Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Faith in the World, the Concept of Omega,

the Vision of Christ's Parousia

Perhaps the champions of Christian Orthodoxy will bring up the confession Teilhard makes in the Phenomenon of Man when, towards the close of the book, he considers "The Christian Phenomenon", The confession is apropos of his concept of Omega.

We may first summarise this concept. According to Teilhard, evolution produces, in the course of time, systems ever more complex in the sense that a larger and larger variety of elements are organised around a more and more distinct centre: the atom, the mega-molecule, the virus, the amoeba, the plant, the animal, man. Teilhard further notes in connection with living entities that with the greater degree of centred complexity there goes a greater degree of consciousness. Evolution proceeds in the direction of increasing complexity-consciousness. Man, with his all-centring brain, is its maximum result so far. But we cannot cry a halt to evolution.

We see everywhere today a penchant for socialisation within each country and a general move for the unification of mankind and for a pooling of knowledge and resources. The biological trend towards a convergence, a synthesis, of elements in a dominating centre is evident again in that penchant and this move. Evolution is proceeding towards a sort of super-organism formed of all human individuals and possessing a unified superconsciousness. The final stage, the consummating term of history, lying in the remote future, Teilhard calls "Omega Point". Omega is the "Ultra-human", the "God Ahead", who is the goal of earthly evolution. As the highest product of evolution is the Human Person, intensely conscious of a self as well as broadly aware of the totality to which he belongs, progress cannot devalue this state but must refine and sublimate and perfect it, removing whatever limitations it still bears, whatever egoism and individualism it has carried in its train. So Omega will be a complexity, a

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convergence, a synthesis of human centres in a new supreme Centre. This supreme Centre of personal centres will be a Super-Person, by union with whom those centres will themselves be super-personalised. Omega will be the divine consummation of our universe brought about by an action of love and a co-operative pursuit of research: it will be a meeting and mingling of the Many and the One to form a single-hearted single-minded All.

But Omega is not only a divine marvel of the future: if the evolving cosmos has a direction, if it progresses towards Omega Point across its myriad travail of ages, through a forward groping amidst a diverse play of chance, then Omega must be also a divine wonder of the past and present, an already existent pole of attraction at the same time that it is in a phenomenal process of formation: it is an eternal Prime Mover from in-front, an Omega who is also an Alpha.

Now, Teilhard, basing himself on St. Paul and St. John, stresses the cosmic function of Christ. This function starts with the Incarnation which joins Christ to the material universe. It passes through his Resurrection from the dead by which he becomes the Universal Power who will gather everything together, transform everything and finally "close in upon himself and his conquests, thereby rejoining, in a final gesture, the divine focus he has never left".¹ In that focus there will be complete unity and yet each element will have its own fulfilment. Looking at that ultimate result Teilhard² writes: "The universe fulfilling itself in a synthesis of centres in perfect conformity with the laws of union. God, the Centre of centres. In that final vision the Christian dogma culminates. And so exactly, so perfectly does this coincide with the Omega Point that doubtless I should never have ventured to envisage the latter or formulate the hypothesis rationally if, in my consciousness as a believer, I had not found not only its speculative model but also its living reality."

1.The Phenomenon of Man, p. 294.

2.ibid.

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We may be asked: "Do not these words put Christianity prior to faith in the World?"

Let us examine them carefully- What Teilhard is concerned with is nothing else than Christianity and Omega Point. The proper question is: "Do they base the concept of Omega on Christianity?" Here faith in the World is not involved at all. But, as that concept crowns this faith, it is important to ascertain whether Christianity really plays a crucial mediating role between them.

The words tell us that the Omega-concept was suggested by the Christian doctrine of the Parousia, the Second Coming of Christ in the far future to collect his adherents and their universe into his mystical Body. But the actual working out of the concept took no help from Christianity. It was based entirely on Teilhard's scientific observation and insight. In the very chapter on the Christian Phenomenon he³ tells us about the need of Omega if reflective life is to continue to function and to progress: "This is the postulate to which we have been led logically by the integral application to man of the experimental laws of evolution." And the Preface to The Phenomenon of Man⁴ begins by saying: "If this book is to be properly understood, it must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a sort of theological essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise." The warning means that even if Christianity set him to look for Omega Point he would never have accepted such a summit for evolution in the absence of scientific sign-posts to it. The vision in which Christian dogma culminates did no more than suggest a scientific possibility: the conviction of the truth of what had been suggested came wholly and solely from science. And the Christian Phenomenon itself is treated without religious preconceptions, as Teilhard ⁵ assures us in the chapter devoted to it: "As I am living at the heart of the Christian world, I might be suspected of wanting to introduce an apologia by

3.Ibid., p. 291.

