The Heart of Matter

The following excerpt (Foreword by N.M. Wildiers) is from the last volume of Pere Teilhard's essays.

The main themes emphasized in The Heart of Matter - the Cosmic or the Evolutive, the Human or the Convergent - are subordinate, we shall find, to another theme which embraces them both: the Christic or the Centric. At the peak of his thought Teilhard finds himself faced with God alone. It is then that he writes his Prayer to the ever-greater Christ, a prayer as yet unequalled, whether for its mystical depth, the width of its underlying scholarship, or the beauty of its language.

After reading these pages we might well be inclined to think that Teilhard had said his last word; but The Christic was still to come... Providentially, The Christic is at hand to fill the gap caused by Pere Teilhard's religious obedience. He had, in fact, planned a second part of The Phenomenon of Man, which would have completed the first part by the addition of the Phenomenon of Religion, but his religious superiors had then ordered him to confine himself to the strictly scientific field.