Part Two
THE BASIC TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
AND THE MODERN RELIGIOUS INTUITION
I
The Fundamentals of Teilhard's Faith: T.
(1)
It is our thesis that among contemporary Europe's religious thinkers Teilhard de Chardin is a case sui generis calling us beyond easy and exclusive labels to a truth at once of the present-day West and of the ancient East.
He is not only complex but also puzzling - and he is a puzzle to his own being no less than to others. Just as he is basically an unorthodox Roman Catholic and cannot be fitted into mere Christianity, as his co-religionist admirers want, so too is he a strange heretic and cannot be fitted into mere pantheism, as his co-religionist critics contend. But he has himself given a handle to either party. Continually he sways between his openly confessed inborn pantheist temperament and the equally sincere Christian responses evoked in his heart and mind by early training and later discipline. He never quite finds the correct poise to which, beyond both mere Christianity and mere pantheism, his deepest attempts at self-clarification point. This poise may broadly be termed the modern religious intuition. And that intuition in its turn may be defined in general as an evolutionist version of what is in essence the original many-sided as distinguished from the later single-tracked Vedanta.
*
Not that those who would connect Teilhard to orthodoxy are as sweeping in their championship of his cause as are his critics in running him down. They admit considerable obstacles in several places and positively reject some of his ideas. But they still argue that on the whole and in his centrality he
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is a genuine Christian adhering to traditional truth no less than practice, and that even his so-called advanced notions are, in the main, really what the Church has always said in old-fashioned instead of in new-fangled forms. Such, for instance, is the conviction of Emile Rideau, S.J., in an extremely intelligent book which has the honesty to offer us an enormous number of passages illustrating all possible shades of opinion in Teilhard. He quotes a series of them which tend to the orthodox Roman Catholic, and then comments:1
"In these paragraphs the form of expression sometimes, we can recognize, goes beyond what the thought behind it will bear, so that they would seem to suggest that we must look for something that will re-fashion or complement Christianity. They may, however, be interpreted in a way that reduces them to a more classic theme. The 'synthesis' in question is not an augmentation of Christianity in itself, but an enriching of 'our faith' by a better appreciation of its mystery, by an assimilation and integration of human values into the transcendence of its catholicity...."
Rideau2 goes on to a passage from Teilhard which concludes with a reference to "convergence around a Religion of Action which will gradually be recognized as identical with, and subordinate to, a Christianity that has been extended, in a spirit of faith, to its extreme limit" (Le Christianisme et le monde, 1933).
Then he3 introduces a tribute by Teilhard to Christianity. Rideau begins: "'Everything that justly vindicates the sense of man can find a home' in Christianity" - and ends with Teilhard's words: "The new religion will be exactly the same as our old Christianity, but with a new life drawn from the legitimate evolution of its dogmas as they come into contact with new ideas."
1.Teilhard de Chardin: A Guide to His Thought (Collins, London, 1967), p. 643.
2.[bid. We follow the translations of Teilhard's writings as they appear in Rideau's book. They were published before the official versions in English came out and so their wording differs from them.
3.Ibid., pp. 64344.
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Thus Rideau feels assured of the Roman Catholic nature of Teilhardism. Actually the situation is more complicated than he suspects. The complication makes its presence felt in the words: "a Christianity that has been extended, in a spirit of faith, to its extreme limit." We have the sense of a "faith" exceeding all accomodable extension. The complication stares us in the face in one of the very paragraphs he has commented on. Let us take a straight look at it:4
"A hitherto unknown form of religion - one that no one could yet have imagined or described, for lack of a universe large enough and organic enough to contain it - is burgeoning in men's hearts, from a seed sown by the idea of evolution. God is no longer sought in an identification with things that annihilate personality, nor in an escape from things that de-humanize man. God is attained (and this is infinitely more energizing and brings infinitely truer communion) by entry into the centre of the total sphere that embraces all things - a centre that itself is in process of formation. Far from being shaken in my faith by so profound a revolution, it is with irrepressible hope that I welcome the rise and anticipate the triumph of this new mysticism. For if in the end nothing, absolutely nothing, can prevent man from finally coming to rest in the form of belief that activates in him the forces of convergence to their maximum - then, indeed, we have the finest proof of the transcendence of Christianity. We see it in its unique power to find within itself and present to us, at the very time we need it, what at this precise moment in history is absolutely indispensable to our nature if it is to develop its power to act and adore to the full: and that is a Christ who can be and is commensurate with the universe, in other words a God - the God we look for - of evolution." To complete the sense, Rideau adds some further words of Teilhard's and says that then will be effected "the meeting between the Above of heaven and the Ahead of earth, between a 'cosmified' God
4. Ibid., p. 642.
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and a 'personalized' evolution" (L'etoffe de l'univers, 1953, in L'activation de l'energie, p. 406).
Surely, it is not only the form of expression that has run beyond the exact need of the thought. There is the positive statement that the new religion could never have been part either of the imagination or of the description possible to any old religion. And yet we are told of Christianity's power to bring out of itself the new religion. A veritable paradox faces us - a sheer self-contradiction - unless Teilhard means by "Christianity" something that cannot be identified with any historical version of it. Christianity, to Teilhard, must stand for a religion that undergoes a complete metamorphosis so that it differs toto coelo from all past manifestations of Christian dogma, and yet is qualified to be called Christianity. Christianity must be a certain "truth" connected with the historical Jesus but quite independent of everything that men have understood in connection with him. It seems to be a religion of Christ divested of Christianity, if not even of the historical Jesus as figured so far.
And this is precisely what we can conclude on submitting Teilhard to a close scrutiny. At first it may look as if he has in mind the Christian religion in an older mode than the world-depreciative one that was current in his time: "At the point the world has now reached we are impoverishing it by our modern Christianity. This modern Christianity cannot, however, be the whole of Christianity.... What makes Christians sterile is that they do not love the world" (Le neo-humanisme moderne, lecture, 1948).5 We are led to ask: "What is the rest of the Christian religion that is left out by modern Christianity?" All readers of Teilhard know how much store he sets by St. John and especially St. Paul in whom he reads a body of doctrine justifying his "faith in the world", his forward gaze towards a collective ultra-human ready to be gathered into Christ. But can we aver that Teilhardism coincides with Pauline Christianity? If we go by Rideau's information we
5. Ibid., pp. 326-27.
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cannot. Does he not remark on the selectivism, the tenden-tiousness of Teilhard's resort to his chief authority, the Pauline Epistles? Rideau writes:
"Not being really familiar with the whole of St, Paul, he paid too little attention to his description of man's fundamental cleavage and the deviation of his impulses."6 - "It is interesting that Teilhard's quotations from St. Paul are chiefly taken from humanist or cosmic passages...rather than from the dialectic of the first chapter of Romans."7 - "There is no trace in Teilhard of the Pauline dialectic of death, through the death of God, of the final destruction of a fundamental alienation and a collective existential regeneration through Christ's priestly act. The Cross is never interpreted as a pardon and a return to grace."8
We see that Teilhard fastens on certain elements of original Christianity and ignores others. Even in those elements, can we take him as a faithful interpreter? Rideau9 observes apropos of Teilhard's science-guided vision of evolution culminating in a super-conscious totalisation of mankind at Omega Point: "...it is doubtful whether one can see a correspondence or coincidence between what St. Paul says about the final unification of the Church and the convergence of cosmic history deduced from scientific reflexion." Touching on St. John in relation to the Teilhardian vision of Christ's re-appearance (Parousia) to super-naturalise a mature humanity millions of years hence, Rideau10 pronounces: "...the attraction of a temporal Parousia, to be hoped for in some future, blurs and weakens the Johannine idea that it is already being realized in the here and now of history, by man's present entry into spiritual transfiguration, or his rejection of it."
