Christian Pantheism, Panpsychism,
Omega Point, the Cosmic Christ
Teilhard makes no bones about his "deepest 'pantheist' aspirations"1 nor does he hesitate to speak of "the essential religious tendency which impels man towards some sort of 'pantheism'."2 In the same vein he mentions "the sense of the whole, which is the life-blood at all mysticism"3 and asks: "what in truth is the 'cosmic sense' from which germinates the whole organism of my faith but precisely this same faith in the universe which animates modern pantheisms?"4
But time and again he qualifies such statements by an assertion like: "It is only in fact the 'pantheism' of love or Christian 'pantheism' (that in which each being is super-personalised, super-centred, by union with Christ, the divine super-centre) - it is only that pantheism which correctly interprets and fully satisfies the religious aspirations of man, whose dream is ultimately to lose self consciously in unity. That pantheism alone agrees with experience, which shows us that in every instance union differentiates."5 And when, under the disguise of a "friend", he admits at the end of the three stories he wrote during the First World War: "I had always been by temperament a 'pantheist' "6 - he hurries to append a footnote in the persona propria of a Jesuit priest who has to set himself right with his Church for so dubious an admission:
"Taking 'pantheism' in a very real sense, indeed in the etymological sense of the word (En passi panta Theos, i.e.; in St. Paul's phrase, God 'all in all') but at the same time in an absolutely legitimate sense: for if in the last resort Christians become 'one with God' this unity is achieved not by way of
1.Science and Christ, p. 128. .
2.Ibid., p. 136.
3.Ibid,, p. 122.
4.Ibid., p. 124.
5.Ibid., p. 171.
6."Christ in the World of Matter", Hymn of the Universe, p. 53.
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identification, God becoming all things, but by the action - at once differentiating and unifying - of love, God being all in all, which latter concept is strictly in accord with Christian orthodoxy."7
This footnote, whose text reappears almost verbatim in The Phenomenon of Man,8 is vulnerable on more than one count. The mystical love-union actually experienced by Christian mystics, as against its description by the mere theorists of it, is not always clearly marked by a unifying that differentiates. Not only Meister Eckhart, who is never quite in good odour among his fellow-Catholics, but other Catholic mystics have themselves a non-Teilhardian suggestion. Richard of St. Victor (as far back as the 12th century) says in his treatise. Of the Four Degrees of Passionate Charity: "The third degree of love is when the mind of man is ravished into the abyss of divine Light, so that the soul, having forgotten all outward things, is altogether unaware of itself, and passes out completely into its God."9 Ruysbroeck reports: "We feel ourselves to be swallowed up in the fathomless abyss of our eternal blessedness, wherein we can never find any distinction between ourselves and God."10 He has also written: "whenever we feel this union, we are one being and one life and one blessedness with God."11 Luis de Leon affirms that "in very truth the soul not only has God dwelling in it, but is indeed God".12:
Teilhard himself is not unaware of Christian love-mysticism passing in and out of what he disapproves of as "identification" or what he elsewhere condemns as "fusion". He" has acknowledged: "...mystically speaking, it is difficult not
7.Ibid., pp. 33-54.
8.The Phenomenon of Man, pp. 309-10.
9.Mysticism in World Religion by Sidney Spencer (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 249.
10.Ibid., p. 250.
11.Ibid,
12.Ibid., p. 251.
13.Activation of Energy, translated by Rene Hague (Collins, London, 1970), p. 225.
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to be aware of considerable traces of fusionism in the appeals directed towards the inexpressible by an Eckhart or even a John of the Cross..." And Teilhard14 explains these traces by supposing that "for those great contemplatives" the two types of pantheism "were appreciably confused". He does not stop to think that if even so marked a love-mystic as John of the Cross could bring in "fusion", the two types of pantheism must really be two aspects of the same pantheistic truth.
Further, when we turn to St. Paul's own Epistles, do we have only a phrase like the one from I Corinthians 15:28 which characterises the Parousiac culmination and which Teilhard tries to press into the service of Christian orthodoxy and oppose to a straightforward pantheistic turn like "God is all"? Do we not have also the phrase in Colossians 3:11: "Ta panta kai en passi Christos", "Christ is all and in all"? If St. Paul is to be used in a discussion of pantheism, surely a Christo-logy with a pantheistic background or basis may be deduced here, and then Teilhard's favourite phrase merely promises in an overt realisation what is here declared as an inward truth.
