The divine environment and the human phenomenon
Chardin’s worldview on the human phenomenon ranges from cosmogenesis, the origin of the universe and of life to the complexification of nature and the place of man in it, what the pandemic shows is that this complexification grows and even science has limits to deal with it, however, this pandemic can bring new horizons, when it thinking and clarifying it needs science.
Among his various works, Teilhard Chardin makes a singular journey between The divine environment, written between November 1926 and March 1927 and the Human Phenomenon, written between July 1938 and June 1940, which form an “inseparable whole” also says edition I have of Editorial Presença de Lisboa, Portugal.
Singular because it transits from the divine to the human, as the names of the works attest, without slips or ravages, it shows us the “need for the connection between science and religion equally affirmed by Einstein”, an expression by Helmut de Terra, friend and admirer of Chardin. Chardin initiates the divine environment by realizing “the confusion of religious thought in our time” (page 41) and attests that the man of our time “lives with the explicit awareness of being an atom or a citizen of the Universe” (idem).
The timeliness of the text is because the author affirms at the beginning of his book something that has a lot to do with our days, a collective awakening that a beautiful day “makes each individual aware of the true dimensions of life, necessarily provokes in the human mass a profound religious shock, both to slaughter and to exalt ”(ibidem).
This is because the world is too “beautiful: it is to him and only to him that they should worship” (p. 42). What is then the “divine environment”, the world (in our case we explore the universe’s worldviews) will not be more and more fascinating and it would not be and it would be “eclipsing our God” (idem), and there is a connection, in the view of part of Christianity, between God and matter, the Eucharist, she and she alone can create a real sense of reconnecting us to the divine, “this is my body and my blood” said Jesus, and those who eat will have access to eternal life.
Chardin says “the slowly accumulated tension between Humanity and God will reach the limits set by the possibilities of the World, and then it will be the end” (p. 177)… that we must wait not as a catastrophe but as an“ exit ”to the world to which we must collaborate with all our Christian forces without fear of the world, because his enchantments could no longer harm those for whom he became, in addition to himself, the Body of the One who is and the One who comes ”.
Chardin, Teilhard. (no year). O meio edivino: ensaio sobre a vida interior (The divine environment: I teach about the inner life). Lisbon: Editorial Presença.