty of spirit as it
rises up adorned with all die riches of the
earth!
Son of man, bathe yourself in the
ocean of matter; plunge into it where it is deepest and most
violent; struggle in its currents and drink of its waters.
For it cradled you long ago in your preconscious existence;
and it is that ocean that will raise you up to
God.'
Standing amidst the tempest, the
man turned his head, looking for his companion.
And in that same moment he
perceived a strange metamorphosis: the earth was
simultaneously vanishing away yet growing in
size.
It was vanishing away, for here,
immediately beneath him, the meaningless variations in the
terrain were diminishing and dissolving; on the other hand
it was growing ever greater, for there in the distance the
curve of the horizon was climbing ceaselessly
higher.
The man saw himself standing in the
centre of an immense cup, the rim of which was closing over
him.
And then the frenzy of battle gave
place in his heart to an irresistible longing to submit: and
in a flash he discovered, everywhere present around him, the
one thing necessary.
Once and for all he understood
that, like the atom, man has no value save for that part of
himself which passes into the universe. He recognized with
absolute
certainty the empty fragility of
even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive
plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total,
concrete reality.
He saw before his eyes, revealed
with pitiless clarity, the ridiculous pretentiousness of
human claims to order the life of the world, to impose on
the world the dogmas, the standards, the conventions of
man.
He tasted, sickeningly, the
trueness of men's joys and sorrows, the mean egoism of their
pursuits, the insipidity of their passions, the attenuation
of their power to feel.
He felt pity for those who take
fright at the span of a century or whose love is bounded by
the frontiers of a nation.
So many things which once had
distressed or revolted him -the speeches and pronouncements
of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions,
their refusal to allow the universe to move- all seemed to
him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the
majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed
itself to him : omnipresent, unalterable in its truth,
relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity,
maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.
Thus at long last he had found a
point d'appui, he had found refuge, outside the confines of
human society.
A heavy cloak slipped from his
shoulders and fell to the ground behind him: the dead weight
of all that is false, narrow, tyrannical, all that is
artificially contrived all that is merely human in
humanity.
A wave of triumph freed his
soul.
And he felt that henceforth nothing
in the world would ever be able to alienate his heart from
the greater reality which was now revealing itself to him,
nothing at all : neither the intrusiveness and individualist
separatism of human beings (for these qualities in them he
despised) nor the heavens and the earth in their height and
breadth and depth and power (for it was precisely to these
that he was now dedicating himself for ever).
A deep process of renewal had taken
place within him: now it would never again be possible for
him to be human save on another plane. Were he to descend
again now to the everyday life of earth -even though it were
to rejoin his faithful companion, still prostrate over there
on the desert sand- he would henceforth be for ever a
stranger.
Yes, of this he was certain: even
for his brothers in God, better men than he, he would
inevitably speak henceforth in an incomprehensible tongue,
he whom the Lord had drawn to follow the road of fire. Even
for those he loved the most his love would be henceforth a
burden, for they would sense his compulsion to be for ever
seeking something behind themselves.
Because matter, throwing off its
veil of restless movement and multiplicity, had revealed to
him its glorious unity, chaos now divided him from other
men. Because it had for ever withdrawn his heart from all
that is merely local or individual, all that is fragmentary,
henceforth for him it alone in its totality would be his
father and mother, his family, his race, his unique,
consuming passion.
And not a soul in the world could
do anything to change this.
Turning his eyes resolutely away
from what receding from him, he surrendered himself, in
super- abounding faith, to the wind which was sweeping the
universe onwards.
And now in the heart of the
whirling cloud a light was growing, a light in which there
was the tenderness and the mobility of a human glance; and
from it there spread a warmth which was not nowlike the
harsh heat radiating from a furnace but like the opulent
warmth which emanates from a human body. What had been a
blind and feral immensity was now becoming expressive and
personal; and in hitherto amorphous expanses were being
moulded into features of an ineffable face.
A Being was taking form in die
totality of space; a Being with the attractive power of a
soul, palpable like a body, vast as the sky; a Being which
mingled with things yet remained distinct from them; a Being
of a higher order than the substance of things with which it
was adorned, yet taking shape within them.
The rising Sun was being born in
the heart of the world.
God was shining forth from the
summit of that world of matter whose waves were carrying up
to him the world of spirit.
The man fell to his knees in the
fiery chariot which was bearing him away.
And he spoke these
words:
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 measurement 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 uprootings 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 I bless.
