Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

Jacob Sherman
An Ever Diverse Pair:
Owen Barfield, Teilhard de Chardin
and the Evolution of Consciousness

Chapter Two
Teilhard de Chardin and the Evolution of Consciousness

The time has come to realize that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.[1]

 —Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

[There is] another membrane in the majestic assembly of telluric layers.  A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection.  The point of ignition grows larger.  The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence. [2]

 —Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

Though enrolled in a Jesuit seminary by early adolescence, Teilhard de Chardin met constantly with Vatican suspicion.  Nearly every book and essay in Teilhard’s 13 volumes of collected spiritual/philosophical writings was censored by church authorities.  During his lifetime, Teilhard’s grand evolutionary vision was known only through lectures, word of mouth, and mimeographed copies of his manuscripts passed surreptitiously from hand to eager hand. 

That Teilhard should have produced so massive a collection of work even under his lifetime’s censure is a wonder.  The collected works of Teilhard are vast in length, depth and complexity of thought; so much so that it is beyond the scope of this thesis to tackle them all head-on.  Of all of his formerly clandestine documents, The Phenomenon of Man has rightly earned its place as Teilhard’s magnum opus.[3]  Written in the middle of his career, it is the most systematic and sustained argument he ever produced, both reprising his earlier thought and anticipating what was yet to come.  Furthermore, it presents his most comprehensive and nuanced picture of the evolution of consciousness.  Therefore, in evaluating and explicating the message of Teilhard de Chardin we will look especially at The Phenomenon of Man as the most representative account of his system.

We will approach this work in three ways.  First, we will examine Teilhard’s methodology.  Much of what is distinct in Teilhard can be traced to his ambitious methodology which became something of a lifetime project for him.  Second, we shall take a careful look at the various stages of evolution delineated by Teilhard.  Not only will this provide us with his map of the evolution of consciousness but it will familiarize us with the key concepts and crucial movements in Teilhard’s thought.  Finally, we will conclude with an examination of Teilhard’s cosmic-Christology and its significance for the Teilhardian picture of the evolution of consciousness.

Life, the Universe and Everything: the Methodology of Teilhard de Chardin

Thomas Aquinas aspired to know Toto ordos universi­, the whole world order.   It was the quest for that sort of knowledge—universal knowledge—that had originally led to the establishment of new European schools, schools whose very name belied the nature of their pursuit: the universities.   This vision of Aquinas’s and the original universities’ was largely lost in the institutions of the twentieth century.  Isolation, specialization, and a general lack of interdisciplinary dialogue became the order of the day.  

Teilhard, though he was a twentieth century man, rejected this piecemeal approach to truth wholeheartedly.  This was, for him, as much a moral decision as an intellectual one.  From his earliest days, Teilhard was confronted with an inescapable desire for unity, wholeness, and coherence.  The world, Teilhard intuited, simply had to hold together.[4]  This meant that the hard facts of science—successive layers of sediment, biological novelties, fossil fragments—must somehow converge with theology, philosophy and thought.  It was this passion for convergence that gave shape to Teilhard’s methodology.  We will explore four principle components of that methodology.  First, we will look at Teilhard’s unique phenomenology.  Second, we will take further note of his passion for convergence and his conviction regarding the unity of truth.  Then, we will look at Teilhard’s special emphasis on the “within” of things before finally concluding with a note on the ways Teilhard moved even beyond his phenomenology to embrace a yet wider spectrum of truth. 

A Phenomenology of the Universe

Teilhard referred to the system employed in The Phenomenon of Man as a ‘hyperphysics’ or elsewhere, a ‘phenomenology’ of the universe.[5]  He was avowed in his insistence that this was not metaphysics or theology but science.[6]   His universal phenomenology was not to deal with questions of being or with revelation; its concern was with phenomena.  As he put it in the introduction to The Phenomenon of Man:

If this book is to be properly understood, it must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a sort of theological essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise.  The title itself indicates that.  This book deals with man solely as a phenomenon; but it also deals with the whole phenomenon of man.[7]

It is this attention to the ‘whole phenomenon’ that makes Teilhard’s phenomenology unique for while he vigorously contends that it is not philosophy or theology, the wholeness of his method ensures that he (at least) borders these subjects. His method may not take him into the sanctuary, but it leads him to at least knock on the doors of the sacristy. 

Teilhard’s choice of the word  phenomenology lends itself to misinterpretation.  Under the influence of Edmund Husserl (and subsequent phenomenologists), that word today has come to have a quite specific meaning.  For the latter Husserl, phenomenology is “the study of the essence of consciousness.”[8]  This sort of phenomenological approach to the understanding of consciousness involves the study of the objects of mental acts precisely as they are, and with no regard to existence or the outside world at all.  Consciousness alone is the object of inquiry.[9]   Teilhard’s phenomenology is of a different ilk altogether.  Whereas Husserl is concerned only with consciousness and allows this as his sole datum, Teilhard’s data is the whole cosmos taken in its physicality and interiority.    Teilhard does however, share with Husserl and the phenomenologists the conviction that phenomena must be studied as they are given. N. M. Wildiers says further:

If there is any link between Teilhard and the contemporary phenomenologists, it is to be looked for in the fact that for Teilhard too every effort to grasp the significance of the phenomena stands in a relation to man, seen not only in terms of his structure and his connection with other structures, but above all in his interiority…. The two forms of phenomenology differ where their object is concerned; but in the attitudes which they assume toward that object it is possible to discover a certain affinity.[10]

The Convergence of Truth

Teilhard is convinced that by taking note of the whole phenomenon, as it is and as it is given, something like the medieval synthesis may once again be achieved.  The deeper each discipline delves and the more truth they respectively uncover, the closer they come to one another.  He articulates his conviction:

Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.  I say ‘converge’ advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes…. This ‘hyperphysics’ is still not a metaphysic.”[11]

 While Teilhard believes in the differentiation of the spheres of inquiry (scientific, theological, philosophical, etc.), he laments their compartmentalization or disassociation.  It is this that has led humanity to be somehow excluded from scientific study.[12]  Humanity is examined but not as a whole, not, that is, as the thinking part of the rest of the world.  Even our everyday language displays this divorce between the hard sciences, on the one hand, and the humanities (humanities) on the other.  This disassociation is largely responsible for the failure of science, theology and philosophy to converge as they ought.  By neglecting crucial data (namely, Teilhard thinks, the phenomenon of human interiority in the natural world), science has ensured that these disciplines diverge.  Teilhard seeks to rectify this situation.  He comments:

They treat man as a small separate cosmos, isolated from the rest of the universe.  Any number of sciences concern themselves with man, but man, in that which makes him essentially human, still lies outside science. 

