Dietrich von Hildebrand T.O.S.F.
TROJAN
HORSE
IN
THE CITY OF GOD
Franciscan Herald Press
Chicago, Illinois 60609
1969
TEILHARD
DE CHARDIN : A FALSE PROPHET
From: Dietrich
von Hildebrand T.O.S.F., TROJAN HORSE IN THE CITY OF GOD, Franciscan
Herald Press, Chicago, 1967.
Dietrich
von Hildebrand, of Lutheran background, was a leading German philosopher until
his opposition to Nazism made him a marked man, and forced him to flee to the
U.S.A. where he became a professor at the Jesuit Fordham University in New
York. Pope Pius XII called him a
“twentieth Century Doctor of the Church”.
I met Teilhard de Chardin in 1951 at a dinner arranged
by Father Robert Gannon. S.J., then president of Fordham University. Previously, the noted scholars Father Henri
de Lubac and Msgr. Bruno de Solages had highly recommended him to me. I was, therefore, full of expectations. After the meal, Father Teilhard delivered a
long exposition of his views. Teilhard’s
lecture was a great disappointment, for it manifested utter philosophical
confusion, especially in his conception of the human person. I was even more upset by his theological
primitiveness: He ignored completely the
decisive difference between nature and supernature. After a lively discussion in which I ventured
a criticism of his ideas, I had an opportunity to speak to Teilhard
privately. When our talk touched on St.
Augustine, he exclaimed violently: “Don’t mention that unfortunate man; he
spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural”. This remark confirmed the impression I had
gained of the crass naturalism of his views, but it also struck me in another
way: The criticism of St. Augustine –
the greatest of the Fathers of the Church – betrayed Teilhard’s lack of a
genuine sense of intellectual and spiritual grandeur.
It was only after reading several of Teilhard’s works,
however, that I fully realized the catastrophic implications of his
philosophical ideas and the absolute incompatibility of his theology fiction
(as Etienne Gilson calls it) with Christian revelation and the doctrine of the
Church.
Many Catholics view Teilhard de Chardin as a great
scientist who has reconciled science with the Christian faith by introducing a
grandiose new theology and metaphysics that take modern scientific findings
into account, and thus fit into our scientific age. Though I am not a competent judge of Teilhard
as a scientist, this opinion may be questioned without expertise. For one thing, every careful thinker knows
that a reconciliation of science and the Christian faith has never been needed,
because true science (in contradistinction to false philosophies disguised in
scientific garments) can never be incompatible with Christian faith. Science can neither prove nor disprove the
truth of the faith. Let us also note
several judgements of Teilhard by outstanding scientists.
Jean Rostand has said of Teilhard’s works: “I have argued that Teilhard did not cast the
slightest light on the great problem of organic evolution”. (1) Sir Peter Medawar, the Nobel Prize winner,
speaks of Teilhard’s mental confusion and the exaggerated expression that
borders, he says, on hysteria. He
insists that The Phenomenon of Man is
unscientific in its procedure. Sir Peter adds that Teilhard’s works in
general lack scientific structure, that his competence in his field is modest,
that he neither knows what a logical argument is nor what a scientific proof
is, that he does not respect the norms required for scientific scholarship. (2)
Thus, since the halo surrounding Teilhard is not
unrelated to the opinion that he was a great scientist, it should be noted that
his scientific accomplishments are, at the very least, controversial. My purpose here, however, is to examine
Teilhard’s philosophical and theological thought and its bearings on Christian
revelation and the doctrine of the Church.
I wish to make it clear from the beginning that writing on Teilhard is
no easy matter. I do not know of another
thinker who so artfully jumps from one position to another contradictory one,
without being disturbed by the jump or even noticing it. One is driven, therefore, to speak of the
underlying trend of his thought, to identify the logical consequences of the
core of his doctrine – of what was dearest to him.
THE
PHENOMENON OF MAN:
THE
TEILHARDIAN DEPERSONALIZATION
One of the most striking philosophical shortcomings of
Telihard’s system is his conception of man.
It is a great irony that the author of The Phenomenon of Man should completely miss the nature of man as a
person. He fails to recognize the abyss separating a
person from the entire impersonal world around him, the wholly new dimension of
being that a person implies.
Teilhard sees “self-consciousness” as the only
difference between man and a highly developed animal. But a comparison of the limited type of
consciousness that can be observed in animals with the manifold aspects of a
person’s consciousness shows instantly how wrong it is to regard the latter as
merely an addition of self-consciousness. Personal consciousness actualizes itself in
knowledge – in the luminous consciousness of an object that reveals itself to
our mind, in the capacity to adapt our mind to the nature of the object (adequatio intellectus ad rem), in an
understanding of the object’s nature. It
also actualizes itself in the process of inference, in the capacity to ask
questions, to pursue truth, and last, but not least, in the capacity to develop
an I-thou communion with another person.
All of this implies a completely new type of consciousness, an entirely
new dimension of being. But this marvel
of the human mind, which is also revealed in language and in man’s role as homo pictor, is altogether lost on
Teilhard because he insists on viewing human consciousness as merely an awareness of self that has gradually
developed out of animal consciousness.
The scholastics, on the other hand, accurately grasped the dimensions of
personal consciousness by calling the person a being that possesses itself. Compared
with the person, every impersonal being sleeps, as it were: It simply endures its existence. Only in the human person do we find an
awakened being, a being truly possessing itself, notwithstanding its
contingency.
Teilhard’s failure to appreciate the person aqain
comes to the fore when he claims in The
Phenomenon of Man that a collective consciousness would constitute a higher
state of evolution:
The
idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of
thought but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form,
functionally, no more that a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale.
(3)
Here several grave errors are combined. First, the idea of a non-individual
consciousness is contradictory. Second,
it is wrong to suppose that this impossible fiction could contain something superior
to individual personal existence. Third,
the idea of a “superconsciousness” is, in fact, a totalitarian ideal: It implies an absolute antitheses to true
community, which essentially presupposes individual persons.
The existence of a human person is so essentially
individual that the idea of fusing two persons into one or of splitting one
person into two is radically impossible.
It is also impossible to wish to be another person. We can only wish to be like another person. For at
the exact moment we became the other person we would necessarily cease to
exist. It belongs to the very nature of
the human being as person that he remain this one individual being. God could annihilate him, though revelation
tells us that this is not God’s intention.
But to suppose that a human being could give up his individual character
without ceasing to exist, without being annihilated by that act, amounts to
blindness to what a person is.
Some men claim to experience a kind of “union with the
cosmos” which “enlarges” their individual existence and presents itself as the
acquisition of a “superconsciousness”.