So even what Teilhard takes from St. John and St. Paul is
6.Ibid., p. 219.
7.Ibid., p. 627.
8.Ibid., p. 226.
9.Ibid., p. 218. 10.Ibid.
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not seen by him with their eyes but with his own slant of sight. It would appear that he just takes from them what strikes him as Christianity's vital nerve freed of all particular reactions according to one temperament or another. He seems to find it chiefly in St. Paul but he does not always care for the manner in which that Apostle reacts with it. He gives us the impression that Christianity consists for him of just a few assertions: the remainder that is known as Christianity through the ages is to him negligible and dispensable.
Indeed there is a passage in Teilhard which takes into the scope of its criticism not only the modern age but the whole long period during which Christianity has flourished. All of it - from its very beginning - needs to be altered to Teilhardism. Rideau11 himself has the passage among his copious notes: "After two thousand years so many of our views have been modified that, in religion, we have to slough off the old skin. The formulas we have been using have become too narrow and unyielding. We find them irksome and they have ceased to move us. If we are to go on living we must make a fresh start. By constant repetition of dogma in the same form and developing it only abstractly, we are losing ourselves in the clouds, where we are completely out of touch with what agitates the world, with what it seeks, and with what feeds its vigour. From the religious point of view we are living cut off from the world, both intellectually and emotionally. Here we have an indication that the time for a renascence is not far distant" (Christologie et evolution, 1944).
We have even a definite spotlighting of what this "renascence" should involve. Passages can be culled from Teilhard's writings, that leave us in no doubt of the concentrated specialised vision he had of Christianity. Rideau has, among his quotations, the following:
"The essence of Christianity is simply and solely belief in the unification of the world in God, through the incarnation"
11. Ibid., p. 574.
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(Esquisse d'un Univers personnel, 1936, in L'energie humaine, p. 113).12
"Christ's essential message is not to be found in the Sermon on the Mount, not even in the significant act of Calvary: it consists entirely in the proclamation of a 'divine fatherhood': to put it in another way, in the affirmation in which God, a personal being, offers himself to man as the term of a personal union" (L'energie humaine, 1937, p. 193).13
"The most essential aim and criterion of Christian orthodoxy may be reduced to this one point: to preserve Christ on the scale of and at the head of creation: however vast the world is found to be, the figure of the risen Christ must enclose it. Such, since St. John and St. Paul, is the fundamental rule of theology" (Reflexions sur le peche originel, 1947).14
We may add one more passage from outside Rideau's book. It is perhaps the earliest (1920) in the same volume (published in English) as the preceding one which is perhaps the latest (1947):
"There are times when one almost despairs of being able to disentangle Catholic dogmas from the geocentrism in the framework of which they were born. And yet one dung in the Catholic creed is more certain than anything: that there is a Christ 'in quo omnia constant'.15 All secondary beliefs will have to give way, if necessary, to this fundamental article. Christ is all or nothing."16
Here in these four excerpts we have, unmistakably, Teilhard's understanding of what constituted being Christian, orthodox and Roman Catholic. It has intrinsically nothing to do with the Roman Church's proclamations at any period of history. And it affirms the right to jettison all of them. Now and then they may have had resemblances to this or that
12.Ibid., p. 546.
13.Ibid.
14.Ibid., pp. 538-39.
15.'in whom all things hold together' (Col. 1:7).
16."Fall, Redemption, and Geocentrism," Christianity and Evolution (Collins, London, 1971), p. 44.
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aspect of Teilhardism; but the resemblances are accidental and to Teilhard unnecessary. He has his own all-or-nothing Christ-fixation which is for him the true Christianity. According to him, the Church should turn and listen to his voice, that of an inspired loyal priest who stays within her fold because God has meant her to be Christ's world-body and because she has the promise of being truly Christian though so far she has been imperfect in her truth-sense. She has always fallen short of Teilhardism. The defect, of course, could not be helped in the past when the universe was not large enough and organic enough for Teilhardism to take shape, but today the defect has no excuse and must get remedied as soon as possible.
Such an attitude, implying basic irreconcilableness between Teilhard's Christianity and orthodox tradition, is so glaring in his works that not even the most fervent among his co-religionist admirers who wish to prove him fundamentally traditional and orthodox can avoid undermining their own thesis by admitting this attitude. The fellow Jesuit Henri de Lubac17 well voices them all, half neutrally half ironically: "Teilhard could not escape the conviction - in some cases, possibly, one might say the 'illusion' - that in what was most personal in his thought and in that part of it, accordingly, to which he naturally attached most importance, he was ahead of the main body of the Catholic community," De Lubac18 also notes in Teilhard's essay "Christianity and Evolution" of 1945 the phrase "prae-sentire cum Ecclesia" (="think beforehand with the Church") and comments: "This...verb 'prae-sentire' might cover not only an illusion but a secret pride. Its equivalent can be found in a number of his letters."19
17."Teilhard and the Problem of Today", included in the volume The Eternal Feminine (Collins, London, 1971), p. 194.
18.Ibid., p. 195.
19.For example in a letter to Pere Gorce, 4 October, 1950. Cf. Teilhard missionnaire et apologiste, (Ed. 'Pri£re et Vie,' Toulouse, 1966), pp. 42-43 (De Lubac's Note).
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A Teilhard-quotation in Rideau's own book bears pointed testimony to the great gap between Teilhard's Christianity and that of his Church and of the Jesuit Order to which he belonged. In addition, it shows him active in what he considers the most strategic as well as the most loving way to make them mend the errors of their present religious stand and reach forward to the fundamentals of his faith. A letter of 15 July, 1929, tells us about these institutions: "I want to work, as an individual atom, to perfect them from within..."20 The operative words for us here are not the italicised ones but the expression: "perfect them."
