Humanization As A World Problem

Fr. Paul Verghese

It was a comparatively noiseless break-through that the World Council of Churches made recently in organizing a world level dialogue between Christians and Marxists. The break-through was not in any agreement reached between Christians and Marxists, but in the fact that such dialogue moved from the realm of possibility to reality.

The Christian side had formulated the theme, in our usual clumsy and unclear manner, as “Trends in Christian and Marxist thinking about the Humanization of Technical and Economic Development". Very early the objection was made about the theme-- is humanization something to be brought in from the outside to bear upon something else which is inhuman called “Technical and Economic Development." Certainly not. Development, whether technical and economic or cultural and spiritual, is itself a major element in humanization.

That gives rise to the question: What is humanization? It is an -ation word derived from the adjéctival form of man, it means making men human. How can we give any positive content to the notion of humanization without knowing who man is ? if you say that he is simply a biological species, then you have no problem of humanization-- since the species is already there. But precisely because man finds himself confronted with the need for humanization, it is clear that man is not yet man.

And in order that man truly becomes human, we need to have a basic orientation, if not a model of what man should be, at least a tentative contour of what man is and has to be. Here some Marxists are anxious to talk to intelligent Christians. The more creative Marxist intellectuals are becoming convinced that dogmatic Marxism (no more than dogmatic Christianity) cannot answer the question: “What is Man?" in a manner that will be useful even for the immediate future.

The question about the nature of man appears also to be the central thrust of the dialogue which is now breaking out everywhere— among western Christians whether Protestant or Catholic, between Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity, between Christians and secular men, between Christians and Marxists, and between Christians and adherents of other religions. But dogmatic Christianity too does not seem to have an adequate answer to the question: “What is Man?"

The Question and its Parts

The question about what man is refers both to his finitude and to his transcendence. lt is for this reason that the question seems so hard to tackle. It has both a phenomenological and an ontological aspect. Immanuel Kant, the intellectual father of the modern era, once said that true universal philosophy is concerned with four fundamental questions:

1. What can I know?
2. What ought I to do?
3. What may I hope for?
4. What is man ?

In his handbook (to his lectures on logic), he suggested that the first question is the concern of metaphysics, the second the realm of ethics, the third that of religion and the fourth that of anthropology.

Kant's whole philosophical enterprise was an attempt to answer these questions. He thought that the fourth question: “What is Man?" is the inclusive question, and that the other three simply seek to mark out some of the limitations of man in his finitude. Martin Buber, in his inaugural lectures as Professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1938) accused Kant, however, of not having tackled the question "What is Man ?" because of the indefinite scope of the question.

Heidegger also criticizes Kant for not having dealt with the fundamental question about the being of Man 2. His own project is to seek an answer to the question of fundamental anthropology through the method of fundamental ontology.

But the scope of the question is more than staggering -- it is almost paralysing. As Malebranche put it:

“Of all human knowledge, the knowledge of Man is the most deserving of his study. Yet this knowledge is not the most cultivated or the most developed which we possess. The generality of men neglect it completely. And even among those who busy themselves with this knowledge there are very few who dedicate themselves to it-- and still fewer who successfully dedicate themselves to it."

The effort to subdivide the question into its constituent parts itself involves the begging of some questions. If we say that the three subsidiary questions are, as Kant proposed, what can I know, what ought I to do and what may I hope for, this implies that Man is to be understood primarily as a knower, doer, and hoper. That he is all three, and that these three constitute a major part of his existence cannot be doubted. But are these his constitutive features ? Or can these three, his knowing, doing, and hoping, be better understood as instrumental to something else-- namely man's search for his own being which is more than simply knowing, doing, and hoping.

The Question of Methodology and Criteria

This raises immediately the problem of the method by which we seek to answer the question: “What is Man ?", and of the criteria by which proffered answers are to be tested. Shall we take a “history of ideas" approach, and root our ideas solidly in the past, or shall we take a phenomenological analysis of the Dasein of contemporary existence, or again shall we be boldly speculative and use our freedom to envision the future of mankind by our own discerning choice? Whichever way we choose, there cannot be an external authority or criterion by which we can fully validate our choice. We cannot be exhaustive in our analysis of the past of man's ideas about himself, and even if we were, we would be confronted with the need to choose between varying positions taken in the past. There is nothing authoritative about the past that can be fully normative for the present and the future. Besides, if the analysis of the past is not related to the present and the future, what use is it?

