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 |
"Evolution is holy. There we have the truth that makes us free."
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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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3 |
"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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"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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5 |
"We are the countless centres of one and the same sphere."
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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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7 |
"The bosom of Mother Earth is in some way the bosom of God."
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8 |
"Like particles immersed in one and the same spiritual fluid, souls cannot think or pray or act or move, without waves being produced, even by the most insignificant among them, which set the others in motion."
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"The sum of our souls is the potentiality of Some Thing, not yet made, which is to emerge from their mass. Collective aspirations accompany and assist this organic work, greater than ourselves, which is effected in each one of us. It is the function of Morality to guide our free decisions into fruitful and obedient co-operation in this task."
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10 |
"God, the personal and loving Infinite, is the Source, the motive Force and the End of the Universe."
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11 |
"People are called to form one single Body, in an intensely intimate divinization."
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"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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13 |
"I looked around and I saw, as though in an ecstasy, that through all nature I was immersed in God."
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"There is only ONE SINGLE CENTER in the universe…it impels the whole of creation along one and the same line, first towards the fullest development of consciousness, and later towards the highest degree of holiness."
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"All living beings are but one being."
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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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"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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"The inter-personal contains the hopes of higher union on which evolution lives. It is the milieu of the monads' mutual attraction and confluence that sustains their final centre of coalescence."
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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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"Unity is destined to become more and more fully realized."
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"This is the classic teaching: God, who is 'his own being' is at the same time 'the being of all'."
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22 |
"Each monad is to some degree the centre of the entire Cosmos, resting upon and at the same time supporting its fabric."
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23 |
"Peace is the awareness of Unity."
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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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"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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