'I bless you, matter, and you I
acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing
preachers depict you, debased, disfigured -a mass of brute
forces and base appetites- but as you reveal yourself to me
today, in your totality arid your true nature.
'You I acclaim as the inexhaustible
potentiality for existence and transformation wherein the
predestined substance germinates arid grows.
'I acclaim you as the universal
power which brings together and unites, through which the
multitudinous monads are bound together and in which they
all converge on the way of the spirit.
'I acclaim you as the melodious
fountain of water whence spring the souls of men and as the
limpid crystal whereof is fashioned the new
Jerusalem.
'I acclaim you as the divine
milieu, charged with creative power, as the ocean stirred by
the Spirit, as the clay moulded and infused with life by the
incarnate Word.
'Sometimes, thinking they are
responding to your irresistible appeal, men will hurl
themselves for love of you into the exterior abyss of
selfish pleasure-seeking: they are deceived by a reflection
or by an echo.
'This I now understand.
'If we are ever to reach you
matter, we must, having first established contact with the
totality of all that lives and moves here below, come little
by little to feel that the individual shapes of all we have
laid hold on are melting away in our hands, until finally we
are at grips with the single essence of all subsistencies
and all unions.
'If we are ever to possess you,
having taken you rapturously in our arms, we must then go
onto sublimate you through sorrow.
'Your realm comprises those serene
heights where saints think to avoid you -but where your
flesh is so transparent and so agile as to be no longer
distinguishable from spirit.
' Raise me up then, matter, to
those heights, through struggle and separation and death;
raise me up until, at long last, it becomes possible for me
in perfect chastity to embrace the universe.'
Jersey, 8th August
1919
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THE
PRESENCE OF GOD IN THE WORLD
(excerpts selected by Fernande
Tardivel from Père Tejihard's published and
unpublished works.)
1
Let us pray:
Lord Jesus Christ, you truly
contain within your gentleness, within your humanity, all
the unyielding immensity and grandeur of the world. And it
is because of this, it is because there exists in you this
ineffable synthesis of what our human thought and experience
would never have dared join together in order to adore
them-element and totality, the one and the many, mind and
matter, the infinite and the personal; it is because of the
indefinable contours which this complexity gives to your
appearance and to your activity, that my heart, enamoured of
cosmic reality, gives itself passionately to you.
I love you, Lord Jesus, because of
the multitude who shelter within you and whom, if one clings
closely to you, one can hear with all the other beings
murmuring, praying, weeping...
I love you because of the
transcendent and inexorable fixity of your purposes, which
causes your gentle friend- ship to be coloured by an
intransigent determinism and to gather us all ruthlessly
into the folds of its will.
I love you as the source, the
activating and life-giving ambience, the term and
consummation, of the world, even of the natural world, and
of its process of becoming.
You the Centre at which all things
meet and which stretches out over all things so as to draw
them back into itself: I love you for the extensions of your
body and soul to the farthest corners of creation through
grace, through life, and through matter.
Lord Jesus, you who are as gentle
as the human heart, as fiery as the forces of nature, as
intimate as life itself, you in whom I can melt away and
with whom I must have mastery and freedom: I love you as a
world, as this world which has captivated my heart; -and it
is you, I now realize, that my brother-men, even those who
do not believe, sense and seek throughout the magic
immensities of the cosmos.
Lord Jesus, you are the centre
towards which all things are moving: if it be possible, make
a place for us all in the company of those elect and holy
ones whom your loving care has liberated one by one from the
chaos of our present existence and who now are being slowly
incorporated into you in the unity of the new
earth.
2
The prodigious expanses of time
which preceded the first Christmas were not empty of Christ:
they were imbued with the influx of his power. It was the
ferment of his conception that stirred up the cosmic masses
and directed the initial developments of the biosphere. It
was the travail preceding his birth that accelerated the
development of instinct and the birth of thought upon the
earth. Let us have done with the stupidity which makes a
stumbling-block of the endless eras of expectancy imposed on
us by the Messiah; the fearful, anonymous labours of
primitive man, the beauty fashioned through its age-long
history by ancient Egypt, the anxious expectancies of
Israel, the patient distilling of the attar of oriental
mysticism, the endless refining of wisdom by the Greeks: all
these were needed before the Flower could blossom on the rod
of Jesse and of all humanity. All these preparatory
processes were cosmically and biologically necessary that
Christ might set foot upon our human stage. And all this
labour was set in motion by the active, creative awakening
of his soul inasmuch as that human soul had been chosen to
breathe life into the universe. When Christ first appeared
before men in the arms of Mary he had already stirred up the
world.