Neither is there any guarantee that any phenomenological analysis of man in his present existence can be absolutely free from cultural pre-suppositions. Here is the fundamental difficulty of Husserl's phenomenological method. The word obtained by the analysis of Sartre's consciousness need not be identical with the world which a Japanese Zen Buddhist may have in his consciousness. And no criterion exists to arbitrate between the two. Both consciousnesses are the consequences of particular collective and individual histories, and are coloured also by different systems of education, different personal and cultural fears and inhibitions etc.

It does not seem possible, however, to envisage the future without being partly conditioned by the past and the present. No man is totally free from the formative power of personal and cultural history, even when he claims to be so. One speaks therefore about the future of Man, fully aware that one is so conditioned. The authenticity of the vision can be tested only by the degree to which it commends itself to others.

Let me therefore, from the outset make it clear that I speak with no authority, but simply as one whose cultural and personal history includes the South-East Asian world which gave birth to Hinduism and Buddhism, a spiritual rootage in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and the brainwashing of a western Education, as well as a somewhat unique personal history which creates its own inhibitions and aspirations.

Two Christian Approaches to Anthropology

We shall take here, in order to provide some rootage in the past, just two ancient Christian attempts to draw the contour of man. These men are chosen both because of their great influence on Christianity and human culture, and because of the interesting contrast between them which places us before certain choices. They are St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Gregory of Nyssa.

Augustine found the question of the Psalmist an existential one for himself -- "What is Man, that thou art mindful of him I". Since his own concern is with existential self-understanding he rephrases the question in the first person:

Quid ergo sum, Deus meus? quae natura mea? “So what am I, my God, what is my nature?" Precisely because he could not understand man as something given, a normal part of the scheme of things, he had no method of answering that question, except by addressing it to God Himself. And what answer did he find ? His own personal pre-occupation from his very youth was with the problem of evil, evil in the world, evil in the self. That was the central question in that disintegrating world of fourth-century Rome. And in answering the question about the nature of man, he answered also his prior question about the origin of evil.

His first love, Manicheism, had sought to find the source of evil in a permanent principle of evil -- in an eternal evil God opposed to the good God. In his earlier works as a Christian to combat this is his main pre-occupation—to aifirm the sovereignty of the good God by denying a second eternal God. And he argues -- if this latter God, the God of evil, is capable only of evil, then he is not God, for God is free. He thus denies an unoriginate eternal principle of evil, and locates the origin of evil in the freedom of the will in the created order ‘.

In his controversy with Pelagious and his disciples, however, Augustine had to withdraw much of what he said about free-will, for his anti-Manichean writings had been used by the Pelagians to argue against Augustine's own doctrine of Grace. And so in his Retractions (I : IX) he withdraws much of what he had earlier said about free-will. It is this circumstance that made him reduce freedom to a neutral, medium kind of good and not central to man's nature.

But evil itself Augustine regarded as central to man's nature. For he had fought hard against the evil of concupiscence in his own soul, only to find himself getting more deeply involved in it. So he traces the origin of evil to the free-will, making evil an integral part of man —of natura mea, and thus of human nature itself.

Humanity is thus a massa damnata, revoltingly vile, man being mis-oriented in his very reason by his passions. Desire precedes thought. The will goes before the mind, deflecting and distorting it. Partum mentis praecedit appetitus. It is your love which can decide whether your mind is on the right track or not. There are two fundamental choices for love— Jerusalem, the.city of God, or Babylon, the city of the earth. The natura mea inclines me always to Babylon, the worldly city. Only the Grace of God can lift my love up to Jerusalem.

“My weight is my love, thereby I am borne, whithersoever I am borne. We are inflamed ; by Thy gift (grace) we are enkindled ; and are carried upwards; we glow inwardly, and go forwards... We go upwards to the peace of Jerusalem."

Augustine thus dramatized what is a Biblical insight in St. Paul's epistle to the Galatians:

“The desires of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would." Gal. 5: 17.

And yet in that dramatization, he was laying the foundations of a doctrine which has become deeply entrenched in western Christianity as well as in western culture, that evil or sin is an integral part of human nature. This ontologization of what was but a phenomenological observation in St. Paul, has plagued western Christianity ever since. For St. Paul, sin is not a part of man in his created essence, but rather an enemy that has entered into humanity from the outside, through the disobedience of the first Adam. Of course, Augustine would agree with that. Yet he saw fallen human nature as decisively normative for his understanding of man. ln Augustine, nature is the result of the Fall --not of creation.