Nevertheless, we have only to think for a moment of the tremendous event represented by the explosion of thought on the surface of the earth to be quite certain that this great episode is something more than a part of the general system of nature: we have to accord to it a position of prime importance, from the point of view both of using and understanding the motive forces of nature.[13]

In contrast to this, Teilhard wants “to try to develop a homogenous and coherent perspective of our general extended experience of man.”[14]  Only such a full treatment of the human phenomenon will provide a sufficiently broad account of reality. 

The Within of Things

The ‘tremendous explosion of thought on the surface of the earth’ presents itself as the most peculiar and intriguing aspect of the human phenomenon (the human phenomenon being, for Teilhard, the most intriguing aspect of the cosmic phenomenon).  Père Teilhard’s scientific approach to reality then, includes the crucial concept of interiority or, as he says, the within of things.  If we are to know something we must know it within as well as without. 

We shall cover this concept more fully below, but suffice it to say here that a study of this within of things involves a question of purpose.  An example will illustrate the importance of this.  Let us imagine some extra-terrestrial scientist studying one of our automobiles.  He may examine it bumper to bumper, delineating such things as its weight, size, chemical components and even the wavelengths of its color.  He will not however, have discovered that it is a car until he comes upon the fact that it is meant to be driven, that is to say, that this conglomeration of metals and plastics is a vehicle.  So it is with the phenomena of the cosmos and, especially, with the phenomenon of man—they will only be understood once their purpose is discovered.  Teilhard recognizes this and includes in his scientific, cosmic phenomenology the question of a thing’s end; to use an Aristotelian term, Teilhard addresses the issue of a thing’s entelechy.[15] 

Beyond the issue of entelechy, this withinness can also be described broadly as consciousness.  Teilhard believes that there is a level of consciousness, albeit minute, present at even the molecular level.  His scientific phenomenology seeks to take account of this and does not limit itself simply to what is measurable externally. 

Beyond Phenomenology

Despite his scientific methodology, Teilhard the man always shines through his words, cadences, and images. “To read Teilhard de Chardin is less like reading a philosopher or theologian or scientist (though he was all three) than it is like reading a great visionary, at once a poet and a mystic.”[16]  The problem with visionaries, poets and mystics is that so often their feet are far from terra firma. Teilhard avoids this error by articulating and adhering to a rigorous  methodology throughout The Phenomenon of Man.

In other writings Teilhard employed other methods, crossing fully into theology, poetry, mysticism and even philosophy.  The Phenomenon of Man is admirably consistent, however.  The only real exception is Teilhard’s epilogue, “The Christian Phenomenon.”   Henri de Lubac has noted that the description of this chapter as an epilogue was utterly intentional for here and here alone he significantly strays from his phenomenological inquiry.  Speculating on the nature of Christ within his evolutionary scheme, Teilhard appeals unabashedly to revelation (displaying a side suppressed throughout the rest of The Phenomenon of Man).

In his methodology, Teilhard aimed to literally take everything into scientific account.  It is an audacious project which has annoyed some even while enrapturing others.  Bernard Towers, one of the latter, and goes so far as to compare Teilhard’s work, in scope and in quality, to the great Thomas Aquinas himself.[17]  At end though, Teilhard’s vision was higher than his achievement and he knew it.  In proposing such a sweeping project, the point was not so much to get it right as to simply try it.  Theologians, philosophers and scientists have all found legitimate grounds upon which to contend with Teilhard.  His grand phenomenology proves unsuccessful at points.  That would hardly have ruffled his feathers.  Teilhard knew his vision was incomplete and  as a scientist expected, even hoped, that it would be amended.[18]  For this reason, Doran McCarty says that, “a very important part of Teilhard’s methodology is his dynamic form.”[19] Like everything in Teilhard’s world, his vision is subject to evolutionary forces: his vision itself is moving somewhere, onward and upward.

From Alpha to Omega: the Evolution of Consciousness

“Seeing,” says Teilhard.  “We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb—if not ultimately, at least essentially.”  He continues:

Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book.  But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness, that is to say vision.  And that, doubtless, is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.[20] 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was, as we have said, a visionary.  His writing everywhere bursts with excitement as he gazes upon and describes this cosmos where there is always something more to be seen.  His chief description is an account of the historical unfolding of these ever more perfect eyes, that is to say, an account of the evolution of consciousness.

Teilhard sees this evolution proceeding through a series of four stages that correspond with the four ‘books’ contained in The Phenomenon of Man.  We can describe these stages as: matter, life, humanity, and Christ; or perhaps, the cosmic, the biotic, the noetic, and the Christic;[21] or again, to use terms Teilhard was fond of, the geosphere, the biosphere, the noosphere, and the Christosphere.[22]  Fundamental to each stage is its evolutionary nature.  These stages are dynamic not static; they are in motion and can therefore be described as cosmogenesis, biogenesis, noogenesis, and Christogenesis.  Whatever we call them, describing the advance of evolution through these successive stages or epochs is the heart of The Phenomenon of Man. 

