Modern science has made us familiar with the notion of isotopes: bodies that are of the same “atomic number” and therefore impossible for the chemist to distinguish, and are at the same time so different in their nuclear make-up as to give evidence of histories and display physical properties that are strangely different. Uranium 234–238, lead 204–214, carbon 12 and carbon 14, etc.

What happens in he realm of atoms has surely a remarkable equivalent in the field of psychic energies. Selfishness, detachment, love, intelligence—are all dispositions of the soul which appear identical to a naïve observer; and yet, according to the subject or the “race” under consideration, do they not, in reality, include activities that are profoundly different? At first sight, nothing appears so homogeneous as the current of Christianity. And yet, within the Church, under the shadow of the monasteries, do not two distinct species of the faithful gather together, impelled to the same religious act (towards the same Cross) by two diametrically opposed motives? In one case it is through an excess, in the other through a lack, of vitality: in one, it is in order to sublimate something with which they are filled to overflowing, in the other it is to make up for something they lack.

It is not yet possible, I believe, to judge where and how far we shall one day be carried by the identification and differentiation, deeply rooted in our hearts and our institutions, of such spiritual isotopes. All I wish to show here, by way of example, is the extreme degree of clarity introduced into the whole body of our interior religious experience, simply by the distinction which has at last been established between two forms of spirit, hitherto strangely confused by philosophers no less than by mystics: the spirit of identification, and the spirit of unification; or, if the terms are preferred, the spirit of fusion and the spirit of “amortization.”

Let us try to make this plain by means of a few carefully linked propositions.

From the “existential” point of view, each reflective monad may be defined (in nature, value, and function) as a particular focus-point of vision and action which, from a single determined point in time and space, radiates over the totality (past, present, and future) of the world around it. This amounts to saying that, by construction and structure, each human ego is, as an element, but as one that cannot be replaced or transposed, co-extensive with the entire universe.

Initially, therefore, we can represent the universe symbolically as a sphere, filled with a dust made up of infinitesimal and incommunicable centres—each one of which occupies, within the sphere, a point strictly determined by the play (whatever it may be) of evolution.

That being so, one and the same fundamental and primary disposition can, in our experience (and without any prior ratiocination) be recognized at the heart of each elementary centre. By this I mean the dream of a different state of affairs, in which the present multiplicity of focus-points of consciousness would in some way or other disappear, and each ego would find that it coincided not simply infinitesimally but integrally with the plenitude of being.

In many men this cosmic sense of the one and the all is still obscured or dormant, but even so it seems to me to be at once the most primitive and the most progressive form of psychic energy into which the other energies of the world around us are gradually being transformed. This would lead one to believe that a psychological disposition hitherto regarded as an anomaly is in fact destined to become general, and then to become unassailably dormant on the ultra-humanized earth of tomorrow.

Without urging the point further, and confining ourselves to what is indisputable, we need do no more than note the following highly significant fact: throughout history, wherever man (either in isolated cases or collectively) has effected a sufficiently deep breakthrough into the domain of religious forces (whether among the Vedantists, the Taoists, the Sufis, or the Christians)—in each case he has felt that he is drifting towards a mysticism of the monist or pantheist type.1

This amounts to saying that, reduced to its essence, the problem of “holiness” has lain, ever since its origins and in all cases, in the search for the “great secret” which will allow the isolated particle that each one of us feels himself to be, either (as some say) to establish or (as others say) to re-establish a contact of communion with the whole of the Other that surrounds us.

Here, then, both a priori and a posteriori, two possible solutions, and only two, have since all time suggested themselves to men, as they still continue to do in our own time; solutions that offer them both an intellectual and a practical answer. The one involves relaxation and expansion, the other tension and centration.

Going back to our symbol of “the polycentric sphere,” let us note how, within this particular environment, the element (which is still ex-centric in relation to the principal centre in our picture) will be able to conduct itself in such a way as to succeed in forming one with the totality.

