"Before the world was made, he chose us, chose us in Christ, to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence, determining that we should become his adopted sons, through Jesus Christ." (Eph. I, 4-5). These powerful words of St. Paul in his first letter to the Ephesians, I think, best characterize the spirit of Teilhard the Chardin, his idea of man and man's place in the universe, and of the common goals of humanity.
Just imagine somebody... Somebody, whose whole life was a continuous prayer to God, a prayer, in which he constantly asked to break through the seal of traditional authority and common ignorance, and explore the depth of reality, the ultimate beginning and the ultimate end, and the reasons behind the emergence of life and conscious beings in the universe. Of course, that means that your books are put on the Index and you are almost made into a heretic by the True and Holy Catholic Church. But he didn't give up. He clearly saw his goals, his purpose. It was his life's work, to trace back the origins of mankind, and to speculate of its goals and ultimate outcome. It was his type of spirituality, scientific spirituality, that drove him incessantly to spend sleepless nights trying to make sense out of scientific facts, to tie them together with what seemed apparent, and with that which didn't seem so apparent. And the best he came up with was a simple statement, "We Are All One." Life is eternal, love is immortal, and death is but a horizon. Life Is, he would say if someone would have asked him, what is life? Life Is, and ever was, and forever will be - world without end. Composite matter dies and falls apart, but spirit remains. And with it - that indelible part of it, the nuclei of personality, the individual particles which have been with us from the very beginning, which grow and evolve with us, and which strive towards common union into a whole, with God as the center...
In my paper, I wi...