In reality, however, this union exists only in the consciousness of the
individual person who has such an experience.
Its content – the feeling of fusion with the cosmos – is in reality the
peculiar experience of one concrete person, and in no way implies a collective
consciousness.
From what has been said about Teilhard’s ideal of the
“collective man”, it should be clear that he fails to understand, not only the
nature of man as person but also the nature of true communion and
community. True personal communion, in
which a much deeper union is attained than in any ontological fusion,
presupposes the favourable individual character of the person. Compared to the union achieved by the
conscious interpenetration of souls in mutual love, all fusion of impersonal
beings is mere juxtaposition,
Teilhard’s ideal of “superhumanity”- his totalitarian
conception of community – shows the same naïve ignorance of the abyss that
separates the glorious realm of personal existence from the impersonal
world. It also reveals his blindness to
the hierarchy of being and to the hierarchy of values. Pascal admirably illuminated the incomparable
superiority of one individual person to the entire impersonal world when to his
famous remark, “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature”, he added
the words, “but if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more
noble than that which killed him: He
knows that he dies, and the advantage which the universe has over him, the
universe knows nothing of this”.
Another aspect of Teilhard’s blindness to the
essentially individual character of the person is his inordinate interest in
man as species. Again he overlooks the
differences between humans and mere animals.
A dominant interest in the species is quite normal as long as one deals
with animals, but it becomes grotesque when human beings are involved. Kierkegaard brought out this point when he
stressed the absolute superiority of the individual human being to the human
species. Teilhard’s own approach is
betrayed by his attitude toward the atom-bombing of Hiroshima. The alleged progress of humanity which he
sees in the invention of nuclear weapons matters more to him than the
destruction of innumerable lives and the most terrible sufferings inflicted on
individual persons.
It is true that time and again Teilhard speaks of the
personal and of the superiority of the personal over the impersonal. Indeed, he often explicitly rejects the
possibility that the existence of the individual person will dissolve. He writes, for instance, in Building the Earth: “Since there is neither fusion nor dissolution
of individual persons the centre which they aspire to reach must necessarily be
distinct from them, that is, it must have its own personality, its autonomous
reality”. Yet two pages later we find
him rhapsodizing – “And lastly the totalization of the individual in the
collective man”. Teilhard then explains
how this contradiction will dissolve in the Omega: “All these so-called impossibilities come
about under the influence of love”. (4)
It has become fashionable nowadays to accept
contradictions as a sign of philosophical depth. Mutually contradictory elements are regarded
as antagonistic only as long as the discussion remains on a logical level, and
without interest as soon as it reaches the religious sphere. This fashion does not do away with the essential
impossibility of combining contradictories.
No number of modish paradoxes, of emotional effusions, of exotically
capitalized words can conceal Teilhard’s fundamental lack of understanding of
the nature of the person. The notion of
the “personal” in Teilhard’s system is stripped of any real meaning by the
system’s underlying pantheism. In
Teilhard’s thought “collective man” and the “totalization” of man represent an
ideal that is objectively incompatible with the existence of the individual
person – or, rather, necessarily implies the annihilation of the person.
His monistic tendency leads him to try to liquidate
all real antitheses. He wants to keep
the integrity of the person, but he raves about totalization. He reduces all contraries to different
aspects of one and the same thing, and then claims that the antithetical nature
of the propositions in question is due merely to the isolation or overemphasis
of a single aspect. Yet by reading
Teilhard closely, one can always detect his primary concern, can always tell
where he is going. A passage, on the
differences between democracy, communism, and fascism in Building the Earth is illustrative.
A superficial reading of the passage (which, incidentally, contains
several excellent remarks) could give the impression that Teilhard does not
deny the individual character of man. A
closer, critical study against the background of other passages clearly reveals
not only an impossible attempt to link together individuality and totalization,
but also at what Teilhard is aiming, what his main ideal is, where his heart
is. It is, once again, with totalization,
with superhumanity in the Omega. (5)
The penchant for liquidating antithesis also sheds
light on Teilhard’s false conception of the community, of the union of
persons. It is all conceived upon the
pattern of fusion in the realm of matter, and thus misses the radical
differences between unification in the sphere of matter and the spiritual union
that comes to pass through real love in the sphere of individual persons. For Teilhard, love is merely cosmic
energy: “That energy which, having
generally agitated the cosmic mass, emerges from it to form the Noosphere, what
name must be given to such an influence?
One only – love”. (6) A man who
can write that has obviously failed to grasp the nature of this supreme act
which, by its very essence, presupposes the existence both of a conscious,
personal being and a Thou.
There is no place in the unanimity and harmony of
Teilhard’s totalitarian communion for a real giving of oneself in love. This unanimity and harmony is actualized
through a convergence into one mind; it thus differs radically from the Concordia, from the blissful union of
which the Liturgy of the Mandatum speaks: “Congregavit
nos in unum Christi amor”. The
latter is not a “co-thinking”, but rather a mutual, reciprocal love and a
unification in Christ based on the personal love response which every
individual gives to Christ.
In a monistic world there is no place for the intention unionis and the intention benevolentiae proper to real
love. For in such a world “cosmic
energy” moves everything independently of man’s free response. When we interpret things that are merely
analogous as constituting an ontological unity, or when we use as literal and
univocal a term that is analogous, we necessarily bar the way to a real
understanding of the being in question.
Every monism is ultimately nihilistic.
There is another grave philosophical error closely
linked to Teilhard’s conception of man – namely, his failure to grasp the
radical difference between spirit and matter.
Teilhard deals with energy as though it were a genus and then proceeds
to make matter and spirit two differentiae
specificae of this genus. But there
is no genus energy. Energy is a concept
that is applicable to both of these radically different realms of being only in
terms of analogy. Teilhard does not
understand this; he even speaks of the “spiritual power of matter”. (7)
Teilhard, then, is the type of thinker who indulges in
constructions and hypotheses without caring much about what is “given”. Maritain once said: “The main difference between philosophers is
whether they see or do not see”. In
Teilhard, there is much imagination but no intuition, no listening to
experience. Hence his attempt to project
consciousness into inanimate matter – a project for which there is simply no
foundation apart from Teilhard’s desire to erect a monistic system. Instead of listening to the voice of being in
experience, he arbitrarily infuses into the being in question whatever
corresponds to his system. It is indeed
surprising that a man who attacks traditional philosophy and theology for abstractness
and for trying to adjust reality to a closed system should himself offer the
most abstract and unrealistic system imaginable into which he attempts to force
reality, thereby following the famous example of Procrustes.
