Pierre Teilhard de Chardin “The Eternal Feminine”

I

Ab initio creata sum

When the world was born, I came into being. Before the centuries were made, I issued from the hand of God- half-formed, yet destined to grow in beauty from age to age, the handmaid of his work.

Everything in the universe is made by union and generation —by the coming together of elements that seek out one another, melt together two by two, and are born again in a third.

God instilled me into the initial multiple as a force of condensation and concentration.

In me is seen that side of beings by which they are joined as one, in me the fragrance that makes them hasten together and leads them, freely and passionately, along their road to unity.

Through me, all things have their movement and are made to work as one.

I am the beauty running through the world, to make it associate in ordered groups: the ideal held up before the world to make it ascend.

I am the essential Feminine.

In the beginning I was no more than a mist, rising and falling: I lay hidden beneath affinities that were as yet hardly conscious, beneath a loose and tenuous polarity.

And yet I was already in existence.

In the stirring of the layers of the cosmic substance, whose nascent folds contain the promise of worlds beyond number, the first traces of my countenance could be read.

Like a soul, still dormant but essential, I bestirred the original mass, almost without form, which hastened into my field of attraction; and ! instilled even into the atoms, into the fathomless depths of the infinitestimal, a vague but obstinate yearning to emerge from the solitude of their nothingness and to hold fast to something outside themselves.

I was the bond that thus held together the foundations of the universe. For every monad, be it never so humble, provided it is in very truth a center of activity, obeys in its movement an embryo of love for me:

The universal Feminine.

With the coming of life, I began to be embodied in beings that had been chosen to be in a special way my image.

Step by step, I became individualized.

At first I was ill-defined and elusive, as though I could not make up my mind to be contained in a tangible form:

But then, as souls became more ready to enter into a richer, deeper, more spiritualized union, I became more differentiated.

And thus, patiently and in secret, was developed the archetype of bride and mother.

During this transformation I did not surrender any of the lower charms that marked the successive phases of my appearance-just as the heart of the olive-tree holds firm and sound when, with each new spring, it grows green once more.

I still held them within me, and taught them to bear the burden of a greater consciousness. Thus, as living beings approached greater perfection on earth, so (and yet always outdistancing their growth) I was able to stand before them, matching, circle for circle, the concentric zones of their desires, as the proper form of their beatitude.

Follow with your eye the vast tremor that runs, from horizon to hori-zon, through city and forest.

Observe, throughout all life, the human effervescence that works like leaven in the world—the song of the birds and their plumage— the wild hum of the insects the tireless blooming of the flowers the unremitting work of the cells-the endless labors of the seeds germinating in the soil.

I am the single radiance by which all this is aroused and within which it is vibrant.

Man, nature's synthesis, does many things with the fire that burns in his breast. He builds up power, he seeks for glory, he creates beauty, he weds himself to science. And often he does not realize that, under so many different forms, it is still the same passion that inspires him— purified, transformed, but living- the magnetism of the Feminine.

It was within life that I began to unveil my face.

But it was man who was the first to recognize me, in the disquiet my presence brought him.

When a man loves a woman he thinks at first that his love is given simply to an individual like himself whom he envelops in his power and freely associates with himself.

He is very conscious of a radiance, haloing my countenance, which sensitizes his heart and illuminates all things.

But he attributes this radiation of my being to a subjective disposition of his entranced mind, or to a mere reflection of my beauty in nature's countless facets.

Soon, however, he is astonished by the violence of the forces unleashed in him at my approach, and trembles to realize that he cannot be united with me without inevitably becoming enslaved to a universal work of creation.

He thought that it was simply a partner who stood by his side: and now he sees that in me he meets the great hidden force, the mysterious latency, that has come to him in this form in order to lead him captive.

For the man who has found me, the door to all things stands open. I extend my being into the soul of the world-not only through the medium of that man's own sensibility, but also through the physical links of my own nature—or rather, I am the magnetic force of the universal presence and the ceaseless ripple of its smile.

I open the door to the whole heart of creation: I, the Gateway of the Earth, the Initiation.

He who takes me, gives himself to me, and is himself taken by the universe.

