Teilhard de Chardin and Senghor on the civilization of the universal

I.1.2. Omega: The Point of Universal Convergence

It was without any doubt one of Teilhard de Chardin's most cherished convictions that the cosmos as a whole is somehow converging towards the Omega Point:

[...] in the heart of a universe prolonged along its axis of complexity, there is a divine centre of convergence. That nothing may be prejudged, and in order to stress its synthesizing and personalising function, let us call it the point Omega.^9(*)

He felt that cosmic evolution must have a term, and that this end can only be conceived as a point or centre of universal convergence. Sister Mary LINSCOTT expresses this fact when she avers:

Socialisation energised by love and leading towards unification prepares the consummation of the world but it is a process which cannot go on for ever, Teilhard holds that everything that rises must converge and, when he projects the curve of evolution into the future, he postulates a final convergence which will be the culmination of evolution: the fullness both of the unity of the species and the personalisation of the individual. This is the pleroma seen as the completion of the scientific phenomenon of evolution. Teilhard calls it the Omega point.^10(*)

It is evident therefore that it is evolution that depends on Omega and not the reverse. Teilhard de Chardin takes his final step and identifies Omega with Christ. Faith had to go on to identify the Omega of scientific deduction with the cosmic Christ of revelation and, in this light; the transformation of the world became the fullness of evolution not only as a scientific phenomenon but as a Christian phenomenon too. In effect, in the process of totalisation, the Omega of evolution is to be identified with the Christ of Revelation:

If the world is convergent and if Christ occupies its centre, then the Christogenesis of St. Paul and St. John is nothing else and nothing less than the extension, both awaited and unhoped for, of that noogenesis in which Cosmogenesis culminates.^11(*)

Hence, the divine Omega is rooted in the Person of Christ, source and object of love, through whom mankind is destined to achieve its ultimate unity on a new plane of being. The Prime Mover to speak like Aristotle, the centre of the Civilization of the Universal, actuates all the energies of the universe. Epoch-making as it may be, the scientific recognition of an Omega Point as the ultimate term of Cosmogenesis was for Teilhard de Chardin the first major step towards an even more momentous discovery: the realization, namely, that the Omega Point of Science coincides in reality with Christ. What appears to the eye of science as a universal centre of attraction and confluence is in reality none other than the cosmic Christ of Saint Paul:

It was to be the work, and the constant joy of the next 20 years to see, step by step, and keeping pace with one another, two convictions build up around me, each gaining strength from the other: Christic «density» and the «cosmic density» of a world whose «communicative power» I could see increasing with the increase in its «power of convergence»...The heart of «amorized» matter, of matter impregnated with love.^12(*)

In Teilhardian metaphysics, the layers of matter considered as separate elements no less than as a whole, tauten and converge by synthesis. It is not simply a question of isolated regions detaching themselves from the rest of the cosmos, but of a universal convergence to a single Apex, the Omega Point.

* ⁹ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, New York, 1964, p. 127.

* ¹⁰ Mary Linscott, Teilhard today, Rome, 1972, p. 37.

* ¹¹ Teilhard de Chardin, in Cuénot, C., Teilhard de Chardin, London, 1965, P. 297.

* ¹² Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in Cuénot, C., Teilhard de Chardin, London, 1965, p. 375.