In the case of youthful mankind, just as in that of the young human individual, there can be no doubt about the reaction: to open out wide, to try immediately to embrace all—and, in order to do that, to become all things and all persons. Such, in its youthful form, buoyant and poetical, is the first gesture of every nascent pantheism. Since, however, this effort to achieve direct communion ultimately allows the whole of the multiplicity of the world to subsist, its impotence soon becomes apparent. In the end, accordingly, the consciousness of the sage develops the idea of a more subtle solution (even though it is still sought in the same direction of an expansion to the limits of the universe). In order to become “spiritual” (that is, one with all beings), why exhaust oneself in pursuing a multitude that can never be caught—why not, instead, follow the road of suppression and negation and so try to wipe out everything that produces the “difference” between us and all the objects in the world? This is an attempt, both intellectual and practical, to achieve de-determination; in it, starting from and below the superficial plurality, an effort is made to enter the undifferentiated zone of prime Stuff,2 where, by the elimination of all opposition between things, everything is identified with everything in a foundation that is common to all things. Each infinitesimal centre expands, through release of its individual characteristics, to the dimensions of, and within, one and the same general substratum in which its dream is realized and in which it forms one with all the rest around it. And so, by entry into unconsciousness, we find a complete solution, it would seem, to the problem of perfection and happiness.

In order to become all, to be re-dissolved in something that lies below everything…

It is curious to note the great fascination that this first way of answering the call of the One has been able to exercise over the mind of man—so much so as completely to obscure (right until our own day, in fact) the existence of a second way of conducting the battle against the multiple: one that is theoretically just as effective as the first, even though of a diametrically opposed type.

Instead of allowing our interior gaze to be drawn towards the ill-defined circumference of the cosmic sphere, why not turn it, rather, towards its general centre?

ordinary pantheism has always taken for granted that if we are to overcome the plural, we must eliminate it: if we are to hear the fundamental harmony, we must first create silence. There is, however, an experience whose general applicability, daily ever more evident, is perhaps the most important discovery ever made by the human mind: why not fall into line with that, and admit that, through the miraculous operation of a certain curvature proper to our universe, each particular being contains the hidden power of making one with all the others and achieving harmony with them—but by developing to the full limits of its own self? So true is this that we must conceive the single essence of all things, and seek it, not in the form of a common foundation with which we make one by de-centration, but rather in the form of a universal peak of concentration, which is arrived at through a super-centration of human consciousness.3

“True union does not fuse: it differentiates and personalizes.” This is a perfectly simple principle—and yet, if it is properly understood, it can open our eyes to the springing into being of a new world.

Unity through the base, by dissolution: or unity through the apex, by ultra-differentiation.

It cannot be denied that these two extreme poles enjoy a certain number of properties in common, which makes them extremely alike.

For example, in either case—whether it be “spherically” or “centrically”—the stuff of the world is reduced (by a collective effort of all the associated egos)4 to a certain common state in which the dualism between matter and spirit is obliterated. In both cases, again, psychologically speaking, consciousness is assumed to arrive, at the term of the operation, at a state of inexpressibility in which all opposition between the me, the you, the other, ceases to have any meaning—as, in a more general way, the opposition disappears between all the terms whose distinction is the normal basis of our speech.

Nevertheless, it is equally undeniable that a radical contrast can be distinguished beneath these resemblances which might lead us to believe in a basic identity: for in one of the two directions (that of the “spherical”) the elementary egos disappear, while in the other (that of the “centric”) they reinforce one another as they come together. In the latter case, a first type of the inexpressible is attained by intensification (by excess)—in the former, another type of the inexpressible is obtained by decrease (by lack) of centration and reflection.

Pantheism of identification, at the opposite pole from love: “God is all.” And pantheism of unification, beyond love: “God all in all.”

—Two isotopes of spirit.5

Thus, theoretically speaking, it is perfectly true that two converse methods (and only two) confront the mystic who wishes to effect in and around himself the great cosmic work of unification. He can either concentrate upon the centre, or he can embrace the sphere.