‘In the Beginning’ : The Cosmic

Teilhard begins where any cosmology must, in the time before the emergence of life.  He starts simply with matter—as he calls it, the “stuff of the universe.”[23]  He describes these basic atomic and molecular structures as they surprisingly and wondrously find each other, joining together in increasing molecular complexity.  It is a marvel to behold and Teilhard captures the electric intensity of the event quite well.  But then he sounds a note of disillusionment for though we have marveled at the forces of complexification—the improbable arrangements of atoms that capture our attention—we must still come face to face with the forces of entropy and decay.  As Teilhard describes the situation:

Laboriously, step by step, the atomic and molecular structures become higher and more complex, but the upward force is lost on the way…. Little by little, the improbable combinations that they represent become broken down again into more simple components, which fall back and are disaggregated in the shapelessness of probable distributions.  A rocket rising in the wake of time’s arrow, that only bursts to be extinguished; an eddy rising on the bosom of a descending current—such then must be our picture of the world.  So says science…[24] 

Reflecting on such phenomena as the second law of thermal dynamics Teilhard anticipates the reader's reaction:  Can there any point to it?  Can we explore further?  Do these earliest explorations teach us that evolution cannot but unravel, cannot but degenerate?  Teilhard continues, “So says science: and I believe in science: but up to now has science ever troubled to look at the world other than from without?”[25]

Attention to the within, a scientific account of the internal as well as the external—these are the goals through which Teilhard hopes to make sense of evolution, indeed, of the strange fact that there is anything whatsoever and that we are aware of it at all. 

To speak of a within at these earliest stages of the cosmos may seem nonsensical to most readers.  How, we ask incredulously, can he deem to speak of the within of an atom?  For Teilhard however, the question was reversed: how can we not speak of it?  Teilhard understood the universe to be akin to a single organism and he concluded therefore, that if humanity has a within (and most people, certain extreme post-modernists not withstanding, will agree to that) then we can reason by extension that, “there is necessarily a double aspect to the structure [of the stuff of the universe], that is to say in every region of space and time… co-extensive with their Without, there is a Within to things.”[26]  

For Teilhard, consciousness, an equivalent term for the ‘within’ of things,[27] “is taken in its widest sense to indicate every kind of psychism, from the most rudimentary forms of perception imaginable to the human phenomenon of reflective thought.”[28]  Teilhard states categorically that it does not emerge through some spontaneous generation of mind; it is present, at least minutely, in even the most elementary forms.[29]  This is why we can speak of The Phenomenon of Man as being about the evolution of consciousness even though life itself doesn’t appear until book two, thought in book three.  At every point and in everything throughout the history of the cosmos consciousness has been present.   Teilhard described this poetically in “The Mass on the World”:

In the beginning was Power, intelligent, loving, energizing.  In the beginning was the WORD, supremely capable of mastering and molding whatever might come into being in the world of matter.  In the beginning, there were not coldness and darkness, there was the FIRE.[30] 

This perception of nascent consciousness even in the beginning led Teilhard to articulate the Law of Complexity-Consciousness or, as it has become known,  Teilhard’s Law.  The Law of Complexity-Consciousness describes Teilhard’s two central perceptions regarding evolution:

1.     That with the progression of time matter tends towards complexification.

2.     That there is a correspondence between the level of complexity and the level of consciousness displayed within matter.

Thus, Teilhard approximates the level of consciousness present within any given subject through an examination of its external complexity: a spider is more conscious than an amoeba; an iguanodon than a spider;  a dog than an iguanodon; an ape than a dog; a human than an ape. With each subject there is an observable increase in material complexity, just as there is an increase in consciousness.  Using this law we could postulate, for example, that an electron has more consciousness than a quantum.  But they all possess some form of consciousness, some form of potential life.

To explain further how one gets from the atom to Adam, Teilhard expands on the notion of energy.[31]   All energy, he says, is psychic in nature but it is divided into two distinct components.[32]  On the one hand, there is what he calls tangential energy of which we are all more or less familiar.  Tangential energy is the energy of thermodynamics, the force of entropy and heat death, and the energy which governs external relationships.  It tends to link one element to another at the same level of complexity or organization and, with just a little imagination, one can see how this leads to entropy, a dissolution to the lowest level of complexity.  But there is a second form of energy, radial energy, with which we are less familiar.  Radial energy draws elements “towards ever greater complexity and centricity—in other words forwards.”[33]  Radial energy, something we do not yet know how to measure, is the force of union (it is also called axial or centric energy), drawing elements onward and upward, and manifesting itself ultimately in love.

These two forms are not two things but two forms of a single, psychic energy.  They exist complementarily but in polarity. Like the foci of an ellipse, with the increase of radial energy, the pull of tangential energy lessens and vice-versa.[34]  The play of these two ever present forms of energy, especially the triumph of the radial, goes some way in explaining the evolution of matter—from the hydrogen simplicity of the spiral nebula to the complexity of chemicals on the crust of planets—long before Darwin’s survival of the fittest could ever make one bit of difference. 

‘Let There Be Life’ : The Biotic

Teilhard turns his attention now to the planet earth—with just the right sun, the right distance from its sun, the right axial tilt, the right moon—the planet earth where life takes its first groping steps.  Radial energy propels evolution forward through precisely this mechanism of groping.  Teilhard’s radial energy, whether on a molecular or biological stage, does not advance along a straight line in the sort of crude orthogenesis utterly rejected by modern science.[35]  Rather, he presents this energy as moving forward through a series of attempts, some successful, some not.  As Bernard Towers comments:

It would be astonishing if this ‘groping’ did not lead, more often than not, into byways and blind alleys, where the radial-energy-potential slowly runs down.  But if we think of the process, as Teilhard always did, in terms of the whole rather than of the individual element or group, then even the blind alleys become meaningful.  For complexity-consciousness to be possible, and to go on increasing, there must be variety in the environment for consciousness to operate on.[36] 

How many blind alleys there were we do not know.  But Teilhard describes the surface of the early earth covered  with, “a thickness of some miles, in water, in air, in muddy deposits, ultra-microscopic grains of protein thickly strewn over the surface of the earth.  Our imaginations boggle at the mere thought of counting the flakes of this snow.”[37]  The tangential flow of energy continues as always, uniting and dissipating, but the radial energy presses undauntedly onward, groping this way and that, moving upward in intensity.  There is a sound, as it were, of crackling over surface of the deep.  “Something is going to burst out upon the early earth, and this thing is Life.”[38]

