Father Rapier's ABSOULUTE

[Terrance]

"Life itself-Life is Irreversible." 

In the totalitarian political systems, of which time will
correct the excesses but will also, no doubt, accentuate the
underlying tendencies or intuitions, the citizen finds his
center of gravity gradually transferred to, or at least
aligned with, that of the National or Ethnic group to which
he belongs. This is not a return to primitive and
undifferentiated cultural forms, but the emergence of a
defined social system in which a purposeful organization
orders the masses and tends to impose a specialized function
on each individual.

But Man is not an insect. Nothing is more pathetic than the
total and blind devotion of an ant to its ant-hill; and to
us nothing could be more deplorable. The ant toils without
respite until it dies of exhaustion in a state of complete
self-detachment whose absolute nature and 'faceless' purpose
are precisely what we find repugnant. Are we too to sink
irresistibly, victims of an inevitable of organic
determinism, into a state in which our individual
personality is wholly destroyed.  The thing is
inconceivable. 

Mankind will penetrate for the first time into the
environment which is biologically requisite for the
wholeness of its task. 

Everything glows, expands, is impregnated with an essential
savor of the ABSOLUTE.  

				---The Future Of Man, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Heresy? 

"It sounds like a disclaimer, and the priest sounds afraid."
GR.540

Taylor:  What are you afraid of Father? 

Father Pierre: Your Destiny

The Pope:    I must caution you. Experimental brain surgery
on these creatures is one thing but your behavioral studies
are something else again. To suggest that we can learn
anything about the Simian nature from the study of man is
sheer
nonsense! . . . Man is a nuisance. He eats up his food
supplies in
the forest, then migrates to our green belts and ravages our
crops.
The sooner he is exterminated the better. It's a question of
Simian
survival.

Whose Survival? 

Say a prayer for the common informer, 
He came out of a quim, just like yoooou--

Judas Tolomea: Betrayed by a kiss, in the moonlight of
bliss, in the valley of the sentient stones, now the ice has
closed my eyes, the better to see Them here, so many...

 





Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 

  b. May 1, 1881, Sarcenat, Fr.
  d. April 10, 1955, New York City

 French philosopher and paleontologist known for his theory
that man is evolving, mentally and socially, toward a final 
spiritual unity. Blending science and Christianity, he
declared that the human epic resembles "nothing so much as a
way
of the Cross." Various of his theories brought reservations
and objections from within the Roman Catholic Church and
from the Jesuit order, of which he was a member. In 1962,
the Holy Office issued a monitum, or simple warning, against
uncritical acceptance of his ideas. His spiritual
dedication, however, was not questioned.

 Son of a gentleman farmer with an interest in geology,
Teilhard devoted himself to that subject, as well as to his
prescribed studies, at the Jesuit College of Mongré, where
he began boarding at the age of 10. When he was 18, he 
joined the Jesuit novitiate at Aix-en-Provence. At 24 he
began a three-year professorship at the Jesuit college in
Cairo.

 Although ordained a priest in 1911, Teilhard chose to be a
stretcher bearer rather than a chaplain in World War I; his
courage on the battle lines earned him a military medal and
the Legion of Honour. In 1923, after teaching at the
Catholic Institute of Paris, he made the first of his
paleontological and geologic missions to China, where he
was  involved in the discovery (1929) of Peking man's skull.
Further travels in the 1930s took him to the Gobi (desert), 
Sinkiang, Kashmir, Java, and Burma (Myanmar). Teilhard
enlarged the field of knowledge on Asia's sedimentary 
deposits and stratigraphic correlations and on the dates of
its fossils. He spent the years 1939-45 at Peking in a state
of  near-captivity on account of World War II.

 Most of Teilhard's writings were scientific, being
especially concerned with mammalian paleontology. His
philosophical books were the product of long meditation.
Teilhard wrote his two major works in this area, Le Milieu
divin (1957; The
 Divine Milieu) and Le Phénomène humain (1955; The
Phenomenon of Man), in the 1920s and '30s, but their 
publication was forbidden by the Jesuit order during his
lifetime. Among his other writings are collections of 
philosophical essays, such as L'Apparition de l'homme (1956;
The Appearance of Man), La Vision du passé (1957; The
 Vision of the Past), and Science et Christ (1965; Science
and Christ).

 Teilhard returned to France in 1946. Frustrated in his
desire to teach at the Collège de France and publish
philosophy  (all his major works were published
posthumously), he moved to the United States, spending the
last years of his life at  the Wenner-Gren Foundation, New
York City, for which he made two paleontological and
archaeological expeditions  to South Africa.

 Teilhard's attempts to combine Christian thought with
modern science and traditional philosophy aroused
widespread  interest and controversy when his writings were
published in the 1950s. Teilhard aimed at a metaphysic of
evolution,
 holding that it was a process converging toward a final
unity that he called the Omega point. He attempted to show 
that what is of permanent value in traditional philosophical
thought can be maintained and even integrated with a
 modern scientific outlook if one accepts that the
tendencies of material things are directed, either wholly or
in part,  beyond the things themselves toward the production
of higher, more complex, more perfectly unified beings.
Teilhard
 regarded basic trends in matter--gravitation, inertia,
electromagnetism, and so on--as being ordered toward the 
production of progressively more complex types of aggregate.
This process led to the increasingly complex entities of
 atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms, until finally the
human body evolved, with a nervous system sufficiently 
sophisticated to permit rational reflection, self-awareness,
and moral responsibility. While some evolutionists regard
 man simply as a prolongation of the Pliocene fauna--an
animal more successful than the rat or the
elephant--Teilhard  argued that the appearance of man
brought an added dimension into the world. This he defines
as the birth of  reflection: animals know, but man knows
that he knows; he has "knowledge to the square."

 Another great advance in Teilhard's scheme of evolution is
the socialization of mankind. This is not the triumph of
herd instinct but a cultural convergence of humanity toward
a single society. Evolution has gone about as far as it can
 to perfect human beings physically: its next step will be
social. Teilhard saw such evolution already in progress;
through technology, urbanization, and modern communications,
more and more links are being established between different
 peoples' politics, economics, and habits of thought in an
apparently geometric progression.

 Theologically, Teilhard saw the process of organic
evolution as a sequence of progressive syntheses whose
ultimate convergence point is that of God. When humanity and
the material world have reached their final state of
evolution  and exhausted all potential for further
development, a new convergence between them and the
supernatural order would be initiated by the Parousia, or
Second Coming of Christ. Teilhard asserted that the work of
Christ is primarily to lead the material world to this
cosmic redemption, while the conquest of evil is only
secondary to his purpose. Evil is represented by Teilhard
merely as growing pains within the cosmic process: the
disorder that is implied by order in process of realization.