Chardin’s clearing
12
Mar
The word is in Heidegger’s philosophy, but studying German
etymology we come to the word Lichtung, where the meaning is of a clearing in the forest, while Licht is the word for light, that is, to remove hidden things and unveil them so that the truth come up.
In Chardin it means looking at the Cosmos in its complexity and acquiring awareness of an immense and infinite universe in which Alpha (origin) and Omega (end) are present, but with the meaning of giving the complexity-consciousness the necessary light to understand the life process.
It starts with the Human Phenomenon and will be clearer in your book “The divine environment” where he talks about the inner life, not in the intimate sense, but in the sense of reconnecting it to God and to others.
Explaining better by reading Chardin: “In their effort towards mystical life, men often gave in to the illusion of brutally opposing spirit and flesh, body and soul, as if it were good and evil. from certain current expressions, this Manichaean tendency was never approved by the church… “(p. 117), but it is resistant and is always present in everyday religious discourse,. the purely economic and political views of religion led to this state.
For this reason Chardin will insist on an “interior” life, one capable of achieving divine designs within human realities, hence “the divine environment”.
But what is the divine means, is that permanent tension: “slowly accumulated between Humanity and God will reach the limits fixed by the possibilities of the World, and then it will be the end” (p. 177), we must hope not as a catastrophe or a great sign, but an ´outgoing´ for the world that is heading for a civilizational crisis, and to which we must collaborate that it passes, with all our Christian forces, of other religions or of “good faith”, without fear of the world,
The light came into the world, says the evangelist João (1,20-21), but those who do evil reject it, “But those who act according to the truth, approach the light, so that their actions are carried out. in God ”, and thus carry out our actions within the“ divine environment ”where everything is connected to the Cosmos.
CHARDIN, Teilhard. O meio divino: ensaio sobre a vida interior. Lisboa: Editorial Presença, s/d.