The transition from pre-life to life is, so to speak, organic; the former grows out of the latter.  How then, given Teilhard’s hypothesis of consciousness and pre-life present even in the smallest of granules, can we differentiate one from the other?  It must be understood that although Teilhard clearly delineates a series of stages (each containing even more stages) he still views the entire drama, from the cosmic to the Christic, as an organic whole.  Teilhard recognizes differentiation in evolutionary development without that leading to divorce.  There is, as N. M. Wildiers notes, “a discontinuity in the continuity.”[39]  Such differentiation is observed in cosmic, organic and noetic thresholds or critical points. A critical point occurs when an element’s energy reaches a certain level after which it becomes a qualitatively different element. [40]   Imagine the transition from water to gas which occurs at the critical point of 100 degrees Celsius or, for that matter, of water to ice at 0 degrees.  As Teilhard comments, “In every domain, when anything exceeds a certain measurement, it suddenly changes its aspect, condition or nature… This is the only way in which science can speak of a ‘first instant’.  But it is none-the-less a true way.”[41]

The first instant of life, presaged by the complexification of molecules and even the first viruses, occurs with the cell.  Teilhard sees this too as an event in the evolution of consciousness, the “cellular awakening” as it were.[42]  Shortly after the emergence of the first cell (or cells since they may have appeared almost simultaneously in large numbers) the biosphere was established as life flooded over the whole earth.[43]  “Life no sooner started,” says Teilhard, “than it swarmed.”[44]

Life ascends, radial energy propelling it to grope upwards, though now with the help of life’s own competitive struggle, that natural selection to which Darwinism is so committed.  Teilhard grants this some legitimacy, but stops short of Darwinism.  He contends that ‘natural selection’ is one of those vehicles seized upon by radial energy in its groping orthogenesis.  He points out that the advance of species, that is to say, their evolution as opposed to just change, is not “mere chance.  Groping is directed chance.  It means pervading everything so as to try everything, and trying everything so as to find everything.”[45]

What emerges from this vision of groping-orthogenetic-evolution is a picture Teilhard calls the tree of life.  Radial energy ramifies through the biosphere creating and exploring ever new phyla.  From our position we tend to look at these variegated species as all possessing one and the same instinct.  That is, we frequently speak as if each animal consciousness was identical.  Teilhard maintains that this is a mistake.  “Life,” he says, “is the rise of consciousness,”[46]  or as Joseph Kopp puts it, “biogenesis (ramification of life) is in the first place psychogenesis (ramification of spirit).”[47]  At every step along the way there is a change of some sort in the psychism of the animal species.  Instinct is not a single thing; rather there are many instincts, each appropriate to that species.   “The ‘psychical’ make-up of an insect is not and cannot be that of a vertebrate; nor can the instinct of a squirrel be that of a cat or an elephant: this in virtue of the position of each on the tree of life.”[48]  Teilhard continues, describing these variations as an evolution of consciousness, an ascending system:

They form as a whole a kind of fan-like structure in which the higher terms on each nervure are recognized each time by a greater range of choice and depending on a better defined centre of co-ordination and consciousness… The mind (or psyche) of a dog, despite all that may be said to the contrary, is positively superior to that of a mole or a fish.[49] 

Still, despite these differences, internal and external, Teilhard is an advocate to the end for the unity of the biosphere.  Life appeared once and has since ramified itself throughout the tree of life.  In language that anticipates something like the Gaia hypothesis as put forward by James Lovelock, Teilhard speaks of the earth as a single growing organism. 

The earth is after all something more than a sort of huge breathing body.  Admittedly it rises and falls, but more important is the fact that it must have begun at a certain moment; that it is passing through a consecutive series of moving equilibria; and that in all probability it is tending towards some final state.  It has a birth, a development, and presumably a death ahead.[50]

The highest shoot of this organism at the top of the tree of life is the mammalian branch.  Here we see complexity and consciousness reaching levels achieved nowhere else.  And it is here among the mammals that one must look for the future of evolution.  Teilhard concludes:

We already knew that everywhere the active phyletic lines grow warm with consciousness towards the summit.  But in one well-marked region at the heart of the mammals, where the most powerful brains ever made by nature are to be found, they become red hot.  And right at the heart of that glow burns a point of incandescence.

We must not lose sight of that line crimsoned by the dawn.  After thousands of years rising below the horizon, a flame bursts forth at a strictly localized point.

Thought is born.[51] 

‘Know Thyself’ : The Noetic

Thought is born and this nativity is no less significant than the very advent of life.  Thought which Teilhard likens to reflection or consciousness coiled back in upon itself finds a home in the human being.  Here at last, says Teilhard, is the summit of evolution as we know it.[52]

For Teilhard, what sets thought apart from all lesser types of consciousness, and what so fascinates him, is the phenomenon of reflection.  Reflection is a sort of quantum leap in consciousness.  Teilhard defines it as, “the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know but to know oneself; no longer merely to know but to know that one knows.”[53]  Thought, we might say, is consciousness squared and its emergence affects everything.  As Teilhard wrote in The Future of Man:

Man is psychically distinguished from all other animals by the entirely new fact that … in him, for the first time on earth, consciousness has coiled back upon itself to become thought.  To an observer unaware of what it signifies, the event might at first seem to have little importance; but in fact it represents the complete resurgence of terrestrial life upon itself.  In reflecting psychically upon itself Life made a new start.[54]

Life's new start was momentous but not immediately noticeable.   Indeed, like all other advances in evolution, this threshold disappears under the weight of the past.[55]   “Man came silently into the world,” says Teilhard.[56]   We mustn’t make the mistake of treating this remarkable new human being as something other than a part of nature.  The same play of tangential and radial energy that brought into existence the first crystals, the first plants, the first animals, here brought to birth the first occurrence of mind.   In short, humanity is a natural phenomenon, the latest of life’s successive waves.[57] 

Teilhard describes a world very much like our own with, “myriads of antelopes and zebras, a variety of proboscidians in herds, deer with every kind of antler, tigers, wolves, foxes and badgers, all similar to those we have today… So familiar is this scene that we have to make an effort to realize that nowhere is there so much as a wisp of smoke rising from camp or village.”[58]  Then somewhere, perhaps along the great majestic steppes of Africa, something revolutionary occurred—a breakthrough.  In a flash, in the midst of the anthropoids, consciousness took an infinite leap forward:

Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed.  But in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations; and simultaneously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the concentrated simplicity of its faculties.  And all this happened for the first time.[59] 

This strange and wonderful event—a mutation from zero to everything—resulted in the first persons.  Reflection is consciousness turned inward.  Whereas before humanity, consciousness only radiated outwards perceiving the world to a greater or lesser degree through the senses, we can now for the first time in history speak of centers of consciousness.  This enroulement (‘inturning process’) leads to the reality of  personalization.  Teilhard sums it up, “The cell has become ‘someone’.  After the grain of matter, the grain of life; and now at last we see constituted the grain of thought.”[60]

Surveying the globe today, the significance of this emergence is uncontestable.  Since its recent egression, humanity has ascended to a position of unrivaled privilege.  We are everywhere now engaged in the process of becoming yet more human, even of making the earth itself more human   Teilhard calls this process hominization.  Hominization has two aspects.  “[It] can be accepted in the first place as the individual and instantaneous leap from instinct to thought, but it is also, in a wider sense, the progressive phyletic spiritualization in human civilization of all the forces contained in the animal world.”[61]

To clarify: in humanity evolution finally becomes conscious of itself.  We right now are evolution looking at itself, reflecting upon itself. [62]  Humanity stands like a priest representative of all the forces in the animal world.  In the reflective consciousness of a man or woman, nature itself after laboring so long participates in the phenomenon of thought.  Teilhard therefore, understands the entire span of organic and cosmic evolution in light of this hominization.[63]  Humanity is the key to understanding evolution revealing it to be precisely an evolution of consciousness. De facto the history of evolution is the history of the evolution of persons.  For Teilhard, that evolution should result in the evolution of persons is of profound significance.

Teilhard puts this in historical perspective.  Science, in the person of Copernicus, removed humanity from its arrogant position of privilege within the universe and we have ever since grown increasingly wary of anthropomorphism, anthropocentrisms, etc.  But now that same science, this time in an evolutionary form, restores humanity to a place of even greater dignity as the apex of cosmic evolution.  Without returning to vulgar anthropomorphisms, we nevertheless must now see the cosmos in light of the human person.

Man is not the centre of the universe as once we thought in our simplicity, but something much more wonderful—the arrow pointing the way to the final unification of the world in terms of life.  Man alone constitutes the last-born, the freshest, the most complicated, the most subtle of all the successive layers of life.[64] 

So humanity emerges like an arrow but an arrow pointing where?

Here we find ourselves cast upon Teilhard’s concept of the noosphere. Some years before Teilhard, in 1875, the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess had coined the term biosphere to describe the skin of living material stretched out upon the earth.  Suess derived his neologism from two existing geological terms:  the lithosphere which described the it solid rocky crust of the earth, and just below it the yet more dense, liquid baryshphere.  Barysphere, lithosphere, biosphere.  Teilhard however, adds the noosphere as a description of that skin of mind that, since the advent of hominization, has stretched itself out over the biosphere.  Teilhard describes this event:

A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection.  The point of ignition grows larger.  The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence… It is really a new layer, the ‘thinking layer’, which, since its germination at the end of the Tertiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants and animals [65]

 The noosphere is a sort of envelope of mind, a lattice of thought, relationships, and love that spans the globe, a matrix of personal interconnectivity.  It is the support structure of hominization.  As the noosphere has developed— with, for example, the invention of oral traditions, libraries, or various tools and means of communication—it has become, among other things, a collective depository of human memory.  Though we are wont to regard such noospheric structures as synthetic we must see them as a continuation of the same cosmic drama to which we have thus far been attending.  When evolution, with the appearance of humanity, took its second critical turn (the first being the appearance of life), the mechanisms of evolution themselves went through a decisive change.  Now that thought had at last burst forth the process of evolution moved, more or less, from soma to psyche.[66]  The noosphere is today the psychic front of evolution.  Since the emergence of reflection, evolutionary advancement occurs less and less through heredity and increasingly through conscious means such as communication or education.  In the noosphere, we see Teilhard’s vision of evolution going far beyond the cosmic or biological spheres.  Social evolution, psychic evolution, cultural evolution, moral evolution: these are all parts of the one process that birthed both the stars, and the swamps and all of the life therein.  “The social phenomenon,” says Teilhard, “is the culmination and not the attenuation of the biological phenomenon.”[67]

Noogenesis occurs on any number of fronts.  For example, Teilhard equates it with technological progress of all kinds.  He describes the proliferation of factories, the harnessing of the earth’s powers, the spread of human civilization with awed enthusiasm.  He looks reverently forward to humanity’s mastery of eugenics or artificial creation of neo-life.[68] Teilhard's optimism in these matters may seem naïve, and even reckless, but he did attempt to tie this dangerous concept of progress to a profound reverence for the earth and all of creation.  There is a moral element to his fascination with progress that is revealed by his comment, “There is less difference than people think between research and adoration.” [69]  His moral bearings become even more pronounced when he insists that this progression of science must always wrestle with the question of  “how to give to each and every element its final value by grouping them in the unity of the organized whole.”[70]

Which brings us to the most characteristic quality of the noosphere, namely, collectivity or universality. We recall that evolution has proceeded all along, in Teilhard’s view, through the pull of radial energy.  In humanity and the consequent noosphere, radial energy achieves a new level of ascendancy.  Teilhard notices this first in the peculiar phenomenon of humanity.  “Formerly, on the tree of life,” says Teilhard, “we had [in all phyla] a mere tangle of stems; now over the whole domain of Homo sapiens we have synthesis.”[71]  Different races, cultures, and traditions—what Teilhard likens to different species—shuffle and blend psychically and biologically.  The roundness of the earth even plays its part, for some time now bringing us all ever closer to one another and forcing greater levels of cooperation and communication.  Looking at our modern world, Teilhard comments:

No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us.  With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.[72]  

