“Something binds them together. . .”
Last week, we read a passage from Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland’s 1902 book, The Spark in the Clod: A Study in Evolution, in which he approached the scientific theory of evolution from a religious standpoint. Today, an opposite approach, where religious ideals are found from a more scientific point of view, in the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955).
Teilhard was a Jesuit priest, but also a scientist, and his ideas were unsuccessfully quashed by the Roman Catholic Church. His primary work, The Human Phenomenon, was written in the 1930s but published after his death in 1955. While he was not himself officially a Unitarian or Universalist, it can be argued that his theology was very much in line with both forms of liberal religion, and informs liberal theology today. A rather comprehensive chapter on Teilhard from the book God and Science, by Charles P. Henderson, can be found here for further reading.
What I find fascinating in this excerpt, on the nature of matter, is Teilhard’s conclusion of the interdependence of all things, from our very atoms.
from The Human Phenomenon
by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
Moving an object back into the past is equivalent to reducing it to its simplest elements. Followed as far as possible in the direction of their origins, the last fibers of the human composite are going to merge in our sight with the very stuff of the universe.
The stuff of the universe–that ultimate residue of the more and more advanced analyses of science. To know how to describe it properly, I have never developed the kind of direct and familiar contact with it that makes all the difference between someone who has read about it and someone who has experimented with it. I also know how dangerous it is to take as material for durable construction hypotheses conceived of as only meant to last a day, even in the minds of those who originate them.
The currently accepted representations of the atom are for the most part merely a simple, graphic, and transitory means in the hands of the scientist to accomplish the grouping and the verify the noncontradiction of the ever more numerous “effects” manifested by matter–many of which, moreover, as yet have no recognizable prolongation in the human being.. . .
Plurality, unity and energy are the three aspects of matter.
(a) Plurality, first of all
In the domain of our common experience the profound atomicity of the universe surfaces in visible form. We see it expressed in drops of rain and in the sands of the shore. It is prolonged in the multitude of the living and in the stars. And we even read it in the ashes of the dead. For humans no microscope or electronic analysis was needed to suspect that we lived surrounded and upheld by dust. But to count and describe the grains of this dust, it has taken no less than the clear discernment of modern science. The atoms of Epicurus were inert and indivisible. And the infinitesimally small worlds of Pascal were still seen to have their “mites” within them. In certainty and precision we have now gone far beyond this stage of instinctive or inspired divination. Matter degrades endlessly. Like those minuscule carapaces of diatoms whose pattern resolves itself almost indefinitely under stronger magnifications into new patterns, each smaller material unit tends under the analysis of our physicists to be reduced to something more finely granulated than itself. And with each new step descending this way toward diminution into a larger number, the total configuration of the world is renewed, then blurs.
Beyond a certain degree of depth and dilution, the most familiar properties of our body (light, color, heat, impenetrability . . .) become meaningless.
In fact, our sense experience condenses and floats on a swarm of the indefinable. Dizzying in number and smallness, the substratum of the tangible universe continues on endlessly disaggregating toward what is below.
(b) Now the more we artificially cleave and pulverize matter, the more we can see its fundamental unity
In its most imperfect form, the simplest to imagine, this unity expresses itself in an astonishing similarity between the elements encountered. Whatever their degree of magnitude and whatever their name, these minuscule entities–molecules, atoms, electrons–manifest a perfect identity of mass and behavior (at least at the distance from which we observe them). They seem to be remarkably calibrated–and monotonous–in their dimensions and operations. As if all the surface excitement that delights our lives tends to be extinguished in the depths. As if the stuff of all stuff is reduced to one simple and unique form of substance.
There is a unity of homogeneity, therefore. But at the same time, unity of domain and collectivity.
Unity of Domain. It would be natural for us to attribute to minute cosmic corpuscles a radius of individual action as limited as their own dimensions. But it becomes evident that, on the contrary, each one of them can only be defined in function of its influence on everything around it. Whatever space we suppose each cosmic element to be placed in, it entirely fills that volume itself with its own radiation. However narrowly circumscribed is the “heart” of an atom, its domain is at least virtually coextensive with that of any other kind of atom. We shall meet this strange property again, further ahead, even in the human molecule!
And, as we added, collective unity. Even though the innumerable centers share a given volume of matter in common, for all that they are not independent from each other. Something binds them together that makes them mutually interdependent. Far from behaving like an inert receptacle, the space filled by their multitude influences them like an active medium of direction and transmission within which their plurality is organized. Atoms that are merely added together or juxtaposed still do not make matter. A mysterious identity incorporates them and binds them together, which goes against our mind, yet to which our mind will ultimately be forced to yield.
The sphere above the centers and enveloping them.
Throughout these pages, at each new phase of anthropogenesis we will find ourselves faced with the unimaginable reality of collective bonds, and we shall continually have to struggle against them, until we succeed in recognizing and defining their true nature. Here at the beginning, it is enough to include them under the empirical name science gives to their common initial principle: energy.
(c) Energy, the third aspect of matter
Under this word, which conveys the sense of psychological effort, physics has introduced the precise formulation of a capacity for action, or more exactly, for interaction. Energy is the measure of what is transferred from one atom to another in the process of their transformations. Energy, then, is a power of bonding; but also, because the atom seems to be enriched or depleted in the course of the exchange, a power of building up.
From the standpoint of energetics as it has been renewed by the phenomena of radioactivity, minute material particles can now be treated as transient reservoirs of concentrated power. Never, in fact, grasped in its pure state, but always more or less granulated (even in light!), for science energy currently represents the most primitive form of universal stuff. This is what accounts for our imagination’s instinctive tendency to consider it as a kind of homogeneous primordial flux, of which everything that takes shape in the world is only a fleeting “vortex.” From this point of view, the universe would find its consistency and ultimate unity at the end of its decomposition. It would hold together from below.
Let us keep the indisputable observations and measurements of physics. But let us avoid becoming attached to the perspective of final equilibrium they seem to suggest. A more complete observation of the movements of the world will gradually oblige us to turn this perspective around; I mean, to discover that if things hold, or are held together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.
Source: from The Human Phenomenon by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as translated by Sarah Appleton-Weber, pages 12-14.
Tags: beginning, History, interdependence, meaning, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, science, unity
