5.3. Teilhardian Evolution: matter serving the spirit
The German word Weltanschauung is a term dear to
Father Teilhard de Chardin which he uses very frequently.I It is
usually used to refer to an idea of the world, a conception of the world or a
world view. This admirable word was welcomed in the lexicon of Teilhard de
Chardin. His conception of the world that he explained in all his work with the
scientific rigour and celebrated with the enthusiasm of a believer extends,
through time and space, to the vastness of the cosmos. In his thought, '
globalisation', reduced in the current use of the word to global perspectives,
would have meaning only if it had been seen in the energetic and spiritual
dynamism which carries the infinite universe along in its momentum and its
becoming .
In a letter written from the Cape in the last years of his
life to Father Janssens, Superior General of the Jesuit Society, Father
Teilhard de Chardin, disappointed in his hopes to see his ideas accepted by the
ecclesiastical authorities, expresses in a few lines his conception of "
globalisation" without using the word, which was not yet current:
K ... depuis mon enfance, ma vie spirituelle n'a pas cesse
d'être completement dominee par une sorte de "sentiment" profond de la
reality organique du Monde ; sentiment originairement asset vague dans mon
esprit et dans mon coeur -- mais graduellement devenu, avec les annees, sens
précis et envahissant d'une convergence generale sur soi de l'Univers ;
cette convergence coincidant et culminant a son sommet, avec Celui in
quo omnia constant, que le Ciel m'a appris a aimer
»2.
I This word is in fact fundamental in order to
designate the original conception of the world proposed by Teilhard de Chardin.
In February I948, he entitles a brief essay: "Three things that I see or a
Weltanshauung in three points", in Les Directions de l'Avenir,
pp. I6I-I75.
2 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Lettres intimes
de Teilhard de Chardin [...], Introduction and notes of Henri de Lubac,
Aubier-Montaigne, I974, a letter of Octobre I2th I95I. ... since my childhood,
my spiritual life has not ceased to be completely dominated by a sort of
profound "feeling" of the organic reality of the World; a feeling originally
fairly vague in my mind and in my heart - but gradually it has now become, with
years, precise and pervasive sense of a general convergence on itself of the
Universe; this
Internationalization of trade, convergence of savings,
financial flows between continents, opening of markets, banking and stock of
market vagaries, multiplication of the news media or communication, new
technologies, computers, the Internet, multinational or transnational
companies, the expansion of the Neoliberal democracy and the market economy,
global conflicts, cultural miscegenation: all these words, among others, which
constitute the foundations of the semantic around the concept of globalisation
are not in the Teilhardian lexicon.I Nevertheless, they implicitly
somehow, mutatis mutandi, constitute Teilhard de Chardin's conception
of globalisation. For a better life, men are called upon to be united. Humanity
continues to be united and even in Teilhard de Chardin's days, there was
already a great step towards unity with the Declaration of human rights in
I948.
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