In this rush to collectivity however, one must not forget the preeminence of the personal (the essence of hominization).  The odd trend displayed by evolution is one towards an ever higher degree of personality along with a concomitant rise in universality.  This is the ideal of radial energy, the heights of complexity-consciousness.  Such a uniting of personal centers with other personal centers occurs most fully in Love. As Christopher Mooney notes, “Love is the only energy in the world that is capable of personalizing by totalizing.  It is consequently the highest form of that energy which Teilhard has called ‘radial’.”[73]  In a stunning announcement, Teilhard proclaims that radial energy, [74] the great driving force of cosmic evolution, is nothing other than love itself—l’amore che move il sole e l’altre stelle.[75] 

And so the evolution of the noosphere presents itself to us as a movement towards ever greater unity, cooperation and love. Teilhard illustrates it succinctly:

Evolution = Rise of consciousness,

  Rise of consciousness = Union effected[76]

As the noosphere approaches this collectivity, it has planetary—even cosmic—repercussions.  If Hominization includes all the forces of the animal world, as Teilhard maintains, then the phenomenon of planetization becomes supremely significant.  It is, says Teilhard, nothing short than the emergence of a single planetary spirit; in Teilhard’s language, the spirit of the earth, the spirit of evolution.[77]  Teilhard looks ahead and comments, “Peace through conquest, work in joy.  These are waiting for us beyond the line where empires are set up against other empires, in an interior totalization of the world upon itself, in the unanimous construction of a spirit of the earth.”[78]

As radial energy has gained in ascendancy (through the historical increase of complexity-consciousness) it has become increasingly liberated from the decay of the tangential.  This has translated to an ever greater degree of environmental freedom each step along the way.  With the deployment of the noosphere this freedom reaches a high point. Until fairly recently, evolution continued along gropingly but unabated.  No longer, for an evolution aware of itself is also an evolution that can choose to simply quit  “Evolution,” says Teilhard, “by becoming conscious of itself in the depths of ourselves… becomes free to dispose of itself—it can give itself or refuse itself… We hold it in our hands, responsible for its past to its future.”[79]

Teilhard turns to existential language when discussing this new phase of consciousness evolution.  Having become reflective—evolution conscious of itself—humanity becomes the first creature capable of cosmic refusal.  If in surveying the globe with its conditions of war, poverty, and injustice, humans conclude that our efforts are futile, then it remains only for us to give up.  To do so would be to relinquish evolution itself, to bring the whole cosmic process screeching to a halt.

Teilhard sees humanity as the apex of evolution but not the end.  He anticipates a future spirit of the earth but concedes that it is not yet inevitable.  There is a precariousness to humanities present condition that must be met with a reliable vision of the future.  Hope must be kindled; instead of despair and angst, Teilhard insists, even the prognostications of science must somehow generate a taste for life, for upon this love of life and kindling of hope hangs the whole cosmic project of evolution. 

If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the work involved we can say: ‘What’s the good of it all?’ our efforts will flag.  With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt—because we are evolution.[80] 

‘All in all’ : the Christic

In Book 4 of The Phenomenon of Man Teilhard turns away from the past, fixes his gaze on the future.  In this discussion of the future, Teilhard’s originality is most profound and his passion most pronounced.  “The future,” he says, “is more beautiful than all the pasts.”[81]

In order to treat the future with the same dignity he has given the past, Teilhard must continue treat it scientifically.  But how does one arrive scientifically at a view of the future?  For Teilhard the answer is simple: applying the same logic an astronomer uses to predict, say, planetary alignment or a solar eclipse, Teilhard looks at the principles and direction of evolution in the past and from them extrapolates evolution’s destination in the future. 

Before proceeding it is necessary to review the story thus far.  From the very beginning a process of cosmic evolution was underway.  Even inanimate matter was caught up into this stream propelled ever forward in increasing complexity-consciousness.  Eventually the pull of radial energy (the energy of union and transcendence that can also be called love) resulted in the first faltering steps of life.  Life spread like a fire over the geosphere and the biosphere was born.  Evolution continued as the biotic force ramified, flowering  ever new peduncles on the tree of life.  Relatively recently, a new critical point was reached as one shoot on this tree began to reflect upon itself: the birth of thought, the advent of humanity.

Each stage in this grand story saw the progressive liberation of increasing amounts of consciousness, radial energy freeing itself more and more from the strictures of the tangential.  At the last critical threshold—hominization—this radial liberation resulted in a sudden and unexpected change in the mechanism of evolution.  With the advent of Homo sapiens the process of ramification was finally abandoned.  Evolution switched from a primarily divergent direction to an overwhelmingly convergent one.  As a result, humanity became engaged in the grand project of noogenesis, the heart of which was a move towards planetization and reaching its hight point in love.  From this point, Teilhard extrapolates.

As far as Teilhard is concerned, humanity is a work in progress, at present no more than an embryo of what it shall one day become.  Marvelous as they might be, the emergence of humanity and the concomitant noosphere do not mark the end of evolution.  Their significance is not the termination of evolution but a change of venue: humanity has become the field upon which evolution is now at play.   In this sense, Teilhard agrees with Nietzsche that man is made to be surpassed.  However, Teilhard does not anticipate some Nietzschean ubermensch emerging in the future, but instead sees a vision of a super-humanity.  As Teilhard says:

The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others.  They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth…[82] 

Teilhard arrives at this vision of the all-together ascent of humankind through an extrapolation of his former logic.  We recall his formula:

Evolution = Rise of consciousness,

  Rise of consciousness = Union effected[83] 

From these two postulates Teilhard deduces a third: namely, that this increase in consciousness and movement towards union must result in a center, a point of utmost consciousness.  Teilhard calls this point of ultimate consciousness–the terminus of evolution wherein humanity transcends itself–the Omega Point.

There is a tendency to assume that any collective transcendence of humanity must be impersonal, but Teilhard will have none of this.  Persons after all, are de facto what evolution labored so long to create; that the personal should be lost then, is inconceivable.[84]  Far from disappearing, the personal will actually increase as it rushes headlong towards the universal.  Teilhard calls this state of excited-personality the Hyper-Personal.  He states flatly, “It is… a mistake to look for the extension of our being or of the noosphere in the Impersonal.  The Future-Universal could not be anything else but the Hyper-Personal.” [85]

It is one thing to postulate a hyper-personal-collective-future but another thing entirely to make this concept intelligible.  In an effort to do so Teilhard introduces one of his most characteristic axioms: union differentiates, a phrase as connected with Teilhard as the cogito is with DesCartes.[86]    True union differentiates, believes Teilhard, and so Omega is not a great ocean swallowing and eradicating the grains of consciousness that flow into it, but is rather a distinct Center radiating at the core of a system of centers.[87]  The hyper-personal doesn’t just transcend but includes and intensifies the personal.  Omega is more personal than we, not less.

