The Problem with Teilhard

The Pontifical Council for Culture has voted to request that the monitum issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1962 against the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin be lifted on the grounds that, though "some of his writings might be open to constructive criticism, his prophetic vision has been and is inspiring theologians and scientists." Whether there are scientists who, qua scientists rather than amateur philosophers, are inspired by Teilhard may be doubted. That there are still theologians of a certain sort who are thus inspired may not be. Which is why the monitum must remain in place. For it is not his association with frauds like the Piltdown man that matters, but his assault on basic Catholic orthodoxy in cosmology, Christology, and ecclesiology. A reminder of this seems timely. Hence I offer here an abridged version of what may be found in full elsewhere.¹

Let us begin with what attracted (and still attracts) people to Teilhard, in whom the conflicting hopes and fears of the twentieth century met and found expression. Positively, he wanted to reconcile, to unite in a grand synthesis, "faith in God and faith in the World," or "the cult of progress and passion for the glory of God." Negatively, he wanted to combat with resolute determination an angst he thought rooted in the trauma of the Copernican revolution. He recognized man's loss of bearings in the vastness of the universe and his sense of futility in a world subject to the law of entropy. He knew the "malady of space-time" that manifests itself as a "fundamental anguish of being," a "sickness of the dead end," a feeling of confinement: "As the years go by, Lord, I come to see more and more clearly, in myself and in those around me, that the great secret preoccupation of modern man is much less to battle for possession of the world than to find a means of escaping from it. The anguish of feeling that one is not merely spatially but ontologically imprisoned in the cosmic bubble; the anxious search for an issue to, or more exactly a focal point for, the evolutionary process; these are the price we must pay for the growth of planetary consciousness; these are the dimly-recognized burdens which weigh down the souls of christian and gentile alike in the world of today."²

Teilhard made it his aim to address this anxiety, to restore confidence in progress, and so to make the Christian faith relevant once again. To that end, he undertook what he called a "re-cosmologization of our religion," commandeering evolution as the vehicle not only of creation but also of redemption. Evolution, if we ourselves took charge of it, would lead us to what he called Omega, that final issue our hearts desire, a point of complete cosmic convergence that quells all fear of perpetual, meaningless becoming. With this combination of evolutionism and eschatology, he hoped to cure the spiritual crisis of the modern world. Humanity needed a common center, a new hope, a uniting faith and vision.

That is just what he hoped to achieve by breaking down the disastrous barrier dividing devotion to God above from commitment to worldly progress here below. These "rival mysticisms" must not be allowed to divide mankind any longer. Advance toward God must be linked with social progress for the benefit of both. In an article entitled "The Heart of the Problem," he offered the following diagram, in which O^Y represents, he says, Christian faith aspiring upward, while O^X represents humanistic faith driving forward, and O^R is a "rectified" Christian faith capable of reconciling the two:

Through this rectified and rectifying faith, mankind would "achieve a breakthrough straight ahead by forcing its way over the threshold of some higher level of consciousness." All who, in their own fashion, shared this conviction would advance in step together, be they Christian or otherwise.

I call this "diagonalism." Teilhard called it "noogenesis." By that, he meant the "ascent of the Universe towards...