Commenting on the importance of human consciousness, Pascal said:

“The Universe may crush them, but they are greater than the Universe because they know they are being crushed”.

“We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with individual life, but short indeed, compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish”:

Arthur Balfour, Foundations of Belief (1894)

Humans “very existence is an accident, their story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of planets [comment Brian Cox?]… famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant”:

Arthur J Balfour, Foundations of Belief (1895)

One possibility: “Disease and hunger will be conquered by science…Hatred and internecine struggles will have disappeared in the ever-warming radiance of Omega… The final convergence will take place in peace”.

Another possibility: “Obeying a law from which nothing in the past has ever been exempt, evil may go on growing alongside good… There are no summits without abysses”:

The Phenomenon of Man [1959]

Teilhard de Chardin was well aware of the cataclysmic possibilities lying in wait for Planet Earth: “With age and increasing complication, we are ever more threatened by internal dangers at the core of both the biosphere and the noosphere. Onslaughts of microbes, organic counter-evolutions, sterility, war, revolution – there are so many ways of coming to an end”. But he was no pessimist: “However possible [these cataclysms] may be in theory, we have higher reasons for being sure that they will not happen“: See next blog….

The Phenomenon of Man (1959)

The famous Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin argued that a process of cultural convergence would lead the human species into a single interthinking group based on a single self-developing framework of thought or “noosphere”. As Julian Huxley explained it in 1959: “Teilhard, extrapolating from the past into the future, envisaged the process of human convergence as tending to a final state, which he called ‘point Omega‘, as opposed to the Alpha of elementary particles and their energies.” Chardin’s theological take on this was that humanity would ultimately merge with the Divine, an idea that generated much controversy.

The early twentieth century, even before the horrors of World War 1, experienced a crisis of identity and of culture generally. For Paul’s essay on this age of anxiety see attached file from my website dpcrook.wordpress. com.

Cultural Crisis in the West

Dorothy Sayers played down the deadly sin of Lust, which she saw as much less important than the Six Other Sins (such as Greed, Avarice and Envy, the “respectable sins”}. Too many people laboured under the delusion that for Christians matter and the body were evil: “For this misapprehension, St. Paul must bear some blame, St. Augustine of Hippo a good deal more, and Calvin a very great deal. But so long as the Church continues to teach the manhood of God and to celebrate the sacraments of the Eucharist and marriage, no living person should dare to say that matter and body are not sacred to her. She must insist strongly that the whole material universe is an expression and incarnation of the creative energy of God… For that reason, all good and creative handling of the material universe is holy and beautiful, and all abuse of the material universe is a crucifixion of the body of Christ”.

[Creed or Chaos, 1947]

“If man’s fulfillment of his nature is to be found in the full expression of his divine creativeness, then we urgently need a Christian doctrine of work, which shall provide not only for proper conditions of employment, but also that the work shall be such as a person may do with their whole heart, and that they shall do it for the very work’s sake. But we cannot expect a sacramental attitude to work, while many people are forced, by our evil standard of value, to do work which is a spiritual degradation – for example, a long series of financial trickeries or the manufacture of vulgar and useless trivialities”:

[Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos, 1949]

“It would not perhaps be altogether surprising if, in this nominally Christian country, where the Creeds are daily recited, there were a number of people who knew all about Christian doctrine and disliked it. It is more startling to discover how many people there are who heartily dislike and despise Christianity without having the faintest notion what it is…. they simply cannot believe that anything so interesting, so exciting, and so dramatic can be the orthodox Creed of the Church”:

[Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos, 1949]