The ambiguity underlying Teilhard’s thought also
emerges in a passage that accuses Communism of being too materialistic, of
striving only for the progress of matter and, consequently, ignoring spiritual
progress. His admirers might point to
this passage as proof that Teilhard clearly distinguishes between matter and
spirit and acknowledges the superiority of the latter. Actually, it proves no such thing. Teilhard always distinguishes between matter
and spirit, but he regards them as merely two stages in the evolutionary
process. Physical energy becomes – is
transformed into – a spiritual energy.
But to regard the difference between the two is simply stages of a
process – or, as we may put it, to regard the difference as a “gradual” one –
is utterly to fail to understand the nature of the spirit. Again, monism prevents an understanding of
reality and creates the illusion of being able to combine what cannot be
combined.
Teilhard’s incomprehension of man’s nature is further
evidenced in his implicit denial of man’s free will. (8) By grounding man’s spiritual life in an
evolutionary process – which by definition acts independently of man’s free
will and transcends the person – Teilhard clearly denies the decisive role of
human freedom. Freedom of will is
obviously one of the most significant and deepest marks of a person. Thus, once again, he overlooks the radical
differences between man as person and a highly developed animal.
The role of freedom of will emerges decisively in
man’s capacity to bear moral values and disvalues. For this highest characteristic of man
presupposes free will and responsibility.
But Teilhard blithely reduces the antithesis between good and evil to
mere stages of evolution, to mere degrees of perfection – surely a classic case
of philosophical impotence. Moreover, he
ignores the critical importance of the moral question, which is strikingly
expressed in Socrates’ immortal dictum:
“It is better for man to suffer injustice than to commit it. In Teilhard, the entire drama of man’s
existence, the fight between good and evil in his soul, is ignored – or,
rather, overshadowed by the evolutionary growth toward the Omega.
RELIGION
AND EVOLUTION:
THE
TEILHARDIAN DESTRUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY
Teilhard’s thought is thus hopelessly at odds with
Christianity, Christian revelation presupposes certain basic, natural facts,
such as the existence of objective truth, the spiritual reality of an
individual person, the radical difference between spirit and matter, the
difference between body and soul, the unalterable objectivity of moral good and
evil, freedom of will, the immortality of the soul, and, of course, the
existence of a personal God. Teilhard’s
approach to all of these questions reveals an unbridgeable chasm between his
theology fiction and Christian revelation.
This conclusion inescapably follows from Teilhard’s
oft-repeated arguments for a “new” interpretation of Christianity. Time and again he argues that we can no
longer expect modern man, living in an industrialized world and in the
scientific age, to accept Christian doctrine as it has been taught for the last
2,000 years. Teilhard’s new
interpretation of Christianity is fashioned by asking, “What fits into our
modern world?” This approach combines historical relativism and pragmatism with
a radical blindness to the very essence of religion.
I have dealt with the myth of modern man throughout
this book. It suffices here to insist
that man always remains essentially the same with regard to his moral dangers,
his moral obligations, his need of redemption, and the true sources of his
happiness. We have also examined the
catastrophic error of historical relativism, which confuses the
socio-historical aliveness of an idea with its validity and truth. Now, if it is sheer nonsense to assert that a
basic natural truth might be valid for the Middle Ages but no longer be so in
our epoch, the absurdity becomes even more drastic when the subject is
religion.
With a religion the only question that can matter is
whether or not it is true. The question
of whether or not it fits into the mentality of an epoch cannot play any role
in the acceptance or the rejection of a religion without betraying the very
essence of religion. Even the earnest
atheist recognizes this. He will not say
that today we can no longer believe in God; he will say that God is and always
was a mere illusion. From the position
that a religion must be adapted to the spirit of an epoch there is but a short
step to the absurd drivel (which we associate with Bertrand Russell or the Nazi
ideologist Bergmann) about having to invent a new religion.
In a letter in 1952 Teilhard wrote: “As I love to say, the synthesis of the
Christian God (of the above) and the Marxist God (of the forward) – behold!
That is the only God whom henceforth we can adore in spirit and in truth”.
(9) In this sentence the abyss
separating Teilhard from Christianity is manifest in every word. To speak of a Marxist God is very surprising
to say the least, and would never have been accepted by Marx. But the idea of a
synthesis of the Christian God with an alleged Marxist God, as well as the
simultaneous application of the term “God” to Christianity and to Marxism,
demonstrates the absolute incompatibility of Teilhard’s thought with the
doctrine of the Church. Note, moreover,
the words “henceforth” and “can”. They
are the key to Teilhard’s thinking and expose unmistakably his historical
relativism.
In Le paysan de
la Garonne, Jacques Maritain remarks that Teilhard is most anxious to
preserve Christ. But, adds Maritain, “What
a Christ!” (10) Here indeed we find the
most radical difference between the doctrine of the Church and Teilhard de
Chardin’s theology fiction. Teilhard’s
Christ is no longer Jesus, the God-man, the epiphany of God, the Redeemer;
instead, He is the initiator of a purely natural evolutionary process and,
simultaneously, its end – the Christ-Omega.
An unprejudiced mind cannot but ask:
Why should this “cosmic force” be called Christ?
It would be a peak of naiveté to be misled by the mere
fact that Teilhard labels this alleged cosmogenic force “Christ” or by his
desperate effort to wrap this pantheism in traditional Catholic terms. In his basic conception of the world, which
does not provide for original sin in the sense the Church gives to this term,
there is no place for the Jesus Christ of the Gospels; for if there is no original sin, then the
redemption of man through Christ loses its inner meaning.
In Christian revelation, the stress is laid on the
sanctification and salvation of every individual person, leading to the
beatific vision and, simultaneously, the communion of saints. In Teilhard’s theology, the stress is laid on
the progress of the earth, the evolution leading to Christ-Omega. There is no place for salvation through
Christ’s death on the Cross, because man’s destiny is part of pancosmic
evolution.
Teilhard’s conception of man and his implicit denial
of free will, his tacit amoralism and his totalitarian collectivism cut him off
from Christian revelation – and this notwithstanding his efforts to reconcile
his views with the Church’s teaching. He
writes: “Yes, the moral and social development of humanity is indeed the
authentic and natural consequence of organic evolution”. For such a man, original sin, redemption, and
sanctification can no longer have any real meaning. Note that Teilhard does not seem quite aware
of this incompatibility:
Sometimes
I am a bit afraid, when I think of the transposition to which I must submit my
mind concerning the vulgar notions of creation, inspiration, miracle, original
sin, resurrection, etc., in order to be able to accept them. (11)
That Teilhard applies the term “vulgar” – even if not
in the pejorative sense – to the basic elements of Christian revelation and
their interpretation by the infallible magisterium of the Church should suffice
to disclose the Gnostic and esoteric character of his thought.