The same background or basis is deducible from the Fourth Gospel where "Paul's Christ-mysticism" finds renewed expression through St. John. "Johannine mysticism, like the Pauline," comments Sidney Spencer,15 "is a corporate and not merely an individual fact. It receives its culminating expression in the prayer of Jesus in Chapter 17. Jesus prays that all who follow him may share his union with God - that all may be one, as a living and interpenetrating unity of souls, 'even as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us'. The divine destiny which Christ has attained, the divine glory which belongs to him in his perfect union with the Father, he seeks to share with ail his followers - 'that they also may be with me where I am'; 'that they may
14.Ibid.
15.Mysticism in World Religion, p. 221.
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be one even as we are one, I in them and Thou in me, that they may become perfectly one'," If the union of souls among themselves and with Christ as well as with the Father can be of the same nature as Christ's union with the Father, which has the same substance though difference of persons, there certainly must be - over and above the unifying that differentiates - an essential identification everywhere.
A relation of difference in the ultimate mystical experience need not imply difference of essence or substance: it could be no more than a certain posture assumed by the One with the Many who are Its self-expressions. And indeed, without an underlying sameness of essence, would it make any sense to define, as Teilhard16 does while again quoting St. Pauls's En passi panta Theos, "the essential aspiration of all mysticism" as: "to be united (that is, to become the other) while remaining oneself? If Teilhard knows that the heart of union is "to become the other" and that without this becoming there is only contact, interaction, intertwining but no genuine experience of being united - if he knows that short of this becoming there can merely be at the utmost an extremely intimate extrinsicality of relationship, how can he deny sameness of essence? To become, in any authentic sense, the other, the mystic's soul must previously have a secret inner oneness of being with the Divine beloved - the oneness posited by pantheism. Christian pantheism is necessarily a special development of the pantheism that is non-Christian and it must carry over the universal identity of being, which is the true substance of the latter, and, because of this carrying over, cannot help passing at times into a total union such as pantheism promises to the individual soul.
However, we should remark here on the wrong-headed-ness of Teilhard's notion,17 which is common to all Roman Catholics: "Pantheism seduces us by its vistas of perfect
16.The Divine Milieu, pp, 93-94.
17.Ibid., p. 93.
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universal union. But, ultimately, if it were true, it would give us only fusion and unconsciousness; for, at the end of the evolution it claims to reveal, the elements of the world vanish in the God they create or by which they are absorbed."
No articulation could be more packed with absurdity. If the "fusion" attained were to spell "unconsciousness', who would ever be seduced by pantheism as people are, according to Teilhard, and who would talk of "perfect universal union"? Again, when the pantheistic union means, by Teilhard's own definition in the long footnote we have quoted, "God becoming all things", how can the world's elements create God? They can only be absorbed by God. And this absorption, which from God's side would be "God becoming all things", must be, from the side of things: "all things becoming God." The two formulas are the obverse and reverse of the same mighty occurrence. And, for the individual soul, the occurrence would be, at the same time, God withdrawing into Himself the individual aspect He has put forth of His own being, and the individual aspect of Him merging in its own original universal reality. The soul grows conscious of the World-Soul that is its own secret supreme Self. What it loses is the small subjectivity which was its old life: what it gains is a vast inwardness, an infinite Selfhood, as its new existence. There is no resultant unconsciousness. The result is consciousness turning into superconsciousness.
It is not that Teilhard has no inkling of this truth. He must have more than an inkling, since he has said; "I believe that I was born with a 'naturally pantheist' soul."18 And a most positive fulfilling content is suggested for pantheism by accents like these: "the fundamental, obstinate, incurable yearning for total union, which gives life to all poetry, all pantheism, all holiness."19 Or when he visions the end of the universe in Christ's Pleroma: "Like a vast tide. Being will
18.Quoted by de Lubac in The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin, p. 155, from Teilhard's Mon Univers (1918).
19.Writings in Time of War, p. 101.
