The Philosophy of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

A look at the famous Jesuit theologian.

Henry G. Hadley, M.D., Research Foundation, Inc., Washington D.C.

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN was a Jes­uit priest and well-known paleontologist who tried to reconcile and unify science with religion. His philosophy has kindled unusual provocation in the literary world. Although he desired that his book The Phenomenon of Man not be read as a meta­physical or theological essay, but as a sci­entific treatise, libraries generally classify it under philosophy and religion.

De Chardin's beliefs are a synthesis of re­ligion and science, resulting in a theory somewhat resembling Christian Science. He conceived mankind to be an unfinished product of past evolution and firmly be­lieved that in the future he would become a transcendent result of biological and psy­chosocial development. After his attempt to explain his futuristic perceptions of God and science, his superiors not only ordered him to cease writing philosophical sub­jects but refused to allow the publication of his manuscripts.

These writings—held back during his lifetime—were finally released by a com­mittee called the Friends of Teilhard de Chardin. It included such eminent per­sonages as Sir Julian Huxley, G. G. Simp­son, Abbe Breuil, and Arnold Toynbee.

His publications, by a lay organization, have launched a stronger theological con­troversy than those of any other modern Catholic thinker and show how the exten­sion of the evolutionary and relativity theo­ries into the future actually affect the theo­ries of the prospects of society.

 The evolutionary theory, in Catholic doctrine, did not originate with Darwin. Thomas Aquinas held that "the ultimate end of the whole process of generation is the human soul, and to it matter tends as toward its final form." 2 The Catholic be­lief of Biblical inspiration is that the au­thor of Genesis was an anonymous Hebrew living in the postexile period about the sixth century B.c. In this concept the di­vine charism of inspiration does not ex­tend to previously unknown truths; thus, inspiration and revelation are not identi­cal, and intellectual enlightenment is con­ferred "not that the human author may be enriched with new ideas, but that he may judge with certainty the divine truth of information already acquired."

"Under the light of inspiration which guided his judgment in his selection of materials, the sacred writer adapted pagan notions for his purposes, used current con­cepts, purged them of idolatrous and im­moral elements, and exploited them as ve­hicles of truth." 4"Since the final author did not find to hand new documents on the history of beginnings and did not so far as we know receive any fresh revelation from God about them, he limited himself to plac­ing these two ancient traditions side by side, or rather to combining them so skill­fully that, up to modern times, biblical scholars did not even suspect their exist­ence."

Teilhard de Chardin conceived mind and matter to be two different forms of energy. All individuality, in his evaluation of evolution, is lost, and he adjudged that all society finally would be absorbed into the universal mind of Christ and God. He believed that through love all individuals with matter, energy, and power, would be synthesized to a universal form of mind and matter. He called the origin of all things the "Alpha point," and "Omega" identified the center, which radiated at the core of a system of centers. He believed in an irrevers­ible universe, with God as "Omega," re­vealing Himself only through intelligence. The kingdom of God, in this hypothesis, becomes a prodigious biological operation with man as the axis and leading shoot of its revolution.

His book describes this process, begin­ning at Alpha and ending at Omega, with man as the most important and necessary being. He recognized that while he was al­ready spread over the earth, his origin from animals could not be established. He believed that neither life and unconscious­ness are explainable by material laws, nor how they came into existence. He projected evolution backward to a supposed union of space and time (thereby absorbing the relativity theory) and assumed that it pointed forward to a complete assimila­tion of all minds into the universal mind of Christ, which resembles pantheism.

He described several visions in which material substances he gazed upon seemed to melt away into infinity to include all the material of the universe. After a time each appearance gradually resumed the sharp­ness of the original.

The wide interest in the works of De Chardin illustrates the concept of the evo­lutionary and relativity theories when pro­jected into the future. De Chardin's philos­ophy is a brew of evolution kindled from a Catholic theology base and stirred by a la­dle seasoned with pantheism, mysticism, ex­trasensory perception, metaphysics, and so­cialism. He simply rode into the realm of pure fantasy on bubbles of thought. The writings are comparable in style to science fiction and basically are evolutionary theo­ries extended into the future with no tangi­ble basis of fact.

A primary reason for the popularity of his writings among Jesuits is found in the permission of the Catholic Church to ac­cept evolution as long as the immortal soul is held as being God given and not re­ceived by descent from the parents. Catho­lic theology insists that the human soul does not proceed by way of generation from the human parents but is directly iso­lated by God and infused into the living organism for which the parents are respon­sible.' The Pope has expressly stated that while the direct creation of the human soul by God pertains to Catholic faith, the dis­cussion of the origin of the human body may continue among competent scholars.

The ideas of Teilhard de Chardin are in harmony with the Jesuit conception of orig­inal sin and its transmission from Adam. Individual responsibility is lost as finally the mind of each individual becomes as­similated into the universal mind of Christ. The Catholic doctrine of original sin, through inheritance, has as its corollary the universal grace of Christ, and the book presents this grace as the consciousness of evolution, which finally draws all mind and matter into the universal mind of Christ. It outlines an attempt to synthesize the evolutionary theory with Catholic doctrine and offers a probable future of such a unity. Universal sin and the universal grace of Christ absorb all individuality into a pantheistic complex of mind and matter, which culminates in the Omega point.

Summary

The works of Teilhard de Chardin are only interesting as an illustration of the results of the evolutionary theory projected into the future. They are actually a form of science fiction as he rides into a mystic future.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de, The Future of Man (Har­per and Row, New York and Evanston, 1964), p. 23.

2 Vollert, S. J., S.T.D., Cyril: Evolution and the Bible, p. 83. Symposium on Evolution, Duquesne University, April 4, 1959, Pittsburgh.

3__________ Ibid., p. 88.

4 __________  Ibid , pp. 90, 91.

5__________ Ibid., p. 91.

Henry G. Hadley, M.D., Research Foundation, Inc., Washington D.C.

March 1967

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