Teilhard de Chardin: Scientist and Poet of Evolution
I recently watched a film on PBS produced by a friend, an independent film maker, on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest, who was and still is a great influence in my education in science, philosophy, and politics.
Teilhard was trained in contemporary twentieth century physical, astronomical, and biological science. As a trained and distinguished paleontologist, he researched, classified, and published numerous papers in the best scientific journals on the thousands of fossils that he discovered in China, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. His scientific work has filled in gaps of knowledge in the biological and historical evolution of the human and other species.
Teilhard was also a philosopher/theologian with a faith and vision that drove him to his scientific discovery, insight, and expression. “Scientific research,” he says, “is the highest form of adoration.” And again: “Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.” While he was born and bred in the Christian tradition in France, his faith and vision included and transcended all great religions and religious persuasions.
As a philosopher and social activist, I had studied his understanding of the role of mind, consciousness or, if you want, spirituality in the “human phenomenon.” This exemplifies for me the broad context, usually invisible, unformed, unfocused, of all human expression. Teilhard’s vision was of a spiritual dimension of the cosmos of all things. If you want to discover spirit, he said, “immerse yourself in matter.”
He is one of my mentors in philosophical and political thought and practice. And he led me to choose many other mentors who have shaped who I am and want to be. While the Roman and other Christian Churches and even his own Jesuit religious order (and mine) forbad his teaching on evolution and his cosmic philosophy, many seminarians, spiritual seekers, and ecologists were buoyed in the faith and hope in science, new theology, new forms of spirituality, and democratic social change. He was hot in the 1960s when I was feeling the peak of my Chicago education!
As a progressive mind in science, religion, culture, and politics and a conservative mind regarding the great ideas of and about the past, Teilhard is a bridge to my classical education and to my openness to new ways of critical thinking especially in American pragmatism, Continental existential phenomenology, and especially my commitment to action for social justice.
Because of his influence, my language and views in understanding evolution have changed or, better, developed from his. He was disapproved by his Roman superiors who judged him heretical for rethinking the Augustinian dogma of “original sin” in relation to the scientific affirmations of evolution. As Mathew Fox and Thomas Berry have said, his was more a teaching of “original blessing” (as Unitarian Universalists say) over original sin. But this did not mean that he denied the problem (or “mystery”) of evil which he experienced deeply in the Great War and twentieth century fascism.
He had a direct sense and firm belief of God in his Christian tradition. I have been led to no longer speak of God because I think “god” it is a lousy metaphor for understanding the inexplicable spiritual dimension of nature. I am not a theist. Nor an atheist. I call myself a panentheist which is closer, I think, to his sense of the divine in the cosmos.
Like him I do not separate soul from body, energy from matter, spirituality from the world. I do not see the divine or the spiritual as a separate Being but as a dimension of all beings. Not accessible by objectification as Aristotle or Thomas’s first or final cause of the universe. Personal, but not a supernatural person (Big Man in the Sky), in a supernatural place (Heaven) in a supernatural time (Eternity).
I know that many religious people would see and name me as a heretic (as did once one of my Jesuit teachers). I have a sense of transcendence as a dynamism of my personal and collective human consciousness. I too would love to discover, as Teilhard would believe, that there is a cosmic, universal, infinite spirit he calls in the Chistian tradition “God” which relates all that there is with all that there is, including me with you and with all in Love as recorded in the good news professed by the early Christian community of John.
Every particle with every other — all matter and energy connected in the universe including us, as Einstein imagined, as Buddhist, Islamic and other religious mystics imagine.
Teilhard’s vision, informed by his science, gave him hope which he wanted to seed and cultivate in the world. His Theology is like Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope built on the conception of Marxist Ernst Bloch in defining God as Being whose essence is Future — the “To-Come” through human collective action. Liberation, whether by resistance, rebellion, or revolution, is the ongoing cutting of oppressing chains or the removal of obstacles to human thriving.
Many would call Teilhard, like all progressives, an optimist. And yet here I as an aged existentialist, subject to the laws of entropy, argue he also had a contrary vision of, as one philosopher I follow says, “cosmic horror.” That is, the state of absurdity we humans sense, conceive, and even manufacture as we become more conscious of our existence in extended and extending space and time. Sein-zum-Tode — being towards death. A being towards nothingness.
These visions of cosmic horror and divine milieu are both linked to our invisible unmediated direct perception of our existence. These visions are discovered in the act of mediated perception. This is perception of a world of others, things, objects to which our bodies’ perceptions are directed and which are captured in concepts, words, stories, formulas, all images collectively artificed. The cosmic horror of an eternal infinite and indefinite past and future is confronted by present creative imagination which can be pointed to but never finally expressed.
Evil occurs in human individuals and society by the refusal to think which is also the refusal to transcend. It disrupts the basic human drives to know, to love, and to act. It results from the fallacies of the absolute that keeps us from self-criticism. And from delusions of certainty which undermine our ability to learn. It dispels pluralism and diversity which are conditions of community and contrary to our nature as a social organism or political animal. In the human project we are all called on to be heretics.
For me this is where politics comes in. Starting with Aristotle’s reflections on the Greek polis, through Augustine of Hippo at the fall of Rome, to Thomas Aquinas in the Holy Roman Empire, Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson in the age of the Enlightenment, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, Hannah Arendt in more contemporary times.
Politics from Aristiotle to Arendt is the human community, awed by the possibility of cosmic horror of death and nothingness, acting together to cultivate and maintain new life, discovering and producing meaning and purpose, and culminating in personal and public happiness.
Genetically, humans are socio-political animals building the human community to heightened consciousness and project it to the cosmos. Human consciousness according to Teilhard is a way by which evolution “becomes conscious of itself.” Matter and spirit become one, surging towards what Teilhard called the “Omega Point” and named the “Noosphere” which assumes the geosphere and biosphere. Martin Luther King calls it the Beloved Community, Christians name it the “realm or city of God,” humanists “the good society,” democratic republicans “freedom and justice for all.”
Teilhard’s theory and practice, however expressed, keeps me going in the here and now aiming and acting for the world, our spiritual growth, our greater association, and transcendence into the future.
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