20. Op. cit, p.298.
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(2)
Throughout his life Teilhard sought to bring the Church into line with himself. He made attempt after attempt to present his Christianity in a fashion that might make it look orthodox in the ordinary sense of the term. He remained respectfully within the Society of Jesus and the Roman Catholic Church, believing in the great destiny of those institutions as well as in his own great mission of changing them from within. Now and again he reduced the sharp angles of his dissension from accepted doctrine. But the compromise was always temporary. Rideau2 alludes to one such compromise. When Pere Joseph Marechal read in 1934 the manuscript of Teilhard's Christology and Evolution (1933), he made a comment correcting Teilhard's complete negation of the accepted meaning of Redemption. Teilhard's Introduction to Christianity, written in 1945, "shows that he took notice of this comment". But in 1953, in The Stuff of the Universe, "Teilhard puts it with less qualification". And to get an insight into the real Teilhard we have only to read the passage that removes the qualification previously made. We may cite Rideau's own reference to it. In fact he refers to it twice, and the second occasion2 reveals Rideau's own awareness of the true Teilhard, the obstinate irreducible innovator:
"Towards the end of his life, Teilhard summed up his theological views as follows: 'It is impossible to think of Christ as the "evolver" without thereby having to re-think the whole of Christology.... A functional completion of the one and the multiple takes the place of the creative paternalism we were accustomed to. The twofold notion of statistical evil and evolutionary redemption corrects or complements the idea of catastrophic sin and reparative expiation. The final Parousia becomes more a maturing than a destruction'" (L'etoffe de l'univers, in L'activation de l'energie, p. 405).
1.Op. cit., p. 549.
2.Ibid., p. 575.
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Let us touch, in the context of Rideau's book, on the salient points of this passage.
"Creative paternalism" implies that God, as an agency external to what is created, brings about or "fathers" the world, producing it from absolute non-being or nothingness by an act of sheer benevolence, an act of gratuitous creation -that is, unconditionally free, and without any need in himself or obligation to create. Teilhard contests both the externalistic production - by "efficient causality", as if by a "worker" - of the universe ex nihilo, and the utter contingence or dependence of the universe, the universe's nature purely as what in Christian theology is called "participated being" that has no intrinsic eternal existence, the universe's entire lack of inherent as distinguished from conferred value. In a passage Rideau3 quotes from an early writing, Teilhard anticipates in 1919 his stand of 1953: "...if you look around you, you cannot help being astonished that the Christian way of presenting the origins and vicissitudes of the world should be so artificial and even infantile." Among other things Teilhard points out that in "making non-being absolute" and "the creation gratuitous" we are "in danger of making the universe insupportable and the value of souls, which we so emphasize, inexplicable".
Rideau4 refers to Comment je vois of 1948, Nos. 25-31, and, calling it "an essential source" on "the problem of creation", he5 quotes the key-passage No. 28: "The self-subsistenl unity lies at the pole of being, and as a necessary consequence the multiple occupies the whole circumference around it - I mean by that pure multiple: 'Creatable nothingness', which is nothing, and yet in virtue of a passive potentiality for
3.Ibid,, p. 510: Note pour servir a I'evangelisation des temps nouveaux in Ecrits du temps de la guerre, p. 337.
4.Ibid., p. 509.
5.Ibid., p. 507.
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arrangement (that is to say, union) is at the same time a possibility of, a yearning for, being - and here our intelligence is completely at a loss to distinguish, in such depths, supreme necessity and supreme freedom, for this potentiality or possibility of yearning is such that it is just as though God were powerless to resist it."
A further gloss on the problem comes when Rideau,6 after mentioning Nos. 25-31 of Comment je vois,
"This line of thought had appeared earlier, in l'union creatrice, 1917 (in Ecrits du temps de la guerre, pp, 184-8), not intended for publication. In this we find that Teilhard has already arrived at his fundamental idea that being is defined by union, whether active or received, and is trying to envisage an interconnexion between God and the world that goes beyond the notion of efficient causality. He imagines 'a primitive substratum of spirit' which he sees as an 'extremely attenuated and reduced substance', and even as 'a sort of positive non-being'. 'I cannot pretend,' he says, 'that there are not grave objections to this concept.... It suggtests that the creation was not absolutely gratuitous but represents a work of almost absolute involvement.' He adds, however, 'why should we not admit that the necessary existence of absolute unity entails as a secondary consequence, ad extra, as an antithesis or a shadow, the appearances at the antipodes of being of an infinite multiplicity?'"
In all this context Rideau7 is most concerned to comment: "The imagery of his language is sufficient evidence of the absence of any trace of Manicheanism, of the suggestion of God's coexistence with an eternal matter" - in other words, "an antagonistic co-eternal", to use Teilhard's expression8 But while, in being non-Manichean, Teilhard is markedly Christian, what happens in his hands to Christianity's doctrine of pure nothingness rather than "a sort of positive non-being" or "a passive potentiality for arrangement...a yearning
6.Ibid., pp. 509-10.
7.Ibid., p. 153.
8.Ibid., p. 507.
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for being"? Do we not have to un-Christianise Teilhard in order to accommodate it? We get the answer when we see Rideau9 writing: "One might add a comment that is perhaps too far-fetched. The difficulty would vanish from the real problem put forward by Teilhard, if we accepted an eternal pre-existence of the creature in God. That, however, is impossible and the hypothesis is untenable. Teilhard went a tittle way in this direction when he spoke, as we saw earlier, of a 'pure potentiality', 'at the antipodes of God' and 'a yearning for being'."
True, Teilhard never made up his mind to go the whole way to the destination indicated by Rideau, He always endeavoured to strike a compromise which was chimerical -but even the little way he went takes him leagues off from Roman Catholicism. His problem can never be solved within its framework.
And, if it cannot, Teilhard's demand for "a functional completion of the one and the multiple" must logically elude Christian thought. The total contigence of the multiple will always leave a hole in the theory of functional completion a la Teilhard. As a quotation from him by Rideau10 tells us, Christianity stands poles apart from his theory and it is this theory, rather than the traditional Christian religion, that should be entitled real Christianity:
"From the human point of view, a doctrine that no longer justifies in our eyes the vastness and the laboriousness of the evolution in which we can see that we are now caught up, does more than violently contradict the evidence of our minds - it strikes at the very motive power behind our action. What is the point of attaining 'beatitude' if, in the final reckoning, we have made no absolute contribution, through our lives, to the totality of being? At the same time, from the Christian point of view, we can no longer understand why a God could have committed himself, out of mere 'benevolence', to such a flood
9. Ibid., p. 514.
10. Ibid., p. 508.
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of sufferings and vicissitudes. You may, by a dialectic of pure act, silence our reason as much as you please, but you will never now convince our hearts that the vast business of the cosmos, as we now see it, is simply some gift or plaything of God's, And why, again, if that were so, do the most unmistakable scriptural texts attach so much importance to the fulfilment of the mysterious Pleroma? God is entirely self-sufficient: nevertheless the universe brings him something that is vitally necessary: there you have the two conditions, apparently contradictory, that must in future be satisfied explicitly by any theory of participated being" (Christianisme et evolution, 1945).
