2.3. The Christogenesis
According to Teilhard de Chardin, the next phase of evolution
is Christo genesis. This is evolution upward towards Christ, towards increasing
love of God and neighbour. It began 2000 years ago, and certainly has not yet
supplanted either biogenesis or Noo genesis. Christo genesis moves towards
uniting all consciousness, all mankind, in unity with God. This final state was
termed by Teilhard the Omega Point, using the final letter of the Greek
alphabet to signify it:
Once he has been raised to the position of Prime Mover of
the evolutive movement of complexity-consciousness, the cosmic-Christ becomes
cosmically possible... For each one of us, every energy and everything that
happens, is superanimated by his influence and his magnetic power...
Cosmogenesis reveals itself, along the line of its main axis, first as
Biogenesis and then Noogenesis, and finally culminates in the Christogenesis
which every Christian venerates.'
I Humanity has a clerical role with regards to the
rest of creation, recapitulating it in ourselves and therefore uniting it to
Omega.
2 Doran McCarty, Teilhard de Chardin, Waco,
I976, p. II6.
3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and
Evolution, New York, I97I, p. 96.
4 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of
Matter, New York, I979, p. 94.
2.3.1. Cosmogenesis and Christogenesis
Cosmo genesis is Christo genesis. While it remains, for the
most part, veiled in his phenomenological writings, there can be no doubt that
Teilhard's vision of the evolution of consciousness is a Christian one. For
Teilhard de Chardin, the axis and terminus of evolution is the cosmic-Christ.
Instead of the two natures of Christ, he says, perhaps rashly, that Christ has
three.
This third 'nature' of Christ, neither human nor divine,
but cosmic," he concedes, "has not noticeably attracted the explicit attention
of the faithful or of theologians.'
Despite the paucity of modern theological attention to the
cosmic Christ, Teilhard de Chardin takes courage from the company of many
theologians of a stature simply unapproached in the modern world. Indeed, St.
John, St. Paul and the Greek fathers all spoke passionately about this cosmic
aspect of Christ. The Jesuit priest was fascinated by their words:
In the beginning was the Word f...] in Him was life and
that life was the light of men f...] He was in the world and the world came
into being through Him f...] May they all be one. As you Father, are in me and
I am in you, may he also be in us f...] When all things are subjected to him,
then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in
subjection under him, so that God may be all in all f...] He has set forth
Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him,
things in heaven and things on earth... And he has put all things under his
feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his
body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.'
Reflecting on these and similar passages, Teilhard de Chardin
felt the need to expand the church's traditional view of Christ in order that
he might remain the Christ of Paul and John. We no longer live in the static
cosmos of the first century but in a
1 Ibid., p. 93.
2 Jn. 1:1, 4, 10; 17:21; 1Cor. 15:28; Eph. 1:10,
22.
65 Cosmo genesis; the grand cosmic Pauline, Johanine and
Patristic visions must now be appropriately reinterpreted. He declares:
Christ is in the church in the same way as the sun is
before our eyes. We see the same sun as our fathers saw and yet we understand
it in a much more magnificent way.'
The magnificent new understanding of an evolving cosmos
highlights for us the cosmic aspect of Christ within an evolutionary universe.
For Teilhard de Chardin, Christ is the organic centre of evolution; it is the
love of Christ that draws Cosmo genesis ever onward and upward. Christ is
"co-extensive with the vastness of space" and "commensurate with the
abyss of time" and "radiates his influence throughout the whole mass
of nature."2 This is what it means to be Alpha and Omega:
Christ is the beginning and the end of the process of cosmic evolution and he
is its animating energy fully present every point along the way.
Given all of this it is fair to ask if this cosmic-Christ of
evolution is still the Jesus Christ who taught along dusty Galilean roads.
Teilhard de Chardin insists on the fact that the cosmic Christ and the
historical Jesus are one and the same, a conclusion that he supports by an
appeal to the necessity of the incarnation. For universal convergence and
Christification, Christ had to be inserted historically into the evolutionary
process.
The more one considers that the fundamental laws of
evolution, the more one becomes convinced that the universal Christ would not
be able to appear at the end of time, unless he had previously inserted himself
into the course of the world's movement by way of birth, in the form of an
element. If it is really by Christ-Omega that the universe is held in
movement... it is from his concrete source, the Man of Nazareth, that
Christ-Omega (theoretically and historically) derives for our experience his
whole stability.3
I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of
Matter, New York, I979, p. II7.
2 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and
Evolution, New York, I97I, p. 88.
3 Quoted in the work of Norbertus Maximilaan
Wildiers, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin., New York, I968,
p.I37.
As Norbertus Maximilaan Wildiers adds, "In other words:
without a historic Christ there could be no mystical body of Christ, no total
Christ." 1 Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Christ of the
cosmos. Teilhard de Chardin speaks far more about the Pantokrator than
the man of Galilee, but they are still the same cosmic, divine and supremely
attractive person.
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