3
Like a river which, as you trace it
back to its source, gradually diminishes till in the end it
is lost altogether in the mud from which it springs, so
existence becomes attenuated and finally vanishes away when
we try to divide it up more and more minutely in space
or-what comes to the same-to drive it further and further
back in time. The grandeur of the river is revealed not at
its source but at its estuary. In the same way man's secret
is to be sought not in the long-outgrown stages of his
embryonic life, whether individual or racial, but in the
spiritual nature of his soul. Now this soul, whose activity
is always a synthesis, in itself eludes the investigations
of science, the essential concern of which is to analyze
things into their elements and their material antecedents;
it can be discovered only by inward vision and philosophic
reflection.
Those thinkers are absolutely
mistaken, therefore, who imagine they can prove man's nature
to be purely material simply by uncovering ever deeper and
more numerous roots of his being in the earth. Far from
annihilating spirit, they merely show how it mingles with
and acts upon the world of matter like a leaven. Let us not
play their game by supposing as they do that for a being to
come from heaven we must know nothing of the earthly
conditions of his origin.
4
When your presence, Lord, has
flooded me with its light I hoped that within it I might
find ultimate reality at its most tangible.
But now that I have in fact laid
hold on you, you who are utter consistency, and feel myself
borne by you, I realize that my deepest hidden desire was
not to possess you but to be possessed.
It is not as a radiation of light
nor as subtilized matter that I desire you; nor was it thus
that I described you in my first intuitive encounter with
you: it was as fire. And I can see I shall have no rest
unless an active influence, coming forth from you, bears
down on me to transform me.
The whole universe is
aflame.
Let the starry immensities
therefore expand into an ever more prodigious repository of
assembled suns;
let the light-rays prolong
indefinitely, at each end of the spectrum, the range of
their hues and their penetrative power;
let life draw from yet more
distant sources the sap which flows through its
innumerable branches;
and let us go on and on
endlessly increasing our perception of the hidden powers
that slumber, and the infinitesimally tiny ones that
swarm about us, and the immensities that escape us
because they appear to us simply as a point.
From all these discoveries, each of
which plunges him a little deeper into the ocean of energy,
the mystic derives an unalloyed delight, and his thirst for
them is unquenchable; for he will never feel himself
sufficiently dominated by the powers of the earth and the
skies to be brought under God's yoke as completely as he
would wish.
It is in fact God, God alone, who
through his Spirit stirs up into a ferment the mass of the
universe.
5
A limpid sound rises amidst the
silence; a trail of pure colour drifts through the glass; a
light glows for a moment in the depths of the eyes I
love…..
Three things, tiny, fugitive: a
song, a sunbeam, a glance…
So, at first, I thought they had
entered into me in order to remain there and be lost in
me.
On the contrary: they took
possession of me, and bore me away.
For if this plaint of the air, this
tinting of the light, this communication of a soul were so
tenuous and so fleeting it was only that they might
penetrate the more deeply into my being, might pierce
through to that final depth where all the faculties of man
are so closely bound together as to become a single point.
Through the sharp tips of the three arrows which had pierced
me the world itself had invaded my being and had drawn me
back into itself.
We imagine that in our
sense-perceptions external reality humbly presents itself to
us in order to serve us, to help in the building up of our
integrity. But this is merely the surface of the mystery of
knowledge; the deeper truth is that when the world reveals
itself to us it draws us into itself: it causes us to flow
outwards into something belonging to it everywhere present
in it and more perfect than it.
The man who is wholly taken up with
the demands of everyday living or whose sole interest is in
the outward appearances of things seldom gains more than a
glimpse, at best, of this second phase in our
sense-perceptions, that in which the world, having entered
into us, then with- draws from us and bears us away with it:
he can have only a very dim awareness of that aureole,
thrilling and inundating our being, through which is
disclosed to us at every point of contact the unique essence
of the universe.
6
Like those materialistic biologists
who think they can do away with the soul by dismantling the
physico-chemical mechanisms of the living cell, zoologists
are persuaded they have done away with the necessity for a
first Cause simply because they have discovered a little
more about the general structure of his work. It is time we
set aside once and for all a problem so invalidly stated.
