WRITINGS IN TIME OF WAR
Pierre Teilhard deChardin
Written at the front and in the trenches during World War I, these essays contain the core of Teilhard deChardin's thought. His central theme is the unity of all life.
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| 1 |
"Peace is the awareness of Unity."
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"Precisely because there exists in all beings a common centre, scattered and separable though they are in appearance, they meet together at a deeper level. The more they perfect themselves naturally and sanctify themselves in grace, the more they come together and fuse into one, within the single, unifying Centre to which they aspire: and we may call that Centre equally well the point upon which they converge, or the ambiance in which they float. All these reachings-out that draw beings together and unify them constitute the axis of all individual and collective life."
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| 3 |
"People are called to form one single Body, in an intensely intimate divinization."
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| 4 |
"In the material universe it is Spirit, and in Spirit it is the moral sphere, which are eminently the PRESENT centre in which life develops. It is into this flexible core of ourselves, accordingly, where divine grace mingles with the natural impulses of the Earth, that we have forcefully to direct the power of faith."
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| 5 |
"We are the countless centres of one and the same sphere."
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| 6 |
"If man believes with sufficient vigour in the force that is creating him, he will soon find that, for all its terrifying uncertainty, the future provides him with a solid footing as he advances."
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| 7 |
"Souls are not a group of isolated monads…they make up one single whole with the universe."
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| 8 |
"Charity [love] safeguards the development of the universe and keeps it to the true path of its progress. Moral effort is the continuation in our souls of the same dynamic effort that gave us our bodies."
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| 9 |
"The more we lose all foothold in the darkness and instability of the future, the more deeply we penetrate into God."
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| 10 |
"Charity [love] is the force that stops beings from shutting themselves up in a self-centered folding-in of their energies, and makes them 'unbutton', open themselves and surrender themselves to one another."
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| 11 |
"Morality is generally regarded as a system of actions and relationships that are biologically secondary, less immediate and less physical than material or vital relationships. This is a great mistake. One has only to study, from the point of view of creative union, its role in the evolution of living beings, in order to see how profound is the morphogenic power of the Good."
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| 12 |
"There is in the universe only one single individuality (one single monad), that of the whole."
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| 13 |
"Each one of us is linked by all the material, organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him. Not only is he caught up in a network, he is carried along, too, by a stream. All around us, in whatever direction we look, there are both links and currents."
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"The final purpose of providence is the influence of the transcendent Centre whose unerring action can infallibly guide chance toward its determined end."
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| 15 |
"In each one of the souls that is born from it, the cosmos is incessantly fulfilling its finest hopes."
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"Like knots spaced out along a cord, or like the folds into which a single curtain falls, or the eddies forming on one and the same surface, everything that moves and lives in the universe represents, in one particular aspect, the modifications of one and the same thing."
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| 17 |
"Only a long and patient struggle can teach us the operative power of faith and show us what it can achieve."
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| 18 |
"Every being can subsist and hold together only through confluence with others."
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| 19 |
"From the pantheist point of view, everything in the universe is seen to be radically One, Absolute, and Divine."
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| 20 |
"To share in a hallowed unity, even for a split second, is enough to enable us to glimpse the future promised to our species, and to find the road that will lead us to it."
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| 21 |
"The deeper I descend into myself, the more I find God at the heart of my being."
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| 22 |
"This is the classic teaching: God, who is 'his own being' is at the same time 'the being of all'."
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| 23 |
"All living beings are but one being."
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"God, the personal and loving Infinite, is the Source, the motive Force and the End of the Universe."
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"If the Will of God is seen with sufficient intensity and realism it positively transforms the universe. It animates and softens all that we suffer; it stimulates and directs all that we initiate; it abolishes chance. It makes it possible for us to live, physically and for ever, within the divine Unity."
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