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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"From the pantheist point of view, everything in the universe is seen to be radically One, Absolute, and Divine."
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"The Real incessantly reawakens us to an impassioned awareness of a wider expansion and an all-embracing unity."
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"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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"God is at work within life. He helps it, raises it up, gives it the impulse that drives it along, the appetite that attracts it, the growth that transforms it. I can feel God, touch Him, 'live' Him in the deep biological current that runs through my soul."
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"The interplay of the monads would be unintelligible if an aura did not extend from one to another: something, that is, which is peculiar to each one of them and at the same time common to all."
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"I looked around and I saw, as though in an ecstasy, that through all nature I was immersed in God."
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"Love is the conscious mark in us of the act that creates us by melting us into one."
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"People are called to form one single Body, in an intensely intimate divinization."
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| 9 |
"We can count upon creative energy awaiting us, ready to transform us in a way that goes beyond anything that the eye of man has seen or his ear has heard."
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"God, who is as immense and all-embracing as matter, and at the same time as warm and intimate as a soul, is the Centre who spreads through all things."
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"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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| 12 |
"Seek in utter darkness the dawn of God."
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"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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"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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"Souls are not a group of isolated monads…they make up one single whole with the universe."
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"I believe that the world records everything good and useful that is done in it; it notes and assimilates to itself every movement and every impulse that is fitted to harmonize with its own becoming, of whose real goodness there can be no doubt."
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"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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"Every being can subsist and hold together only through confluence with others."
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"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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"From time to time a great common aspiration comes to the surface from roots that lie deep down in mankind. At a given moment, the whole mass of souls thrills as it opens its eyes to a new light. Their multitude, for all its diversity, forms one whole in the unanimous and undisputed acceptance of a truth that is spontaneously taken as established; and, in one body, they set out together as though to find a new Holy Grail."
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"Basically, the whole of the world's psychism [psyche] gravitates towards a single centre."
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"Blessings on the philosophy that shows us that the cohesion of things is destined to be completed!"
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"We are the countless centres of one and the same sphere."
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"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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"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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