Teilhard maintains that there is a difference  between personality and individuality.  The egoist tries to separate himself as much as possible from others in order to individualize, but in doing so drags the world backwards towards a retrograde plurality.  In contrast, Teilhard says that “the peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person.”[88]  We don’t become persons through isolation but through communion, through relationships.  Thus, “the true ego grows in inverse proportion to egoism.”[89]  Teilhard suggests that this seemingly paradoxical statement proves itself in everyday life.  When we love with abandon, losing ourselves in the beloved, don’t we at the same time become more truly ourselves?  We find ourselves, so to speak, in the other.  Union doesn’t just differentiate, it centrifies, it personalizes; ultimate union with Omega personifies ultimately.[90]

If evolution progresses (which, as we saw above, is not guaranteed) it must progress along the lines of this increased personalization, that is, it must culminate in Omega Point.  Even as a cell is more than the sum of its molecules, or a plant more than the sum of its cells, so too Omega is more than the sum of its persons.  Teilhard catalogues four necessary and novel attributes of this Omega Point:[91]

1.     Actuality:  Omega is not an ideal nor a potential, but is rather, ‘present’ and ‘real’.  Though it arises out the noosphere, it has its own ontological reality like consciousness which arose out of the biosphere but has its own reality.

2.     Irreversibility:  Each of the thresholds we have encountered has proven to be irreversible, a once for all event that may be destroyed but cannotbe undone (e.g. thought can be destroyed if humanity destroys itself, but will not be undone apart from such a cataclysm).  Omega however, escapes from even the potential of destruction by escaping totally from the forces of decay.  Because of this it inspires hope and action and leads us to deduce a third attribute:

3.     Autonomy:  Omega is the terminus of evolution, the point on the top of the pyramid of space and time.  As such, it transcends both space and time.  We saw radial energy progressively gaining increased liberation from tangential decay.  At Omega Point, tangential energy is shed completely.  Though the earth will, in keeping with entropy, one day perish, the Omega Point will not.  “Omega must,” says Teilhard, “be independent of the collapse of the forces with which evolution is woven.”[92]

4.     Transcendence:  Looked at from the historical process, Omega “only reveals half of itself,” says Teilhard.  “While being the last term of its series it is also outside all series.  Not only does it crown, but it closes.”[93]  Escaping time and space, Omega is able to be simultaneously present at all times and at all spaces.  Here is the great secret of evolution, long hidden but now revealed: Omega is the Prime Mover ahead.[94]  The radial energy of evolution (what we have learned is really love) has been all along the attraction of Point Omega. 

The stability of the universe is not found in ever smaller units—quarks or sub-quarks or what have you—but in the highest and most complex of phenomena: in life, in consciousness, in Omega.  Omega finally transcends and unifies the whole universe; it “escapes from entropy and does so more and more.”  Because Omega has actuality humanity will not just unite in Omega, but will unite with Omega and so will humanity achieve its own liberation from entropy.[95] 

Teilhard is in love with the concept of Omega, his tone switiching to one of hushed reverence and sensual delight when he speaks of it.  For Teilhard actually, Omega was more than a concept—it was, in fact, personal, a someone, and as a someone could be loved.  Omega is the personalization of the whole universe, the spiritual face of the world.  As the combination of both the universal and the personal, it is the fulfillment of the Spirit of the earth anticipated in noogenesis.  And, for, Teilhard it was still more.

In the epilogue to The Phenomenon of Man as well as in a host of other essays, Teilhard equates Omega with Christ.  Teilhard believed that he arrived at the personal Omega without deviating from his strictly phenomenological approach to reality.  However, in his epilogue, Teilhard cannot help but connect this vision with his own Christianity.

Teilhard reads the scriptures as a child of the earth by temperament and profession.  He speaks of the kingdom of God as “a prodigious biological operation—that of the Redeeming Incarnation” and sees Christ as “the principle of universal vitality… [who] put himself in the position (maintained ever since) to subdue under himself, to purify, to direct and superanimate the general ascent of consciousness into which he asserted himself.”[96]  Still, despite his use of unconventional language, Teilhard believes he is describing the biblical and catholic picture of Christ, a Christ who by virtue of his death and resurrection is calling all things to himself and will then hand them to God and God will be all in all (1Cor. 15:28).  For Teilhard, the attainment of Omega Point is nothing less than the Parousia of Christ.  As he says, “so perfectly does this coincide with the Omega Point that doubtless I should never have ventured to envisage the latter or formulate the hypothesis rationally if, in my consciousness as a believer, I had not found not only its speculative model but also its living reality.”[97]

In Teilhard’s mind, the different spheres of knowledge—science, mysticism, philosophy, religion—taken to their utmost, meet in this one point of God-Omega.   In inquiry as in cosmic evolution, “Everything that rises must converge.”[98]  The equation of Omega with Christ has the effect of Christifying the whole universe.  The entire evolutionary event can be imagined as a cone: cosmogenesis blending into biogenesis blending into anthropogenesis blending into noogenesis and finally Christogenesis reaching its peak at Omega.[99]  Bernard Towers comments:

Superimposed, then, on what Teilhard called the noosphere, there is the beginning of the Christosphere.  ‘Christogenesis’ is the process through which all men will come to share in, to form part of, the Mystical Body of Christ.  And men will bring with them all the rest of that world of nature in which our human nature is inextricably bound up.  Christogenesis constitutes the last stage of the evolutionary process.[100]

Teilhard's is a vision of the entire cosmos, matter as well as spirit, ultimately Christified.[101]   Omega occurs as a kind of transfiguration: the cataclysmic end of material reality as we presently know it and the birth of Omega, absolute consciousness.  Cosmos becomes Christos as the Cartesian dualism of subject/object is left behind once and for all in the ultimate personalization of the universe.[102]

And so Teilhard comes to the end of the drama of evolution, a unified picture of ascent from the first quarks all the way up to the cosmic body of Christ.  For Teilhard, this vision has become a creed and he sums it up well in his essay, “How I Believe”:

I believe that the universe is an evolution.