In the knowledge of me, alas, there is both good and evil.

Man's initiation has proved too strong meat for him.

When he saw that I was for him the universe, he thought to encompass me in his arms.

He wished to shut himself up with me in a closed world for two, in which each would be sufficient to the other.

At that very moment, I fell apart in his hands.

And then it could have seemed as though I were the rock on which mankind foundered — the Temptress.

Why, O men, why do you halt in the task of hard-won purification as a summons to which my beauty was made?

I am essentially fruitful: that is to say my eyes are set on the future, on the Ideal.

The moment you try to pin me down, to possess me in some complete form, you stifle me.

What is more, you distort, you reverseas you would a geometric pattern-my nature.

Since the true balance of life forces you continually to ascend, you cannot set me up as a lifeless idol to cling to, without falling back; instead of becoming gods, you revert to matter.

As soon as you fold your wings around me, you follow matter in its descent: for what drives matter down is the sterile union of its elements in which each neutralizes the other.

What you are grasping is no more than matter: for matter is a ten-dency, a direction— it is the side of Spirit that we meet as we fall back.

And your fall accelerates at a terrifying speed — as fast as the widening of the gap between your real appetites and the ever lower forms in which you seek for me.

And, when you, who are but dust, reach the term of your efforts, it is but dust that you embrace.

The more, O men, you seek me in the direction of pleasure, the farther will you wander from my reality.

The flesh, in truth, which operates as the pull of evil between you and the lower multiple (that reversed image of God) is no more than my inverted semblance, floating over an abyss of endless dissociation, that is, of endless corruption.

For a long time man, lacking the skill to distinguish between the mirage and the truth, has not known whether he should fear me or worship me.

He loved me for the magic of my charm and my sovereign power; he feared me as a force alien to himself, and for the bewildering riddle I presented.

I was at once his strength and his weakness—-his hope and his trial. It was in relation to me that the good were divided from the wicked.

Indeed, had Christ not come, man might well have placed me forever in the camp of evil.

II

Et usque adfuturum saeculum non desinam

Christ has given me salvation and freedom.

When he said: Melius est non nubere, men took it to mean that I was dead to eternal life.

In truth, by those words he restored me to life, with Lazarus-with Magdalen-and set me between himself and men as a nimbus of glory:

In making manifest that great virtue he defined, in fact, my true essence, and guided men, who had lost track of me, back to the true road I had trodden.

In the regenerated world I am still, as I was at my birth, the summons to unity with the universe-the world's attractive power imprinted on human features.

The true union, however, is the union that simplifies, and to simplify is to spiritualize.

The true fertility is the fertility that brings beings together in the engendering of Spirit.

If, in the new sphere into which created being entered, I was to remain Woman, I was obliged to change my form without impairing my former nature.

While my deceptive image continues to lure the pleasure-seeker towards matter, my reality has risen aloft, drawing men to the heights: it floats between the Christian and his God.

My charm can still draw men, but towards the light. I can still carry them with me, but into freedom.

Henceforth my name is Virginity.

The Virgin is still woman and mother: in that we may read the sign of the new age.

The pagans on the Acropolis blame the Gospel for having disfigured the world, and they mourn for beauty. These men are blasphemers.

Christ's message is not the signal for a rupture, for an emancipation: as though the elect of God, rejecting the law of the flesh, could break the bonds that tie them to the destiny of their race, and escape from the cosmic current in which they came to birth.

The man who hearkens to Christ's summons is not called upon to exile love from his heart. On the contrary, it is his duty to remain essentially a man.

Thus he has an even greater need of me, to sensitize his powers, and arouse his soul to a passion for the divine.

For the Saint, more than for any other man, I am the maternal shadow leaning over the cradle-and the radiant forms assumed by youth's dreams— and the deep-seated aspiration that passes through the heart like some undisputed alien force the mark, in each individual being of Life's axis.

Christ has left me all my jewels.

In addition, however, he has sent down upon me from heaven a ray that has boundlessly idealized me.

It seemed good to him, in the first place, to give a new zest to the natural impetus of my development.

