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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Extract from Le Christique
Looking around me, and intoxicated with everything that has appeared to me, I should be almost alone of my kind? The only one to have seen? And thus, incapable - when people ask me - of quoting a single author or book, where the marvellous 'diaphanie' is recognisable and clearly expressed. And how can it be, when I have 'come down from the mountain', in spite of the magnificence I have seen, that I should be so little better, so little pacified, and so impotent to translate into acts, and thus communicate effectively to others the wonderful unity in which I feel myself engulfed? For all the ambitious splendour of my ideas, I am still, in practice, disturbed by my imperfections. In spite of my claims to formulate it, my faith does not produce in me as much real charity, or calm confidence, as the children's catechism produces in the humble person kneeling at my side. But I know, too, that this faith ... of which I make so poor a use ... is the only faith I can entertain, the only one that satisfies me - and even (for of this I have no doubt) the only one that will satisfy the coal-heavers and charwomen of tomorrow.
In me, by chance of temperament, education and environment, the proportion of one and the other are favourable, and the fusion has spontaneously come about - too feeble yet for an explosive propagation - but still of sufficient strength to show that the reaction is possible and that, some day or other, the two will join up. A fresh proof that the truth has only to appear once, in a single mind, and nothing can ever again prevent it from invading everything and setting it aflame.
(Quoted in Speight, 329-330)
Books
| Speight, Robert, Teillhard de Chardin: A Biography, Collins 1967 Jacket: '... a great biography that is at the same time a lucid, straightforward and critical account of Teilhard's ideas and beliefs. Using not only Teilhard's own published works and the memoirs about him that have appeared, but also unpublished material that has become available within the last two years, Robert Speight adds to these the facts and insights gained from conversations with Teilhard's family and friends.'back |
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