He writes to Leontine Zanta:
As you already know, what dominates
my interest and my preoccupations is the effort to establish in myself and to
spread around a new religion (you may call it a better Christianity) in which
the personal God ceases to be the great Neolithic proprietor of former times,
in order to become the soul of the world; our religious and cultural stage
calls for this. (12)
Not only, then, is the Christ of the Gospels replaced
by a Christ-Omega, but also the God of the old and new covenants is replaced by
a pantheistic God, “the soul of the world” - and again on the strength of the
unfortunate argument that God must be adapted to the man of our scientific age.
It is no wonder that Teilhard reproaches St. Augustine
for having introduced the difference between the natural and the supernatural. In Teilhard’s pantheistic and naturalistic
“religion” there is no place for the supernatural or the world of grace. For him, union with God consists principally
in assimilation into an evolutionary process – not in the supernatural life of
grace which is infused in our souls through baptism. Why does the one tend to exclude the
other? If Teilhard’s notion of a
participation in an evolutionary process were reality, it could only be a form
of concursus divinus. Yet great and mysterious as is the concursus divinus – that is, the support
God gives at every moment of our natural existence, without which we would sink
back into nothingness – there is an abyss separating this natural metaphysical contact from grace. Whether or not Teilhard explicitly denies the
reality of grace does not matter much:
His ecstasy in the presence of the natural contact with God in the
alleged evolutionary process clearly discloses the subordinate role, if any,
that he assigns to grace. Or, to put it
otherwise: After Teilhard has replaced
the personal God, Creator of heaven and earth, by God the soul of the world,
after he has transformed the Christ of the Gospels into the Christ-Omega, after
he has replaced redemption by a natural evolutionary process, what is left for grace?
Maritain makes the point admirably. After granting that Teilhard’s spectacle of a
divine movement of creation toward God does not lack grandeur, he observes:
But what does he tell us about the
secret path that matters more for us than any spectacle? What can he tell us of the essential, the
mystery of the Cross and the redeeming blood, as well as of the grace the
presence, of which in one single soul has more worth than all of nature? And what of the love that makes us
co-redeemers with Christ, what of those blissful tears through which His peace
enters into our soul? The new gnosis is,
like all other gnoses, ‘a poor gnosis’. (13)
In Teilhard we find a complete reversal of the
Christian hierarchy of values: For him,
cosmic processes rank higher than the individual soul. Research and work rank higher than moral
values. Action, as such – that is, any
association with the evolutionary process – is more important than contemplation,
contrition for our sins, and penance.
Progress in the conquest and “totalization” of the world through
evolution ranks higher than holiness.
The vast distance between Teilhard’s world and the
Christian world becomes dramatically clear when we compare Cardinal Newman’s
priorities with Teilhard’s.
Newman says in Discourses
to Mixed Congregations:
Saintly
purity, saintly poverty, renouncement of the world, the favour of Heaven, the
protection of the angels, the smile of the blessed Mary, the gifts of grace,
the interposition of miracles, the intercommunion of merits, these are the high
and precious things, the things to be looked up to, the things to be reverently
spoken of. (14)
But for Teilhard it is otherwise:
To adore once meant to prefer God to
things by referring them to Him and by sacrificing them to Him. Adoring today becomes giving oneself body and
soul to the creator – associating ourselves with the creator – in order to give
the finishing touch to the world through work and research. (15)
Teilhard’s ambiguous use of classical Christian terms
cannot conceal the basic meaning and direction of his thought. We find it impossible, therefore, to agree
with Henri de Lubac that Teilhard’s theology fiction is a “possible” addition
to Christian revelation. (16) Rather,
the evidence compels our agreement with Philippe de la Trinité that it is “a
deformation of Christianity, which is transformed into an evolutionism of the
naturalistic, monistic, and pantheistic brand”. (17)
In Teilhard’s writings, there is a gliding from one
notion into another – a cult of equivocation which is deeply linked to his
monistic ideal. He systematically blurs
all the decisive differences between things:
The difference between hope and optimism; the difference between
Christian love of neighbour (which is essentially directed to an individual
person) and an infatuation for humanity (in which the individual man is but a
single unit of the species man). And
Teilhard ignores the difference between eternity and the earthly future of
humanity, both of which he fuses in the totalization of the Christ-Omega.
To be sure, there is something touching in Teilhard’s
desperate attempt to combine a traditional, emotional attraction to the Church
with a theology radically opposed to the Church’s doctrine. But this apparent dedication to Christian
terms makes him even more dangerous than a Voltaire, a Renan, or a
Nietzsche. His success in wrapping a
pantheistic, Gnostic monism in Christian garments is perhaps nowhere so evident
as in The Divine Milieu.
To many readers, the terms Teilhard uses sound so
familiar that they can exclaim: How can
you accuse him of not being an orthodox Christian? Does he not say in The Divine Milieu, “What is it for a person to be a saint if not,
in effect, to adhere to God with all his power?” Certainly, this sounds absolutely
orthodox. Actually, however, Teilhard’s
notion of adhering to God conceals a shift from the heroic virtues that
characterize the saint to a collaboration in an evolutionary process. The attainment of holiness in the moral
sphere through obeying God’s commands and imitating Christ is tacitly replaced
by an emphasis on developing all of man’s faculties with – this seems the
appropriate word – efficiency.
Teilhard makes this clear; although once again, he veils the point in
traditional terminology:
And what is it to adhere to God to
the maximum if not to fulfil in the world organized around Christ the exact
function, humble or important, to which nature and supernature destine it? (18)
For Teilhard, then, the very meaning of the individual
person lies in his fulfilment of a function in the whole – in the evolutionary
process; he is no longer called upon to glorify God through the imitation of
Christ, which is the one common goal for every true Christian.
