II
What is Basic Teilhardism? What Place has his Christianity in it?
(1)
In Rideau's book we have found from his Teilhard-quota-tions that Teilhard's Christianity has no vital concern for any traditional dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church but concentrates solely on preserving "Christ on the scale of and at the head of creation".1 According to Teilhard, such an exclusive regard is "the most essential aim and criterion of Christian orthodoxy"2 and, "since St. John and St. Paul, the fundamental rule of theology".3 The divine power so figured is the Cosmic or Universal Christ and, naturally, his central function is related to the cosmos with whose space-time he is coextensive and which he works to consummate. A new quotation taken from Rideau4 shows Teilhard affinriing this role in a personal confrontation with his Master: "All my joy and all my triumph, my very reason for existence and my zest for life depend upon this fundamental vision of your coming together with the universe" (Le Cceur de la Matiere, 1950).
But Teilhard's double-aspected Christology - Christ Cosmic and uniting the cosmos in himself - does not hang, so to speak, in the air of a merely religious orientation. It is intrinsically connected with the mind of the modern world. It is fundamental to his Christianity because he is an embodiment of that mind at every moment of his religious life. A progressive self-exceeding of man by a collective unanimity which will constitute a super-consciousness within a sort of super-organism: such is the direction of his modernist spiri-
1.Op. tit., p. 539.
2.Ibid., p. 538.
3.Ibid., p. 539.
4.Ibid., p. 615.
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tual turn. Rideau5 tells us: "Teilhard speaks of the 'novelty, the boldness and at the same rime the paradoxical possibility in the attitude' that must be adopted by a man who 'in his quest for holiness has decided to allow the free interaction within himself of the upward impulse of faith in God and the forward impulse of faith in the ultra-human'" (Ibid., p. 25).
The same turn towards a synthesis of essential Christianity with the religious spirit implicit in the modern world-sense is discovered in even more pronounced a vein in another quotation Rideau6 makes from Teilhard belonging to the same year, 1950: "Even now I am still experiencing the dangers to which a man is exposed who, by internal law and necessity, sees himself forced to leave the well-beaten track of a certain traditional askesis that is now insufficiently adapted to human requirements; he then has to try to find another road that will lead to heaven by which the entire dynamism of matter and flesh is channelled into a genesis of the spirit -and it must not be a mean between the two but a synthesis of them" (Ibid).
The synthesis demanded sets up the temper of scientific modernism as the test to which Christianity must submit. Another quotation by Rideau7 runs: "As a result of the scientific discovery of the natural unity and immensity of the world, modern man can no longer accept God except as the extension of (could one say 'under the species' of?) some universal progress of attainment of maturity" (L'incroyance moderne: Cause profonde et remede, 1933, in Science et Christ, p. 151).
We may consider along with these exceedingly important words the following of Teilhard's as cited by Rideau:8 "In future, faith in Christ will never hold its own or gain ground except through the medium of faith in the world" (Letter of 4 May 1931, in Letters from a Traveller, p. 177).
5.Ibid., p. 588.
6.Ibid.
7.Ibid., p. 308.
8.Ibid., p. 602.
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Now, if Christianity has no future save as a Christianised faith in the world and if Christ himself has to be accepted "under the species" - that is to say, under the aspect - of evolution, as a cosmic divine "extension" of the ultra-human, two capital issues arise: (1) What is first and fundamental to Teilhard - faith in the world or faith in Christ? (2) Is the name "Christ" utterly indispensable to Teilhardism?
The answer to the second question would be implicit in the answer to the first. For, with faith in the world, the basis of the Teilhardian religion, the name "Christ" comes in simply because Teilhard happened to be born a Christian: the choice of it is accidental and optional. What is needed is just an Incarnation to give an intimate humanised concreteness to the cosmic divinity. Teilhard's position emerges pretty plainly from some of Rideau's excerpts from his writings:
"I have come to see more clearly the only thing I believe and the only thing I want to be my gospel and my vocation, if I may put it so. The things in which I believe: there are not many of them. They are: first and fundamentally the value of the world and secondly the indispensability of some Christ to give this world a consistency, a heart and a face" (Letter of 25 February 1929).9
Mark the expressions: "secondly" and "some Christ". A world in process of evolution and calling for total adherence: that is the prime spiritual necessity. The Christian religion is only the next desideratum. And it is wanted because it supplies a God-Man. Not this religion especially but any that provides a God-Man will serve. A Christ of one kind or another is indispensable - not necessarily the Christ we know of as Jesus of Nazareth. Such, logically, is the sense of the adjective "some" which the Concise Oxford Dictionary10 defines as: "Particular but unknown or unspecified (person or thing)."
However, Teilhard, according to his lights, has no alterna-
9. Ibid., pp. 649-50.
10. Ed. 1964, p. 219, col. 2.
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five and that is why he does not look beyond Jesus of Nazareth. This we learn when, after repeating in general the need of "some Christ" by saying, "We cannot dedicate ourselves to a 'faceless' world", he continues: "And it is because we have, historically speaking, no face to give it but that of Christ that I feel myself bound until the end..." (Letter of 15 July 1929).11
Of course, we cannot deny that, in a full religious stand which would be valid for today, Christ was to Teilhard as necessary as world-value. Occasionally he appears as even more so - but here we must be careful not to mix up two questions.
Teilhard often spoke of the Ahead and the Above - on the one hand cosmic fulfilment at Omega Point and on the other the Omega already complete though experientially seeming to be in the making, in a process of formation which will be finished in the remote future. The already completed Omega is called by Teilhard the Above, the term meaning "transcendent": this Omega is fully existent for all time and does not depend on the attainment of the ultra-human in order to become a reality. Its transcendent reality that shall fulfil the collectivity of evolution's highest products so far - human persons - is distinguished by Teilhard12 as not only "ultra-conscious" and "ultra-present" but also "ultra-personalised". What else than a Super-Person can be the supreme Centre of all personal centres? Teilhard's "phenomenology", taken to its furthest, culminates in the vision of the God Ahead as actually a Super-personal God Above, both loving and lovable. "This conclusion," Rideau13 claims, "...is strikingly confirmed by an appeal to another source of information besides facts of the natural order" - namely, Christianity's supernatural mysteries - but he also explicitly tells us that Teilhard's conclusion is "arrived at solely in the light of an
11.Op. cit., p. 650.
12.Ibid., p. 374, note 72.
13.Ibid., p. 60.
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honest appraisal of the scientific evidence". No Christ as such is yet on the scene. The "Christian phenomenon" is still to be integrated into the "ultra-physics" treating of the "Phenomenon of Man". And it is at this furthest boundary of ultra-physics without Christianity that we get a statement like the one which de Lubac14 culls from Teilhard's Comment conce-voir...l'unanimisation humaine (1950): "However effective may be man's faith in the Ultra-human, I do not think that its urge towards Some Thing ahead can succeed without being combined with another still more fundamental aspiration, one that comes down from on high, from Somebody." De Lubac does not particularly bother to keep this superpersonal Omega separate from Christ. He15 speaks of Teilhard holding up before the world "the figure of Christ", "Centre of total convergence" and he talks of objects "intrinsically united at their term in Christ-Omega..." Teilhard does identify Omega and Christ, but not at the juncture we have mentioned. So the "still more fundamental aspiration" is not outside but inside the phenomenology of ultra-physics and is part of the philosophy of World-value.
