Teilhard de Chardin and Senghor on the civilization of the universal

I.1.3. Attributes of the Omega Point

First, Omega is a pole. It is a centre in itself and it is not directly comprehensible to us even though its divine nature allows us to formulate the conditions which must be met in order that it fulfils its role. Omega must be supremely present, with a mastery over time and chance and it must be a personalizing focus, a Person distinct from all persons whom it completes in unifying.

Secondly, Omega must be conceived as a summit of transcendence, a primeval transcendence, a transcendent reality. Omega must also be looked at as a centre of centres, a centre of a superior order which waits for us, no longer besides us, but also apart and above us.

The main reasons for the nature and function of the Omega Point are based on love and love is the highest energy that can personalize by totalisation: it is the highest form of radical energy:

Love is the most universal, the most formidable and the most mysterious of cosmic energies. [...] The progress towards Man, through Woman, is in fact the progress of the whole universe. The vital concern for Earth [...] is that these bearings be established.^13(*)

For human beings, «love alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves».^14(*)

Omega is thus the pinnacle of humanisation, the summit of the Civilization of the Universal. The final union of the converging forces of evolution must entail not repression or diminution, but expansion and fulfilment. Omega must therefore be a supreme centration, the focus in which are united without any loss of identity all the individual centres of men, taking up into themselves the full development of the material cosmos. According to Teilhard de Chardin, «autonomy, actuality, irreversibility, and thus, finally, transcendence are the four attributes of Omega».^15(*) All these four attributes simply refer to a Perfect Being in whom the universe is personalized by His very nature.

I.1.4. The Ultra Reflection

Co-reflection among men, Teilhard de Chardin says, must simply follow a universal centre of convergence and consciousness:

(It is) not as something engendered by energy as it reflects upon itself, but a centre that constitutes the generative principle (the mover) of that reflection.(It is) the phenomenon, in fact, of the third reflection by which Omega reflects itself upon (reveals itself to) a universe that has become capable of reflecting it in turn.^16(*)

Omega is not a potential centre, but something real and already in existence and only a sufficiently high degree of socialisation will enable man to reflect it.

The ultra-reflection is the third and final stage of reflection after the birth of consciousness in man and the stage of co-reflection. Teilhard de Chardin stresses the fact that the ultra-reflection does not consist in bringing all men into a single supra-consciousness in such a way that their personal identity and their individuality would disappear. Every gigantic effort to reduce the multitude of mankind to some order seems to have ended by slitting the human person, because none is higher than each man's personal consciousness and freedom.

* ¹³ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in Cuénot, C., Teilhard de Chardin, London, 1965, p. 112.

* ¹⁴ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, New York, 1959, P. 256.

* ¹⁵ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, New York, 1959, P. 271.

* ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 259.