The transposition of the Cross into the Christ-Omega
is also wrapped in apparently traditional terms:
Towards the summit wrapped in mist
to our human eyes and to which the Cross invites us, we rise by a path which is
the way of universal Progress. The royal
road of the Cross is no more nor less than the road of human endeavour
supernaturally righted and prolonged. (19)
Here, Christian symbols conceal a radical
transformation of Christianity that takes us out of the Christian orbit
altogether into a completely different spiritual climate. Sometimes, however,
Teilhard does discard the Christian guise, and openly reveals his true
stand. In 1934, in China, he wrote:
If in consequence of some inner
revolution, I were to lose my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, my
faith in the spirit, it seems to me that I would continue to have faith in the
world. The world (the value,
infallibility, and goodness of the world) this is – definitely – the first and
only thing in which I believe. (20)
MATTER
AND NATURE: THE TEILHARDIAN
ANNIHILATION
OF THE HIERARCHY OF VALUES
Yet, clear as is the heterodoxy of Teilhard’s
theology, some Catholics have elevated him to the rank of a Doctor, indeed,
even a Father of the Church. For many
unsophisticated Catholics, he has become a kind of Prophet. That “progressive” Catholics relish Teilhard
is, of course, not surprising. The “new
theologians”, the “new moralists”, welcome Teilhard’s views because they share
his historical relativism – his conviction that faith must be adapted to
“modern man”. Indeed, for many
“progressive” Catholics, Teilhard’s transposition of Christian revelation does
not go far enough. But it is
astonishing, on the other hand, that many faithful Christians are carried away
by Teilhard – that they fail to grasp the complete incompatibility of his
teaching with the doctrine of the Church.
This popularity, however, becomes less surprising when
viewed in the context of our contemporary intellectual and moral climate. In a period familiar with Sartre’s “nausea”
and Heidegger’s conception of the essentially “homeless” man, Teilhard’s
radiant and optimistic outlook on life comes for many as a welcome relief. His claim that we are constantly
collaborating with God, whatever we do and however insignificant our role –
that “everything is sacred” – understandably exhilarates many depressed
souls. Another reason for such
enthusiasm, perhaps more important, is that Teilhard is credited with having
overcome a narrow asceticism and false supernaturalism.
There is no doubt that in the past many pious
Catholics considered natural goods primarily as potential dangers that
threatened to divert them from God.
Natural goods, even those endowed with high values – beauty in nature
and in art, natural truth, and human love – were approached with
suspicion. These Catholics overlooked
the positive value that natural goods have for man. They frequently advocated the view that
natural goods should only be used, that
they should never evoke interest and appreciation for their own sake. But in this view they forgot the fundamental
difference between natural goods and worldly goods such as wealth, fame, or
success. They forgot that natural goods,
endowed as they are with intrinsic value, should not only be “used”, but
appreciated for their own sake – that it is worldly goods that should be “used”
only. It cannot be denied, moreover,
that this unfortunate oversimplification often gained currency in seminaries
and monasteries, notwithstanding that it was never part of the doctrine of the
Church. This is why Teilhard is able
with superficial plausibility to accuse the Catholic tradition of disparaging
nature; and because he himself praises nature, it is understandable that for
many his thought has seemed to be a just appreciation of natural goods.
And Teilhard’s related claim that traditional
Christianity has created a gap between humanness and Christian perfection has,
also, impressed many sincere Catholics.
In The Divine Milieu he
attributes to traditional Christianity the notion that “men must put off their
human garments in order to be Christians. (21)
Again, it cannot be denied that Jansenism reflecst this attitude, or
that Jansenistic tendencies have crept anonymously into the minds of many
Catholics. For instance, the
arch-Christian doctrine that insists that we must die to ourselves in order to
be transformed in Christ has often been given an unwarranted dehumanizing
emphasis in certain religious institutions.
The view has been encouraged in some monasteries and seminaries that
nature must, in effect, be killed before the supernatural life of grace can
blossom. In the official doctrine of the
Church, however, such dehumanization is flatly rejected. As Pope Pius XII said:
Grace
does not destroy nature; it does not even change it; it transfigures it. Indeed, dehumanization is so far from being
required for Christian perfection that this may be said: Only the person who is transformed in Christ
embodies the true fulfilment of his human personality. (22)
Now, the point we wish to make is that Teilhard
himself ignores the value of high natural goods and that, contrary to his
claim, a real dehumanization takes place in his monistic pantheism. We have seen that his ideal of collective man
and superhumanity necessarily implies a blindness to the real nature of the
individual person and, derivatively, to all the plenitude of human life. But dehumanization also follows inevitably
from his monism which minimizes the real drama of human life – the fight
between good and evil – and which reduces antithetical differences to more
gradations of a continuum.
Teilhard’s failure to do justice to the real
significance of natural goods is clear at the very moment he stresses their
importance for eternity. Anyone can see
that in dealing with natural goods he is primarily concerned with human
activities, with accomplishments in work and research. He does not mention the higher natural goods
and the message of God they contain, but only activities, performances, and
accomplishments in the natural field.
Teilhard applies to these actions the biblical words “opera ejus sequuntur illos”; (22a) but
he does so in contradistinction to the original meaning of “opera”, in which “works” are identical
with morally significant deeds. Still more important is the relation he
sees between natural goods, as such, and God.
Teilhard sees no message of God’s glory in the values contained in these
great natural goods; nor does he find in them a personal experience of the
voice of God. Instead, he posits an
objective and unexperienced link between God and our activities that results
from the concursus divinus. He says: “God is, in a way, at the end of
my pen, of my pickaxe, of my paintbrush, of my sewing needle, of my heart, of
my thought. (23)
The real object of Teilhard’s boundless enthusiasm,
then, is not natural goods themselves, but an abstraction: the hypothesis of evolution. The nature that moves him is not the
colourful, resounding beauty of which all the great poets sing. It is not the nature of Dante, Shakespeare,
Keats, Goethe, Hölderlin, Leopardi. It
is not the glory of a sunrise or sunset, or the star-studded sky – the
evidences of the natural world which Kant regarded, along with the moral law in
man’s breast, as the most sublime thing of all.
There is another way in which Teilhard’s thought
necessarily results in a dehumanization of the cosmos and man’s life. In his
world view there is no place for an antithesis of values and disvalues. Yet every attempt to deny these ultimately
important qualitative antagonisms always produces a kind of levelling, even a
nihilism. The same thing happens when
the hierarchy of values is
overlooked, if only because man then responds to all levels of value with the
same degree of enthusiasm.
The principle “everything is sacred”, which sounds so
uplifting and exhilarating, is in reality fraught with a nihilistic denial of
low and high, of good and evil. This
fallacious and treacherous approach of praising everything actually results in
denying everything. It reminds me of a
remark made by a violinist I once met.
“I love music so much”, he said, “that I do not care what kind of music
it is, as long as it is music”. This
statement, designed to suggest an extraordinary love for music, in fact
revealed an absence of any true understanding of music and therefore of any
capacity to love music. The same thing
happens to man when qualitative distinctions are not made.
Let us now examine a little more closely the Christian
view of nature, as compared with that of Teilhard. The revelation of God in nature has always
been affirmed by the Christian tradition.