We may note that this philosophy, involving a loving and lovable Omega, whose secret presence enfolds us and attracts our adoration as well as endows the cosmos with solidarity and unity and evolves it as one whole towards ever more complex and conscious states of synthesis, has room for a "heart" in the universe no less than for a "consistency" (a holding-together) without the postulate of a Christ. Rideau has Teilhard clearly affirming this. Drawing upon Teilhard's own words, he16 writes: "If, 'when all is said and done, all the forces of the world work together to bring about our fulfilment', then 'our terror of matter and of man is transformed, and reversed, to become peace and trust, and even existential love...and all this is so, because the world has a heart"." Only a
14 Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning, p. 156,
15.Ibid., p. 157.
16.Op. tit, p. 60.
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"face" is missing and Christ offers it. Indeed in the passage from the letter of 15 July 1929 it is just the face that Christ is credited with putting upon the divinity of the evolutionary World.
But the work of preventing this divinity from facelessness does not confer primacy on Christ in Teilhard's religion. Only as a push towards a sense of certainty in world-fulfilment at Omega Point does Teilhard consider Christ more fundamentally required. Yet Christ is thus rated because he serves the purpose of reinforcing for us the value of the world. If he did not do so he would be useless. Exclusively Christ the Evolver, Christ the Consummator of Cosmic Evolution is the Christ worth having. As we saw in the preceding chapter, if our concept of Christ did not conform to the criterion of evolution, it would be fit for summary dismissal and contemptuous disposal like a would-be scientific paper on perpetual motion or on squaring the circle.17 Christianity independent of the scientific truth of evolution is a veritable absurdity to Teilhard: it has no raison d'etre for him. So it is this scientific truth which, ultimately, is all in all. It needs to be enriched by a faith in the God-Man of Nazareth - it needs him if it is to become a total grip on our hearts and minds - yet it is the World that is the primary Value. If World-value were not there, nothing would be of any consequence: Christ would stand merely as the Centre of a religion which would be, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the people". Rideau18 has here an apt extract from Teilhard: "Religion can become an opium. It is too often taken to be no more than an anodyne. Its true function is to maintain and spur on the progress of life" (L'esprit de la terre, 1923, in L'energie humaine, p. 53). Without belief in evolution no progress of life can be maintained and spurred on. We would be in a static universe with no natural pole of vital fulfilment, no Ultra-human awaiting our long travail. And even if Christianity brings us an assurance of success by
17.Ibid., p. 308.
18.Ibid., p. 650.
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its doctrine of the Mystical Body whose unity is assumed to be already there and by whose gathering together its members the cosmos will be unified in that unity - even if the Christian religion holds forth before us by its revelatory authority the final universal plenitude, does it actually set at rest the doubts arising when we witness all around us the innumerable signs of conflict and divergence instead of harmony and convergence? Teilhard's answer as cited in Rideau's book19 is both Yes and No: "For a Christian...the eventual biological success of man on earth is not merely a probability but a certainty; since Christ (and in him virtually the world) is already rising. But this certainty, born as it is of a 'supernatural' act of faith, is of its nature of a higher order than the phenomenal: which means, in one sense, that it leaves all the anxieties attendant upon the human condition, on their own level, still alive in the heart of the believer" (The Directions and Conditions of the Future, 1948, in The Future of Man, p. 237).
Even if the "supernatural" act of faith could remove the anxieties of the phenomenal plane, it would not, for Teilhard, be of pre-eminent and paramount meaning. It would be something superadded: it could never be the basis of his life. The basis is a direct, independent conviction of the world as a Divine Movement. No special revelation is required to convince Teilhard on this score. Whether Christ historically happened or not, there would be a living All, claiming his religious adherence. And it is not always that he feels the scientifically inferred sense of an all-totalising future Omega to be deficient - an anticipation fragile and precarious in the absence of Christian faith. In an earlier section we have shown his irrepressible optimism. We may extract a few more "quotes" from Rideau's "Notes" to prove that the true Teilhard, for all his spells of hesitation, could have no final misgivings nor require a "supernatural" prop.
"Human molecules" may have dissensions on the surface, but Teilhard is sure that "under the rapidly mounting
19. Ibid., p. 559.
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pressures forcing them upon one another the human molecules will ultimately succeed in finding their way through the critical barrier of mutual repulsion to enter the inner zone of attraction" (The Human Rebound of Evolution, 1947, in The Future of Man, p. 211).20 Again: "No obstacle can prevent human energy - the expression of a force as irresistible and infallible as the universe itself - from freely attaining the natural term of its evolution (L'energie humaine, 1937, in L'energie humaine, p. 190).21 Once again: "It would be easier at the stage of evolution we have reached to prevent the earth from revolving than to prevent mankind from becoming totalized" (Directions and Conditions of the Future, 1948, in The Future of Man, p. 229).22
Confronted with such confidence in an inwardly propelled world-development, we may justifiably argue that, apart from his desire for a "face" borrowed from a human-divine historical figure, there is no vacuum left to be filled by Christianity in the science-inspired philosophical religion of faith in the world, which is the basic religion of Teilhard. The desire for a God-Man's face is a legitimate one; but it never has for Teilhard an utter indispensability, nor is it ever given by him an outstanding place. And, if the secondary level of what he believes in is occupied by none other than Christ out of all historical figures, it is merely because he has no notion of any other possible Avatar. Could he have visualised an alternative incarnation, he might not have focused on Christ. When we consider the circumstances under which he made his choice, we cannot regard the choice as either basic or exclusive. And, even as things are, we may recall that the individual Jesus is, in the framework of Teilhard's vision, just the stepping-stone to the Cosmic Christ whom he saw taking shape from the Resurrection of Jesus - a stepping-stone he
20.Ibid., p. 368.
21.Ibid., p. 369.
22.Ibid.
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practically ignored in his worship once he had arrived at that universal divinity. Further, as the Cosmic Christ is but the Principle of Evolution apotheosised, the name "Christ" marks no more than a special enhanced stage of activity reached by a Universal Presence functioning under the appearance of an ascending cosmogenesis - a Presence that was there even before the birth of Jesus. Essentially this Presence, of whose all-embracing vastness the historical Jesus may be deemed a concentrated manifestation rather than the individual fount and origin, is the truth behind Teilhard's Christian stance.
The awareness of such a Presence causes what Rideau23 takes to be Teilhard's overwhelming religious experience -"entrancement with the greatness of the universe".
23. Ibid., p. 220.
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(2)
One of the last Teilhard-quotations we picked out from Rideau's book1 had the phrase applying the attributes "irresistible" and "infallible" to the "universe".2 In this expression we may read a virtual summing-up of what we have termed Teilhard's basic religion. It answers to the "cosmic sense" he often spoke of as something born with him. And Rideau quite openly recognises the foundational and self-sufficient character of that sense for Teilhard, as indeed no intelligent student of Teilhardism can help doing. He3 writes: "Teilhard was a romantic, and his keen sensibility was so excited by the immense spatial dimension of the universe, by the power and complexity of cosmic energies, without qualifying that emotion by critical assessment, that he made of the world an initial, paramount, primordial entity. No doubt this world is dialectically linked with man and ascends towards a fuller degree of spirit; but, in its very development, it is affirmed as absolute and governs his whole view of being and existence."
Rideau4 frowns at Teilhard's "romanticism". He sees it as part of the modern scientific spirit which assigns a primary place "to nature and to action upon nature" and gives rise to "philosophies of becoming". He is doubtful whether those philosophies will retain their hold for long and feels that Teilhard was not cautious enough when he based everything on a scientific formulation of his cosmic sense and brought even traditional Christianity to this touchstone. "Though the force and usefulness of some of Teilhard's criticism should not be overlooked," Rideau envisages with Bergson a non-Teilhardian turn of man's mind in the future: "this hypothesis would weaken the case he made out against a theologi-
1.Op. cit.
