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September 1917. World War I has been ravaging Europe for three years when a 36-year old infantry medic by the name of Teilhard de Chardin takes part in the battle of Douaumont, France. There, knee-deep in the cold mud, exhausted from months spent on the battlefront, starved from weeks of short supplies, hundreds of thousands of men from both sides are waging the most epic and bloody battle of the Great War. 300,000 will lose their lives on this killing field over a matter of days, in a frenzy of deafening noise, blinding light and burning shrapnel.
Teilhard de Chardin
To anyone, this pandemonium of violence is yet another of those horrific setbacks to the progress of humanity; a useless tragedy that ought to be never allowed to happen again. To Teilhard, however, there is no such thing. Before his eyes, in the midst of one of the greatest manslaughters ever, something deeply meaningful is blooming, that can take place nowhere else. These men are well aware that joining the bloodbath will mean almost certain death for them, yet they refuse to stand down; they are pouring all their last energy into something greater than themselves. It is then that Teilhard has an epiphany: humanity is converging. Men from both sides are transcending their small selves, elevating their otherwise menial existence and becoming part of a larger purpose.
Only the truly illuminated can see the constructive power coming out of this wanton destruction. The peace that ensued was, in a twisted way, a disappointment; it meant going back to a trivial life, full of petty concerns and pointless feuds.
Christianity has long considered such occasional mayhem as a divine retribution for committing the original sin, or as the self-inflicted consequence of mankind’s constant straying from the path. Religion dictates that all earthly lives, because they are material, are bound to end in loss and grief. As to why God would tolerate such evil, religion would evasively (and conveniently) refer to the Lord’s “mysterious ways” and dismiss all human efforts, for good or evil, as puny and irrelevant to the some broader plan kept away from us. To Teilhard, they were anything but; he blamed preachers for failing to recognize “the truly admirable and growing reality of a large share of the human Effort”. During the war, Teilhard had witnessed the tremendous amount of energy that mankind can put towards an endeavor, and knew that this proud effort could be harnessed into something positive and hopeful, provided we stopped waiting for an unlikely signal from Heaven and began acknowledging the material reality around us.
Interestingly, despite coming from a person of deep faith, Teilhard’s view resonates with that of pragmatic agnostics: whether or not God exists is irrelevant, because He does not appear to intervene in the physical world anyway. This gives us humans the tremendous and exciting responsibility to take control of our lives and world, recognize our existence as material beings living in a material world, and act accordingly, to the fullest extent of our will and stamina, instead of using our inferiority to God as an excuse for inaction and apathy. It also gives hope in mankind’s capability to strive towards the Singularity as an end goal.