4.MA., p. 29.

5.Ibid., p. 292.

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artifice. But,...so far as it is possible for a man to separate in himself the various planes of knowledge, it is not the convinced believer but the naturalist who is asking for a hearing."

In The Phenomenon of Man it is the naturalist who everywhere has priority in any significant computation. The hint for a scientific hypothesis can come from anywhere. All scientists, as Karl Popper has demonstrated, begin with a "hunch", an "intuition": the very method of theoretical science, as Einstein's General Theory of Relativity has exemplified, proceeds by way of a "free creation", an imaginative leap. Such a point de depart makes no odds to the scientific character of an inquiry, provided the steps proper to the subsequent procedure are taken: logical deduction and whatever experimental verification is proper to each field. The fact that belief in the Parousia of Christ sparked off the Omega-concept is really neither here nor there as far as the naturalist claim of Teilhard's book is concerned. In the establishment of Omega Point the naturalist has undoubted priority over the Christian.

And this priority becomes dazzlingly apparent in Teilhard if we pose a query counter to the one we commenced with. Let us ask: "Would Teilhard believe in the Parousia of Christ if he did not vision Omega Point?"

Omega Point means a total maturation of mankind - a maturation represented by the existence of a collective unit of unanimity. Without such a maturation, would Teilhard have faith in the completion of Christ's mystical Body? His own answer 6 is unmistakable: "We continue from force of habit to think of the Parousia, whereby the Kingdom of Heaven is to be consummated on Earth, as an event of a purely catastrophic nature - that is to say, liable to come about at any moment in

6. The Future of Man, translated by Norman Denny (Collins, Fontana Books, London, 1969), p. 280,

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view of Mankind in an actual state of anthropogenesis, that the parousiac spark can, of physical and organic necessity, only be kindled between Heaven and a Mankind which has biologically reached a certain critical evolutionary point of collective maturity?"

To the word "anthropogenesis" here Teilhard has the footnote: "And, it may be added, in perfect analogy with the mystery of the first Christmas which (as everyone agrees) could only have happened between Heaven and an Earth which was prepared, socially, politically and psychologically, to receive Jesus,"

There is also the categorical statement:⁷ "The truth is that the Kingdom of Christ, to which our allegiance is sworn, cannot be established...except upon an earth that has been taken, along the roads of technology and thought, to the extreme limit of its humanisation."

A still more positive assertion we encounter in How I Believe:" "Under the combined pressure of science and philosophy, we are being forced, experientially and intellectually, to accept the world as a co-ordinated system of activity which is gradually rising up towards freedom and consciousness. The only satisfactory way of interpreting this process...is to regard it as irreversible and convergent. Thus, ahead of us, a universal cosmic centre is taking on definition, in which everything reaches its term, in which everything is explained, is felt, and is ordered. It is, then, in this physical pole of universal evolution that we must, in my view, locate and recognise the plenitude of Christ. For in no other type of cosmos, and in no other place, can any being, no matter how divine he be, carry out the function of universal consolidation and universal animation which Christian dogma attributes to Christ."

A footnote to the end of the passage goes: "In other words, Christ needs to find a world-peak for his consummation, just as he needed to find a woman for his conception."

7 Science and Christ, p. 205.

8. Christianity and Evolution, pp. 127-28.

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The words from How I Believe mention not only the purely philosophic-scientific grounds on which the concept of Omega Point is supported but also the complete dependence of belief in the Parousia on this concept. To Teilhard, that belief, however inspired it may be by a divinity in whom he had faith, would be an empty and meaningless hope without this concept. Although the Parousiac belief is chronologically prior, the Omega-concept has a logical priority.

As for faith in the World, pure and simple - a posture antecedent to the Omega-concept - it has both a logical and a chronological priority. Teilhard's confession of his Parousiac belief is quite irrelevant to it. This faith is connected only with "the presence of the Whole"⁹ that he felt from his childhood, and in connection with this feeling of his we may terminate our discussion with a clinching phrase from How I Believe:^10" "...it is precisely the value of this primordial intuition which seems to me to hold up the whole edifice of my belief."