I believe that evolution proceeds towards spirit.

I believe that spirit is fully realized in a form of personality.

I believe that the supremely personal is the universal Christ.[103] 

O Christ, Ever Greater : Teilhard’s Cosmic Christology

Once he has been raised to the position of Prime Mover of the evolutive movement of complexity-consciousness, the cosmic-Christ becomes cosmically possible… For each one of us, every energy and everything that happens, is superanimated by his influence and his magnetic power… Cosmogenesis reveals itself, along the line of its main axis, first as Biogenesis and then Noogenesis, and finally culminates in the Christogenesis which every Christian venerates.[104]

Cosmogenesis is Christogenesis.  While it remains, for the most part, veiled in his phenomenological writings, there can be no doubt that Teilhard’s vision of the evolution of consciousness is a Christian one.[105]  For Teilhard, the axis and terminus of evolution is the cosmic-Christ.  Instead of the two natures of Christ, Teilhard says, perhaps rashly, that Christ has three.  “This third ‘nature’ of Christ (neither human nor divine, but cosmic),” he concedes, “has not noticeably attracted the explicit attention of the faithful or of theologians.”[106]

Despite the paucity of modern theological attention to the cosmic Christ, Teilhard takes courage from the company of many theologians of a stature simply unapproached in the modern world.  Indeed, St. John, St. Paul and the Greek fathers all spoke passionately about this cosmic aspect of Christ.  Teilhard was fascinated by their words:

In the beginning was the Word… in Him was life and that life was the light of men…He was in the world and the world came into being through Him… May they all be one.  As you Father, are in me and I am in you, may he also be in us…When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all…He has set forth Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth… And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.[107]

Reflecting on these and similar passages, Teilhard felt the need to expand the church’s traditional view of Christ in order that he might remain the Christ of Paul and John.  We no longer live in the static cosmos of the first century but in a cosmogenesis; the grand cosmic Pauline, Johanine and Patristic visions must now be appropriately reinterpreted.  “Christ is in the church in the same way as the sun is before our eyes,” he says.  “We see the same sun as our fathers saw and yet we understand it in a much more magnificent way.”[108] 

The magnificent new understanding  of an evolving cosmos highlights for us the cosmic aspect of Christ within an evolutionary universe.  For Teilhard, Christ is the organic center of evolution; it is the love of Christ that draws cosmogenesis ever onward and upward. Christ is “co-extensive with the vastness of space” and “commensurate with the abyss of time” and “radiates his influence throughout the whole mass of nature.”[109] This is what it means to be Alpha and Omega: Christ is the beginning and the end of the process of cosmic evolution and he is its animating energy fully present every point along the way.

Given all of this it is fair to ask if this cosmic-Christ of evolution is still the Jesus Christ who taught along dusty Galilean roads.  Teilhard insists to the end that the cosmic Christ and the historical Jesus are one and the same, a conclusion Teilhard supports by an appeal to the necessity of the incarnation.  For universal convergence and Christification, Christ had to be inserted historically into the evolutionary process. 

The more one considers that the fundamental laws of evolution, the more one becomes convinced that the universal Christ would not be able to appear at the end of time, unless he had previously inserted himself into the course of the world’s movement by way of birth, in the form of an element.  If it is really by Christ-Omega that the universe is held in movement... it is from his concrete source, the Man of Nazareth, that Christ-Omega (theoretically and historically) derives for our experience his whole stability.[110]

As N.M. Wildiers adds, “In other words: without a historic Christ there could be no mystical body of Christ, no total Christ.”[111]   Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Christ of the cosmos.   “The universe assumes the form of Christ—but, O mystery!  The man we see is Christ crucified!”[112]“ Teilhard speaks far more about the Pantokrator than the man of Galilee, but they are still the same cosmic, divine and supremely attractive person.

There is a further objection raised by those uncomfortable with Teilhard’s idea that the Parousia coincides with evolutionary consummation.  After all, a natural process culminating in Christogenesis sounds little like the second coming of tradition.  True, Teilhard allows, but this unfamiliarity is no sign of illegitimacy.  Teilhard considers Christ’s first coming:  Could there have been a Jesus of Nazareth without the long labor of evolution to produce humanity, or more specifically, a Mary?  No, he answers.  “Christ needs to find a summit of the world for his consummation just as he needed to find a woman for his conception.”[113]  So too the second coming.  Even as in Mary the supernatural and the natural met, so too must Christogenesis be a meeting place of the natural (noogenesis) and the supernatural (the Parousia).

And so Christ emerges as the organic peak and cosmic power of the evolutionary process. He is at once evolution’s author, creator, animator and mover, director and leader, center and head, its consistence and consolidation, its gatherer and assembler, purifier and regenerator, crown and consummation, its spear-head and its end.[114]   And, lest we forget, Teilhard reminds us, “The universal Christ in whom my personal faith finds satisfaction is none other than the authentic expression of the Christ of the gospel. Christ renewed, it is true, by contact with the modern world, but at the same time Christ become even greater in order still to remain the same Christ.”[115]

Who, then is this God, no longer the God of the old Cosmos but the God of the new Cosmogenesis—so constituted precisely because the effect of a mystical operation that has been going on for two thousand years has been to disclose in you, beneath the Child of Bethlehem and the Crucified, the moving Principle and the all-embracing Nucleus of the World itself?  Who is this God for whom our generation looks so eagerly?  Who but you, Jesus, who represent him and bring him to us?

Lord of consistence and union, you whose distinguishing mark and essence is the power indefinitely to grow greater, without distortion or loss of continuity, to the measure of the mysterious Matter whose Heart you fill and all whose movement you ultimately control—Lord of my childhood and Lord of my last days… sweep away the last clouds that still hide you… Let your universal Presence spring forth in a blaze that is at once Diaphany and Fire.

O ever-greater Christ![116]