The Sanctus says, “pleni sunt caeli et terra Gloria tua”. The psalms are filled with praise of God
as the Creator of the marvellous features of nature. St. Augustine’s exemplarism emphasizes time
and again the message of God in the beauty of nature. The same idea is found in St. Francis’ love
of nature.
But an appreciation of this natural revelation of God
implies an “upward direction toward God” – to use Teilhard’s terminology. Natural revelation speaks to us of God by
suggesting the admirable wisdom that pervades creation and by providing a
reflection, in the values of natural goods, of God’s infinite beauty and glory. Our response to this revelation is either trembling
reverence and wonder for the wisdom manifest in the finality of the cosmos and
its mysterious plenitude – a looking up to God the Creator; or, at least, a deep awareness of the beauty
of nature and of all the high natural goods – and this also lifts up our
vision. In either case, we are able to grasp the message from above; for all true values are pregnant with a
promise of eternity. By lifting up our
hearts we are able to understand that these authentic values speak of God’s
infinite glory. All of this unmistakably
implies an “upward direction”.
But Teilhard’s “nature” is not linked to an “upward
direction”; it is not a message from
above. Since, for Teilhard, God is behind nature, we are supposed to reach
Him in the Christ-Omega by moving in a “forward direction”.
In Teilhard’s forward direction, where everything is
involved in an evolutionary movement, natural goods lose their real value. The suggestion they contain of something
transcendent is replaced by a merely immanent finality; they become links in the chain of
evolution. When evolution is viewed as
the main and decisive reality – when it is, in fact, deified – then every
natural good becomes, on the one hand, a mere transitory step in the forward
movement of the evolutionary process;
and, on the other hand, a mute thing, cut off by a levelling monism from
its real, qualitative, inherent importance.
It follows that we can do justice to high natural
goods only if we discern in them a reflection of an infinitely higher reality –
a reality ontologically different from them.
This “message character” of natural goods is admirably expressed in
Cardinal Newman’s remarks about music.
Can it be that those mysterious
stirrings of the heart, and keen emotion, and strange yearnings after we know
not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be brought in
us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in
itself? It is not so; it cannot be.
No; they have escaped from some
higher sphere, they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of
created sound; they are echoes of our
home; they are the voice of angels, or
the Magnificat of the Saints. (24)
Another aspect of this problem
deserves notice. The fact that Teilhard
sees a higher stage of evolution in today’s industrialized world reveals the
lack of a real sense of the beauty of nature and of the qualitative message of
God that it bears. Even the most
enthusiastic “progressive” cannot deny that industrialization consistently
ruins the beauty of nature. Moreover,
industrialization (though perhaps the process is inevitable) certainly cannot
be considered a univocal progress, either from the point of view of increasing
human happiness or of fostering higher culture and a real humanism. As Gabriel Marcel correctly shows in his
Man
Against Mass Society, industrialization implies the danger of a
progressive dehumanization. The
replacing of the “organic” in human life by the artificial – from artificial
insemination to social engineering – is symptomatic of this
dehumanization. Yet Teilhard heedlessly
jumps from an enthusiasm for nature to elation over the progress of technology
and industrialization. We are thus again
confronted with his blindness to antithesis, with his monistic levelling.
It is clear, nevertheless, that Teilhard’s first love
is technological progress. The creation
of God has to be completed by man – not in St. Paul’s sense, not by
co-operating with nature, but by replacing nature with the machine.
The poetic expressions that appear when Teilhard
presents his vision of evolution and progress make clear that he never saw the
authentic poetry of nature or of the classical “forms” of creation. Instead, he tries to project poetry into
technology – again revealing a monistic denial of the basic differences between
the poetic and prosaic, the organic and the artificial, the sacred and the
profane.
To be sure, it is always impressive when a man seems
to have achieved a deep vision of being, and, instead of taking it for granted,
gives it a full and ardent response. So
with Teilhard. We are far from denying
that he discovered in matter many aspects which had generally been
overlooked. For example, the mysterious
structure and the multiplicity of matter, which natural science is increasingly
unfolding, call for genuine wonderment about this reality and for respect for
this creation of God. But because
Teilhard does not recognize the essential differences between spirit and matter
– because his response to the spirit is not in proportion to his praise of
matter (recall his “prayer” to matter) – the advantage of this unusual insight
into matter is, for him, quickly lost. (25)
We must put this question of “matter” in its proper
perspective. To overlook the marvels
hidden in a creature that ranks lowest in the hierarchy of being is
regrettable. But the oversight does not
affect our knowledge of higher ranking creatures; it is therefore not a catastrophe. On the other hand, to grasp the lower while
overlooking the higher is to distort our entire world view; and that is
a catastrophe. Moreover, to esteem a
lower good as a higher is not misunderstand the hierarchical structure of being
and thus to lose the basis for property evaluating either higher things or lower things.
Teilhard’s blindness to the real values in, for example,
human love is shown in these unfortunate remarks about eros and agape:
Naturally,
I agree with you that the solution of the eros-agape problem is simply to be
found in the evolutionary trend (dans
l’évolutif), in the genetic, that is to say, in sublimation, [It is to be
found in] the spirit emerging from matter through pancosmic operation. (26)
We have already seen that Teilhard’s conception of the
moral sphere (virtue and sin) is incompatible with Christian revelation. We may now note that the role he grants to
the moral sphere is yet another factor leading to dehumanization. The unique contact with God that takes place
in one’s conscience, in one’s awareness of his moral obligations, plays no role
in Teilhard’s system. He does not
understand that man in the realm of nature never reaches so intimate a contact
with God as when he listens to the voice of his conscience and consciously
submits to moral obligation. How pale by
comparison – in purely human and natural terms – is Teilhard’s notion of the
“conscious” and the “unconscious” participating in a “cosmic progress”!
And how pale are the scope and breadth of cosmic
events in contrast with the liberating transcendence of a man authentically
contrite. What event could hold more
grandeur than David’s response to the challenge of the prophet Nathan? The secondary role which Teilhard assigns to
man’s conscious and personal dialogue with Christ – his preference for
objective co-operation in the “evolutionary process” – reveals as clearly as
anything can the truly dehumanized character of his “new world”.
Many people are impressed by a thinker who constructs
a new world out of his own mind in which everything is interconnected and
“explained”. They consider such
conceptions the most eminent feat of the human mind; accordingly, they praise Teilhard as a great
synthetic thinker. In truth, however,
the measure of a thinker’s greatness is the extent to which he has grasped
reality in its plenitude and depth and in its hierarchical structure. If this
measure is applied to Teilhard, he obviously cannot be considered a great
thinker.