And a sharp autobiographical light is cast on this primordial intuition by a passage¹¹ which is almost as famous as the one in the first part of How I Believe though it has not provoked any comparable controversy:

"It is not that I have laboriously discovered the whole; it is the whole that has presented itself to me, imposed itself on me through a sort of 'cosmic consciousness'. It is the attraction of the whole that has set everything in motion in me, has animated and given organic form to everything. It is because I feel the whole and love it passionately that 1 believe in the primacy of being - and that 1 cannot admit that life meets a final check - and that I cannot look for a lesser reward than this whole itself

"Philosophically and psychologically,...nothing in the world is intelligible except in and starting from the whole."

As to the exact relationship between the object of Teilhard's "cosmic consciousness " - the World that was the

9. Ibid., p. 102.

10.Ibid.

11.Science and Christ, pp. 43-44.

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foundation of his religious life - and the Christianity under whose aspect he came to view the World, we have a very revealing phrase which puts his Omega-concept in its proper perspective within the context of these two faiths. It occurs in the same essay, "My Universe", as the above passage - the essay whose purpose he¹² states thus: "All I wish to do is to explain how I personally understand the world to which I have been progressively more fully introduced by the inevitable development of my consciousness as a man and a Christian." The revealing phrase runs:¹³ "My philosophical skill may be greater or less [than that of my critics], but one fact will remain permanently unchallenged: that an ordinary man of the twentieth century, because he shared as any one else would in the ideas and cares of his own time, has been unable to find the proper balance for his interior life except in a unitary concept, based upon physics, of the world and Christ - and that therein he has found unbounded peace and room for personal development."

Absolutely unequivocal is the declaration here that the all-fulfilling harmony Teilhard has felt between his faith in the World and his faith in Christ has its basis in the grand conclusion to which physics has led him: the Omega-concept. Physics, starting with the World which for Teilhard was one and infallible and had undeniable value, gave him the vision of a progressive complexity-consciousness and a convergent evolution which would culminate in the realisation of Omega Point, in the unfolding of a Divine Plenitude. This vision alone rendered convincing and credible the Christ of the Parousia, the universal Christie expansion which he had religiously derived from his acceptance of the historical Jesus as a God-Man and which had served as an inspiring idea to his search for the implications of evolutionary physics but which would have been to him an unactualisable fantasy instead of a supernatural truth if physics had failed to

12.Ibid., p. 37.

13.Ibid., pp. 37-38.

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disclose an Omega Point for the cosmic whole primordially intuited by Teilhard. -

In no way was the Parousiac Christ palpably foundational or sufficient. It is Omegalic physics, scientifically reasoned out, that endowed him with reality and unified him with the World-Whole in which Teilhard had an inborn faith and from which his physics proceeded Omega-wards.

So we may well repeat that Teilhard's religious sense of "the cosmic" was stronger than his priestly convictions and was deeper as well as earlier than his love of "the Christly".

We may also answer the question we asked: "Did Christianity really play a crucial mediating role between his faith in the World and his concept of Omega?" Our answer is: "It did not. World-faith led to physics. Physics led to the Omega-concept. And the Omega-concept was the crucial mediator between World-faith and Christianity."

Even further we may go and say: "Faith in a World that is one and infallible and good, World-faith wherever it may lead Teilhard, implies a fulfilling destiny for the universal process, a consummating finality which can be termed Omega. The Omega-concept is significantly connected, in however embryonic a way, not with 'the Christly' but with 'the cosmic'."

All in all, Teilhardism is best seen as "the Christly" concentrated in "the cosmic" and not vice versa. Whatever endeavour Teilhard made in the opposite direction did injustice and violence to his fundamental feeling. Not that the Super-Person that is his Christ need be irreconcilable with the anterior bedrock credo. But the reconciliation is impossible in the traditional terms of the Christian religion, where the world does not itself partake of God-stuff and is not projected from God's own being. And if, following Teilhard's self-misleading trend, we insist, as most Roman Catholic exeget-ists do, on explaining him away as an orthodox in a heterodox garb, we miss the living beat of Teilhardism and falsify the deepest significance of his spiritual insights.

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