2.Ibid., p. 369.
3.Ibid., p. 246.
4.Ibid., pp. 246-47.
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cal system and a Christian attitude that is not sufficiently receptive to the modern spirit."
Rideau is right in his assessment of "the passion for action" in an objective environment which, as current science ordinarily goes, is not conducive to "the development of interior and mystical potentialities".5 However, Teilhard's science is not endstopped, but flows over and gets "enjamb-ed" to religious prospects. Rideau is aware of this: "...what Teilhard tried to do was, in principle, praiseworthy and in conformity with a long philosophical tradition: he sought to use science (particularly in its biological branches essentially linked with history) in order to induce from it, almost experimentally, the existence of God, and from that a religious apologetics." While appreciating Teilhard's ultra-scientific project, Rideau expresses his reservations. He continues: "Nevertheless, the biological law of unification, backed by the rational demand for unity, cannot be fully transposed to the plane of a human history, for the latter is subject to the indetermination of moral freedom, to the alternative of the spiritual option, as it is to God's loving battle with sinful man."
Whether or not Rideau's stricture be quite correct, his setting forth of the "romantic"-cum-scientific Teilhard concedes and endorses a point that has often been debated: Teilhard's affirmation of what Rideau6 calls "the universe in the vastness of its extension and the power of its energies" as a world that is "absolute" - "an initial, paramount, primordial entity". What is of further pertinence is Rideau's .reference to the Teilhardian induction of God's existence from this entity and then from that existence "a religious apologetics", the process of demonstrating that the Personal God, loving and lovable, of ultra- or hyper-physics is concerned not only to reflect Himself in man's consciousness by way of a general worship-instinct and then of a precise revelation but
5.Ibid., p. 247.
6.Ibid., p. 246.
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also to appear in an incarnate mode in the course of world-history: in short, that He evokes religion, inspires a Bible and produces a Christ. Yes, Teilhard attempts to guide the modern age through his phenomenology to Christianity or, more correctly speaking, from a hyper-physics to a "hyper-Catholicism" - that is, to an extreme extension of the central Catholic dogma of "Christ is all" into that Christian version of pantheism - "pan-Christism" - with its Universal Evolver Christ. But Rideau is not quite logical in equating Teilhard's "religious apologetics" with "a long philosophical tradition". Teilhard does use science in the interests of religion but there is a momentous difference between his apologetic procedure and that of a whole line of Christian philosophers in the past.
Rideau" tells us that "in his sense of nature and of man, Teilhard follows in the steps of Saint Thomas who also based his thought on the analogy of being, on the correspondence between the 'orders' and on nature's pre-adaptation to the supernatural". But Rideau8 himself admits a little later: "[Teilhard] did not, of course, deny man's supernatural end, but by making religion a function of life, a privileged natural organ of cosmic history, he tended to transpose the 'kingdom of heaven' to the terrestrial plane, as something to be hoped for in world-time. Again, while retaining God's transcendence in relation to his work and the gratuitous character and newness of the Christian mystery, all his intellectual and emotional bent led him to emphasize the connexions and continuities between Creation and Creator, between the world and Christ. His logical insistence on unity and his aspiration for the universal caused him, while retaining the distinction between them, to unite in synthesis and in theory orders or planes that are separated by their distance from the mystery." We may remember that, for Teilhard, God is conceived as an extension of the world's progress and figured under the form of the world's evolutionary peak, Omega Point. He makes
7.Ibid., p. 239,
8.Ibid., p. 245.
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this peak the test of religious truth. Everything has to be in accord with Omega Point. No religion, no revelation can have any force for Teilhard if it is unaware of Omega or bypasses it. This stand of Teilhard's has always to be kept in mind when defining his "religious apologetics".
Rideau seems apt to ignore it in an important place. If we look at Teilhard's apologetics in a broad general fashion we may stress, as Rideau does, a passage penned in 1946. Rideau9 writes: "In his Esquisse d'une dialectique de l'esprit (1946, in L'activatian de l'energie, pp. 149-58) Teilhard sets out clearly the 'successive phases of his apologetics or, if you prefer it, dialectic': (1) discovery of Omega as the 'purely immanent focus of Convergence'; (2) discovery of God as the personal centre of attraction not only for the world but for free consciousness; (3) discovery of the Christian phenomenon and faith in the Incarnation; (4) discovery of the Church, the germ of the 'supervitalization' of history. The distinction and dialectical connexion of the stages of the religious quest are well brought out by these phases, in particular the transition into the order of revelation. 'It is worth noting that the second phase opens with a question: that of 'knowing whether there are not hidden messages, as yet unnoticed by our observation' (Ibid., p. 153). The enquiry, still rational, into the divine is connected by an historical enquiry. 'It is here, in the very midst of the human phenomenon that the Christian problem emerges and demands our attention. Historically starting with the Man-Jesus, a phylum of religious thought appeared in the human mass' (Ibid., p. 154)."
Then Rideau approaches a passage in Teilhard which has aroused much controversy but which, according to us, is the most explicit key to the core of his specific "ism". Referring to his own note on Teilhard's apologetics Rideau10 remarks: "It is in this context that one should interpret the controversial passage from Teilhard..." The passage in question is quoted,
9. mid., p. 376.
10. Ibid.
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but not in full. So before citing Rideau's comment, we may pick out the complete text as first presented in a critical article in the Vatican's mouthpiece, the Ossewatore Romano of July 1, 1962. We shall follow the official translation, which has recently come out, of the essay How I Believe (1934),11 where the text occurs.
*
Teilhard writes: "If as the result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world. The world (its value, its infallibility and its goodness) - that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe. It is by this faith that I live. And it is to this faith, I feel, that at the moment of death, rising above all doubts, I shall surrender myself.... I surrender myself to an ill-defined faith in a world that is one and infallible - wherever it may lead me."
Rideau's comment12 runs: "Pere de Lubac, while admitting that there is some ambiguity in this passage, forcibly demonstrates that it expresses an approach both justified and classical. Teilhard, addressing himself to an unbeliever and adopting an existential point of view, seems to make a clean sweep of his religious faith; but he does this only to develop to its conclusion the basic affirmation of the world and unfold the dialectical stages that can lead the unbeliever to the recognition of God and of Christianity. Both on the objective and the personal level, the order of nature and that of the supernatural are connected by a dialectic of analogy and discontinuity. The passage from one order to the other is achieved by a gratuitous initiative on the part of God, which resumes and transcends nature, and subjectively by an act of
11.Christianity and Evolution, pp. 99, 103.
12,Op. cit., pp. 376-77.
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faith that transcends, without denying, the initial affirmation of the world (H. de Lubac, The Faith of Teillhard de Chardin, London, 1965, pp. 136 ff.13). In a recent book the eminent theologian Pere Guy de Broglie shows also that Christian faith appears not as the result of two different intellectual processes (one purely rational, the other purely mystical) but as the climax of a single spiritual activity, animated by grace and receptive of the good tidings that crown it (Les origines de credibilite de la Revelation Chretienne, Fayard, 1964),"
All this insistence on the need of a direct revelation in order to reach the total Christian vision is not irrelevant to Teilhard's stand, and we may also grant that what Teilhard throws aside at the start is certain to be recovered if he pursues to its end his initial faith in the world, and that this very faith leads him to the position in which the need of a direct revelation of the Christian vision is logically compassed; for, if a Personal God issues from the dialectic of faith in the world, not only the strong possibility but also the extreme probability of such a God directly communicating Himself to man and even incarnating Himself in history and founding a Church as His growing Mystical Body arises by sheer force of reasoning. Situated as Teilhard was, the direct communication could be conceived only as Judaeo-Christianity and the incarnation as the Man-Jesus and the Mystical Body as the Roman Catholic Church. But when we have traced the broad shape of the Teilhardian apologetics we have not yet got to the heart of the matter: we have not yet explicated all the definite and decisive terms of the "controversial" passage.