Are we, then, to believe that we may choose between these two symmetrical ways: as though the two roads, even though they followed two opposite slopes, led equally well to the same peak?

I am absolutely convinced that this is not so—and for two reasons. The first, as I said before, is that by structural necessity there is no conceivable common measure between the inexpressible of identification and the inexpressible of unification, nor can they be in any way complementary to one another. The second reason is even more categorical, and it derives from the fact that, concretely speaking, the universe in which we are involved displays indisputably a bias towards the spirit not of diffusion but of concentration. Throughout the thousands of millions of years in which we can follow its course, cosmogenesis has continually developed in the form of a noögenesis, in other words in the direction of an equilibrium that lies not this side, but the further side, of all organization and all thought.

In such a system there is no room for even a partial retrogression of the reflective towards the unconscious.

In planetary terms, the human forms but one. It is therefore as one body (that is, in a unanimous movement) that it must abandon the mirage of a mysticism of relaxation and conform to the particular type of spirit determined for it by the immutable axes of a convergent universe.

Once we have recognized the distinction between the two “isotopes” of spirit and appreciated their relative cosmic value, it immediately becomes possible to characterize and accordingly to classify, in their absolute value, the principal religious currents which at this moment claim the allegiance of consciousness on earth.

In the eastern (or Hindu) quarter, there is no doubt but that, from the very beginning, the ideal of diffusion and identification has been dominant. The elementary egos are regarded as anomalies to be reduced (as holes to be filled up) in universal being; or, which comes to the same thing, the biological evolution of the world represents for the sage no more than an illusion or an insignificant eddy—in that we have, patched-up though it may be in minor ways, the unchangeable essence of the Vedantic mystiques of affinities, and (from the point of view of the implacable demands of noögenesis) their incurable weakness.

In the marxist quarter, I would not hesitate to say that it is very clearly the spirit of centration which is striving to emerge through the “communist” effort, in order to super-differentiate man and super-organize the earth. “Striving to emerge,” I say advisedly; but it will never succeed in doing so until the party theoreticians make up their minds at last to accord to the superstructure of the world the final consistence which they still confine to the material infra-structure of things.

Finally, in the Christian quarter, two remarks are required to cover the situation, one affirmative and the other restrictive.

First and foremost, it is clear that since all time Christianity has, by virtue of its structure, fallen into equilibrium in the direction of the spirit of unification and synthesis: God finally becoming all in all within an atmosphere of pure charity (“sola caritas”). In that magnificent definition of the pantheism of differentiation is expressed in unmistakable terms the very essence of Christ's message.

Nevertheless, that is far from meaning that the centric and centrifying character of the movement can be considered as having yet been perfectly defined, either in its mystical expression or in its dogmatic formulation.

In the first place, mystically speaking, it is difficult not to be aware of considerable traces of fusionism in the appeals directed towards the inexpressible by an Eckhart or even a John of the Cross: as though, for those great contemplatives, the two isotopes of spirit were still appreciably confused. Secondly, theologically speaking, I may be forgiven for pointing out that it is simply impossible for any true universalist vision to develop untrammeled within a certain Aristotelian concept of the universe.6

Such a concept gives us a world so thoroughly divided up into immutable sectors and zones that it retains, even in its final state, a mixed stuff in which an incomprehensible “matter” is still coupled to a concretely objectified “spirit”: and a Pleroma, whose cement (“sanctifying” grace) cannot logically be considered or classified except as a mere “accident” (!) In short, something that would like to be a “monism” of the centric type but which (from refusing to go beyond the cosmos and take its stand in cosmogenesis) is much more akin to a juridical association than a biologically organic system.

It is not evident that Christianity will be able to breathe freely and spread its wings to their full span only in the prospect that has at least been opened up for its spiritual potentialities by a true philosophy, not simply of the whole, but of a convergent whole?