In western Christian anthropology, the distinctive thing about man is that he is a sinner by nature. Nothing good can come from him by nature. Only grace can produce the first movements towards the good. By nature he is not free. Grace coming from outside humanity, outside nature liberates him to will the good and thus restores to him the limited freedom of being able to do good.

One feels embarrassed by the degree of presumption that is required to engage in fundamental criticism of such a towering genius of humanity as Augustine. And yet, without exercising that freedom, one becomes paralyzed by the overpowering authority of obvious error. So the following criticisms of Augustine are proffered in the interests of starting a discussion between East and West within the Christian Church which has been long overdue. Here they are in the form of five theses:

The opposition between Jerusalem, the city of God and Babylon, the city of earth, has been posed by Augustine too undialectically to permit its remaining faithful to the Biblical tradition. A false opposition is created here between this world and the world to come. The world to come has, according to the Biblical view, come into this world in Jesus Christ, pervades it and grows within it, transforming it from within. By failing to recognize this dialectical tension, and by making the two realms disjunctive, Augustine has unwillingly laid the foundation for the unfortunate choice between world-affirmation and world-denial in western intellectual and cultural life. Overcoming this disjunction is of primary significance to a relevant anthropology today.

By making human nature totally devoid of the good and conceiving grace as omething supernatural entering nature from the outside, Augustine has been unwittingly responsible for the Christian Church's false claims to exclusive possession of the good, and the despising of other religions and cultures-- which still remains a fundamental problem of western culture. By conceiving man's essential nature to be sinful it has been unable to have a positive evaluation of man's destiny as man—secular or religious—in the material creation, to accept man as at least in part free to shape his own nature and destiny in this world. The opposition between nature and grace continues to plague western theology, even in a new theologian like Karl Rahner.

3) By making sin the central problem of man, western Christianity has been caught in the trap of being concerned primarily with the salvation of the individual to the neglect of his corporate vocation to be the bearer of God's name in history. it has thus been pre-occupied with the problems of forgiveness of sins and justification by faith, which are both preliminary to the true vocation of man to be transformed into the image of God, transforming his environment in that process. Deliverance from sin is not enough. The vocation to shape the world belongs integrally to the Christian message.

By focusing on the salvation of the individual from sin, Augustine laid the foundation for thinking of the Church as a collection of saved individuals, rather than as the corporate body of Christ by participation in which the individual man experiences not only forgiveness of sins, but also access into the presence of God. A relevant Christian anthropology today has to grant primacy to man's corporate existence and the structures of society, and only in that context view the problems of personal existence.

By thinking of the sacraments mainly in terms of a verbum visible and as a vehicle of grace to the individual. Augustine made possible the obscuration of the Eucharist as the central act of the Church with a double movement --the corporate self-giving of the Church to her Lord in loving adoration, and the self-giving of the Lord to the Church in the Body and the Blood. The recovery of an authentic sacramental practice in the Church is necessary to revalidate matter in Christian thought, and thus to train Christians to take the incarnation and this world seriously.

Western anthropology finds itself caught in the terms of these Augustinian deviations, even in their denial of them. Correctives are to be sought outside the western tradition, since new alternatives have to be posed to come to grips with man in his complex reality. Ecumenical discussion should soon pay attention to this aspect.

One such corrective can come from Augustine's contemporary, St. Gregory of Nyssa, from whom Augustine seems to have derived many of his ideas, though not directly but through Jerome, Ruffinus and Ambrose. I shall here refer to seven points of Nyssa's anthropology in the form of succinct theses.

1) Man is an integral part of creation, and cannot be understood or saved in isolation from the rest of creation. The creation was made for man and finds its fulfilment in him.

2) Man is distinguished from the rest of creation by his “ruling power" over the rest of creation. Man is thus born to be Lord of Creation —this is his nature as the image of God. Tool-making is an essential aspect of the Lordship of man, and this is why he is born weak and defenseless, but has to acquire his tools and weapons by subduing animals and metals.

3) Man's mind, which rules over him (the hegemonikon) works through the senses, which in turn operate through the body, and therefore the three are inseparable, and all three (mind, body and sense) are to be saved as integral parts of man.