Why is the passage "controversial" at all? Why is de Lubac constrained to write: "We would not deny that there is something over-nice and paradoxical in the turn which Pere Teilhard gives to his thought...."14 - "His style of writing in the opening passage of How I Believe is philosophically
13.This book appears in our footnotes in its paperback form as Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning.
14.Op. cit, p. 132.
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unsatisfactory until it is explained by what follows...."15 -"Here at the very beginning of his apologetic task he finds himself obliged to use language that is still elliptical and involves a certain ambiguity..."16 Merely to undertake an apologetic task cannot render a piece of writing so difficult to "Christianise". Every Christian reader could understand that for the sake of argument the writer has to proceed as if he did not believe ab initio in the spirit, the personal God and Christ. The apologist commences on what is common ground between his interlocutor and himself: here this ground should be the world of natural experience, which one pragmatically accepts as worth living in and working for. An additional merit of the world for a modern thinker would be its interrelated vastness and its evolutionary career with a present climax in Man, Beyond this, no apologist who is alleged to write for an unbeliever can go. But does not Teilhard give us much more than a science-tinged practical acceptance of the world?
He gives us a fervent mysticism of the universe. He endows the cosmos not only with a unified character, not only with value in general, but also with infallibility and goodness. He has endowed the world with a secret unerring intelligence heading towards some glorious goal, a concealed heart of absolute love which makes it lovable to us and inspires us to trust implicitly in its forward-looking guidance. Teilhard's faith is in some supreme divinity whose appearance is the world of natural experience. He cannot precisely define this faith with which he starts, but there is no denying that the faith is most firm and is felt as intrinsically justified. What is even more unusual for an apologist who has Christianity at the back of his thought, Teilhard's world-mysticism is openly declared to be the first and last and only thing he believes in. All else - spirit, personal God, Christ - are considered secondary and superadded. Their existence is not necessarily denied; neither is their value in any way negated. And if
15.Ibid., p. 155.
16.Ibid., p. 158.
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nothing about them is asserted, it is because the stage proper to any assertion about them has not been reached. Just because Teilhard has supposed a situation in which he might lose faith in them, we have no reason to think that he has actually lost faith. So much can be conceded to de Lubac and his tribe. But on the other hand we have no reason to hold that Teilhard can afford to start with a clean sheet merely because he knows that he will be able to fill the sheet with all the contents of the New Testament. Nothing to that effect is implied in the words. There is no question now of either a straight pro or a straight contra for spirit, personal God and Christ. But while a straight contra is absent, an oblique contra of a specific sort is present. We are unmistakably told that all through his life right up to the moment of his death Teilhard, though he might not actually choose to do so, could live without them. They do not belong to the fundamentals of his faith. All that is fundamental, the sole thing that he is sure of and regards as indispensable - the one and only essential for him in his religious life from birth to death - is his world-mysticism. If this essential carries him towards faith in spirit, personal God and Christ, he is prepared to embrace that faith. But even if it does not, he is ready to follow its lead, confident that it will never let him down and that somehow it will fulfil him. He can doubt everything else but he will succeed in banishing at all times all hesitation here - and this world-mysticism is the single religious experience he requires for the very act of living, as it were, and for final as well as constant peace of mind and happiness of heart.
Teilhard could not be more precise and categorical as regards these implications. He would appear ambiguous, paradoxical, over-nice, philosophically unsatisfactory under just one condition - namely, that we try to "Christianise" his basic religious stance. We are far past a Christian apologist's pretension of unbelief. We have the downright confession of a belief that is deeper in Teilhard than Christianity and that can even do without it. In view of his well-known devotion to Christ we may be tempted to read here a hidden Christianity
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and then we shall be forced to feel uneasy and to explain away the non-Christian, though not inevitably anti-Christian, mysticism that is the bedrock of Teilhard's soul - a mysticism that can be defined simply as the ineradicable inner sense of a God who is a World-Soul, within whose bosom all things and beings are ultimately held and borne both intelligently and lovingly towards their as-yet-unknown consummation in the context of an unavoidably slow and difficult cosmic process.
An honest analysis of the so-called controversial statement is bound to yield a special kind of pantheism. This pantheism blends the universal and the personal without making any philosophy or dogma out of the blending. It is the pantheism to which Rideau draws our attention when he17 notes that "in Christ in the World of Matter (1916, Hymns of the Universe, pp. 53, 54) Teilhard, deliberately disguising his own identity," wrote: "I had always been by temperament a pantheist... I live at the heart of a single, unique Element, the centre of the universe and present in each part of it: personal love and Cosmic Power.'"
The pantheist temperament which provides the theme of the opening of How I Believe is frankly acknowledged by Teilhard more than once in the course of the same essay. Thus, he18 mentions "the cosmic sense from which germinates the whole organism of my faith". Again we read: "I tried to place at the head of the universe which I adored from birth the risen Christ whom others had taught me to know."19 Evidently Teilhard considers himself to be a born pantheist, an adorer of the world as divine in its inner substance and in its wholeness. Once more we read: "From the point of view we are adopting here, Christianity would appear to satisfy the essential religious tendency which impels man towards some sort of pantheism."20 In the same vein but with a direct
17.Op. cit., p. 279.
18.Op. cit., p. 124.
19.Ibid., p. 128.
20.Ibid., p. 136.
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personal note we have the confession: "Now I realize that on the model of the incarnate God whom Christianity reveals to me, I can be saved only by becoming one with the universe. Thereby too my deepest pantheist aspirations are satisfied."21 Earlier in the essay, as if to leave no misgiving about the radical drift of the "controversial" passage, a new reference to the religious state of self-sufficient world-mysticism such as we have found there, is broadly framed. Tracing the individual development of his faith, Teilhard speaks of its culminating "at a point at which were I to lose confidence in all revealed religion, I would still, I believe, be firmly anchored".22
With these pronouncements before us, it is not only inadequate to speak of the opening words as a mere apologist's procedural gesture: it is also futile to argue that whatever apologetics operates in them is of the general or classical type in a confused mode. Teilhard23 himself goes out of his way to disown any general operation: "...these pages make no claim to determine the theory of a general apologetics. All I am proposing to do is to describe, so far as I understand them, the developments of a personal experience. As such, what I have to say will not satisfy everybody." Later he24 distinguishes his venture from the classical type: "In all the old apologetics, the choice of religion was principally governed by the consideration of the miraculous." And what exactly is Teilhard's own style of apologetics, as differing from the classical, we can gather from a quotation by Rideau:25 "You will note the interesting apologetical approach I feel driven into. Visibilia are to me no longer simply a logical premise to some chain of reasoning that leads to the invisibilia. They now constitute for me an initial world of faith of which the world of supernatural faith is only the development. I wonder whether
21.Ibid., p. 128.
22.Ibid., p. 117.
23.Ibid., p. 97.
24.Ibid., p. 119.
25.Op. cit., p. 650.
