There are indeed a number of interesting parallels between Aurobindo's and Teilhard's teachings. Not only are they quite similiar as far as their respective cosmologies go, but both men developed their philosophies at the same time. M. Andrè Monostier observes that:
"during the First World War, while the corporal stretcher-bearer Teilhard de Chardin was composing inside the trenches of his regient the broad outlines of Le Phénomène humain and Le Milieu divin, 10,000 kilometres away the Indian revolutionary leader Sri Aurobindo was developing in the same way in the pages of the monthly review Arya the essential ideas of his magnum opus, The Life Divine (10th ed.), ." ["Teilhard de Chardin: His Spiritual-Scientific Thought and its Meeting-Point with Sri Aurobindo", Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture (Pondicherry), March 1966]
Yet there is still a very real difference of consciousness between the two men, although the Indian writer K.D. Sethna is perhaps being too harsh when he states:
"Sri Aurobindo had already attained the direct spiritual experience of the fundamental realities he was expounding intellectually in his journal....Teilhard, even in his maturity, was not putting into intellectual language the results of any comparable inner compassing of hidden truths. All that he had to go upon was a number of vivid intuitions and intense feelings in boyhood and a vibrant spiritual sense in subsequent years. Surely, these...are of great value.....But they are still worlds apart from the realisation of a master of the via mystica, a supreme Yogi."
[K. D. Sethna, Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo - a Focus of Fundamentals, p.100, (Bharatiya Vidya Prakasan, Varanasi, 1973)] Teilhard's writings show through and through a deep mystical awareness, as the following passage shows:
"Christ invests himself organically with the very majesty of his creation. And it is in no way metaphorical to say that man finds himself capable of experiencing and discovering his God in the whole length, breadth and depth of the world in movement. To be able to say literally to God that one loves him, not only with all one's body, all one's heart and all one's soul, but with every fibre of the unifying universe--that is a prayer than can only be made in space-time." (The Phenomenon of Man, 1955, p. 297)
If this is not a mystical utterance (albeit with a strong and pantheistic slant), I don't know what is.
The more significant point is that Teilhard, working within the framework of the dualistic Christian religion, had conceptual restrictions placed upon him that Aurobindo, who was coming from the much more ecumenical Indian spiritual culture, was blessedly free of. This difference in religious mileu led to very real doctrinal differences in the teachings of these two great Visionaries, despite the obvious and striking similarities that are there.
An important difference, Sethna points out, between the Aurobindonian and the Teilhardian conceptions of the divine culmination of evolution is that unlike Aurobindo, Teilhard "...puts the realm of perfection still beyond the earth" in a transcendent Omega-Christ principle, and thus "stops short of what the evolution or unfoldment of the Divine hidden in matter should logically reach - a new ceation here which would correspond in all essential terms to the epiphany that already exists in the Divine beyond." This would seem to be due to his religious conservatism, so that even in his magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard tried to make his vision compatable with Roman Catholicism, and in some other works this tendency is more pronunced. "A somewhat elastic Roman Catholicism which would not exclude his mystico-scientific weltanschauung of evolution...would wholly satisfy him. He wants to retain the old form as much as possible for his novel substance; otherwise he could not remain a devout Jesuit in spite of the Church's suspician of his philosophy." [K. D. Sethna, Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo - a Focus of Fundamentals, pp.36-7,
Original article (here)
No comments:
Post a Comment