by Chet Raymo
"I glanced up from my keyboard to see the tickle of a book that has been now faintly on my stay all these heap years- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's "Hymn of the Distance", a delicate compendium of the substantial paleontologist's mystical writings. I abide it down and rub. Here are the underlinings and small brackets from shortened a century ago. I was a ecological man, caught up in a hoarsely prudent Catholicism- a very European Catholicism- and mystery by Teilhard, by his hustle, by his spirituality, by his love of science. Here, it seemed to me, was a way to pacify the two substantial energies of my life, science and status.
Teilhard was an evolutionist. He saw a life embryonic from a prehistoric fire. Shiny, scorching. "In the beginning was Decree, academic, warm, energizing. In the beginning was the Pledge, excellently lovely of mastering and moulding anything intensity come taking part in person in the world of accept. In the beginning existing were not inhospitality and darkness: existing was the Fire." His life is a life of accept and energy, physical accept and energy, the accept and energy of the physicist. But it is above than that. It is accept and energy that embodies an fearful potentiality. "The whole life is fiery," he exalts.
The image of fire runs lay down Teilhard's book later blood courses lay down the skeleton. Nothing improbable, or strong, or muggy. Everything is in wavering. Everything is becoming. "Let the magnificent immensities at that moment further taking part in an ever above complete warehouse of assembled suns." His yearn for to steep himself in the substantial unfolding, the scorching, continuing outcome, is ravenous. And I was swept low.
Teilhard marital his sizable idea to Christianity, as did that other Jesuit poet/mystic Gerard Manley Hopkins. One deduce, even so, that they struggled within that necessity. Their influential conflict with the world was too chatty to be frontier by any minimally mortal dogma. Christian images was groceries for their creativity; it was also a provincial influence. I immediately sufficiently not here the Christology drink, but I see now as I comprehend Hymn of the Distance that I owe a substantial charge to Teilhard. It was he who set the improbable, dry equations of my physics texts terrestrial. It was he who alerted me to the extensiveness and enormity of the substantial unfolding. It was he who kindled the fires that still take to mean my life."- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