4) Man is created in the image of God. His nature is therefore to be like God, participant in all good. Sin is extrinsic to his nature, an accretion from the outside. His nature is participation in all possible good. There is no limit to his potentiality for good.

5) The basis for participation in all good is freedom from necessity, for that which is not free is not virtue. Man's nature has therefore to be freely achieved, by creative activity and not simply by passively being moulded, or by grace infused from outside.

The basic distinction between God and Man is that God is unoriginate, while man is created. God is beyond time, not subject to change as time-creatures are. Man is originate, and in time, and therefore has constantly to change -- ie he is a historical being, in the flux of change, always at the point of intersection between a past and a future.

Man in his fundamental essence is corporate, the body is the principle of individuation. His vocation therefore is to be a corporate body -- the body of Christ. Perfection itself belongs to mankind as a whole in the final recapitulation, when evil shall cease to exist even at the Pragmatic level

The subtlety of St. Gregory of Nyssa's anthropology can be grasped only by apprehending his analysis of the Creation, Man, and the God-Man Christ Jesus in their various relations to God.

God is Freedom. That is what the transcendence of God ultimately means. He transcends all determinations, physical, psychological, moral or conceptual. He is free also in His immanent relations to the cosmos and to Man.

The world is no emanation from God. It is created, i.e. the principles (aphormas) the causes (aitias) and the forces (dunameis) of all that exists are set in motion by God's‘ will. The creation is thus the realization, or concretization of God's will. "The will of God is, so to speak, the matter, the form and the energy of the universe, and everything in the universe is subject to it." This, according to Nyssa, is the Christian understanding of God's immanence in creation. Not that God's being is in the cosmos (pantheism), not that the Universe is in the being of God (pan-en-theism), but rather that God's will has become the cosmos. And therefore while we can speak of God's immanence in creation through His will, precisely because the will of God is the being of the universe, the universe itself is transcendent and free, beyond our conceptual determinations. The universe is thus dynamic being. It is God's decision, will and purpose that gives it motion. The immanence of God thus serves both as the principle of cohesion and as the motor of evolution.

The cosmos is the dynamic concretion of the will of God and man is an integral part of this cosmos. But man is more than that. He is participant in the very phusis or dynamic nature, of God. God's grace is ultimately, His choice to make man participate in His nature. The two creations —the creation of the universe, and the creation of man -- are both acts of God's grace. It is this double grace -- the grace of simple creation by will and of the second creation after his own image, -- that constitutes our being as body and soul. Grace is thus not opposed to to nature, but is the constituent of nature.

The mind, or spirit, or nous, creative mental activity, constitutes the difference between the rest of creation and man. ln man God's transcendent and free immanence becomes present in a special way. And since this is the essence man, human nature cannot be conceptually determined. It breaks out of all confining limits except that of creaturehood, for even historical existence is one day to be transcended.

This transcendent divine immanence in man is neither static nor self-evident. It is a free, dynamic presence, and is realized by man to the extent to which the soul or the constructive essence of man, becomes transparent to the reality of itself. God's freedom functions in the cosmos as an immanence of which the uni verse is not consciously aware. In man there is the possibility of his being consciously aware of the Divine presence in him. In the God-Man Jesus Christ, the awareness of man's self-identity as the Divine immanence became fully transparent to the Divine transcendence of the Father, and this is the reality of being the image of God -- the transparence of the image to its proto-type. It is in this transparent stance that the transfiguration of man takes place -- as St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:12-18.

Man thus, according to Nyssa, is an earth-born organism destined to become transparent to the reality of the transcendent God and to transform the creation by his free creativity to become the bearer of the Good.

Transition to our Time

But what indeed does all this have to do with the issues confronting man today? Where is the transition from this abstract ontological analysis to contemporary problems? Perhaps the best exponent of Patristic thought in relation to current problems is that great western Christian genius Pere Teilhard de Chardin. His thought seems to be in direct continuity more with Nyssa than with Augustine.

The idea that plays a central role in Teilhard's thought is that of "hominization" or humanization and cosmogenesis or planetization. There are two fundamental faith-affirmations which underlie this vision of history as humanization and cosmogenesis.

1) Evolution is infallible; it cannot miscarry; it must go through to the end of what it has set out to achieve, despite many failures along the way. Industrialization is the consequence of evolution.
2) This end already exists—as point Omega, a personal centre able to sum up all consciousness within itself, and finally to unify the human super-organism.