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have engulfed the shifting sands of beings. Within a now tranquil ocean, each drop of which, nevertheless, will be conscious of remaining itself, the astonishing adventure of the world will have ended. The dream of every mystic, the eternal pantheist ideal, will have found their full and legitimate satisfaction. 'Erit in omnibus deus.' ['God will be in all'.]"20
And what else than an irrepressible pantheism breaking through the Christian constraints put upon it makes de Lubac21 confess: "We believe, as Pere Rabut does, that the elliptical form and the emphasis of some of Pere Teilhard's expressions would seem to suggest a sort of natural identity of Christ and the Universe."
Perhaps the master key to Teilhard's true drive of thought and to the correct understanding of the relation between God and the physical cosmos in his philosophy is to be found if we take as our starting-point that commonplace of Teilhardian exegesis that, to the author of The Phenomenon of Man, life is co-extensive with matter. There is, for Teilhard, a "within" to every "without", just as in ourselves is an interior existence, a being of consciousness, along with our exterior existence, a being of matter. Although life seems to commence at a certain stage, Teilhard, accepting the scientific principle of the unity of Nature, sees it as latent - or, rather, as imperceptibly present - in even the apparently inorganic, down to the elementary particles. Another word for life, which he uses, is "consciousness". Thus he writes: "Refracted rearwards along the course of evolution, consciousness displays itself qualitatively as a spectrum of shifting hints whose lower terms are lost in the night."22 And "consciousness" is taken "in its widest sense to indicate every kind of psychism, from the most rudimentary forms of interior perception imaginable to
20.Science and Christ, p. 85.
21.The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin, p. 139.
22.The Phenomenon of Man, p. 59.
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the human phenomenon of reflective thought".23 The word "psyche" or "psychic" is the most general for expressing Teilhard's "within" everywhere. Thus we have the statement: "We are logically forced to assume the existence in rudimentary form...of some sort of psyche in every corpuscle..."24 And again: "...the 'psychic' shows itself subtending (at various degrees of concentration) the totality of the phenomenon."25
Yes, it is Teilhard's doctrine that life is ubiquitous and all matter is alive. But there is a further issue to be decided. Corte26 indicates the Teilhardian doctrine by the well-known philosophical label "panpsychism" and, though himself disapproving of it, takes panpsychism to be the very basis of Teilhard's vision of the world. Now, panpsychism does not only mean that life is co-extensive with matter. It has a further shade which is of central moment. And N.M. Wildiers, a prominent Roman Catholic theologian and commentator on Teilhard, comes to grips with it.
After quoting Teilhard to the effect that consciousness, in diverse modes, is a cosmic phenomenon, Wildiers27 tells us: "That is not to say - as has been said from time to time - that Teilhard is an advocate of pan-psychism - as though one and the same consciousness were present in all things: in the atom, the amoeba, plant, animal, man. That would be a total misrepresentation of what he has in mind. What he means is simply this: that if we want to arrive at a coherent account of the universe - one based on a scientific phenomenology - we must accept that, albeit in an analoguous fashion and in varying degrees, all creatures possess a certain interiority,. an interior aspect."
Wildiers's vehement protest is rather strange in the wake
23.Ibid., p. 57, fn.1.
24.Ibid., p. 301.
25.Ibid., p. 309.
26.Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Life and Spirit, translated from the French by Martin Jarrett-Kerr (Barrie & Rockliff, London, 1960), p. 61.
27.An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin (Collins, A Fontana Original, Theology and Philosophy, London, 1968), pp. 78-79.
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of his definitions of Teilhard's "phenomenology". He 28 calls the tatter "a science which seeks to describe the universe as an observable phenomenon in its totality and its intrinsic coherence and to discover the meaning concealed in that totality". Once more he29 characterises it "as an endeavour, through the use of scientific expertise, to give as complete as possible expression to the world in its totality and inner orientation". Unless "one and the same consciousness were present in all things", at the back of their psychic diversity, could there be a concealed meaning, an inner orientation, in the world's totality? In the absence of a unitary all-life, could there be an overall import and drive hidden and inherent in the entire cosmos?
