Le Milieu Divin [antikvár]

TEILHARD DE CHARDIN: THE MAN by PIERRE LEROY, s.j. The look in his eyes when they met your eyes revealed the man's soul : his reassuring sympathy restored your confidence in yourself. Just to speak to him made you feel better; you knew that he was listening to you and that he understood you. His own faith was in the invincible power of love: men hurt one another by not loving one another. And this was not naiveté but the goodness of the man, for he was good beyond the common measure. In him, this belief was no mere conventional sentiment grafted on a generous nature, but the fruit of long meditation; it was a certainty that came only with years of reflection. It was this deep-seated spiritual conviction that led Pere Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to the practice of self-forgetfulness : self being forgotten in a sympathetic union with all men and with every individual man. The combination of priest and scientist is nothing new; but in his case what was really astonishing was his closeness to the earth and his deep feeling for the value of matter. People who were shocked by him never realised how deep lay the roots of this simultaneous love of God and of the world. ' Throughout my whole life,' he wrote, ' dtiring every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within. . . The purple flush of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, to be lost finally in the incandescence of a personal universe. . . . ' This is what I have learnt from my contact with the earth—the diaphany of the divine at the heart of a glowing universe, the divine radiating from the depths of matter a-flame.' There was something paradoxical in a priest who seemed 13