Once more we glean from Rideau11 an onslaught on Christianity as it has been so far and a claim that Teilhardism alone is the true Christian position:
"Christian faith, through its mysteries of the Incarnation and even of the Redemption, adorns this world with many charms, but does it not, on the other hand, rob it of all interest - even, maybe, make it contemptible to us - by insisting on God's self-sufficiency and, in consequence, on the complete contingence of creation?.,. It is sound scholastic philosophy, we all know, that being, in the form of Ens a se, is posited exhaustively and super-abundantly, and immediately, at the ontological origin of all things. After this, in a second phase, all the rest (which means the world) appears only as an addition, or an extra granted entirely by favour: we are guests at God's banquet.... Unless at the term of existence we seek only an individual happiness (and that is a form of happiness we have definitely to reject), how could the self-styled revelation of man's radical uselessness fail to make him lose all heart for action?... This is a time when man is becoming conscious -as, apparently, he will now never cease to be - of his planetary responsibilities and future: and Christianity (for all the beauty of its gospel) would cease to have any religious value for us if we could suspect that it was depriving our universe
11. Ibid., pp. 508-09.
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of its zest; for that alone would exclude it from the domain of vitalising faiths.... If I allow myself here to criticise so sharply the scholastic notion of 'participation', it is not only (as will have been apparent) because it degrades the man in us, but also because it angers the Christian in me. 'God creates by love' is a fine scholastic phrase: but what is this love, then, inexplicable in its subject and degrading for its object, that is based on no need (unless it be the pleasure of giving for the sake of giving)?" (Contigence de Tunivers et gout humain de survivre, 1953).
Teilhard presses home in another of Rideau's citations12 the disparity between the doctrine of a wholly contingent participated being and "the really authentic and concrete expressions of Christian revelation and mysticism". He writes: "What we find at the heart of the teaching and [of] those outbursts is none other than the affirmation and the experience of a strictly bilateral and complementary relationship between God and the world.... We should read St. John again, and St. Paul. They accept the existence of the world (in too summary a fashion, maybe, for our taste) as an initial datum. But, on the other hand, what a feeling they both have for the absolute value of a cosmic drama, in which it is just as though God, even before his Incarnation, were ontologically involved. And, in consequence of this, how forcibly they stress the Pleroma and Pleromization. Indeed, what really gives life to Christianity is not the sense of the contingence of the created, but the sense of the mutual completion of the world and God."
Teilhard goes on to fill with "this spirit of 'complementarity"' what he considers a lack in the "Aristotelian ontology" which Christianity bases itself on. He takes the created and the uncreated as indispensable to each other, "both, each in its own way, exist in themselves and join together."13
But we know that neither St. John nor St. Paul denied the
12.Ibid., p. 511.
13.Ibid., p. 512.
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complete contingence of participated being. So, in Teilhard's eyes, even Johannine and Pauline Christianity must be inadequate, failing as it does to plumb the full implications of the Pleromatic mystery. For, this mystery at its deepest must imply two modes of perfection in God: one of them enables God to do without the world but the other needs the world: the world "represents completion and fulfilment for absolute being itself"14 and "we cannot conceive the world as being merely accessory without rendering creation incomprehensible, the passion of Christ an absurdity - and our own struggle meaningless".15
We can perceive how radically revolutionary Teilhard's feeling is about the first point of his re-thought Christology. The second is no less uncompromisingly unorthodox.
In orthodox Christianity, sin occurs with the first Man, whether we take Adam in an individual or in a collective sense. As a result of Adam's violation of God's command, evil entered the world and ruined the paradisal state: all life, and not only humanity, underwent a catastrophe and man lost the intimacy with God he had been accorded by supernatural Grace. Adam's loss extends, because of the solidarity of all human generations, over the whole post-Adamic history. To heal the terrible cleft between Man and God, God's Son came to earth to sacrifice himself in an extreme love and pay by his death the price of original sin. The root of Sin and Evil on earth is in Adam, in initial Mankind - and Christ's mission is to expiate divinely for human transgression. This nexus of human sin and divine expiation has been basic for Christianity ever since St. Paul enunciated it in Romans 9:5.
Teilhard does not overlook the fact that sin as such is confined to the human state in which one has the power to choose, the freedom of rejecting love for God and His
14.Ibid., p. 511: Le Cceur de la Matiere, 1950, p, 30.
15.Ibid., p, 508: Mart u Miners,
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creatures. Nor does he ignore the impression of an excess of evil in the human world due to man's exercise of his distinctive and intensified power, as the sole moral being among all the products of evolution, to go counter to evolution's upward push. Evil assumes in the human world a specially marked colour which is absent from what we may call the "natural" or "normal" evil in the general state of the universe.
What Teilhard refuses to accept is, in the first place, that man is the originator of evil on the earth. Disorder was there from the beginning, suffering and death were present in prehuman times. One of Rideau's16 quotations from Teilhard says: "The origin of evil does not present the same difficulties, nor call for the same explanations, in a universe whose structure is evolutionary as it does in an initially perfect static universe. It ceases then to be necessary for reason to suspect or look for a 'culprit'. Physical and moral disorders arise spontaneously in a self-organising system, so long as that system is not completely organised. Necesse est ut eveniant scandala.17 From that point of view, original sin - considered in its cosmic basis, if not in its historical occurrence among the first men - tends to merge into the actual mechanism of creation, in which it appears as the activity of the negative force of counter-evolution" (Note sur le peche originel, at the end of Le Christ evoluteur).
In the second place, Teilhard refuses to accept that Man's Sin was accidental and could as well have not happened. Being an element in the evolutionary process man was subject from the start to the forces of counter-evolution: moral evil, which is the form that universal evil takes among reflective beings, is to be expected. To expect it is just to acknowledge that statistically a certain number of sinful actions must take place because there is a constant pull back towards the lesser
16.Ibid., p. 539.
17."It is necessary that temptations come," The exact text of the Vulgate (Matt. 18:7) is: "Necesse est mint ut veniant scandala." (Footnote 5 on p. 150 of Christianity and Evolution, Collins, London, 1971.)
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conditions of synthesis from which man has half-emerged. Here we may take some passages of Teilhard's from Rideau.18 Evil, according to Teilhard, is "the very expression of a still incompletely organized plurality. In a world that is in process of formation, this transitory state of imperfection is manifested, no doubt, in detail, in the form of a certain number of culpable actions: the very first instances of these, and the most decisive (although the least conscious actions in human history19) could well be taken separately and described as a 'primitive fault'. But what constitutes the original weakness for the creature is in reality the radical condition that causes it to be born from the multiple, so that it continually retains in its fibres (so long as it is not completely spiritualized) a tendency to sink back into the dust. In such conditions evil is not an unforeseen accident in the universe. It is an enemy, a shadow that God inevitably raises up simply by the fact that he decides on Creation.... Creation is no trifle for omnipotence, no afternoon picnic. It is an adventure, a risk, a battle to which he commits himself entirely" (Christologie et evolution, 1933). "In this new setting, evil, without losing any of its bite or horror, ceases to be an unintelligible element, and becomes a natural feature of the world's structure" (Ibid).
Thirdly, Teilhard refuses to consider man a fallen being who needs to be redeemed from his hopeless state by a divine sacrifice. Man is the spearhead of evolution's forward thrust towards the ultra-human. Statistically, in spite of his freedom to choose the downward path and in spite of a certain number of fall-backs, there must be on the whole an evolutionary advance - a passage towards a finer and wider synthesis, a collective unanimity, a superconscious totalisation of mankind. Hence whatever payment has to be made, in sweat and tears and blood, is not for an initial fall whose victim is the entire race throughout history, but for errors and crimes constantly commited all along historical time by individuate
18.Ibid., pp. 540-41.