No; strictly speaking, scientific transformism can prove
nothing for or against the existence of God. It simply
establishes as a fact the concatenation of reality. It
offers us an anatomy of life, not an ultimate explanation of
life. It affirms that something has become organism,
something has developed; but to discern the ultimate
conditions of that development is beyond its competence. To
decide whether the evolutionary process is self-explanatory
or whether it demands for its explanation a progressive and
continuous act of creation on the part of a first Mover:
this falls within the domain not of physics but of
metaphysics.
The theory of transformism, it must
be said again and again, does not of itself involve the
acceptance of any particular philosophy. Does that mean that
it offers no hint in favour of one rather than another ? No,
indeed. But it is interesting to note that the systems of
thought which are best adapted to it would seem to be
precisely those which at first regarded it as a menace to
them. Christianity, for example, is essentially based on the
twofold belief that man is in a special sense an object of
pursuit to the divine power throughout creation, and that
Christ is the terminal point at which, supernaturally but
also physically, the consummation of humanity is destined to
be achieved. Could one desire an experiential view of things
more in keeping with these doctrines of unity than that
which shows us living beings, not artificially set side by
side in pursuit of some doubtful utility or amenity, but
bound together by virtue of the physical conditions of their
existence, in the real unity of a shared struggle towards
greater being ?
7
Where at first glance we could see
only an incoherent arrangement of different altitudes, of
land-masses and of waters, there we later established a
solid network of real relationships: we animated the earth
by communicating to it something of our own
unity.
And now, through a gushing forth of
vitality in the reverse direction, this life infused by the
human mind into the greatest material mass with which we
have contact tends to flow back into us under a new guise.
When, through our vision of it, we have endowed our earth of
iron and stone with 'personality', then we find ourselves
infected by the desire to build for ourselves in our turn,
out of the sum total of all our souls, a spiritual edifice
as vast as the one we contemplate, the one brought forth out
of the travail of the geogenetic processes. Around the
sphere of the earth's rock-mass there stretches a real layer
of animated matter, the layer of living creatures and human
beings, the biosphere. The great educative value of geology
consists in the fact that by disclosing to us an earth which
is truly one, an earth which is in fact but a single body
since it has a face, it recalls to us the possibilities of
establishing higher and higher degrees of organic unity in
the zone of thought which envelops the world. In truth it is
impossible to keep one's gaze constantly fixed on the vast
horizons opened out to us by science without feeling the
stirrings of an obscure desire to see men drawn closer and
closer together by an ever-increasing knowledge and sympathy
until finally, in obedience to some divine attraction, there
remains but one heart and one soul on the face of the
earth.
8
Because of the fundamental unity of
the world, every phenomenon, if it is adequately studied
even though under one single aspect, reveals itself as being
ubiquitous alike in its import and in its roots. Where does
this proposition lead us if we apply it to human 'self-
awareness' ?
We might have been tempted to say:
'Consciousness manifests itself indubitably only in man;
therefore it is an isolated event of no interest to
science.'
But no, we must correct this, and
say rather: 'Consciousness manifests itself indubitably in
man and there- fore, glimpsed in this one flash of light, it
reveals itself as having a cosmic extension and consequently
as being aureoled by limitless prolongations in space and
time.'
This conclusion is big with
consequences; but I cannot see how it can be denied if sound
analogy with all the rest of science is to be
preserved.
It is a fact beyond question that
deep within ourselves we can discern, as though through a
rent, an' interior' at the heart of things; and this glimpse
is sufficient to force upon us the conviction that in one
degree or another this 'interior' exists and has always
existed everywhere in nature. Since at one particular point
in itself, the stuff of the universe has an inner face, we
are forced to conclude that in its very structure-that is,
in every region of space and time-it has this double aspect,
just as, for instance, in its very structure it is granular.
In all things there is a Within, co-extensive with their
Without.
9
Let us ponder over this basic truth
till we are steeped in it, till it becomes as familiar to us
as our awareness of shapes or our reading of words: God, at
his most vitally active and most incarnate, is not remote
from us, wholly apart from the sphere of the tangible; on
the contrary, at every moment he awaits us in the activity,
the work to be done, which every moment brings. He is, in a
sense, at the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my
needle-and my heart and my thought. It is by carrying to its
natural completion the stroke, the line, the stitch I am
working on that I shall lay hold on that ultimate end
towards which my will at its deepest levels tends. Like
those formidable physical forces which man has so
disciplined that they can be made to carry out operations of
amazing delicacy, so the enormous might of God's magnetism
is brought to bear on our frail desires, our tiny
objectives, without ever breaking their point. For it endues
us with super-vitality; and therefore introduces into our
spiritual life a higher principle of unity, the specific
effect of which can be seen-according to one's point of
view-as either to make human endeavour holy or to make the
christian life fully human.
