Part One
THE REAL RELIGION OF TEILHARD
DE CHARDIN
His Version of Christianity and
Sri Aurobindo's
Expose of the Ancient Vedanta
The Roman Catholic Church has shown deep concern over the real religion behind the scientific-spiritual philosophy of the Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Apropos of some declarations of his, a very disturbing question has arisen for it: "Was Teilhard a pantheist?"
According to pantheism, the universe is a single infinite Being manifesting all that is physical and all that is psychological as two aspects of itself, revealing to the inner sight all things as one equal stuff of divinity and absorbing into a Totality of Universal Soul all individual souls that in mystical experience unite with it, individual souls being ultimately this Totality's own partial aspects or phases.
In the eyes of Roman Catholic thought, pantheism stands sharply over against the doctrine of Christianity that a Personal God other than the universe and other than the human soul has created both, established strict distinctions between the divine, the non-divine, the anti-divine, and ensures even in the unitive life of mysticism an unqualified survival of human personality, a non-absorption of the soul of the individual. To Roman Catholicism, the individual soul unites with God in a relationship of intimate and interpenetrative love, such that it is never merged in Him but has always a separate existence of its own though this existence is due altogether to God's will. Further, in spite of pantheists speaking of beatitude and self-universalisation when the individual soul is absorbed in the divine Totality, Roman Catholic thought maintains that in pantheistic mysticism a reversal rather than a fulfilment takes place: the individual soul loses all consciousness and suffers dissolution.
Naturally, therefore, zealous efforts have been made to prove that Teilhard's pantheistic-seeming declarations were not those of a true pantheist but only of a formulator, in original terms, of two ideas of Christianity: (1) God, who is transcendent of the world, is also omnipresent in the world. His is an omnipresence of action by which He is everywhere
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as a supreme causative power that is creator of the universe and ever remains as its preserver, the ground of all its processes, and that can intervene in them at any time; (2) God is incarnate in Jesus Christ. His incarnation directly infuses divinity into the world of matter and, by virtue of Christ's resurrection after his death, it keeps a special intermediary divine presence at all places and at all times, a Holy Spirit constituting a mystical Body and unifying all believers, a Body whose nucleus is the Christ-appointed Church. This intermediary presence assures for the material universe Christ's return at the end of history, his Parousia or Reappearance, to gather up his followers completely in that Body and, uniting them with him, unite them with God.
Roman Catholic thinking, careful not to imply that God in any way constitutes the universe or has in any respect identity with its finite elements or brings about in any sense a fusion of the human soul with Him, sees no use at all in pantheism. It endeavours also to show Teilhard in the same light as itself and quotes again and again his strictures on that doctrine. But, for all his strictures, Teilhard's attitude is poles apart.
He speaks of "false pantheism" and "true pantheism". To him there is something of indispensable value which is distorted in the former, and when freed from the distortion it yields a truth lacking in Christianity as Roman Catholicism has understood it but sorely needed by every religion and actually waiting in the heart of Christianity. That is why he1 says: "The trails of false pantheism bear witness to our immense need for some revealing word to come from the mouth of Him who is." And this revealing word is what Teilhard calls the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ. The function of such a Christ is evidently different from whatever cosmic office Christianity has so far attributed to Jesus in extension of his nature as God-man. For, that office is inde-
1. The Divine Milieu, translated by Bernard Wall (Harper & Row, New York, 1960), p. 109.
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pendent of anything characteristic of a Pantheos, whereas the cosmic function Teilhard ascribes to his Christ is one whose absence would render a Pantheos eminently seductive. Bruno de Solages and Henri de Lubac,2 fellow-Jesuits, interpreting Teilhard, cannot help noting: "It is faith in the divine Omnipresence, completed by the doctrine of the Universal Christ, that will provide the antidote to the temptations of pantheism." We get the same conviction in another shape when Teilhard3 affirms: "The Universalised Christ takes over, correcting and completing them, the energies that un-doubtedly lie hidden in modern forms of pantheism... If Christianity is to keep its place at the head of mankind, it must make itself explicitly recognisable as a sort of 'pan-Christism'..." The implication of such statements is clear: something contained in pantheism has to be added to Christianity while something else in it is to be left out. The result is bound to be both pantheism Christianised and Christianity pantheised.