19.Here a very original piece of early writing by Sri Aurobindo would be pertinent. It is reproduced as a Note on pages 122-25 (K.D.S.)
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and collectivities. It is the harsh price to be rendered for an inevitable yei hard-won progress. Sin is not a catastrophe which chanced to strike down heavenly man; redemption is evolutionary and not reparative: it is meant to uplift man still further along his rising curve and to check him from a degringolade which he could never be immune from. A short Teilhardian excerpt from Rideau20 will bear out this point: "Nothing, as it seems to me, can prevent the universe from succeeding - nothing, not even our human liberties, whose essential tendency to union may fail in detail but cannot (without 'cosmic' contradiction) err 'statistically'" (Faith in Peace, 1947, in The Future of Man, p. 152). A letter of Teilhard to Rideau,21 of 13 June 1953, may also be called to witness: "Human evolution is both conscious and self-directed. Nevertheless it is, at the same time, statistically determined in this sense: 1. That there are natural through-roads and deadends about which our freedom can do nothing; and 2. there are, in the Human, currents of unanimity against which the individual's reaction is fruitless or impotent,"
Finally, Teilhard refuses to whittle down the function of Christ the Evolver of all cosmos to a function of salvation that is not cosmic in its central meaning. We would decosmicise his role by making him counter merely the wrong turn taken by man in quite recent time, rather than act as one who has animated universal evolution from the very beginning of time - animated it not by an external "juridical" right but by an internal "organic" activity. How could he be a cosmic organic evolver if he is not made the saviour of a cosmic fall structurally inherent in creation? Teilhard urges that St. John and St. Paul always saw Christ's function in cosmic terms. Christ saved the entire universe and not only man. The original sin, therefore, must be as cosmic as Christ. If it were just a moral accident of no great antiquity, then, as a quota-
20.Ibid., p. 551.
21.Ibid., p. 552.
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tion by Rideau22 has it, "the Christie power could never directly, organically, formally extend beyond a short slender human spindle" (Reflexions sur le peche originel, 1947).
Rideau23 informs us: "some aspects, at least, of the problem of original sin have been removed by the principles of the encyclical Divino afflante spiritu (1943) and by advances in exegesis. Thus Teilhard's statement of the problem is to some extent out of date." But the progress of theological thought on the subject still leaves the crux of Teilhard's differences from orthodoxy untouched. And an assertion of Rideau's24 a little earlier suggests the unconvertible heart of the situation even now. He says that, realising the difficulty in winning acceptance for his theory, Teilhard wrote: "I don't think that in the history of the Church anyone has 'pulled off such an adjustment (in the way of representation) of dogma as that of which we're speaking though similar attempts have been made and carried half-way, for example when geocentrism was abandoned...." (Letter of 14 May 1922).
The exact divergence of Teilhard's theory is spotlighted in a letter of Pere Joseph Marechal cited by Rideau. The letter, according to Rideau,25 is most sympathetic to some of Teilhard's theories, yet Marechal26 is forced to write: "...this new explanation modifies, it seems to me, the essential basis and not simply the formulation of the 'defined' dogma. More precisely still, it suppresses the dogma, by declaring that it is superfluous. What in fact it does is to replace original sin by the distant ontological root of physical and moral evil.... The whole Christian economy of justification is upset. The hypothesis put forward would lead to saying that mankind as such has never lost its initial right to grace and that the deprivation of grace is to be seen in each individual, simply as the effect of a fault of which he is now guilty."
22.Ibid., p. 539.
23.Ibid., p. 540.
24.Ibid., p. 539.
25.Ibid., p. 543.
26.Ibid., pp. 543-44.
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Teilhard's revolutionary departure in going beyond Adam and making a cosmic Christ call for a cosmic imperfection to be compensated and turned to the advantage of man's earthly progress - that revolutionary departure is indirectly brought to a head and hit at in a sharp condensed negative mode by N.M, Wildiers27 in a footnote to Teilhard's "Reflections on Original Sin" when Teilhard appeals to St. John and St. Paul, The footnote goes: "St. Paul himself in the Epistle to the Romans (9:5) speaks of Adam as essentially related to Christ. This point of view must dominate all theological treatment of the nature of original sin." This point of view is precisely what Teilhard brushes aside.
In passing, we may remember that St. Paul takes Adam to be "one man" - a single individual, even if representative of all possible human nature. Teilhard repeatedly dubbed absurd by scientific standards the assertion of monogenism that mankind first emerged as a single individual or, at most, as a pair: one male and one female. Rideau28 informs us: "Discussing the question of monogenism, Teilhard says that it is essentially for 'theological' reasons ('the Pauline conception of the fall and redemption') that 'tire Church clings to the historical reality of Adam and Eve' (Wfiat should we think of transformism?', 1930, in Vision of the Past, p. 156). He adds: 'On the other hand, for reasons of probability and also comparative anatomy science, left to itself, would never (to say the east of it) dream of attributing so narrow a basis as two individuals to the enormous edifice of humankind'. And he anticipates that more theological research may solve the problem (Ibid)." According to science, every natural species makes its evolutionary appearance polygenerically - as a group - though mostly within a certain restricted cradle-area. But, as late as July 1966, the allocution of Pope Paul VI as communicated to the secular press suggests that polygenisrn
27.Christianity and Evolution, p. 190, fn. 5.
28.Op. cit„ p. 517.
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spoils the picture of original sin.29 Hence the authoritative Christian position is still in conflict with Teilhard's modern-mindedness with regard not only to the Fall as such but also to the type of "genism" that may be associated with it.
Free of the incubus of orthodoxy's "peccatum originale", Teilhard cannot help fixing his gaze on a peak of evolution awaiting us in the future. And he defines the peak as the natural meeting-place between fully evolved Man and the Christ who will reappear with his final supernatural action to gather the elect into himself and, through himself, into God. But we must get the proper "hang" of Teilhard's statement that the Parousia will not be a destruction.
By this he does not mean that all will be peaceful for the world at the end - clear of all internal conflict within the world itself. Rideau30 has well said that "although Teilhard emphasizes certain passages in St. Paul dealing with the final unity of the Church or the presence of God in all things", he is also at pains to set forth the view suggested by many other passages "(in the Gospels and the Apocalypse for example) which present the general history of the world as a dramatic conflict whose issue is a forcible division of mankind". But even a final conflict can come only when a mass of mankind has attained en ultra-human unification by an evolutionary process of fulfilment. What Teilhard means by "destruction" grows clear when Rideau shows him writing: "The Kingdom of Christ to whose cause we have devoted ourselves can never be established, either peacefully or through conflict, except on an earth that has been carried by the development of every intellectual and technological resource to the extreme limit of its humanization" (Sur la valeur retigieuse de la recherche, 1947, in
29,See Teilhard and the Creation of the Soul by Robert North, SJ. (The. Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, 1966), p. 207, m. 4 (continued on p. 208).