Faced by a mankind that never ceases to ascend, the part I have to play insists on my withdrawing to an ever higher level held alof, over the earth's growing ambition, as a lure and a prize almost grasped, but never held. By its very nature, the Feminine must continue unremittingly to make itself progressively more felt in a universe that has not reached the term of its evolution: to ensure the final blossoming of my stock, will be the glory and bliss of chastity.

Countless are the new essences handed over by nature, from age to age, to life!

Under the influence of Christianity, I shall combine, until creation is complete, their subtle and dangerous refinements in an ever-changing perfection which will embrace the aspirations of each new generation.

Then, so long as the world endures, there will be seen reflected in the face of Beatrix the dreams of art and of science towards which each new century aspires.

Since the beginning of all things, Woman has never ceased to take as her own the flower of all that was produced by the vitality of nature or the art of man.

Who could say in what climax of perfections, both individual and cosmic, I shall blossom forth, in the evening of the world, before the face of God?

I am the unfading beauty of the times to come— the ideal Feminine.

The more, then, I become Feminine, the more immaterial and celestial will my countenance be.

In me, the soul is at work to sublimate the body-Grace to divinize the soul.

Those who wish to continue to possess me must change as I change.

Behold!

The center of my attraction is imperceptibly shifting towards the pole upon which all the avenues of Spirit converge.

The iridescence of my beauties, flung like a mantle over creation, is slowly gathering in its outlying folds.

Already the shadow is falling upon the flesh, even the flesh purified by the sacraments.

One day, maybe, it will swallow up even art, even science-things loved as a woman is loved.

The beam circles: and we must follow it round.

Soon only God will remain for you in a universe where all is virgin.

It is God who awaits you in me!

Long before I drew you, I drew God towards me.

Long before man had measured the extent of my power, and divinized the polarity of my attraction, the Lord had conceived me, whole and entire, in his wisdom, and I had won his heart.

Without the lure of my purity, think you, would God ever have come down, as flesh, to dwell in his creation?

Only love has the power to move being.

If God, then, was to be able to emerge from himself, he had first to lay a pathway of desire before his feet, he had to spread before him a sweet savor of beauty.

It was then that he caused me to rise up, a luminous mist hanging over the abyss— between the earth and himself-that, in me, he might dwell among you.

Now do you understand the secret of the emotion that possesses you when I come near?

The tender compassion, the hallowed charm, that radiate from Woman—so naturally that it is only in her that you look for them, and yet so mysteriously that you cannot say whence they come-are the presence of God making itself felt and setting you ablaze.

Lying between God and the earth, as a zone of mutual attraction, I draw them both together in a passionate union.

—until the meeting takes place in me, in which the generation and plenitude of Christ are consummated throughout the centuries.

I am the Church, the bride of Christ.

I am Mary the Virgin, mother of all humankind.

It might be thought that in this conjunction of heaven and earth I am destined to disappear as a useless handmaid, that I will have to vanish like a shadow before the reality.

Those who love me should dismiss this fear.

Just as participated being is not lost when it attains its principle

—but, on the contrary, finds fulfillment in melting in God— Just as the soul, once it is formed, does not completely exclude the countless elements from which it emerged —but retains, as essential to it, a potency for and a need for flesh in which to contain itself So the Cosmos, when divinized, will not expel my magnetic influence by which the ever more complex and more simplified fascicle of its atoms is progressively more closely— and permanently-knit I shall subsist, entire, with all my past, even in the raptures of contact with God—

What is more, I shall continue to disclose myself as inexhaustible in my development as the infinite beauties of which I am always, even if unseen, the raiment, the form, and the gateway.

When you think I am no longer with you when you forget me, the air you breathe, the light with which you see-then I shall still be at hand, lost in the sun I have drawn to myself.

Blessed elect, you have only (think: is this not true?) to relax for one moment the tension that impels you towards God, or to let your glance fall the least distance short of the center that enchants you, in order once again to see my image playing over the surface of the divine fire.

—And at that moment you may see with wonder how there unfolds, in the long web of my charms, the ever-living series of allurements-of forces that one after another have made themselves felt ever since the borderline of nothingness, and so brought together and assembled the elements of Spirit-through love.

I am the Eternal Feminine.