The more, as an irresistible effect of technical progress and reflection, mankind becomes conscious of the immensity, and even more the organicity, of the world around it, the more the necessity for a soul makes itself felt: for a soul that is capable of maintaining and directing the vast process of planetization in which we are The more, too, it becomes clear that the only form of spirit capable of producing this soul is that which we defined earlier as sustaining and impelling the universe in the direction of progressively better forms of arrangement: isotope 2, (the most recently discovered!)—the spirit of greater love and greater consciousness.

And at this profit we meed a paradoxial situation.

While the Hindu mysticism of fusion and the juridical type 7 of Christian mysicism have for centuries been the object of countless descriptions and codifications, it is still impossible at the present moment to find a single printed work which affirms the existence and describes the specific properties of an interior attitude (the centric cosmic sense) which, through force of circumstances, is coming to be the hidden mainspring of the life of each one of us.

Every day the reality of an ultra-human becomes more insistent; and there is no possible way for our generation to enter into it except with the help of a new form of psychic energy in which the personalizing depth of love8 is combined with the totalization of what is most essential and most universal in the heart of the stuff of the cosmos and the cosmic stream—and for this new energy we have as yet no name!

The time has certainly come when a new mysticism, at once fully human and fully Christian, must emerge at the opposite pole from an outworn orientalism: the foray of the West, the road of tomorrow's world.

1. Père Teilhard often uses the words “pantheism” and “pantheist” in various senses. He rejects panetheism, when it is used in the strict sense it bears in ordinary speech and in philosophy, as being opposed to personalism. For convenience, he uses it in a very wide sense which includes, as it does here, all forms of the tendency towards unity. In an exact and personal sense, as on p. 223 where he relates it to the “God who is all in all” of St. Paul (1 Cor. 15: 28), he accepts pantheism. (Editor’s note) ↩
2. Cf. the Aristotelian “prime matter.” ↩
3. It is, I think, a misunderstanding of this effort to concentrate (rather than the “eastern” reaction of denial of the multiple) that produces the manichean or Catharistic tendency to conceive spirit as the result of a separation between two components of the universe, one pure and the other impure. This is an attitude that has subtly made its way into many manuals of Christian ascesis. To my mind, however, it is a misbegotten concept, in as much as it does not respect the fundamental mystical demand that, through the process of spiritualization, “all shall become All.” This is quite apart from the fact that, from this point of view, there is no explanation of why or how the spiritual portion of the world is automatically and “lovingly” unified simply as a result of being “poured into” All. ↩
4. Since, in order to reduce the cosmic sphere to a unified state, all the elementary centres have to disappear—whether by way of dissolution or by the contrary way of mono-centration. ↩

5. In slightly different terms, one might say that the pantheist (or cosmic) line tends to be expressed in one or other of the three following formulas:

   1. To become all beings (erroneous, and impossible to effect): para-pantheism.
   2. To become all (“eastern” monism): pseudo-pantheism.
   3. To become one with all beings (“western” monism): eu-pantheism (see below). ↩
6. The “certain” Aristotelianism referred to, and briefly described in the next paragraph, is a cut and dried Aristotelian concept of the elements of the world, carried over right into the twentieth century by certain philosophers and theologians, without taking into account (in particular) the transposition necessitated by the transition from a static universe (cosmos) to a dynamic universe (cosmogenesis). (Editor's note) ↩
7. The expression “juridical rape of Christian mysticism” calls for more exact qualifications, which the author would probably have added if he had published this day. Père Teilhard came into conflict with what he calls “juridical” (on other occasions, “artificial”) in a number of shields. In the first place, in the “social” field, where his concept of society, linked with that of noögenesis, was of something organic and not simply “juridical”: parallel with this, in the “field of the mystical body of Christ” (cf. Le Milieu Divin) he converted one theological concept which tends to reduce th eunion of the members of Christ to a “moral” union, but was in no way opposed to the Thomist concept which sees in it a “physical” union. (Cf. the related question of the “physical” causality of the sacraments. (Editor's note)↩
A personalizing depth already vouched for in other contexts by parasitic and theological traditions (for exaple, St Bernard). (Editor's note) 8