Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Faith in the world and Faith in god

No doubt, "the human, the Christly" answered to an authentic need of Teilhard's soul. Yet the concentration of the "cosmic sense" in it does not ever seem to have been a complete success. For, we cannot overlook the now-notorious passage commencing Part One of How I Believe (Comment je crois) which was written in 1934 and which became the target of a grave criticism in the Vatican's mouthpiece, Osservatore Romano, in June 1962 but which has subsequentlv been interpreted by most Roman Catholics as not necessarily a slip from orthodoxy. Teilhard¹ writes:

"If, as a result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God and my faith in Spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the World. The World (its value, its infallibility and its goodness) - that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe. It is by this faith that I live. And it is to this faith, I feel, that at the moment of death, rising above all doubts, I shall surrender myself... I surrender myself to an ill-defined faith in a World that is one and infallible - wherever it may lead me."

De Lubac has essayed a defence of this passage against the accusation of "pantheism". According to him, the words can be justified in their context. The justification is succinctly expressed thus by a reviewer of de Lubac in The Times Literary Supplement:² "The words are part of an apology addressed ad

1.Christianity and Evolution, pp. 99, 103. We have restored, from the French original, the capital letters wherever they were used.

2.18 November 1965, p. 1027. De Lubac's book, in the hardbound edition which was reviewed, is entitled The Faith of Teilhard de Chardin (Collins, London, 1965). The paperback is named Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning {A Mentor-Omega Book, The New American Library, New York, 1967). The version, in de Lubac, of the debated passage reads somewhat different to the one we have reproduced from the later official English translation of the entire Comment je crois, but the difference is merely in the choice and arrangement of words, except where de Lubac has an omission: "the first and the last thing" instead of "the first, the last, and the only thing".

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Gentiles, whom Teilhard wished to lead from a faith in the World to faith in the Spirit, followed by faith in immortality and faith in personality, until eventually they came to faith in Christ. They mean more than Margaret Fuller's declaration, 'I accept the universe', which led Carlyle to exclaim, 'Gad! she'd better', but the World is the beginning, not the end, of Teilhard's faith."

True, there is a series of "faiths" mentioned and expounded, but they arise from the belief in "a World that is one and infallible": the belief does not depend on them. The World is the foundational datum and desideratum, and the manner in which the faith in it is affirmed suggests its all-sufficiency. It is hardly right to say: "the World is the beginning, not the end, of Teilhard's faith." Teilhard's own asseveration to the contrary stares us in the face: "The World..., when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe." Does not "the last, and the only thing" hold the "end" with a vengeance? And if this faith alone is mentioned as that to which he will surrender himself" at the moment of death", what other faith can remain to follow, remain to be led up to and reached? No, "the cosmic" far exceeds for Teilhard "the human, the Christly", whether he would always openly admit it or not.

To a certain extent the exceeding comes out in the very foreword to the essay, where he sets forth the two roots of his belief - two apparently contrary influences:³ - "By upbringing and intellectual training, I belong to the 'children of Heaven'; but by temperament, and by my professional studies, I am 'a child of the Earth'... I have the feeling that a synthesis has been effected naturally between the two currents that claim my allegiance... Today I believe probably more profoundly than ever in God, and certainly more than ever in the World." An author who is temperamentally "a child of the Earth" should lead us to anticipate in his essay a drive towards drawing Christians to World-faith rather than unbelievers to

3. Christianity and Evolution, pp. 96-97.

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Christianity. Also, the deliberate distinction between "probably" for increase of belief in God and "certainly" for augmentation of belief in the World betrays the trend of the man's nature and the tilt of his faith.

De Lubac makes a gallant complicated attempt to get round the difficulties of the text for a Christian, difficulties whose awareness he evinces by comments like: "We would not deny that there is something over-nice and paradoxical in the turn which Pere Teilhard gives to his thought..."⁴ - "His style of writing, in the opening passage of How I Believe, is philosophically unsatisfactory until it is explained by what follows..."⁵ - "Here, at the very beginning of his apologetic task, he finds himself obliged to use language that is still elliptical and involves a certain ambiguity."⁶ These very comments should expose the wrong-headedness of de Lubac's approach, which is one with that of Pere Roger Leys whose interpretation he approves. It ignores the straightforward drift of Teilhard's expression.