10
Yes, Lord God, I believe that-and
believe all the more readily since it is a question not
merely of my being consoled but of my being completed-that
it is you who stand at the source of that impulse and at the
end-point of that magnetic attraction to which all my life
long I must be docile, obedient to the initial impulsion and
eager to promote its developments. It is you too who quicken
for me by your omnipresence-far more effectively than my
spirit quickens the matter it animates-the myriad influences
which at every moment bear down upon me. In the life
springing up within me, in the material elements that
sustain me, it is not just your gifts that I discern: it is
you yourself that I encounter, you who cause me to share in
your own being, and whose hands mould me. In the initial
ordering and modulating of the life-force which is in me,
and in the continuous, helpful action upon me of secondary
causes, I am in very truth in contact-and the closest
possible contact-with the two aspects of your creative
activity; I encounter and I kiss your two wonderful hands:
the hand that lays hold on us at so deep a level that it
becomes merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the
hand whose grasp is so immense that under its slightest
pressure all the springs of the universe respond
harmoniously together. Of their very nature those blessed
passivities which are my will to be, my inclination to be
thus or thus, and the chances given me to attain to my own
completion in the way I desire, all are charged with your
influence-an influence which I shall come before long to see
more clearly as the organizing force of your mystical Body.
And if I would enter into communion with you in these
passivities-a frontal communion, a communion in the sources
of life -I have but to recognize you within them and to beg
you to be ever more and more fully present in
them.
11
The mystic only gradually becomes
aware of the faculty he has been given of perceiving the
indefinite fringe of reality surrounding the totality of all
created things, with more intensity than the precise,
individual core of their being.
For a long time, thinking he is the
same as other men, he will try to see as they do, to speak
their language, to find contentment in the joys with which
they are satisfied.
For a long time, seeking to appease
his mysterious but obsessive need for plenitude of being, he
will try to divert it on to some particularly stable or
precious object to which, among all the accessory pleasures
of life, he will look for the substance and overflowing
richness of his joy.
For a long time he will look to the
marvels of art to provide him with that exaltation which
will give him access to the sphere-his own sphere-of the
extra- personal and the suprasensible; and in the unknown
Word of nature he will strive to hear the heartbeats of that
higher reality which calls him by name.
Happy the man who fails to stifle
his vision.
Happy the man who will not shrink
from a passionate questioning of the Muses and of Cybele
concerning his God.
But happy above all he who, rising
beyond aesthetic dilettantism and the materialism of the
lower layers of life, is given to hear the reply of all
beings, singly and all together: 'What you saw gliding past,
like a world, behind the song and behind the colour and
behind the eyes' glance does not exist just here or there
but is a Presence existing equally everywhere: a presence
which, though it now seems vague to your feeble sight, will
grow in clarity and depth. In this presence all diversities
and all impurities yearn to be melted away.'
12
For christian humanism -faithful in
this to the most firmly established theology of the
Incarnation- there is no real independence or discordance
but a logical subordination between the genesis of humanity
in the world and the genesis of Christ, through his Church,
in humanity. Inevitably the two processes are structurally
linked together, the second needing the first as the
material on which it rests in order to supervitalize it.
This point of view fully respects the progressive
experimental concentration of human thought in a more and
more lively awareness of its unifying role; but in place of
the undefined point of convergence required as term for this
evolution it is the clearly defined personal reality of the
incarnate Word that is made manifest to us and established
for us as our objective, that Word 'in whom all things
subsist'.
Life for Man: Man for Christ:
Christ for God.
And to ensure the psychic
continuity of this vast development in all its phases,
extending to the myriads of elements scattered through the
immensities of all the ages, there is but one mechanism:
education.
Thus all the lines converge,
complete one another, interlock. All things are now but
one.
13
Without any doubt there is
something which links material energy and spiritual energy
together and makes them a continuity. In the last resort
there must somehow be but one single energy active in the
world. And the first idea that suggests itself to us is that
the soul must be a centre of transformation at which,
through all the channels of nature, corporeal energies come
together in order to attain inwardness and be sublimated in
beauty and in truth.
(To be
followed)
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