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.