Its folly can be clearly seen if we look at de Lubac's quotation from Leys's French article in the Flemish review Bijdragen, "1963 (pp. 1-20) before opening fire on Teilhard's accusers, Leys⁷ says: "All this passage does is to state with great emphasis that with the world everything else is given. If we accept it, weigh it, and search into its depths, we must find that it depends only from on high, through the Spirit and through God. Teilhard could write the words objected to, because he knew that this fidelity to the world would give back to him what, according to the hypothesis he put forward, he had progressively lost."

Leys's gloss misses the precise point Teilhard makes. Teilhard is at pains to state emphatically that the World, even if it gives nothing that is spiritually significant in a definite way to a Christian, suffices him completely with the broad

4.Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning, p. 132.

5.Ibid., pp. 157-58.

6.Ibid., p. 158.

7.Ibid., p. 185.

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spiritual significance it does give. It is true that Teilhard will be able to find evervthing else, but what he is emphasising is, in the first place, his initial, fundamental and innate religious experience and, in the second place, the all-sufficiency, despite the ill-defined character, of the sense it brings of some universal plenitude and directive care. The hypothetical manifold loss of Christian dogma as a matter not essentially vital is seriously and genuinely meant. Pere Philippe de la Trinire,⁸ though his words are a little lax in one place, is substantially justified in his irony at Leys's expense:

"Consider this extraordinary interpretation: Teilhard says black - that means white...

"In other words, according to Pere Leys, if Teilhard lost his faith in Christ, in a personal God and in the Spirit - well, he has not lost it...he has simply mislaid it temporarily and no doubt will find it again. On such an exegetic principle there is no difficulty in making any author you please say the opposite of what he has written."

Of course, Teilhard does not say he has actually lost his faith in Christianity, nor is it that, relying simply on the World, he will not obtain all that Christianity stands for. He merely says: "If...I were to lose..." But the attitude of the "If" is not, as Leys and de Lubac would designate it, "unreal": it posits a possible realitv and by "lose" Teilhard does mean loss for good and not just a hiding away for the time being. Also, the finding again of Christianity is worked out in the rest of the essay: it is not in the least figured in the passage: rather Teilhard assumes that there may not be any rediscovery. These two motifs make the burden of Philippe de la Trinite's song. And de Lubac⁹ errs in insisting that the critic has not kept in mind "the context of How I Believe, on which Pere Leys' opinion is based". We are not concerned with all that Teilhard can Christianly get out of his concept of the World: we are concerned just with his definitive confession

8.Rome et Teilhard, quoted in Nouveltes de Chretiente (21 May 1964, p. 24) and rcquoted by de Lubac, op. cit., p. 185.

9.Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning, p. 185.

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that he can live and die as a non-Christian but can never divest himself of his confidence in the World. And such is the case not because he takes the World to be pregnant, as Leys and de Lubac make him out to do, with the truths of Christianity but because, even without Christianity, the World is felt by him in the dim depths of his consciousness as secretly a Being, perfect in Itself, who will somehow or other evolve and manifest man's perfection, man's fulfilment, in Its own plenitude.

Both Leys and de Lubac feel their argument supported by the type of work they take How I Believe to be, a work addressed ad Gentiles, to unbelievers or non-Christians, and therefore following the provisional tactics of a classical apologetics which re-arrives at a pre-adopted position through temporary denial of it. But it is untrue to say that How I Believe is avowedly a classical apologetics in a Teilhar-dian form. The procedure Teilhard has followed is plainly set forth by him:¹⁰ "...these pages make no claim to determine the theory of a general apologetics. All I am proposing to do is to describe, so far as I understand them, the developments of a personal experience. As such, what I have to say will not satisfy everybody." Here Teilhard not only disclaims "general apologetics" but, by his last sentence, implies that the provisional tactics of a classical apologetics are not there at all; for, if they were, orthodox Christians would surely be satisfied by what he had to say: his implication is that because of the absence of such an apologetics many orthodox Christians were likely to be dissatisfied. And Teilhard¹¹ further elaborates on his procedure:

"...if I am to demonstrate my Christian faith to myself, I cannot have (nor, in fact, have I ever found) any other way of doing so than by verifying in my own self the legitimacy of a psychological evolution. In the first phase, I feel the need to descend, step by step, to ever more elementary beliefs, until I

10.Christianity and Evolution, p. 97.

11.Ibid., p. 99.