The whole of the history of creation forms one single movement forward of God's dynamic will immanent in the universe, according to Teilhard. Consciousness, which becomes most manifest in Man, goes back‘ to matter itself for its origin. All sciences deal with aspects of this movement forward —Astronomy, Palaeontology and Geology dealing with the history of material creation, Biology with the history of life, World history with the dealings of men with each other and with their environment, and Church history or holy history dealing with the transcendent God's breaking into man through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

The question then is about the orientation or direction of the whole process, and particularly about the goals for man. Point Omega as a goal does not suffice to orient, without greater amplification.

Teilhard finds the orientation by an analysis of the process of movement. He finds a dialectic in the total process between death and life, between the tangential or external energy which governs the physical and chemical relations of the elements to each other on the one hand, and radial or internal energy, which is really psychic energy drawing every group of life forward towards greater complexity and centricity. The physico-chemical movement is subject to Carnot's second law—the increase of entropy, the running down of the universe, the drift to death and non-being. The psychic energy of consciousness overcomes this tendency to death by the creation of life, which by greater complexity of organization and by being more centred, is able to make the particles of matter function in such a way as to move forward to hominization or cosmogenesis.

Thus, according to Teilhard, there is in the stuff of the universe, and not merely in man, a growing force of desire and invention, very feeble and unsure at first, but growing in intensity as time progresses. This then becomes life, "something that arranges, converges, becomes concentrated, interiorized, develops corpuscles" through something else that “disarranges, diverges, expands, and loses its corpuscles". It is this process which we call evolution.

The appearance of Man in this evolutionary continuum creates a new situation, precisely because of the existence of nous or human consciousness. It is no longer the body that evolves, but the sphere of the mind —the noosphere. The fundamental direction is the same — namely increasing complexity and centricity. The region and the technique of evolution has now radically shifted.

The new fact is that it is no longer the body that evolves, but the human mind, moving forward towards more complexity. Complexity means not merely greater diversity, but also a multi-variety of levels and currents of relationship. Centricity means a more centred and therefore more wide-embracing and more consciously directed process of human development. lt is no longer simply the original impulse within creation that directs the universe towards its fulfilment centred in point Omega. A part of the stream of evolution, namely human consciousness, becomes capable, not only of comprehending the process that gave birth to it, but also of directing it towards freely chosen goals. j‘God makes things make themselves“, says Teilhard.

It is in fact no longer evolution, giving rise to a multiplicity of forms of life. A new process has begun with man — namely that of involution. Man finds himself confronted not only with the task of liberating himself from the evolutionary stream that carries him forward through the double process of expansion in diversity of species and concentration or selectivity in survival. He is also called upon to gather up the multifarious universe and bring it under centred and directed control.

Man is no longer the plaything of the reproductive urge which produces indiscriminately and the fact of death which eliminates the unfit. He assumes control of the mainstream of evolution by being able to transcend it and transform it. Science and technology thus become the instruments of salvation. Economics and Politics become part of the activity of increasing the centred complexity of a pluralistic world. Human creativity goes forward through not only science and technology, but also through the production and distribution of new goods, and the organization of power in society.

Human culture itself is influenced by this process. Changes in the pattern of production and distribution and in the organization of power radically alter the way of life, thought and action of men —their attitudes and aspirations included.

Thus Teilhard becomes the exponent of a new way of looking at life or existence. History is now unified into one vision that comprehends the history of the universe and the earth (palaeontology, geology), the history of matter (the physico-chemical sciences), the history of life (biology) and the history of man (history, including science and technology, politics and economics as well as culture).

History thus becomes the magnificent all-pervading movement of all existence in its proud though painful march towards fulfilment, and here in this process is where modern man seeks his own fulfilment or salvation. As Montuclard says:

"Modern man is convinced that history has a liberating part to play as regards humanity. To him, history is the mediatrix of salvation. And if he has no religious faith, he carries this conviction to the lengths of believing that it is up to history alone—that is to say, for human effort inserted in the historical process—to secure for men, through justice, freedom and solidarity, the deliverance that they seek...

There are in some men a faith, a hope, a sense of the future, and at times an overwhelming vision of the historical situation from which they can draw self-control, freedom of thought and action, courage and initiatives. What did they have to do, in order thus to be "saved"? No more than enter actively into the current of history."

It is this hope and trust in history and in the human effort to be inserted in human history, that constitutes the common ground for many Christians, secular humanists, and Marxist humanists. It is on this basis that they seem willing to enter into a dialogue about the humanization of the world.