Perhaps the most concrete illustration of the two-aspected result is in one of the three stories Teilhard wrote in connection with his service as a stretcher-bearer during World War I. The stories called "Christ in the World of Matter" are told about a "friend" before an engagement at Douaument in 1916, but, as the Editor's note says, "the 'friend' is clearly himself".4 At one point the "friend" confesses: "I had always... been by temperament a 'pantheist'. I had always felt the pantheist's yearnings to be native to me and unarguable; but had never dared to give full rein to them because I could not see how to reconcile them with my faith."5 A striking way in which the reconciliation comes is when the "friend" meditates before a picture of Christ. What happens is thus related:6
2.Writings in Time of War, (Collins, Fontana Books, London, 1968), p. 121, fn. 10.
3.Science and Christ (Collins, London, 1968), p. 124.
4.The Hymn of the Universe (Harper & Row, New York, 1965), p. 42, fn. 2.
5.Ibid., pp. 53-54.
6.Ibid., 42-43.
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"...as I allowed my gaze to wander over the figure's outlines I suddenly became aware that these were melting away: they were dissolving, but in a special manner, hard to describe in words. When I tried to hold in my gaze the outline of the figure of Christ it seemed to me to be clearly defined; but then, if I let this effort relax, at once these contours, and the folds of Christ's garment, the lustre of his hair and the bloom of his flesh, all seemed to merge as it were (though without vanishing away) into the rest of the picture. It was as though the planes which marked off the figure of Christ from the world surrounding it were melting into a single vibrant surface whereon all demarcations vanished...
"I perceived that the vibrant atmosphere which surrounded Christ like an aureole was no longer confined to a narrow space about him, but radiated outwards to infinity. Through this there passed from time to time what seemed like trails of phosphorescence, indicating a Continuous gushing-forth to the outermost spheres of the realm of matter and delineating a sort of blood stream or nervous system running through the totality of life.
"The entire universe was vibrant! And yet, when I directed my gaze to particular objects, one by one, I found them still as clearly defined as ever in their undiminished individuality."
What we have here is the whole physical world vibrating as the Cosmic Christ and therefore every part of it sharing in his existence, without either its own finite character being lost or his central all-animating dominance being annulled. Inasmuch as the cosmic stuff gets subtly deified in Christ, we have Christianity pantheised, while insofar as Christ retains his sovereign personality in spite of his universal extension, we have pantheism Christianised. The essence of pantheism and the essence of Christianity are here. And no summing up of them can be more succinct and more vivid than the "friend'"s own words:7 "I live at the heart of a single, unique Element, the Centre of the universe and present in each part
7. Ibid., p. 54.
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of it: personal Love and cosmic Power."
A more elaborate expression, driving home the pantheism with which Teilhard's Cosmic Christ is instinct, may be offered by stringing together some passages from the collection entitled "Pensees" made by Fernande Tardivel from Teilhard's writings:
"Lord Jesus Christ, you truly contain within your gentleness, within your humanity, all the unyielding immensity and grandeur of the world. And it is because of this, it is because there exists in you the ineffable synthesis of what our human thought and experience would never have dared join together in order to adore them - element and totality, the one and the many, mind and matter, the infinite and the personal; it is because of the indefinable contours which this complexity gives to your appearance and to your activity, that my heart, enamoured of cosmic reality, gives itself passionately to you,
"I love you as the source, the activating and life-giving ambience, the term and consummation, of the world, even of the natural world, and of its present becoming.
"You the centre at which all things meet and which stretches out over all things so as to draw them back into itself: I love you for the extensions of your body and soul to the farthest corners of creation through grace, through life, and through matter.
"Lord Jesus, you who are as gentle as the human heart, as fiery as the forces of nature, as intimate as life itself, you in whom I can melt away and with whom I must have mastery and freedom: I love you as a world, as this world which has captivated my heart; - and it is you, I now realize, that my brother-men, even those who do not believe, sense and seek throughout the magic immensities of the cosmos."8
"In the life springing up within me, in the material elements that sustain me, it is not just your gifts that I discern: it is you yourself that I encounter."9
8.Ibid., pp. 75-76,
9.Ibid., pp. 84-85.
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"Lord, once again I ask: which is the more precious of these two beatitudes, that all things are means through which I can touch you, or that you yourself are so 'universal' that I can experience you and lay hold on you in every creature?"10
"Lord, by every innate impulse and through all the hazards of my life I have been driven ceaselessly to search for you and to set you in the heart of the universe of matter,"11
"...fire, pestilence, earthquake, storm, the unleashing of dark moral forces, all these sweep away ruthlessly, in an instant, what we had laboured with mind and heart to build up and make beautiful.