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that is not the only legitimate apologetics...." (Letter of 25 February 1929). Here the classical procedure is spotlighted as the chain of reasoning which starts with the visible order of things as premise and ends with the invisible order as conclusion. Teilhard's non-classical or rather anti-classical procedure takes the world of natural experiences as in itself a revelation, a basic presence of the Divine - independent of what is termed supernatural revelation and actually constituting a foundation without which supernatural revelation would have no substance and would lack any possibility of existence. Do we not have here the exact position of the "controversial" passage? And we may observe that the lines on the Teilhardian neoapologetics occur in the same letter that pins down "the things in which I believe".26 We have already cited the credo in an earlier chapter; what is of moment here is that, although the total Teilhard cannot dispense with "some Christ", his credo makes no bones about listing "first and fundamental, the value of the world".27 This phrase along with that about the visibilia being for him "an initial world of faith", should clinch our reading of the pseudo-enigma that de Lubac has created out of the primary posture of How I Believe.
Practically the same posture - and with the further characteristic that, unlike in the letter mentioning "some Christ", it announces itself without adding any secondary article of belief - confronts us in another Teilhard-quotation by Rideau:28 "In future, the only religion for man is the religion that will teach him in the first place to recognize, love and serve with passion the universe of which he is a part" (Le sens humain, 1927).
Not that Teilhard could ever completely do without
26.Ibid., p. 649.
27.Ibid., p. 650.
28.Ibid, p. 307.
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Christianity, but Christianity comes in only to intensify and enrich the world-mysticism that in various ways fills his entire consciousness. We get an emphatic picture of his position - world-mysticism in the full foreground, with Christianity a reinforcing touch from the background - in a letter of April 16,1948, which has even the main motifs of our passage running through it: "All I can find to say from the whole edifice of my experience, my reason, and my deepest convictions, is this: 'whatever happens,...hold fast and do not lose confidence (however ironic it may seem) in the value, the interest and even the fundamental and ultimate goodness of the world.' In a Universe in which we find that we have awakened one day, without asking to, or understanding why, and in a Universe which, however, really seems to be going somewhere, engendering something, after we have done our best in staying afloat and our strength fails, the great infallible and fundamental gesture is to abandon ourselves confidently (I think with our whole Christian experience we must say, lovingly) to the current that bears us along. In this atmosphere of blind surrender, the absurd and the unjust are transformed and take on a meaning. This is the prayer of prayers."29
How primary and pervasive this "prayer of prayers"was in Teilhard's life may be felt in the very fact of what Rideau30 terms his "steadfastness" as a Roman Catholic priest. Rideau31 tells us: "A letter of 15 July 1929 speaks of the end of an interior crisis and his firm determination never to break with the Church and the Society of Jesus: 'I am conscious of feeling myself fundamentally bound to both, for new and even more cogent reasons - by which I mean that I believe I would be betraying "the world", if I deserted the post I have been assigned to. In this sense I love them both, and I want to
29.Letters to Two Friends, 1926-1952 (The Fontana Library, Theology and Philosophy, Collins, London, 1972), p. 103.
30.Op. cit., p. 298.
31.Ibid.
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work, as an individual atom, to perfect them from within, with no trace of antagonism...'." Here we have three truths to set together. One is that Teilhard's "steadfastness" is not a mere adherence to what the Church and the Society of Jesus teach as Christianity. Secondly, his own Christianity is considerably different from theirs and he sees the need to change theirs into his own vision. Thirdly, his aim in not leaving them is to act as an inside force to bring about the required perfection of them - in short, their Teilhardisaton. Lastly, all these Teithardo-Christian movements spring basically not from loyalty to the Vatican but from loyalty to "the World". The World in which he is borne along as an inseparable element is to him the physical presence of an all-wise guiding Power that has his unquestioning love. He believes this Power to have made him a Jesuit Churchman and that is the reason, above all others, why he remains one. Faith in the World is at the back of even his career as a member of the Catholic clergy. When he says of the Church and the Society of Jesus: "In this sense I love them both", he clearly refers to the duty to them he has derived from a deeper duty, the obligation of not "betraying" the World. His vocation as a priest as well as his mission to reform the institutions he serves are at bottom taken up for the World's sake and because of a faith beyond Christianity as such.
Before moving further, we may make for the sake of exactness a certain observation. The adoration of the world as being inwardly a divine Person and acting as such in its totality through the aeons is not itself the religious evolutionism which Teilhard so often expounds. The cosmogenesis of an already existent Omega towards its own emergence in the space-time process is not the same as the single infallible World that Teilhard worshipped from birth. The presence of a Pan-Person under the appearance of a natural order of things precedes in his experience the presence of universal evolution which he felt to be a Pan-Person. De Lubac32 informs us that
32. Op. cit., p. 18,
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when the First World War broke out in 1914 Teilhard's "scientific ideas had already matured": "In contrast with the mental attitude that predominated in his environment, generalized evolution was already to him a matter of conviction." Rideau33 also gives the time-bracket 1908-1914 for Teilhard's growth into an evolutionist. One of Rideau's excerpts34 from him vividly recalls the great occasion of this growth soon after his return from a three-year teachership in Cairo: "It was during my theology years in Hesting (That is, immediately after the marvels of Egypt) that there gradually grew in me -much less as an abstract notion than as a presence - until it filled my whole interior climate, the consciousness that all around me flowed the deep all-embracing ontological drift of the universe" (Le Coeur de la Matiere, 1950).
What Teilhard's being was charged with from the very start of his life was an intuition with three levels of depth.35 At its most elementary, it gave him "the live sense of universal relationships of interdependence". At the next deeper step it disclosed that "the universe forms a system endlessly linked in time and space" and constitutes un bloc. At the final Stratum it provided the inevitable conclusion from the word "bloc": "the world constitutes a whole." This whole laid itself bare as "a global reality whose condition is that of being more necessary, more consistent, richer and more certain in its ways, than any of the particular things it embraces".36 In fact, "there are no longer any 'things' in the world: there are only 'elements'". Carried a little further, this transition from things to elements makes us "speak of their 'identity'". The infinite multiple of the cosmos is "necessarily completed in some unity".37 All this is independent of the question: "Is it a static totality we are concerned with or a dynamic one? Is it material or spiritual? Is it progressive in its movement, or is it
33.Op. cit., p. 27.
34.Ibid., p. 295.
35.Christianity and Evolution, p. 100.
36.Ibid., p. 101.
37.Ibid.
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periodic and circular?"38 Just the overwhelming presence is there of the unitary and unifying whole behind the apparent multiplicity, a oneness existing with a plenitude of being and a certainty of action and taking care of all its elements that are really identical with one another in spite of their surface differences. Prior to any recognition of an evolutionary process mounting higher and higher, Teilhard stands with the statement:39 "Does not the presence of the Whole in the world assert itself for us with the direct evidence of some source of light? I do indeed believe that that is so. And it is precisely the value of this primordial intuition which seems to me to hold up the whole edifice of my belief."
Such an intuition can very naturally, under the impact of modern physics and biology, go past the ordinary materialistic conclusion of science and taking the world's most advanced element, Man, for the starting-point of a synthesis of phenomena, flower into the well-known Teilhardian vision of a march of complexity-consciousness towards Omega Point which is at once "God Ahead" and "God Above." But in itself it is just a special pantheism blending, as we have said, the universal and the personal. The impression of its being pantheism is particularly strengthened by the "elements" getting termed not only a unified ensemble but also an ultimate "identity". If they are secretly identical with one another, then the whole, whose elements they are, must, in the last computation, have an identity with them. At the stage where Teilhard's credo is, he merely calls his intuition "cosmic sense".40 He distinguishes it from its full flowering when he uses the phrase: "the spiritual-evolutionary point of view to which faith in the world has led me."41
38.Ibid.