Several Questions

The Christian is tempted to ask a few questions to himself at this point:

1) What is the ground of this great hope in history ? Does history itself provide the ground for such hope? Has not history betrayed men in the past?
2) Does this hope not create the false idol of a utopia on earth which man can create by his own efiort? Does not the Christian faith preclude the vision of such a paradise on earth in history?
3) Does this hope not eliminate the need for any specific faith in God, and therefore make the Church and its message totally irrelevant?
4) Where does God fit in all this ? If man can achieve the_kingdom by his own efiorts, does this not make God unnecessary and obsolete?
5) ls this all not too optimistic ? Why is there no realistic appraisal of the fact of sin or evil which also exists in this evolutionary history? How did it originate? What is the function? How can it be overcome?

We may have to go beyond Teilhard in seeking to answer some of these questions. But in some cases Teilhard himself has pointed the way forward.

1. The Ground of Hope

Christians ought to reflect on the fact that the Christian hope is not for Christians alone. The redemption in Jesus Christ is a cosmic one, and it is sheer pettiness on our part if we deny its fruit to non-Christians.

Of course history does not provide a great basis for hope. It is the Christian hope that enables a Teilhard to see hope in the direction of evolution. It is the Jewish Old Testament hope that enables a Marxist like Ernst Bloch to live by the principles of hope, which is a fundamental Messianic principle. But history itself validates Bloch's own marvelous summary of his philosophy as Harvey Cox narrates it to us: "S is not yet P". At least the not-yetness of man is something of which most men are directly convinced, even those who are comfortably bourgeois and hug that status quo in the name of “law and order". Being is in motion -- towards fulfillment or destruction we cannot be sure form history, but history does not succeed completely in laughing at all assumption of directedness in history. Man is a future-seeking being whether in this world or in another. Possibility, the new, Futurity-- these are categories within which to conceive the not_yet being of man. To use the pompous words of the Second Vatican Council:

“This sacred Council proclaims the highest destiny of Man and champions the God-like seed which has been sown in him."

Whether history provides us with an adequate ground for this hope, it is the Christian‘s responsibility to stand behind secular man's hope, for he, like us, is created in the image of God and is destined to be like God. Even if secular man has nothing but the fact of his hope as the basis of his hope, we must hope with him for the sake of man.

2. Secular Hope and Utopia

Western theology has been bitten by the deep disillusionment of speculative philosophy and secular liberalism. It has seen the depths of evil in man in the pogroms and the concentration camps of our century. It is naturally wary of an optimistic estimate of the future or of man.

Secular utopias are also now becoming transformed. The kind of static utopia that Dostoevski's underground man cynically sought to overthrow no longer exists in the minds of perceptive secular thinkers. "A revolution in human relations and a turn-about in man himself are therefore the goals of socialism, not the build-up of the productive forces", says a modern Marxist from Yugoslavia.

The socialists are now laughing at us Christians for being concerned only with salvation in the next world, and therefore becoming supporters of the Status quo of oppression and injustice on earth. They say the utopia is a Christian creation. Socialists are now pursuing more modest goals. As Professor Pejovic says:

"If the goal of history is understood to be not salvation, but rather a freer and more sensible life on this planet, then Phlosophy has the task envisaged by Marx, viz. to be sensible (and not calculating) and capable of helping people to live more sensibly and of leading them to freedom."

And even when other Marxists like Professor Maximilien Rubel insist that "Utopia and Revolution are the two historical co-ordinates of the socialist movement," they mean that we must will the abolition of an unjust society (revolution) and the creation of a just society-- the New City which itself is not static or perfect. That seems to have been the content of the prophetic message -- judgment and hope.

3. What about Faith in God?

There we have a more radical problem. If we allow men to go on building up secular hopes not grounded in faith in God, are we not betraying God ? ln fact, does Teilhard himself give room for a purely secular hope which eliminates any need for faith in God?

If Olivier Rabut's two-point summary of Teilhard's basic understanding of God's purpose as unilinear from the beginning of the universe to its end in point Omega is correct, then it is possible that faith need not be in God, but only in the process of history.

"1. Evolution is infallible, it cannot miscarry, it must go through to the end of what it has set out to do. It is written within its very law that it will end up at a definite point—the point at which mankind is unified in one higher person. Everything necessary to achieve this end, is therefore already in existence.
2. The end would not be achieved did there not already exist a personal centre able to sum up all consciousness within itself, and finally to unify the human super-organism."