"Lord God, my dignity as a man forbids me to shut my eyes to this, like an animal or a child; therefore, lest I succumb to the temptation to curse the universe, and the Maker of the universe, teach me to adore it by seeing you hidden within it. Say once again to me, Lord, those great and liberating words, the words which are at once revealing light and effective power: hoc est Corpus meum ['This is my Body']."12
Teilhard's "pan-Christism" stands unequivocally defined by these passages. With their help we can understand the short definition he13 has given of it in direct relation to the term: "pan-Christism - which, in fact, is simply the notion of the mystical Body, taken in its fullest and most profound sense, and the extension to the universe of the attributes already accorded (particularly with reference to human society) to Christ the King." Our passages show how far beyond traditional Christianity the Christ of Teilhard goes and hence how mistaken would be the attempt, just because this Christianity has always talked of Christ's mystical Body, to read in the above definition merely this Christianity expanded along its own line. Surely, the mystical Body of tradition, be it ever so expanded, cannot make us "love" Christ as "this world" or say to him that "in the material elements that sustain me,...it
10.Ibid., p. 140.
11.Ibid.,
12.Ibid., p. 90.
13.Science and Christ, p.
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is you yourself that I encounter" or ask him to "teach" us "to adore" the "universe" by "seeing" him "hidden within it". The operative words render the very cosmos a species of Christ-stuff - no doubt inferior to the central cosmic Christ-being but all the same sharing to some measure the latter's direct divinity: Christ's mystical Body on a cosmic scale is for Teilhard both a natural and a supernatural reality - complete, perfect, plenary as supernature and developing, progressive, evolutionary as nature. Teilhard never restricts Christ to the cosmos by an exclusive identification with it but he implicitly or explicitly intends the cosmos to be considered - within whatever limits - Christie.
Roman Catholic exegetes are confused by this double vision, finding as they do that Teilhard seems to say "Yes" and "No" simultaneously. So, one of his most distinguished commentators, de Lubac,14 writes: "He tried to show in our Lord Jesus Christ 'the synthesis of the created Universe and its Creator': did he not sometimes seem to establish this synthesis at a too accessible level and thus, in spite of the qualifications and corrections we have noted, and against his unmistakable intention, to some degree naturalize Christ?" The naturalisation of Christ to some degree is undeniable and cannot be helped: it logically arises out of Teilhard's panthei-sation of Christianity, But de Lubac's confusion reflects Teilhard's own vacillations and ambivalences.
A born pantheist, deeply realising, as an eminent coreligionist, Piet Smulders,15 informs us, the two great magnets pantheism held before his soul - (1) "the possibility of finding in every thing and in every action a contact with the ultimate fountainhead of being" and (2) "the ideal of a total and universal unification" - Teilhard repeatedly let himself go towards Christifying the cosmos and cosmicising Christ. But he tried always to counterbalance this tendency because of his intellectual misconception that to unite with the Divine of
14.The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (Collins, London, 1967), p. 262.
15.The Design of Teilhard de Chardin, An Essay in Theological Reflection, translated by Arthur Gibson (The Newman Press, Westminster, Maryland, 1967), pp. 121-22.
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pantheism spells self-loss and facile inactivity for the present peak of evolution, the human person. He sought a compromise by differentiating world and soul from God, yet affirming a physical and organic God-involvement in all concerns of cosmic history. Thus he wrote:16 "God, who cannot in any way blend and be mingled with the creation which he sustains and animates and binds together, is nonetheless present in the birth, the growth and the consummation of all things."
What Teilhard here really means is that God's presence in evolution must not be confined to evolution: he must exceed it, he must be already an eternal and self-consummated being. To blend or be mingled with evolution amounts in Teilhard's eyes to be bound down to it, debarred from a transcendent existence. Short of being so debarred, God can be concretely and intrinsically one with the evolving cosmos. And it is his concrete and intrinsic oneness with it, his physical and organic inwardness to it, that Teilhard continually celebrates and that charges with a religious passion at once for Christ and for evolution a passage like the following:17
"Since Jesus was born, and grew to his full stature, and died, everything has continued to move forward because Christ is not yet fully formed: he has not yet gathered about him the last folds of his robe of flesh and of love which is made up of his faithful followers. The mystical Christ has not yet attained to his full growth; and therefore the same is true of the cosmic Christ. Both of these are simultaneously in the state of being and becoming; and it is from the prolongation of this process of becoming that all created activity ultimately springs. Christ is the end-point of the evolution, even the natural evolution, of all beings; and therefore evolution is holy."