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reach a certain fundamental intuition below which I can no longer distinguish anything at all. In a second phase, I try to re-ascend the natural series (I was on the point of saying 'phylum') of my successive acts of faith in the direction of an over-all view which ultimately is found to coincide with Christianity. First one has to verify the solidity of an inevitable initial faith, and then one has to verify the organic continuity of the successive stages which the augmentations of that faith pass through. I know no other apologetics for my own self and I cannot therefore suggest any other to those for whom I wish the supreme happiness of one day finding themselves face to face with a unified universe."

No tactics of any sort are in view: "a fundamental intuition", which is the true basis of the inner life, is begun with. A genuine psychological evolution and not a manoeuvre at converting an unbeliever is the contents of the essay. The picture of such an evolution is defined as the sole Teilhardian apologetics and it rules out all classical apologetics.

The only ground de Lubac¹² proffers for his ad-Gentiles proposition is Teilhard's phrase, in a letter of March 1947, that How I Believe "was intended for a very special public". De Lubac identifies the "special public" with the scientists Teilhard mixed with. And with a similar assumption the Roman Catholic editor¹³ prefixes a note to the English translation of Teilhard's essay: "This paper was written by Pere Teilhard in answer to a request from Mgr. Bruno de Solages, characteristic of the latter's deep concern for the apostolate." In connection with his essay, Teilhard himself nowhere singles out his fellow-scientists, nowhere refers exclusively to apostolic work among them. Passing from the personal aspect of the essay to a general one, he¹⁴ asks: "The passion for the World from which my faith springs; the dissatisfaction, too, which I experience at first when I am confronted by any of the

12.Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning, pp. 175-76.

13.christianity and Evolution, p. 96.

14.Ibid., p. 130.

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ancient forms of religion - are not both these [the]¹⁵ traces in my heart of the uneasiness and expectancy which characterize the religious state of the world today?" And he illustrates the religious state by listing three movements: "The East seems already to have forgotten the original passivity of its pantheism. The cult of progress is continually opening up its cosmogonies ever more widely to the forces of spirit and emancipation. Christianity is beginning to accept man's effort. In these three branches the same spirit which made me what I am is obscurely at work." Thus Christians are openly said to be part of his audience. And his fellow-scientists are only one out of three groups forming his "special public".

We could even pick out Christians as especially the people Teilhard had in mind. If faith in the World was his "fundamental intuition", his "inevitable initial faith" and if, in his eyes, Christianity by and large was reluctant to accept "man's effort" and was only lately beginning to do so, the hammer-ing-in of World-faith would be most effective as a blow to it. And we have actually a direct clue that writings like How I Believe were not addressed ad Gentiles but the other way around. In a letter of 29 October 1949 Teilhard again discusses "faith in Heaven" and "faith in Earth" as both leading to the same religious conclusion:

"The synthesis of the two forms of faith in Christo Jesu is not an arbitrarily chosen tactical move ad usum infidelium. It represents hic et nunc a condition of survival for an increasing number of Christians. We have to choose right now between the Christianising of neo-humanism and its condemnation. The problem is with us now, and the time is short."¹⁶

Evidently, the main audience addressed is Christian believers, not "infidels". Teilhard wants them to change, to take account of the World, accept Science whole-heartedly and realise God's concrete presence in the evolving universe

15.My insertion to prevent the mistake of reading "these" as an adjective of "traces" (K.D.S.).

16.Quoted by Cuenot, Teilhard de Chardin, A Biographical Study (Burns and Oates, London, 1965), p. 271.

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through scientific pointers and a new pantheism. A letter of 4 May 1931 discloses "the idea - very close to my heart, as you know - that in future the faith in Christ will never hold its own or be extended except through the intermediary of faith in the World."¹⁷

On the very job undertaken by How I Believe a straight light is available in Robert Speaight's biography of its author. After informing us that Teilhard acceded to de Solages' request for his credo, Speaight¹⁸ says: "He believed himself that the personal tone of the essay would disarm theological objections, and he told Bruno de Solages that he would 'never find it possible to think or to write anything other than these pages'." The essay was evidently the credo of one who was "irreducibly 'hyper-Catholic'" (to use a label Teilhard applied to himself elsewhere¹⁹), meant to be utterly candid, hiding nothing of his non-orthodoxy, hoping to be a guide ahead to his fellow-Christians and yet sufficiently Christian in spirit at the end to expect understanding and tolerance from them. He was on the defensive against orthodoxy and it was the orthodox, not the "Gentiles", who were to be converted by his essay, and for their conversion the mighty chord of faith in the World had to be struck as the key-note. What Speaight quotes from Teilhard reveals also the finality for Teilhard of this opening chord no less than of the Christian-sounding yet really radical readjustment he wanted of Roman Catholicism through his specific brand of "Universal Christ", towards which "we have no better way - no other way, even - ...than fully to accept the most modern concepts of evolution"²⁰ and by which "my deepest 'pantheist' aspirations are satisfied, guided and reassured".²¹

17.Letters from a Traveller (Collins, Fontana Religious Books, London, 1967), p. 132.

