Free PDF

Author : Teilhard de Chardin Pierre
Title : Man's Place in Nature
Year : 1966

Link download : Teilhard_de_Chardin_Pierre_-_Man_s_Place_in_Nature.zip

INTRODUCTION. Pire Teilhard de Chardin is at last coming into his own, and Ms life purpose is being achieved. The obstacles in the way ofthe dissemination ofhis vision ofthe world have now been removed. But he was a unique figure who cut his way through what in some sense were virgin forests of the mind, and there has been some misinterpretation. The misinterpretation has come from both religious and scientific milieux. It could hardly be otherwise as in his person Teilhard concretised two pursuits ofman which have ignored one another for centuries-— religion and science—and both at his own peculiarly high level. For many official followers of Christ, brought up in a tradition that has hardly changed since the great Aristotelian- Thomist synthesis of religion and science in the thirteenth century, aJesuit priest had no business exploring the panoramas opened to us in the twentieth century by astronomy, physics, biology and the other sciences 'in Xto Jesu . For some of his fellow-explorers into the nature of the physical universe, Teilhard had no business to go beyond the limits of what is experimentally verifiable. Misunderstanding was made worse by the prodigious quantity of knowledge now available to man, which involves us in more and more specialisation. So that if theologians who first read P&re Teilhard were ignorant ofmodern physics or biology so some physicists were ignorant ofthe very terms, or possible justifications, offaith in precisely St. Paul's (and Teilhard's) sense of 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things that do not appear/ The situation was hardly made easier by the fact that Teilhard had to forge a new language to express new concepts—not only 'Noosphere', for instance, but above all 'Omega Point*, which - seemed some sort of unverifiable and fanciful poetry to metaphysical agnostics when they first read The Phenomenon of Man. When that vision of the world in terms of cosmic evolution was followed by Le Milieu Divin, in which we could hear the voice of St. Ignatius ofLoyola, St. John of the Cross and (a non-Jansenist) Pascal expressed in a terminology of twentieth-century man in full crisis of 'cosmogenesis', confusion— here and there—was even greater. Ifthis note, therefore, is to follow P£re Teilhard's intentions, it needs to dwell on two points. First the avalanche of the revolution in which contemporary man is involved, and second, the nature of faith. ...