39.Ibid., p. 102.
40.Ibid.
41.Ibid., p. 118.
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We have shown everything in the opening passage of How I Believe to be as clear-cut as the profundity of the subject permits. Teilhard's hand nowhere shakes or wavers. And, though he does not yet employ the word "pantheism" for his basic posture and afterwards condemns "false pantheisms", as against the true one which is his own "Christian" brand, we find here no blurring of any proper issue. His stand is unequivocal: "The world (its value, its infallibility, and its goodness) - that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe."1
The spuriousness of the enigmatic character assigned to the passage is evident from what Teilhard on his own has to say of his essay. De Lubac2 tells us about the work: "At first he wished to publish it, but when he had finished the draft he was not entirely satisfied and he does not seem later to have tried to have it brought out." However, in the period when he penned it, Teilhard has three capital disclosures to make. To begin with, we have one from de Lubac's own book:3" In 'How I Believe', he confided to a friend when he was actually writing the last pages, 'I feel that I have succeeded in expressing my personal reasons for believing.'" Can we associate with this sense of success any dissatisfaction with the draft? The motive for the latter feeling must be sought in some extraneous circumstance connected with publication.
As for the essay's thesis, there is first his declaration4 in a letter of August 18, 1934: "...basically, my whole religion-can be reduced to this active surrender to a world which I understand less and less in detail (in the sense that the traditional explanations that people give of it seem more and more inadequate) but whose 'divinization' or 'personaliza-
1.Christianity and Evolution p. 99.
2.Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning, p. 133.
3.Ibid., p. 139.
4.letters to Two Friends. 1926-1952, p. 83.
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tion' seems clearer to me every day. That my existence has been as much as possible an act of fidelity to Life is the only thing that interests and reassures me from now on." In addition to this affirmation of a profound "cosmic sense" and its passionate intuition of what the cosmos is leading us to - a consummating "ultra-human" - we have on December 31 of the same year the communication:5 "I am taking the liberty of sending you...a copy of my latest essay 'Why I Believe'. It seems to me that these pages are clear and that I have almost succeeded in expressing my present position.... 'Why I Believe' was originally intended for publication but as it has expanded it has taken on characteristics that may cause it to be considered unpublishable. In that case there is always private circulation." Teilhard has no feeling of ambiguity - he says he has attained clarity and near-exactitude and, if he puts aside the project to publish the essay, it is simply because the Church would not favour its thesis which, starting with faith in the world as primary and self-sufficient in essence, went on to say a number of unconventional things like: "the sense of the Whole..,is the life-blood of all mysticism."6 - "Christianity gives the impression of not believing in progress. It has never developed the sense of the earth."7 -"Judging from first appearances, Catholicism disappointed me by its narrow representations of the world and its failure to understand the part played by matter,"8 Teilhard also says that he found repose in Christianity only when the Universal Christ was revealed to him,9
5.Ibid., pp. 85-86. It will be noted that Teilhard refers to his essay as Why I Believe. In a letter of 23 September 1934 he writes of the essay: "I am calling it 'Comment je crois' (Why and How')" (Letters from a Traveller, Fontana Religious Books, London, 1967, p. 158).
6.Op. cit., p. 122.
7.Ibid., p. 126.
8.Ibid., p. 128.
9.Ibid., p. 126.
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have this Christ unless we fully "accept the most modern concepts of evolution".10
For Teilhard there is the crucial question: "How exactly is the divine power to put the universe together in such a way that it may be possible for an incarnation to be biologically effected in it?"11 The answer, of course, is: in no other way than evolutively. And there is also the crucial point for Teilhard that, unless there is "a physical pole of universal evolution" where the world's "co-ordinated system of activity" rising higher and higher converges irreversibly, never "can any being, no matter how divine he may be, carry out the function of universal consolidation and universal animation which Christian dogma attributes to Christ".12
Then Teilhard adds a sentence with a puzzling last part. "By disclosing a world-peak, evolution makes Christ possible, just as Christ, by giving direction and meaning to it, makes evolution possible."13 The last part is puzzling because the direction and meaning of evolution have already been traced entirely to a source outside Christianity: "Under the combined pressure of science and philosophy, we are being forced, expertentially and intellectually, to accept the world as a coordinated system of activity which is gradually rising up towards freedom and consciousness. The only satisfactory way of interpreting this process...is to regard it as irreversible and convergent. Thus, ahead of us, a universal cosmic centre is taking on definition, in which everything reaches its term, in which everything is explained, is felt, and is ordered."14 This renders that last part itself devoid of "direction and meaning". It is just an inconsequential side-bow, en passant, to orthodoxy.
Obviously the Universal Christ, who alone enables Teilhard to embrace Christianity, has no logical link with that
10.Ibid., p. 127.
11.Ibid.
12.Ibid., pp. 127-28.
13.Ibid., p. 128.
14.Ibid., p. 127.
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religion: he is absolutely bound up with the scientific view of the world as evolutionary. The concepts of evolution are all in all to Teilhard and apart from them Christianity must fail and even "the most magnificent cosmic attributes lavished by St. Paul on the risen Christ"15 be inexplicable and unconvincing: "Christianity takes on its full value when extended (as I find it rewarding to do) to cosmic dimensions."16 The only nexus with orthodoxy lies in the latter's ascribing to Christ "the function of universal consolidation and universal animation" - a function appearing akin to the one performed by the "physical pole of universal evolution". It is thus that Teilhard finds his "individual faith in the world" and "Christian faith in Christ" "inexhaustibly justified by one another".17
In pantheist style he calls Christ the "world-soul"18 but he Christianises his pantheism by finding in Christ "a personalized universe whose domination personalizes me".19 He does not hesitate to declare like the pantheist: "The world around me becomes divine"20 - but he adds that in "pan-Christism" the individual is super-personalized and does not dissolve in the divine All. Looking at his religious discovery he21 tells us: "I have never for the last twenty-five years ceased to marvel at the infinite possibilities which the 'universalization' of Christ opens up for religious thought..." And he22 holds that only through the Universal Christ as he envisaged him "a religion of the future can be conceived."
But can the Roman Church ever allow the value of Christianity to depend vitally and inevitably on modern evolutionism? Surely it will not. De Lubac,23 facing in an early
15.Ibid., p. 129.
16.Ibid.
17.Ibid.
18.Ibid.
19.Ibid.
20.Ibid.
22.Ibid., p. 130.
23.Op. cit.. Preface, p. v.
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work (Forma Christi) of Teilhard's the doctrine of "Christ the final determination and plasmatic Principle of the Universe" - that is, the Principle of Evolution - is liberal enough to say that the vision Teilhard so resolutely followed is one of the roads that lead to Christ, yet he insists that it "cannot but be only one of the convergent roads...; the road, maybe, that best answers the expectations of our own days, but that must fail to reach its destination if it claims to be the only road". We suspect de Lubac is being liberal because of missing the true import of Teilhard's highly heterodox evolutionism. For, on the issue of the "only road" Teilhard never compromised. About "the most modern concepts of evolution" he24 wrote in How I Believe that "If we Christians wish to retain in Christ the very qualities on which his power and our worship are based, we have no better way - no other way, even - than fully to accept" these concepts.