18.Teilhard de Chardin: A Biography (Collins, London, 1968), p. 209.

19.Letters to Leon tine Zanta (Collins, London, 1969), p. 36 (Introduction by Henri de Lubac).

20.Christianity and Evolution, p. 126,

21.Ibid., p. 127.

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Commentators like de Lubac forget that, though the "Christly" could not be neglected by Teilhard in his whole-view, it never had such natural, early, deep and intense roots as the "cosmic". Further, the "Christly" did no more than render the "cosmic" human and intimate: without being given the universal dimension, the "Christly" meant nothing to Teilhard, whereas without being "Christlv" the "cosmic" would still make Teilhard's life worthwhile. That indeed is the core of the disputed passage.

And this truth blazes out at us in the essay not only from there. Once more - in about the middle of the piece -Teilhard²² speaks of the individual developments of his faith coming to a stop and culminating "at a point at which, were I to lose confidence in all revealed religion, I would still, I believe, be firmly anchored". Then, towards the end of the piece, we discover not only the mention²³ of "the 'cosmic sense' from which germinates the whole organism of my faith" but also the comparative statement:²⁴ "I tried to place at the head of the universe which I

Nor is How I Believe a freakish or isolated witness - except for the reminiscence in Le Coeur de la Matiere in 1950 and Cuenot's report of a talk in the same year - to the priority and sufficiency. In the essay, My Universe, written in 1923 - eleven years before - Teilhard²⁵ lays, "directly side by side", the two corner-stones of his interior life. One of them is the belief "(a) That it is better to be conscious than not to be conscious" and

22.Ibid., p. 117

23.Ibid., p. 124.

24.Ibid., p. 128.

25.Science and Christ, pp. 40-41.

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"(b) That it is better to be more conscious than less conscious". Its companion is "Faith in life, in other words the unshakeable certainty that the universe considered as a whole

a.Has a goal.

b.Cannot take the wrong road nor come to a halt in mid-journey." Teilhard continues with the grand attestation:

"Taken in isolation, only a pathetically insignificant proportion of the elements of the world, sad to say, turns out successfully. With absolute conviction, I refuse to extend this total contingency to the elements as a collective whole. I cannot admit that the universe is a failure... Before looking for any explanation of the thing, I believe in the fact that the world, taken as a whole, is assured of attaining its end, that is to say (in virtue of our first principle) of arriving at a certain higher degree of consciousness.

"I believe by inference: because, if the universe has hitherto been successful in the unlikely task of bringing human thought to birth in what seems to us an unimaginable tangle of chances and mishaps, it means that it is fundamentally directed by a power that is eminently in control of the elements that make up the universe. I believe it, too, from necessity: because, if I thought that the solidity of the substance in which I am implicated was not proof against any test, I would feel completely lost and despairing. Finally, and perhaps most of all, I believe it from love: because I love the universe that surrounds me too dearly not to have confidence in it."

Sixteen years after this utterance and five years after How I Believe we hear the identical accents in The Phenomenon of Man. As regards man's future, as regards the problem whether a greater state of evolved being is open to us, Teilhard, in view of "the promise of a whole world" that has reached in its evolution the stage where modern man stands, asks: "How can we still speak of a simple game of chance? Have we the right to hesitate?" Quite independent of Christianity, which is not yet under discussion, and even apart from any deduction of a divine final peak of evolution from physical and biologi-

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cal data, Teilhard's answer²⁶ rings out:

"The world is too big a concern for that. To bring us into existence it has from the beginning juggled miraculously with too many improbabilities for there to be any risk whatever in committing ourselves further and following it right to the end. If it undertook the task, it is because it can finish it, following the same methods and with the same infallibility with which it began."

Once more we have the basic vision and attitude found in those earlier words about "a world that is one and infalli-able", in which faith, however "ill-defined", is to be placed, "wherever it may lead me".

26, The Phenomenon of Man, p. 234.

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