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 |
"In everything in me that has subsistence and resonance, in everything that enlarges me from within, that arouses me, attracts me, or wounds me from without, it is you, Lord, who are at work upon me – it is you who mould and spiritualize my formless clay – you that change me into yourself."
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"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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"Seek in utter darkness the dawn of God."
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| 4 |
"I looked around and I saw, as though in an ecstasy, that through all nature I was immersed in God."
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| 5 |
"In the domain of morality the Divine and the Terrestrial meet and are fused into one."
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| 6 |
"From the pantheist point of view, everything in the universe is seen to be radically One, Absolute, and Divine."
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| 7 |
"There is in the universe only one single individuality (one single monad), that of the whole."
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| 8 |
"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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| 9 |
"God, the personal and loving Infinite, is the Source, the motive Force and the End of the Universe."
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| 10 |
"People are called to form one single Body, in an intensely intimate divinization."
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| 11 |
"Every being can subsist and hold together only through confluence with others."
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| 12 |
"Human monads are atoms immersed in, nourished by, and carried along by one and the same unfathomable primitive substance; they are elements that are combined and given a special character by a network of intimate interconnections, in order so to constitute a higher unity."
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| 13 |
"Everything that is active, that moves or breathes, every physical, astral, or animate energy, every fragment of force, every spark of life, is equally sacred; for, in the humblest atom and the most brilliant star, in the lowest insect and the finest intelligence, there is the radiant smile and thrill of the same Absolute."
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| 14 |
"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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| 15 |
"I dreamed of a common centre into which all things would drive the most vital roots of their sensibility and energy; a universal Centre, living and benign, that would itself reinforce our desire to do what is right, when we are at a loss to express it, or preserve it, or realize it."
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| 16 |
"This is the classic teaching: God, who is 'his own being' is at the same time 'the being of all'."
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| 17 |
"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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"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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| 19 |
"Souls are not a group of isolated monads…they make up one single whole with the universe."
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| 20 |
"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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| 21 |
"Basically, the whole of the world's psychism [psyche] gravitates towards a single centre."
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| 22 |
"Evolution is holy. There we have the truth that makes us free."
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| 23 |
"Love is the conscious mark in us of the act that creates us by melting us into one."
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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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"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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