These, as we have stated earlier, are Christian affirmations, about the purpose of God in Jesus Christ. Their antecedents are not in Marx and Lenin, but in the doctrine of the recapitulation of all things in Christ as taught by St. Paul, St. lreneus and St. Gregory of Nyssa.

If secular man wants to secularize these faith-affirmations and hold them as secular affirmations, as Montuclard suggests, should we deny him this privilege? Perhaps secularized man's own faith will become more articulate when he sees Christians working side by side with him for the emancipation of man and his unification.

We should be prepared to welcome secular man's faith in the historical process as a pre-figuration of his faith in God.

4. Why God at all?

That leads to the fourth question: does all this not mean that the belief in God is something dispensable for man, and that Christians themselves would be freer to help man become man if they would free themselves from this juvenile dependence on God ? Is not then the Gospel of Christian atheism of Altizer and Hamilton, the most sensible of gospels that the Christian can still hold to? Not necessarily. First of all let us make clear that God is not scared by the possibility of men denying him. He gives us every possible opportunity to do so, because he respects man's freedom. And when we proclaim that “God is dead", God says to us-- "That is alright; so long as you do not say, ‘Man is dead‘ ". For ultimately, in affirming man, the image of God, we are affirming its prototype.

God is not jealous about man's achieving the kingdom by his own efforts. After all, all the good efforts of man are nothing but the efforts of God, for it is God who acts in us. God has become man. Let man act for the good of his fellowman, and that will be the God-man acting.

As for conscious faith in God, we who do believe in God, even if it is unfashionable need the chastening fire of a fighting atheism both within and without the church to bring purity and clarity to our faith.

God dwells in light unapproachable. He dwells also in the very being of man. And when man grows into goodness, the face of God appears on the faces of men, both individually and corporately.

Let us not be too keen to defend God. Our defense only makes him look weak and ridiculous. Give yourself to Man — and slowly you will discover that you do believe in God.

By making God necessary, we do no service to God.

5. Why no Mention of Sin and Evil

Yes, evil is there, for all of us to see. It does not go away with our closing the eyes. Teilhard is not unaware of the problem of evil. Neither was Augustine or Gregory. History is a realm where the wheat and the tares grow together. There is always the possibility that evolution may miscarry, that non-being may triumph over being. If that possibility were not real, faith would have had no meaning. Evil is there, almost regnant in the status quo. But it is the negation of being, not being itself. If we sanctify the status quo, we are sanctifying evil and making it absolute.

Hope is, as Tillich put it, the negation of the negative. What is, is not the real. The real is what is to be. In denying what is to be (the future) and affirming what is (evil), we are denying the real. This is not realism.

Teilhard has a pregnant passage on this subject which leaves open the possibility of universalism itself being wrong and points to the inevitability of catastrophe:

“There are no summits without abysses. Enormous powers will be liberated in mankind by the inner play of its cohesion : though it may be that this energy will still be employed discordantly tomorrow, as today and in the past. Are we to foresee a mechanizing synergy under brute force, or a synergy of sympathy? Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? A conflict may supervene. In that case the noosphere, in the course of and by virtue of the processes which draws it together, will, when it has reached its point of unification, split into two zones each attracted to an opposite pole of adoration. Thought has never completely united upon itself here below. Universal love would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere so as to consummate it-the part which decided to ‘cross the threshold‘, to get outside itself into the other."

Conclusion

Tomorrow the world may come to an end, not with a bang, but in a whimper, perhaps. But then tomorrow may go on, for no man knoweth the time of his coming.

In either case, the kingdom is here, we have no choice but to live it, whether here or hereafter.

God is here too, in Man. Man is unbounded, except as creature, in his hands are power, wisdom and love. He has the capacity to create and to give, and in giving himself to his fellow-man finds fulfilment and growth.

The horizon of man is always receding. But that is no reason for not moving. The creator is up to something in the Creation. The creation is in motion. It is not that he comes into history now and then to act. He has set that history in motion, and given us the intelligence to discern and direct the movement of that history.

Humanization as a world-problem is that of drawing all men all over the world to shed their pettiness and their lethargy, to put away their narrow loyalties and anxious fears for themselves, and to join in the one single movement of history towards point Omega.

Along the way, death will come. The movement will go on, on both sides of
the veil.