30.Op. cit., p. 559.
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Science et Christ, p. 203).31 - "We continue from force of habit to think of the Parousia, whereby the Kingdom of God is to be consumated on earth, as an event of a purely catastrophic nature - that is to say, liable to come about at any moment in history, irrespective of any definite state of mankind. But why should we not assume, in accordance with the latest scientific view of mankind in a state of anthropogenesis, that the Parousia 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?" (The Heart of the Problem, 1949, in The Future of Man, p. 267).32
Teilhard has a footnote to the above: "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."
Teilhard's thesis simply is that there will be and can be no Parousia in the manner Christianity has figured. He insists: "Christ delays his reappearance until collective humanity shall have finally become capable, in virtue of having fully realized its natural potentialities, of receiving from him its spiritual consummation" (Trois choses que je vois, 1948).33
The Teilhardian thesis in its stark and firm formulation flies in the face of the Christian vision. Rideau,34 for all lus sympathy with several of Teilhard's contentions, makes this perfectly plain. In the previous section we have already seen him35 sceptical whether the convergence of cosmic history which Teilhard deduces from scientific reflection can correspond or coincide with what St. Paul says about the final unification of the Church. Further on, Rideau36 notes:
31.Ibid., p.627
32.Ibid., p. 564.
33.ibid.
34.Ibid., p. 248.
35.Ibid.
36.Ibid., pp. 248-49.
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"While...the final coming of the kingdom of God implies conditions and preparations, the conception of a global unanimity of the human mass at the end of history as a necessary preliminary to the Parousia, is purely hypothetical. The realism of the beatitudes, modelled on the long, austere and dramatic experience of Israel, can hardly be reconciled with this triumphalism. Rather than this hypothetical vision, some would prefer - and rightly - that of a humanity or a Church that is constantly staggering under a burden, constantly road-weary, constantly, but always with greater hope, crying out to the divine mercy to take pity on it. Christianity, we must remember, is above all salvation, which means liberation - God's enterprise to extract man from a condition of loss and despair; and the true picture of man is always that of the wounded traveller, more dead than alive lying by the roadside and awaiting the charity of the Samaritan."
Thus we can derive the clearest evidence from Rideau's book that Teilhard contradicted orthodoxy on every vital issue.
Note
THE LEGEND OF ORIGINAL SIN AND ADAM'S FALL
(These pages are from a chapter in a series of articles written by Sri Aurobindo for his journal The Karmayogin in the first decade of the twentieth century. The chapter is entitled "The Place of Religion in Ethics" and is preceded by the exposition of a view of human development which Sri Aurobindo calls "trigunic development", from the Indian vision that all nature is a play of three "gunas" or qualities: tamas = inertia, obscurity, mechanical movement; rajas = kinesis, movement prompted by impulse, desire, self-assertiveness; sattva = balance, harmony, enlightened activity. Thus human development would be, on the whole, in a tamasic, rajasic, sattvic sequence. To what phase of this sequence would correspond the
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legendary picture of the "original sin" committed by Adam and leading to his "Fall"? Religious dogma speaks of a lapse from perfection; Teilhard de Chardin, speaking from the evolutionary standpoint, considers the first state of humanity to be "the least conscious" in its whole history. Sri Aurobindo casts light on the subject from many sides and gives us a convincing assessment of the legend's implications within the general panorama of human progression.)
...we shall have to part with several notions long cherished by humanity. One of these is the pristine perfection of man and his degradation from his perfect state by falling into the domination of sin; God made man perfect but man by his own fault brought sin and death into the world. This Semitic tradition, passed from Judaism into Christianity and less prominently into Mahomedanism, became for a long time part and parcel of the fixed beliefs of half of humanity. Yet it is doubtful whether the original legend which enshrined and prolonged this tradition, quite bears the interpretation which has been put on it. If rightly understood, it supports rather than conflicts with the theory of trigunic development. The legend does not state that man was unfailingly virtuous by choice, but that he was innocent because he did not yet know good and evil. Innocence of this kind is possible only in the primitive state of man and the description of man as naked and unashamed shows that it is precisely the primitive state of society before arts and civilisation were developed, to which the legend alludes, Man was then innocent, because being unable to distinguish between good and evil he could not choose evil of free choice and therefore had no sense of sin and no more responsibility for his actions than the pure animal. His fall from the state of innocence was the result of the growth of rajasic. individuality in his mind which led him to assert his own will and desires and disobey the law imposed on him by an external Power. In this first stage of his evolution he is not guided by a law within himself, but by prohibition which his environment imposes on him without
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his either understanding or caring to understand the reason for their imposition. Certain things are forbidden to him, and it is as much a necessity for him to refrain from them as to refrain from putting his hand in the. fire lest he should be burned; all others are allowed to him and he does them freely without questioning whether, apart from their legality, they are bad or good. Sin comes by disobedience and disobedience by the assertion of an inner standard as against the external standard hitherto obeyed; but it is still a standard not of right and wrong, but of licit and illicit. "What I desire, what my individual nature demands, should be allowed me," reasons the rajasic man; the struggle is between an external negation and an internal assertion, not between two conflicting internal assertions. But once the former begins, the latter must in time follow; the physical conflict must create its psychical counterpart. From the opposition of punished and unpunished evolves the opposition of licit and illicit; from the opposition of licit and illicit evolves the opposition of right and wrong. Originally the sanction which punishes or spares, allows or disallows, approves or disapproves, is external and social; society is the individual's judge. Finally, in the higher stage of evolution, the sanction is internal and individual; the individual is his own judge. The indulgence of individual desire in disobedience to a general law is the origin of sin.
With the rejection of this theory of an originally perfect humanity, the tradition of an infallible inner conscience which reflects a divinely-ordained canon of absolute right and wrong must be also rejected. If morality is a growth, the moral sense is also a growth and conscience is nothing more than the activity of the moral sense, the individual as judge of his own actions. If conscience be a divine and infallible judge, it must be the same in all men; but we know perfectly well that it is not.... Even in the same man conscience is an uncertain and capricious quantity changing and deciding inconsistently under the influence of time, place and circumstances. The conscience of one age or country varies from the conscience of another age or country. It is therefore contrary to all expert-
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ence to assert the divinity or infallibility of conscience. A man must be guided ordinarily by his moral sense, not because it is infallible or perfect, but because moral growth depends upon development from within and to this end the independent use of the "inner monitor", when once evolved, is the first necessity.
Sri Aurobindo
(Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Pondicherry, 1972, Vol. 27, pp. 286-88.)
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(3)
It is surprising how - in spite of Teilhard's "Universal Christ" necessitating a radically novel envisagement of (1) God's creative act and His relationship with "participated being", (2) the nature of "original sin" in its bearing on man in particular as well as on the cosmos in general and (3) the right moment for Christ's "Parousia" or final advent to unify the Creation with himself and God - it is surprising how Rideau finds Teilhard still a true son of the Church. But he is too sharp to miss the dissident notes wherever they occur: what he does is to give them a minor role in the total reckoning.
