There are ‘events’ in the human mass, just as there are in the world of organic matter, or in the crust of the earth, or in the stellar universe; and so there are also certain privileged beings who are present at and share in such events. It would have been possible for a witness, positioned further back in duration—provided his observation extended over a sufficiently long period—to watch the formation of our planet, the appearance of life, and the emergence of the human zoological type.
We newcomers of the twentieth century are coinciding in time and place with a happening which is as massive as the initial formation, vitalizing, and humanizing of the earth.
Terrestrial thought is becoming conscious that it constitutes an organic whole.
The affairs of men played a large part in the thinking of the theologians and moralists of yesterday, but (as is today still too often true) there was no room for the affair of man, and still less for the affair of the universe, specifically as such, and both involved as such in the creation.
By about the end of the seventeenth century, man was not much further advanced in his knowledge and mastery of cosmic energies than his cave-dwelling ancestors had been. He still had only fire with which to harness artificially the power needed for his social development. And then, in some scores of years, suddenly everything came in a rush: electricity, physical chemistry, radiations. It was as though a wide breach had been made in the energy reservoirs stored up by the world.
For the first time, perhaps, since his origins, man felt that he had real strength. After having been frightened of the elements, he thought that he might aspire to master them. His study of nature had opened up a vast expanse of time ahead of him, and at that very moment he found that the physical sciences had provided him with the power to use that future to its full capacity.
Man could not discover and master the forces of the world without recognizing that he himself was the most noble and the most formidable of the earth’s energies.
Among so many great events, there is one phenomenon which, in the eyes of posterity, may well overshadow everything that has been discovered in radiation and electricity: and that is the permanent entry into operation, in our day, of inter-human affinities—the movement, irresistible and ever increasing in speed, which we can see for ourselves, welding peoples and individuals one to another, for all their recalcitrance, in a more sublime intoxication. It is the constitution, in progress at this very moment, of the organized human bloc, powerful and autonomous—the mass coalescing of mankind.
There is a solidarity of responsibilities and aspirations which properly constitutes the sense of man, and we would be justified in recognizing in it the psychological aspect, and therefore the experiential manifestation, of what we have called elsewhere ‘the noosphere’. If mankind did not, physically and biologically, constitute a natural unit, provided with certain specific powers of organization, how could it produce a collective soul?
The nature of the sense of man is such that it brings men closer together, and inspires them, in the expectation of a future: in the certainty, that is to say, that something is becoming a reality whose existence is not strictly demonstrable but is nevertheless accepted with even more assurance than demonstration and touch could afford. The sense of man is a faith.
The only religion possible for man is the religion which will teach him, in the very first place, to recognize, love, and serve with passion the universe of which he forms a part.
Faith in the world has just been born. This, and this alone, can save the world from the hands of a mankind that is determined to destroy the universe if it cannot worship it.
Christianity has not yet allowed room for—gives, indeed, even the impression of being hostile to—the aspirations of the sense of man.
Ask the Catholics you know: if they have any mental alertness and sincerity, most of them will recognize that, however faithful they may be in the practice of their religion, they do not find in it total justification for their lives. They give their adherence to Christianity: but only for lack of anything better and provided that certain central points (relating to the value and origin of the world) be left discreetly in the background. This is no longer complete and ardent adherence to the light they have found. It is already (and how many have told me this) anxious expectation of a new gospel.
For all her protestations and parade of sympathy, the official Church has never liked science: and this because she has always been suspicious of new elements that might disturb her peaceful dominance—and, moreover, because she has never looked to the tangible progress of the universe for anything of value.
By her reluctance to keep in step with mankind, which she should have led along new roads, the official Church has allowed an increasingly wide breach to open, since the coming of science, between herself and the life of the earth. She has given the impression of no longer sharing in the life of the world: and that is a mistake which it will take a long time to make good.
The more man becomes alive to the idea of ‘the human function in the universe’ and so attains a higher appreciation of the part played in the world by the forces of deliberate choice and consciousness, the more will he understand that the appearance on earth of reflective thought entails almost necessarily another ‘reflection’ to complete and balance it: after the reflection of the monad upon itself, the reflection of the whole upon the monad—in other words, a revelation.
We see how necessary is the objectivity of some contact with a God; not a long-delayed contact, and one confined to the individual, but one as old and all-embracing as the whole human entity, and made with a God conceived as the supreme centre of personalization.
Either Christ, Christ himself and he alone, is capable of safeguarding the human aspirations of our day—in which case we are ready to worship him with renewed fervour; or his growth is not keeping pace with the finest of our hopes—and in that case he no longer means anything to us.
The Church, drifting in a backwater of abstract theology, of a sacramentalism whose standard is quantity rather than quality, of over-refined piety, has lost contact with the real. The guidance provided by the clergy, and the interests of the faithful, are gradually being confined to a little artificial world of ritualism, of religious practices, of pious extravagancies, which is completely cut off from the true current of reality. The Eucharist, in particular, is tending to become a sort of object whose validity rests entirely in itself, and which absorbs religious activity instead of making it work as a leaven for the salvation of everything in the universe. It is here that we have taken the wrong road; and that is why the progress of Christian truth has, one might almost say, come to a halt.