Here the distinction essayed in the earlier quotation tends to fade away. The same activity under two aspects appears to be there. Christ is not only a supernatural cosmic presence: he
16.Hymn of the Universe, "Pensees", p. 143.
17.Ibid., p. 133.
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is also universal nature, natural evolution itself moving towards its world-fulfilling term. He is not only present in but also himself "the birth, the growth and the consummation of all things". He both stands distinct in his own being and blends and is mingled with his creation.
A similar impression we get of Christ when Teilhard18 tells us of him: "...his directing and informing influence runs through the whole range of human works, of material determinisms and cosmic evolutions. By convention, we call these lower processes in the universe 'natural'. In reality, by virtue of Christ's establishment as head of the cosmos, they are steeped in final purpose, in supernatural life, even to what is most palpable in their reality. Everything around us is physically Christified, and everything...can become progressively more so."
After saying the above, Teilhard19 adds: "In this 'pan-Christism', it is evident, there is no false pantheism..." And he goes on to say of Christ: "his universal influence far from dissociating, consolidates; far from confusing, differentiates; far from allowing the soul to wallow in a vague, supine union, it drives it ever higher along the hard and fast paths of action. The danger of false pantheisms has been removed, and yet we retain the irreplaceable strength of the religious life that the pantheists unjustly claim as their own."
"The irreplaceable strength of the religious life", to which Teilhard refers, is, of course, the pantheists' passion for the divine All and their seeing of the divine All in each part of the cosmos. By reproducing in Christianity this strength without accepting pantheism's supposed submergence of selfhood and relaxation of effort, Teilhard hoped to bring into play one of the two means - the other being evolutionism's progressive earth-building drive - which he deemed necessary in order to counteract the "detaching mysticism" he found in the Roman Catholic religion, its stress on a supra-cosmic transcendent
18.Science and Christ, pp. 58-59,
19.Ibid., p. 59.
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goal, its neglect of the concerns of modem Humanism, its refusal to take the world and its progress as an absolute on a par with the absolute of what is beyond the world, its indifference to evolution's "God ahead" and its preoccupation with revelation's "God above". The Christ Teilhard wants is the one about whom he believes:20 "...you do more than simply stand apart from things as their master, you are more than the incomparable splendour of the universe, you are, too, the dominating influence that penetrates us, holds us, "and draws us through the inmost core of our most imperative and most deep-rooted desires; you are the cosmic being who envelops and fulfils us in the perfection of his unity." Here the Teilhard to whom pantheistic aspirations were innate finds tongue and he is not always sure that the Christ whom he wants is the Christ who has come down in tradition. That is why, soon after hailing Christ as "the cosmic being" he21 lowers his voice, as it were, and prays: "There is one thing more, Lord: just one thing, but it is the most difficult of all, and, what is worse, it is a thing that you, perhaps, have condemned. It is this: if I am to have a share in your kingdom, I must on no account reject this radiant world in the ecstatic delight of which I opened my eyes."
The concluding phrase brings up the essential, the fundamental Teilhard, the born pantheist, and we are called back to several turns of attitude in the passages we have cited from Tardivel's selections: "my heart, enamoured of cosmic reality" - "this world which has captivated my heart" - "the magic immensities of the cosmos". And it is significant of the essential and fundamental Teilhard that he22 should follow up the expression "evolution is holy" with the words: "There we have the truth that makes free, the divinely prepared cure for faithful but ardently moved minds that suffer because they
20.The Prayer of the Universe, Selections from Writings in Time of War, "Cosmic Life", p. 83.
21.Ibid., p. 84.
22.Ibid., p. 92
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cannot reconcile in themselves two almost equally imperative and vital impulses, faith in the world and faith in God." Here we see the cause of the poise and peace Teilhard achieved in himself by harmonising what his co-religionists found mutually contradictory: his Roman Catholicism and his pantheism. In those lyrical phrases where his world-intoxication breaks out, we have a pointer to the priority of his pantheism to his Roman Catholicism.
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