One of the points is that Teilhard makes Christianity depend on Evolution: he maintains that it has to come to terms with Evolution and that whatever does not do so fails to qualify for the religion of the future. Not only does Teilhard hold the Universal Christ to be the core of Christianity: he also considers this Christ as unable to carry out his unifying cosmic function unless we accept science's evolutionary world. Occasionally he states nothing more than that such a world is in the fitness of things for the central work of Christ, but Teilhard's recurrent stress is on its indispensability for this work. Thus Rideau,1 after mentioning a less rigorous context, remarks: "In another passage, what is here noted as appropriate, is regarded as necessary: 'The Christian Universal-Christ would be inconceivable if the universe which it is his function to gather into himself, did not in virtue of some evolutionary structure have a natural centre of convergence from which the Word, becoming incarnate, could radiate its influence over the whole of the universe' (Introduction au Christianisme, 1944)." Again, we have Teilhard saying: "By showing us the summit that crowns the world, evolution makes Christ possible, just as Christ, by giving direction to the world, makes evolution possible. In other words Christ
1. Op. cit., pp. 528-29, note 83.
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must find a summit to the world for his consummation, just as he had to find a woman for his conception" (Comment je crois, 1934).2
One would have thought it was admitted by all that Teilhard based himself on science in most of his philosophical and theological writings. Rideau3 himself cites J.M. Le Blond: "The tendency in fact in Teilhard's work is to move from science and technology to religion, the general direction is religious" (Mise en garde contre le P. Teilhard de Chardin in Etudes, September 1962, p. 283). Yes, Teilhard ends with religion, but by beginning with science; and what he ends with may even be characterised as science turned religious. Rideau has several passages which play variations on the leitmotif phrase in the one we have taken from him in the preceding Chapter - namely, that the need of the hour is "a Christ who can be and is commensurate with the universe, in other words a God - the God we look for - of evolution."4 And yet Rideau5 tells us: "Teilhard's theology, which, in virtue of its supernatural sources, is entirely independent of his cosmological system, expresses the essence of the whole content of tradition, to which on a priori grounds it is absolutely faithful. There is no fundamental dogmatic statement that is not affirmed and maintained in its entirety." But after listing the traditional dogmas, Rideau6 has to admit: "These dogmatic statements can be found in Teilhard's work but their expression is sometimes sporadic and disconnected." We get the impression that Teilhard's heart lay elsewhere than in these echoes of tradition. And we may add that, while the general form of the dogmas is retained from the past, their whole content is recast. Rideau's direct ground7 for Roman-Catholicising Teilhard in toto reduces itself really to a letter
2.Ibid., p- 635, note 180.
3.Ibid., p. 656.
4.Ibid., p. 642.
5.Ibid., p. 188. 0
6.Ibid., p. 189.
7.Ibid., p. 574.
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Teilhard wrote on 12 October 1951 to the General of the Society of Jesus. He speaks of "three convictions which are the very marrow of Christianity: the unique significance of man as the spearhead of life; the position of Catholicism as the central axis in the convergent fascicle of human activities; and finally the essential function as consummator assumed by the risen Christ at the Centre and peak of Creation" (in Letters from a Traveller, pp. 42-3). Actually, in the idea of life's having a spearhead in man and of an axis in a convergent human collectivity and of a consummation at Creation's centre and peak we have the idea of a natural development towards the ultra-human through an organising and unifying energy drawn ever higher by Point Omega - an idea that is evolutionary through and through. The very language of the letter bespeaks the scientific cosmologist envisioning a theology. So, with the scientific cosmologist being all-pervasive, Rideau is surely off the mark when, after painting Teilhard as true to orthodoxy, he8 adjoins the following counter-balance as if it constituted just a minor aberration:
"In so far, however, and only in so far, as Teilhard sought to effect too close a rational synthesis of cosmology and dogma, his theology necessarily became somewhat more precarious: the rigidity of the system then becomes apparent and, although it gives his thought its vital originality, at the same time it tends to undermine its validity.
"In so far, again, as Teilhard's theology depends upon an evolutionary concept of history and a "Weltanschauung" of total unification, there is some difficulty in reconciling it completely with the legacy of tradition."
One should expect that true Teilhardism is just the feature which gives his thought its "vital originality" and that, if his thought is not founded on evolution, it is utterly un-Teilhardian. What else can we say when we face these words
8. Ibid., p.189.
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which Rideau9 quotes from The Phenomenon of Man (p. 219) and which, with a sentence at the start and one at the close which are omitted by Rideau we may regard as Teilhard's touchstone of truth: "Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more; it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow, and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable as true." Nor does Teilhard stop with his sweeping ascription of primacy to the evolutionary world-view. He comes to a burning focus in the question of Christ himself: "Nothing can be admitted into our systems unless it first satisfies the conditions of a world in process of transformation.... A Christ whose features are not moulded to the requirements of a world that is evolutionary in structure, will be progressively rejected without further examination - just as in any scientific institution today a treatise on perpetual motion or squaring the circle goes straight into the wastepaper basket, unread" (Christianisme et evolution, 1933).10
No mode of speech could be harsher towards orthodoxy, no attitude of mind more coldly contemptuous of tradition, no sentence of death on non-scientific Christianity so definitive. The formula "Christ is all or nothing", which we have seen Teilhard to be deeming the sole dogma distinguishing his Christianity, is now seen glaringly to signify "Christ the Evolver and the Evolving - or no Christ at all". Whatever disagrees with Teilhardism, with a Christology totally rethought in the light of the Universal Christ as demanded by Evolution, is to be summarily discarded. The whole of Christianity's contents of the pre-scientific epoch is fit for the wastepaper basket.
Even the special sense in which "orthodoxy" and "Christianity" and "Catholicism" were understood by Teilhard seem in two passages to have struck him as doubtful and his Christ appears to break through all Christian framework. One may
9. Ibid., p. 386.
10. Ibid., p. 308.
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indeed query whether his use of the name "Christ", connected as it is with the historical Jesus, is valid at all, though his ever-increasing devotion still works under the spell of this name. Rideau's collection of Notes has both the passages:11
"Christ is becoming more and more indispensable to me, ...but at the same time the figure of the historical Christ is becoming less and less substantial and distinct to me" (Letter of 8 January 1936). - "I have never felt myself so full of my 'gospel' and at the same time more wholly and entirely dependent, body, mind and soul, on Christ Jesus. I have a bitter-sweet feeling of being completely powerless without him. And at the same time I am terrified when I realize that my view of him is continually carrying him further and higher along the axis of (I hope) orthodoxy. It is not unlike what astronomers tell us of the stars - that while they are ever more closely integrated in our system they are also ever more breathtakingly distant than we imagine. In fact, my panChristism is in some way'trans-Christie' ..." (Letter of 12 April 1948).