There is also Wildiers's summing-up30 of the Teilhardian "world-view": "...the universe presents itself to the eye of the beholder as a four-dimensional continuum, extended in space and time, an organically cohesive and evolving whole which is most completely self-manifested in man and so is best to be understood in that context and perspective." Surely, such a whole, evolubonarily manifesting itself and fully disclosing its own significance in man, cannot but be, in its fundamental nature, a phenomenon of "one and the same consciousness" at work in differing intensities and on dissimilar planes?
Even the title - "An Immense Psychic Exercise"31 - of the chapter in which Wildiers refuses panpsychism to Teilhard suggests what it refuses. And the words constituting the title are Teilhard's own and are drawn from the particular page of an article, to which, along with other places, Wildiers's fellow-theologian, de Lubac, sends us when, looking at Teilhard's not infrequent ambivalences,32 he writes: "...in spite of Teilhard's explanations, it is difficult to deny that there is a
28.Ibid., p. 48.
29.Ibid., p. 50.
30.Ibid., pp. 62-63.
31.Ibid., p. 64.
32.The Eternal Feminine - Teilhard and the Problems of Today (Collins, London, 1971), p. 73.
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certain tendency to pan-psychism in his thought." First, de Lubac33 refers us to the book, Teilhard de Chardin {p. 122) by Teilhard's friend, Mgr. de Solages, for proof of the tendency. Then he34 points to Teilhard's essay, "The Analysis of Life" (1945) in the collection Activation of Energy (p. 133) where we learn of the "psychic polarization of each elementary grain of energy". Next, he35 directs us to Teilhard's article, "The Spirit of the Earth" (1931) in Human Energy (p. 23). It is from the last-mentioned page that Wildiers's chapter-head derives. There we read:36
"No, the cosmos could not possibly be explained as a dust of unconscious elements, on which life, for some incomprehensible reason, burst into flower - as an accident or as a mould. But it is fundamentally and primarily living, and its complete history is ultimately nothing but an immense psychic exercise; the slow but progressive attaining of a diffused consciousness - a gradual escape from the 'material' conditions which, secondarily, veil it in an initial state of plurality. From this point of view man is nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself."
It should be clear that "plurality" - "the atom, the amoeba, plant, animal, man", as Wildiers exemplifies it - is just a cover. Even at its "extreme" it merely hides from our sight, in the shape of "'material' conditions", a basic unitary fact of life, of consciousness, which appears in a diffused state at first but gradually evolves greater interiority until the true nature of its single cosmic psychism behind the pluralistic concealment in local limited phenomena stands revealed in the type of consciousness that is man's.
This interpretation conforms to all else that Teilhard says on the same page. He asserts, among other tilings, that the
33.Ibid., p. 219, fn. 43.
34.Ibid. p.50
35.Ibid.p.62-63
36.Human Energy (Collins, London, 1969), p. 23.
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"primal stuff" of the universe is not matter: what we have is "a universe of 'spiritual' stuff".
The all-round suggestion we catch from Teilhard when he lets his mind run on unobstructedly. is not only that there is one and the same consciousness behind the varying "wi-thins", not only that this consciousness is originally to be conceived under the highly developed aspect we find in the human phenomenon, but also that such a consciousness is secretly the real stuff of the universe.
Thus panpsychism, in a sense even fuller than what Wildiers discusses, is implied in the Teilhardian phenomenology.37 And we can also deduce from Wildiers's account that, in the form of the doctrine of a "within" to every "without", it is, as Corte holds, basic to Teilhard's world-vision. Quoting Teilhard's conclusion38 - "Spiritual perfection (or conscious 'centreity') and material synthesis (or complexity) are but the two aspects or connected parts of one and the same phenomenon" - Wildiers39 tells us: "This conclusion...brings us...to the very centre of his system."
Now let us inquire how Teilhard's indubitable and momentous panpsychism is related to his Cosmic Christ or, as he otherwise names him, Omega which is also Alpha, the God-consciousness in which the race will evolutionarily participate at the end and from which all evolution gets its primal impulse. Let us string together a number of declarations. "We are faced with a harmonised super-consciousness."40 "A new domain of physical expansion...in an interior totalisation of the world upon itself, in the unanimous construction of a spirit of the earth."41 "We have seen and admitted that evolution is an ascent towards consciousness.... Therefore it should culminate forwards in some sort of supreme consciousness."42
37.For further discussion see Supplementary Note on p. 93.