Let us once again dramatize the non-Christian nature
of the Teilhardian speculation by comparing his presentation of the meaning and
purpose of Christianity with that of Cardinal Newman:
[Christ]
becomes the flame of human efforts, he reveals himself as the form of faith
which is most appropriate for modern needs – a religion for progress the
religion even for progress on earth; I dare say: the religion of evolution. (27)
St. Paul .... laboured more than all the
Apostles; and why? Not to civilize the world, not to smooth the
face of society .... not to spread abroad knowledge, not to cultivate the
reason, not for any great worldly object .... not to turn the whole earth into
a heaven, but to bring down a heaven upon earth. This has been the real triumph of the Gospel
... It has made men saints. (28)
NOTES
TO APPENDIX
1. Fiagro Littéraire,
23-29 September 1965.
2. Mind, LXX (1961), 99-106. See also the collection of articles in “Teilhard et la science” Itinéraires, No. 96
(1965).
3. The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper,
1967), p.251.
4. Building the Earth (Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania: Dimension Books, 1965), p.79, 83.
5. Ibid., pp.24-32.
6. Ibid., p.82.
7. “As
you know, I have always been attracted by the idea of writing a hymn ‘to the
spherical power of Matter’ “. The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest (New
York: Harper, 1965), p.292.
8. “Yes,
the moral and social development of Humanity is indeed the authentic and
‘natural’ consequence of organic evolution”.
The Making of a Mind, pp.110-111.
9. Letter
from New York, 2 April 1952. As quoted
in Roger Garaudy, “Le Pére Teilhard, le
concile et les marxistes”, Europe, No. 431-32 (1965), P.206.
10. Le paysan de la Garonne, pp.173-87,
pp.383-90.
11. Letter
of 17 December 1922, in Lettre, No.
49-50 (1962), p.36. As quoted in
Philippe de la Trinité, Rome et Teilhard
de Chardin, (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1964), p.47.
12. Lettres á Léontine Zanta (Paris: Desclée
De Brouwer, 1965). As quoted in
Maritain, Le paysan, p.175.
13. Le paysan, pp.181-82.
14. John
Henry Cardinal Newman, Discourses
Addressed to Mixed Congregations (London: Longmans, 1916), p.94.
15. “Christologie et evolution” (unpublished),
as quoted in Garaudy, Le Pére Teilhard,
le concile et les marxistes”, Europe, No. 431-32 (1965), p.192.
16. Henri
de Lubac, La pensée religieuse du Père
Teilhard de Chardin, (Paris: Aubier, 1962).
17. Rome et Teilhard de Chardin (Paris:
Arthème Fayard, 1964), p.38. Père de la
Trinités study is quite valuable.
18. The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper,
1960), p.36.
19. The Divine Milieu, p.78.
20. “Comment je crois” (unpublished), asquoted
in Philippe de la Trinité, Rome et
Teilhard de Chardin, p.190.
21. The Divine Milieu, p.34.
22. The Pope Speaks: the Teachings of Pope Pius
XII, ed. Michael Chinigo (New York: Pantheon 1957).
22a. The Divine Milieu. P.24.
23. The Divine Milieu,p.35.
24. John
Henry Cardinal Newman, Fifteen Sermons
Preached before the University of Oxford (London: Longmans, 1909),
pp.346-47.
25. See
Philippe de la Trinité, Rome et Teilhard
de Chardin, pp.180-85.
26. Letter
of 13 March 1954, in Psyché, No.
99-100 (1955), p.9. As quoted in Rome et Teilhard de Chardin, p.58.
27. “Quelques reflexions sur la conversion du
monde”, in Oeuvres, Vol. Ix: Science
et Christ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), p.166. Also quoted in Garaudy, Europe, No. 431-32 (1965), p.190.
This issue of Europe is
devoted to Teilhard: most of the studies are sympathetic, and for this reason
they often succeed in revealing the true direction of Teilhard’s thought; the
issue also contains a number of previously unpublished manuscripts of Teilhard.
28. John
Henry Cardinal Newman, Parochial and
Plain Sermons, IV (London: Longmans, 1900), 151-156.
IMMANENTIST
CORRUPTIONS
The secularization – this pseudo-aggiornamento – of Christianity reaches a much greater pitch of
intensity in those “intellectuals” (priests and laymen) who are infected with
various forms of secularist immanentism which are destructive of all true
Christian faith.
TEILHARDISM
In the forefront of the immanentist ranks are the
adherents of the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin.
Even many who do not fully accept this theology fiction (as Etienne
Gilson has called Teilhard’s Gnostic interpretation of Christian revelation)
are under the influence of his replacing eternity with the historical future,
his undermining of the difference between soul and body, spirit and matter, and
his subsuming moral good and evil, holiness and sin, under different stages of
evolution. It should not be necessary to
insist on the absolute incompatibility of these views and Christian
revelation. In Teilhard’s Gnostic
“Christogenesis”, there is no place for original sin, for the need of
redemption, and, consequently, no place for the redemption of the world through
Christ’s death on the Cross. In this
modern gnosis, Jesus Christ is not the God-man who brings the good tidings to
men; He is not the epiphany of God who
attracts men by his infinite holiness:
He becomes instead an impersonal force, vis a tergo, the initiator and terminus (omega) of a process of
cosmic evolution. The transformation in
Christ is replaced by a human evolution that takes place over man’s head,
independently of his free decision.
Instead of the resurrection of the Body at the last judgement, Teilhard
offers us an identification of matter and spirit as the endpoint of
evolution; instead of the beatific
vision – the eternal love-communion of the person with God – he promises the
merging of individual consciousness in the general consciousness of a “superhumanity”.
That Teilhard’s theology fiction embodies many of the
typical contemporary intellectual perversions cannot be denied. There is first of all the evolutionalism and
progressivism. Second, there is a
yielding to historical relativism in that truth – even revealed truth – is made
dependent on the “spirit of the age”. We
need only recall his argument that we can no longer expect men living in the
scientific and industrial age to believe what has constituted the faith for two
thousand years of Christian life. Third,
there is a surrender to materialism in that the essential distinction between
soul and body, spirit and matter, is obscured.
And above all, Teilhard gives in to modern naturalism by eliminating the
difference between nature and super-nature.
Closely linked to Teilhard’s immanentism is his
tendency to lose sight of the marvel of personal being – a discrediting of
individual existence as something limited and imperfect in favour of the cosmic
power of impersonal forces. This
tendency towards a super-personal entity is the very opposite of, for example,
Pascal’s vision of the grandeur of man.