Hence, Teilhard's exclusive Christianity of the Universal Christ cannot be considered attuned to the orthodox tradition despite the Pauline attributes to which he directs our attention. The Church would be bound to adjudge these attributes of a cosmic range to be cosmic in a different sense than the Teilhardian. No wonder Teilhard knew that his essay would lack the Vatican's Nihil Obstat and disqualify for official publication. However, we should refrain from thinking him personally averse to its seeing the light. He held his own Christianity to be in agreement not only with "what is most determinedly emergent"25 in him but also with "what is most alive in the Christian religion",26 so that he "finally .and permanently recognized that in the latter" he had "found the complement" he had "sought" to his "own self".27 He says that therefore to "what is most alive in the Christian religion" he has "surrendered".28
24.Op. cit., p. 127.
25.Ibid., p. 129.
26.Ibid.
27.Ibid., pp. 129-30.
28.Ibid., p. 130.
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We may pause a little over this gesture. The word expressing it harks back consciously to the phrase about surrendering himself absolutely to "faith in a world that is one and infallible - wherever it may lead me".29 The echo shows that world to be really "the synthesis of Christ and the universe", the Universal Christ whose being is organic to the cosmic Whole, the Christ who is "the soul of the world" and whose body in that case must be the world itself - the world for whose evolutionary progress Teilhard heartily shares the devotion of the modern humanists.30 Among the humanists, he31 informs us, "we have without any doubt been watching for the last century the birth and establishment of a new faith: the religion of evolution". And he32 asks what in truth is his own "cosmic sense...but precisely the same faith in the universe which animates modern pantheisms". Hence his synthesis of Christ and the universe is essentially pantheist except that the universe is not an impersonal energy but the fosterer and manifester of ever richer and deeper personality.
Similarly, the synthesis has an affinity with the "eastern religions" to which he was intensely drawn because "they are supremely universalist and cosmic"33 - the religions which are responsible, according to him, for "the birth of pantheism"34 but which he understood (or rather misunderstood) as suppressing the multiple in the One and leading to an unconsciousness of the individual person.35 But inasmuch as he grants that the sense of the Whole "never perhaps has... flowered more exuberantly than in the plains of India,'"he36 proves himself again by his cosmic sense a pantheist with a stress on the individual person in the totality, the One being
29.Ibid., p. 103.
30.Ibid., p. 123.
32.Ibid., p. 124.
33.Ibid., pp. 121-22.
34.Ibid., p. 122.
35.Ibid.
36.Ibid.
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seen as "the concentration of the multiple".37But his "perso-nalism" must not be taken as entirely Christian; for although "Christianity is eminently the religion of the imperishable and the personal", the average Christian, "as a result of seeing only 'personal' relationships in the world...has ended by reducing the creator and creature to the scale of 'juridical man'".38 Teilhard explains this verdict on the average Christian; "In his effort to exalt the value of spirit and supematuratity of the divine he has come to look upon the soul as a transient guest in the cosmos and a prisoner of matter. For such a Christian, accordingly, the universe has ceased to extend the primacy of its organic unity over the whole field of interior experience: the operation of salvation, reduced to being no more than a matter of personal success, develops without any reference to cosmic evolution."39
Teilhard's true final position, as sketched in How I Believe, is best summed up in three passages of Letters to Two Friends: "We all need a new face of God to worship, and I am more and more convinced that this face can appear to us only through and beyond an 'ultra-human'" (March 31, 1950).40 -"...the vague impressions of my youth are now invading everything in the form of participation in some immense energy which is a curious blend of Hindu 'totality', Western 'technology', and Christian 'personalism'. More and more I see growing in me the evidence and the human consequences of the great thing that is happening right now. Not 'God who is dying,' as Nietzsche said, but 'God who is changing,' so that, as I am in the habit of saying, the Upward movement is now reinforced by a Forward movement never before considered by the religions" (July 25, 1950)41 - "...the moment one realizes that the Universe flows (and always has flowed) in the direction of 'ever greater order and consciousness,' a whole
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., p. 125.
39. Ibid., pp. 125-26.
40 Op. cit., p. 112.
41. Ibid., p. 113.
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group of values is introduced into things which, without making one blind or insensitive to Disorder or Evil, give everything an extraordinary savor, warmth, and limpidity: a superior and synthetic form of 'mysticism' in which the strengths and seductions of oriental 'pantheism' and Christian personalism converge and culminate!" (January 2, 1951 )42
Of course, Teilhard, with his central religious slogan "the Universal Christ", seriously believes that "the mainstream of the Christian 'phylum'" is completely capable of carrying as its own "the great event of our time" - namely, "a change in the face of God in which the pure 'God of above' of yesterday is being combined with a kind of 'God of ahead' (in extension of the Human)" (August 30, 1930),43 But he is perceptive enough to make three statements which clarify his "belief": "Truly...I have confidence that my line of thought is essentially Christian, in spite of the fact that I am sometimes forced to define it to myself with a word that looks rather dangerous: hyper-Catholic" (June 25, 1926)44 - "I remain rather (with a few others) at the spearhead of the fight for a 'new' Christianity, a position that renders my superiors shy whenever it is a question of me" (April 30, 1947)45 - "I know that, from your point of view, those limitations (and my not fighting stronger against them) are hard to understand; and I feel it myself to some extent too. And yet, I do not see any other logical (or even biological) way to proceed. According to my own principles, I cannot fight against Christianity: I can only work inside it, by trying to transform and 'convert' it. A revolutionary attitude wou!d be much more easy, and also much more pleasant, but it would be suicidal. So I must go on step by step tenaciously" (March 21,1942).46
A new, transformed, "converted" Christianity, brought about by his working towards it from inside the Roman
42.Ibid-, p. 115.
43.Ibid., p. 114.
44.Ibid., p. 35.
45.Ibid., p. 171.
46.Ibid., p. 155.
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Church, constituted the kind of change which Teilhard saw coming in the face of God. And we cannot help being struck by his mentioning "Hindu 'totality'" and "the strengths and seductions of oriental 'pantheism'" as the factors introducing the universal aspect of his religion. The Christian contribution is restricted to "personalism". Teilhard is often disposed to talk of the Christianity of St. Paul and St. John as supplying the universe-ingredient to make up his Universal Christ. Why has he not talked here of Pauline or Johannine "totality" plus the usual personalism of the Christ preached in the Gospels? Why has he not spoken of a Christian "pantheism" derived from the Epistles of Paul and the Fourth Gospel? We can see his feeling that his religion, while remaining Christianity by retaining Christ, transcends whatever totality of a pantheist character the Christian scripture can attribute to Christ.
Indeed, what he extracts from that scripture is more than it can really yield. We observe the excess when in his letter of October 30, 1926, he47 refers to St. Paul: "Have you read...the beginning of the Epistle to the Colossians (Chapter I, verses 12-23), and tried to give it the full, organic meaning it requires? Here Christ appears as a true soul of the World. It is only thus that I love Him." The last sentence is strange enough for a Christian: it implies that the human Jesus, though necessary for the World-Soul to be named Christ, does not draw Teilhard's adoration at all. And this exclusion is quite pointedly prepared a little earlier when, while appreciating "the real historical beginning of Christ (with a practical code of moral comparison with Him)" presented by "the first three Gospels", he48 declares: "If Jesus were no more than 'a father, a mother, a brother, a sister' to us, I would have no need of Him; and, in a sense, the past does not interest me." But what is most notable is that, though the name "Christ" is there, it denotes the typical God-sense of "Hindu 'totality'" and "oriental 'pantheism'". Of course, the Hindu Godhead, the
47.Ibid., p. 48.
48.Ibid.
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oriental Divinity, is more than a World-Soul; but the latter is the characteristic aspect of this Godhead, this Divinity, in relation to the universe. The beginning of the Epistle to the Colossians has never before been credited with such an aspect by any Catholic exegete. And Teilhard is aware of the lacuna. He writes of "the full, organic meaning" which that Chapter of the Epistle "requires": he is saying that so far the meaning he needs has not been given but that it should be given. In other words, St. Paul does no more than frame for us a text which we may use as a point de depart for an entirely novel development towards the coming change in God's face.