Doubtless, Teilhard always held that we could not dissociate from Jesus of Nazareth the extra push towards unification which he felt going on in the world after the birth of the Son of Mary and which, in his eyes, would be fulfilled by the Pleromatic Divinity visioned by St. Paul as the Christ of the Parousia. But his mind was concentrated on that Pleromatic Divinity rather than on Jesus of Nazareth. According to him, without the latter serving as a point de depart, the former could not be what St. Paul had visioned: besides, the former, without the latter's humanity, would lack for us the heart and face our own humanity keenly wants. Yet once the sense of a heart and face in the Universal Christ is acquired by us, Teilhard would like to forget the Man bom in Nazareth and Crucified on Calvary: only the Risen Christ, the Christ who, after his human body had been crucified, appeared with a
11. Ibid., p. 622.
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glorified divine form to the Apostles and to St. Paul on the road to Damascus mattered to Teilhard.
The birth in Nazareth would have little meaning for Teilhard if the Universal Christ were not related to it. Even Rideau cannot escape this idea of its being a means-to-an-end instead of an end-in-itself. After quoting passages that speak of the historical Christ as indispensable for generating "the mystical energy that has been accumulating for the last two thousand years in the Christian phylum", Rideau12 adds: "Teilhard immediately, however, relates Christ's historical reality to his universality. 'I believe in the divinity of the child of Bethlehem because it is included, and in so far as, and under the form in which it is included historically and biologically in the reality of the Universal Christ to whom my faith and adoration are more directly extended'" (Introduction au Christianisme, 1944).
Rideau's own impression of the balance between the historical Christ and the Universal in Teilhard's "total Christ" comes out pretty definitively in the course of a comparison of Teilhard's "spirituality" with the details of St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises which is the handbook of the Jesuit Order. Rideau13 writes:
"...In spite of what Teilhard asserts in principle his thought is so centred on the glorious mysteries that consummate the Incarnation, that it seems by contrast to be less concerned with the contents of the Gospel. It leaps directly to the Paschal, the Eucharistic Christ, the Christ above all of the Parousia. It is so wedded to the rational and scientific view of the historical evolution of the world, that it tends to emphasize the still incomplete character of Christ (in his mystical body) at the expense of his already actual and total character. The very ardour of Teilhard's contemplation of the burning heart of Christ soon leads to an imprecision that identifies it with the universal presence of Christ in the world. In the
12.Ibid., pp. 530-31.
13.Ibid., pp. 219-20.
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tradition of the Exercise, however, the spiritual transformation is in fact effected only in diligent contemplation of the person of Jesus in the acts and events of his historical existence, by assimilating his mysteries and imitating his behaviour. On the other hand, Teilhard's spirituality, though it never excludes this, does not go further than to pre-suppose the journey of the faithful soul on the roads of Galilee and the hill of Calvary. One may well wish, too, that Teilhard's enhancement with the greatness of the universe had been balanced by a more loving examination of the humble station and the negation of the greatness chosen by the Word."
Teilhard thus cannot be considered a good Jesuit. And in general we must agree with Rideau14 when he says: "One can well understand the reaction of Francois Mauriac who was disconcerted by a certain lack of intimate physical feeling for the Jesus of the Gospels..." Mauriac15 exclaims: "If Christ is commensurate with the cosmos, I am perfectly happy about it - but it means nothing to me" (Ce que je crois, Grasset, 1962, p. 139). Pere Marechal, as cited by Rideau, has perhaps the last critical word from the orthodox yet understanding mind. Rideau16 reports: "Pere Marechal...felt that he was justified in pointing out to Teilhard that Christ's 'universal' and cosmic function was less important than his supernatural function of sanctifying souls." Then Rideau gives us the verba ipsissima of the eminent Jesuit: "...Surely, to be thus the key to the whole of nature and the 'saviour of cosmic evolution', necessary and splendid though that be, is only a secondary perfection for Christ the saviour of souls? To 'see' it and explicitly to inspire our 'practice' by it seems to me to belong more to the elaboration of our religion than to its essence." Rideau picks up the thread here and writes: "He added that some of Teilhard's expressions seemed to him to invert, at least 'affectively', the necessary order of the two aspects - supernatural and cosmic - of Christian salvation."
14.Ibid., p. 229.
15.Ibid., p. 629.
16.Ibid., p. 168.
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Rideau does not mention Teilhard's comment on Mare-chars criticism. Teilhard cannot separate the saving on evolution from the saving of the souls: the two necessarily and indivisibly imply each other. De Lubac17 tells us that to Teilhard the World has to be envisaged "in the form of an immense movement of Spirit"18 and the immortality of the soul no less than the personality of God is an element "essential to the structure of my Universe".19 We learn further that for him God would be fully glorified in "the realization of an organic unity - into which, of course, will be drawn the whole marvellous essence of the inter-personal relationships that characterize the Universe, starting from Man".20 This being so, "nothing in my view is more spiritual than the consummation of the Universe".21 To split, as Marechal did, the function of the Cosmic Christ into two components, which required to be rearranged in order of priority, is senseless in Teilhard's eyes. On 24 August 1934, he remarks in a letter: "This distinction knocks me sideways! as if souls weren't the fruit par excellence of the cosmos, supremely 'cosmic' themselves! - I must say, I thought anyone could understand what I meant."
If so acute a mind as Marechal did not understand it, there must be a huge hiatus between his Christianity and Teilhard's. So, even as regards the Cosmic Christ, Teilhard stood at variance with the Bible's and the Church's attitude. And, apropos of the inversion recommended by Marechal and the indivisibility envisaged by Teilhard of Christ's role as saviour of evolution and as saviour of souls, we may define Teilhard's own broad position vis-a-vis the Bible and the Roman Church. For, the Bible as the scripture of the Cosmic Christ and the Church as his instrument, had to Teilhard
17.Teilhard de Chardin; The Man and His Meaning, p. 147,
18.Letter of 15 April 1929, to Leontine Zanta.
19.Utter of 20 September 1929.
20.Utter of 29 April 1934.
21.Ibid.
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quite other functions than those which orthodoxy primarily claims for them. Rideau22 confesses:
"Teilhard does not seem to have paid much attention to the purifying and illuminating influence of the Bible. In fact he seldom uses the word. He was content to take a number of passages - not many, but admittedly of capital importance -from the New Testament to confirm his theory of the convergence of history towards unity; but he does not consider the present efficacy of the sacrament of the Word of God for the spiritual progress of consciousness. The Church, again, to whom Teilhard asserts his loyalty and to whose growth he is devoted heart and soul, is not presented in the first place as the means of salvation, as the sacrament of Christ in history, or as the mother who brings into life the Sons of God. In short, the primacy accorded to the universe (a universe that, no doubt, when one re-reads Teilhard, is theologically recognized as Christie), to which everything is related, tends to relegate to the background the act of theological submission to the supernatural sources of the revealed message, and the acceptance of the historical forms which determine the relationship between man and God."
In numerous respects Teilhard's Christianity stands away from that of his fellow-Catholics and in the most important respects it stands over against theirs. Whatever he holds in common with them is mainly a matter of nomenclature. His devotion to Christ, the Church and the Jesuit Order cannot be questioned but it is there for reasons all his own: he sees them as forms under which a new religion of the future can best be fostered provided their present contents are either emptied out or radically refashioned.
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