PSEUDO-PERSONALISM
There is another contemporary trend which, on the
contrary, exalts the person at the expense of “impersonal” and “cold” principles. This is the attitude of the proponents of the
various brands of “the new morality”.
To be sure, they greatly misinterpret the notion and
legitimate role of “principles”. The
most absurd expression of this misunderstanding is to be found in Fletcher’s Situation Ethics.
But this misinterpretation of principles has found its
way into the minds of many progressive Catholics, although in a less
superficial form. It appears especially
in their distinction between “Greek” truth and “personal” truth in Christ. (We shall take up this question in some
detail in the following chapter). These
Catholics assert that Christ’s word, “I am the truth”, embody a superior notion
of truth, one not predicated of propositions, but of a person. They emphasize the person as opposed to
abstractions, and take great pains, therefore, to tear down “abstract truth” –
“principles” – in order to erect a “Personal truth”.
DEMYTHOLOGIZATION
Sometimes these two opposed tendencies – the
Teilhardian annihilation and the “situationist” aggrandizement of the person –
are joined. This is the case in those
Catholics who, following Bultmann, claim that Christ did not come to inform us
about supernatural truth, but only to tell us to follow Him. Yet, astonishingly, Bultmann and hisCatholic
followers put no emphasis on the historical Person of Jesus, but only on a kind
of force or principle in men’s souls.
The amoralism gaining currency among Catholics is
indeed one of the most alarming symptoms of a loss of authentic Christian
faith. Goods such as the earthly welfare
of mankind, scientific progress, the domination of the forces of nature are
either considered much more important than moral perfection and the avoidance
of sin or at least evoke much greater interest and enthusiasm.
Typical of this moral indifference were Father Karl
Rahner’s remarks during the dialogue with the Communists at
Herrenchiemsee. He indicated that many
moral values may disappear in the future and only the dignity of the human
person and some other values remain.
Now, the dignity of the person in the strict sense is not a moral value,
but a morally relevant good. Man’s
dignity refers to the high ontological rank he possesses as a person. This dignity certainly imposes moral
obligations on us, such as the necessity of respecting this dignity – of not
abusing other persons, not infringing on their rights. But the value of this dignity is patently not
a moral value. Man possesses this value
by the very fact that he is created in the likeness of God. That a person of Father Rahner’s stature could
take such a relativistic attitude toward the moral sphere and consider
ontological values alone immutable indicates the power that amoralism has
gained in the Church.
It is as if the sense of unique, intrinsic grandeur
and importance of moral values had been lost by a great many progressive
Catholics. They cannot comprehend the
whole glorious world which is at the centre of Plato’s thought and which in its
supernatural transfiguration is at the centre of the Gospel. They see morality as a rather petty, merely
infra-human affair which cannot be compared with the greatness of ontological
perfections or the progress of humanity.
As might be expected, the speculation of Teilhard de
Chardin – that locus of so many contemporary errors – also provides theoretical
support for amoralism. Father Teilhard
replaces the moral question with an ontological growth resulting from
evolution. Sin is viewed as merely a
lower stage of evolution and virtue a higher one. The fundamental fact that sin alone offends
God and supernatural virtue alone glorifies Him does not belong in Teilhard’s
depersonalized world.
Some of the “new moralists” buttress their defiance of
traditional Christian morality by pointing to deficiencies in former arguments
for Christian morality. The Church might
therefore be forced to alter Her understanding of the Christian virtues. A typical example of this error (which Marcel
calls transaction frauduleuse) is the
Jesuit Father W. Molinsky’s suggestion that the sinfulness of pre-marital
intercourse (i.e. impurity) is now in doubt because the arguments St. Thomas
brought for this sinfulness are weak.
But does the fact that impurity is a sin depend on St. Thomas’ arguments
– which are indeed weak? Was not
impurity clearly condemned as a sin in the Gospel and throughout the history of
the Church prior to St. Thomas?
A disastrous habit of certain theologians popular
among progressive Catholics is their equivocal use of terms. One crucial example is their use of the term
“future”. Now it refers to
eternity; now, to the historical future
– that is, to the generations to come in the course of human history. But eternity and the historical future are
such totally different realities that the term “future” cannot be used for both
without falling into a complete equivocation.
Teilhard de Chardin’s naturalistic and evolutionistic interpretation of
man’s destiny has obviously played a role in promoting this confusion.
APPENDIX
OTHER
THEOLOGIANS ON TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
“the near-manic optimism of Teilhard de Chardin” (R.C.
Zachner, in Christopher Danson, Religion and World History).
“A Gnostic heretic” (Karl Barth, Time Magazine, 3 Aug.
1981, p.50)
“In 1966 Pope Paul VI repeated Pope Pius XII’s
condemnation of polygenism (origninally argued
by Teilhard...”) , National Catholic Register, 27 Aug. 1989, p.4.
“It was in Hastings that Teilhard became involved in
the celebrated affair of the Piltdown Man, long believed to represent an
important step in the development of man from ape, but later proved to be a
hoax” (Claire Chambers, Siecus Circle, p.365)
Teilhard as “theology fiction” (Etienne Gilson).
“C.S. Lewis enjoyed the friendship of some Jesuits
like Fr. Peter Milward and Tom Corbishley.
He sided with the Jesuits in ‘shutting up’ Teilhard de Chardin, who was
lionised by theosophists, the precursors of the New Age Movement; and Lewis, after his conversion, had no time
for theosophy or Gnosticism”. (Doctrine
and Life, Nov. 1998, p.538)
“In late 1977, Marilyn Ferguson sent a questionnaire
to 210 ‘persons engaged in social transformation’, whom she also calls ‘Aquarian Conspirators’. The following is interesting: ‘When
respondents were asked to name individuals whose ideas had influenced them,
either through personal contact or through their writings, those most often
named, in order of frequency, were Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, C.G. Jung,
Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Aldous Huxley, Robert Assagioli, and J. Krishnamurti’”. From Vatican document “New Age : A Christian Reflection : Jesus Christ the
Bearer of the Water of Life, footnote 15”
“Neither...
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin nor Carl Jung, for example, were declared
Hermeticists, but how much they have contributed to the progress of the work in
question!... Christian evolutionism (Teilhard) and depth psychology of
revelation (Jung) are in fact, as many inestimable contributions to the cause
of the union of spirituality and intellectuality. Although they did not make Hermeticism their
calling, they served its cause and were inspired from the same sources from
which Hermeticism is inspired”.
(Meditations on the Tarot : A Journey into Christian
Hermeticism, Amity House, 1985).