38.The Phenomenon of Man, p. 60.
39.An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin, p. 77,
40.The Phenomenon of Man, p. 251.
41.Ibid., p. 253.
42.Ibid., p. 258.
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"In the light of our experience it is abundantly clear that what emerges in the course of evolution can only happen successively and with mechanical dependence on what precedes... And it is in the very same way that Omega itself is discovered to us at the end of the whole processus, inasmuch as in it the movement of synthesis culminates."43 No doubt, Teilhard adds: "Yet we must be careful to note that under this evolutive facet Omega still only reveals half of itself. While being the last term of its series, it is also outside all series." But this simply means that Omega is also Alpha, a pre-existent Godhead that is really a disclosure rather than a product, although seeming to be the latter and phenomenally emerging as such. The words do not deny the intimate presence of Alpha-Omega in the evolutionary process, its inwardness to the long series of evolution's products, its continuous line through the corpuscle and the mega-molecule, the cell and the multicellular organism, the human system and the superhuman collective race-body and the vast earth-being. It is obviously the all-life seen in its full original reality underlying evolution, impelling it and fulfilling it.
There appears to be no question that the "within" of panpsychism is the same as the "within" which forms "a new domain of psychical expansion", realises the unity of the world and enjoys, through an ascent towards "some sort of supreme consciousness", union with Alpha-Omega. Indeed, Alpha-Omega is the divine "within", whose diverse phenomenal expressions or manifestations are the graded psy-chisms from the most elementary form of interior perception imaginable up to man's reflective thought and beyond it to an unimaginable magnitude.
But, if that is so, the Cosmic Christ proves himself to be the full glory of panpsychism. And, since no controversy can legitimately rage over Teilhard's meaning of the "within" of panpsychism and consequently nobody can talk of orthodox Christianity as his true drift there or even of a mere omnipre-
43. Ibid., p. 270.
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sence of life's action rather than a direct life-stuff being everywhere both constitutive and operative, the Cosmic Christ is bound to be a divine name for the profoundest significance of that "within". In correspondence with panpsychism, the Cosmic Christ must represent pantheism, even if for the direct beginning of his most outer manifestation he has to wait until his birth as Jesus and his subsequent resurrection.
Perhaps there will be an attempt to avoid this consequence by saying: "Christ is Omega only in Omega's transcendent or supernatural aspect, not in its immanent or natural one. You must show him as identical with the latter to render the consequence unescapable." Well, Teilhard gives Christ himself a natural as well as a supernatural aspect, and after considering how, "under the combined influence of men's thoughts and aspirations", we have come to discern at the term of cosmogenesis a "physical pole of universal synthesis" which is "a supreme focus of personalizing personality", Teilhard44 proposes: "Just suppose that we identify (at least in his 'natural' aspect) the cosmic Christ with the Omega point of science..." In another place Teilhard45 asserts: "In future only a God who is functionally and totally 'Omega' can satisfy us." Here the immanent-natural Omega no less than the transcendent-supernatural is intended. So an immanent-natural aspect is accorded to God also. And soon after the above assertion Teilhard46 breaks down the common reluctance to let the supernatural be the natural at the same time and declares: "in a universe in which we can now see that everything is co-reflective along a single axis, Christ must no longer be offered to our worship (in consequence of a subtle and pernicious confusion between 'super-natural' and 'extra-natural') as a peak distinct from, and a rival to, that to which the biologically continued slope of anthropogenesis is leading us." Here the natural Omega is sought to be identified with a
44.Christianity and Evolution, p. 180.
45.Ibid., p. 240.
46.Ibid., p. 242.
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natural Cosmic Christ. Then we are told47 that "Christ's gradual rise in human consciousness cannot continue much longer without there being produced, in our spiritual climate, the revolutionary event of his coincidence with the definitely foreseeable centre of a terrestrial co-reflection (and, more generally, of the assumed focus of all reflection in the universe)". And the final statement48 runs: "Forced together ever more closely by the progress of hominization, and drawn together even more by a fundamental identity, the two Omegas (let me emphasize again), the Omegas of experience and of faith, are undoubtedly on the point of reacting upon one another in human consciousness, and finally of being synthesized..."
47.Ibid.
48.Ibid., pp. 242-43.
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