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Apropos of "the change in the face of God", with which Teilhard is primarily and passionately concerned, so that "God Ahead" may predominate over "God Above", he observes: "I know that hundreds of people around me feel it (hence the success of the books I've circulated privately)" (August 30, 1950).1
This allusion to a wide Teilhardian public, because of the representative nature of the author in the modem context, sends us back to the sequel Teilhard has in How I Believe to his announcement that he has surrendered to faith in the Universal Christ as a complement to his surrender to faith in the World. He2 writes: "But, if I have surrendered myself why should not others, all others, also do the same? I began by saying that what I am now writing is a personal confession. Deep in my mind, however, as I have proceeded, I have felt that something greater than myself was making its way into me. The passion for the world, from which my faith springs, the dissatisfaction, too, which I experience at first when 1 am confronted by any of the ancient forms of religion - are not these traces in my heart of the uneasiness and expectancy which characterize the religious state of the world today?"
Here we have an indication about the sort of people for whom How I Believe would be a significant and helpful document. Rideau,3 after de Lubac,4 has made out that the essay was specifically addressed ad Gentiles, unbelievers, non-Christians, And de Lubac5 quotes a letter of Teilhard's (March 1947) in which, answering an attack by Pere Lagrange-Garrigou, Teilhard says that How I Believe "was intended for a very special public and not for general circulation". De Lubac goes on: "He is ready to concede that his starting-point and
1.Letters to Two Friends, 1926-1952, p. 114.
2.Christianity and Evolution, p. 130.
3.Op. cil., p. 376.
4.Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning, p. 133.
5.Ibid., pp. 175-76.
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his causes for credibility, in so far as they are personal, may have little solidity or probative force for many minds, including that of his critic: they may, if they wish, regard them as 'flights of imagination'. He does not, however, believe that he is thereby excused from trying to say something that will weigh with other minds - the 'special public' he refers to. He considered that he owed this to the scientists he mixed with and who more or less shared his initial 'general view of the universe', even if they were incapable of discovering a solid basis for it. It was among these men that God had placed him, and it was of them that he once exclaimed in his missionary zeal, 'These are the Indies that call me with even more urgency than St. Francis Xavier's.'"
What de Lubac and Rideau suggest is valid, as far as it goes, for Teilhard certainly wanted to reconcile science and religion; but he never thought that the shortcoming lay always on the side of unbelievers. One of Rideau's quotations6 from him runs: "Everything stems from the perception and acceptance of a sense of the value of the world. It is the absence of such a sense...that leaves the admonitions of our missionaries so cold and uninspiring. On the other hand, once this sense emerges, then I am convinced the Christian faith will once again find echo throughout the world" (Letter of 3 January 1948). An earlier piece of Teilhard's writing rings the same note:7 "In their quest to give a name to the unknown God whose existence they divine, the Gentiles look to us. And then they turn away from a Gospel that seems to have no answer either to their outlook on the world, or to the questions they ask or to the things they look for. The resistance the Church comes up against nowadays in getting a footing, does not derive, as is sometimes said, from its dogmas being too lofty and its moral systems too difficult. It is due to the fact that men no longer recognize in us their religious and moral ideal and accordingly stand aside waiting
6.Op. cit., p. 318.
7.Ibid., p. 326.
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for something better" (L'incroyance moderne, 1933, in Science et Christ, p. 151).
There is nothing in the terms of Teilhard's extension from himself to others that would pinpoint fellow-scientists as his intended readership. Fellow-Christians who are forward-looking would as well come within his purview. Rideau has several passages, either directly quoting Teilhard or incorporating his words, which bear us out:
"With the present development of mankind, 'a new section or, to put it more exactly, a further dimension, has suddenly brought about an almost limitless expansion of man's destiny - a section and dimension of which there is no explicit mention in the Gospel. Until that happened, the Christian had learnt to think and act, to fear and worship, on the scale of his own individual life and death. How without breaking with his traditional background, will he or can he extend his faith and hope and charity to the proportions of a terrestrial organization that is destined to persist for millions of years?' ...There is 'a lack of proportion between the insignificant mankind that still appears in our catechisms and the great mankind with which science is concerned'; 'a lack of proportion between the tangible aspirations and anxieties and responsibilities of life, according to whether they are expressed in a secular book or a religious treatise'" (Le Christ evoluteur, 1942).8 - "Teilhard concludes a criticism...as follows: 'It is here, and only here, in this lack of balance (sometimes more sometimes less distinctly felt) that we can hope to find the ultimate source of the uneasiness that today lies heavy on the mind and consciousness of so many Christians, Contrary to what is generally held, it is not the scientific discovery of man's humble origins but much more the equally scientific discovery of man's fantastic future that now troubles the hearts of men; and it is with this above all, accordingly, that our modern apologetics should be concerned'" (Le Christ
8. Ibid., p. 323. In connection with the italicised phrase here, see the discussion in the Note at the end of the article.
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evoluteur).9...Christianity will lose, to the extent that it fails to embrace as it should everything that is human on earth, the keen edge of its vitality and its full power to attract. Being for the time incompletely human it will no longer fully satisfy even its own disciples....We wonder why there is so much unease in the hearts of religious seekers and priests..." (The Heart of the Problem, 1949, in The Future of Man, p. 260).10 - "Not only to the Gentiles and simple layfolk, but even in the heart of the religious orders, Christianity is still to some extent a refuge, but it does not embrace, or satisfy, or even lead the 'modern soul' any longer. Something has gone wrong, and something, therefore, must be provided, on this planet, in the field of faith and religion - and that without delay" (Le Dieu de revolution, 1953).11 - "Many Catholics, failing to find in their religion 'a complete vindication of their lives, adhere to Christianity but only for want of anything better, and only so long as a number of central points (in connection with the origin and significance of the world) are discreetly left in the background. This is no longer a complete and fervent adherence to the light one has found. They are already - how many people have told me this - conscious of awaiting a new Gospel' (Le sens humain, 1942)."12
Lastly, we have Teilhard referring to his own writing and the Catholics readership it commanded: "Between my way of thinking and the really 'orthodox' (I do not say 'official' but 'practical') Christian vision of the World there is not such a big gap as you think. The proof is the way in which the best of the Catholics are jumping on my poor essays. As I wrote a few days ago to a Superior, a good friend of mine, I do not know whether my bread is well baked: anyhow the way the people eat it is a pathetic proof how much they are starving for a food
9,Ibid., p. 326.
10.Ibid., p. 327.
11.Ibid., p. 328.
12.Ibid.
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in which Love of God does not exclude, but includes, Love of the World" (Letter of February 14,1949).13
All this - taking us beyond the narrow focus sought for How I Believe - brings us back to the point made by the first two quotations we made in contradicting de Lubac and Rideau. They were directed at missionary work and the need for the right type of apologetics. The Catholic priesthood itself is confronted there. And it is strange how de Lubac forgets the information he14 has himself proferred about Teilhard's essay: "Pere Teilhard wrote it in China between September and November [1934] at the suggestion of Mgr. Bruno de Solages." And de Lubac never attends to the fact that at least four times Teilhard uses the pronoun "you" unmistakably to denote de Solages, a fellow-Jesuit who was the rector of the Institut Catholique of Toulouse. In one place, Teilhard uses it after affirming about the "cosmic sense": "In fact, nothing in the vast and polymorphous domain of mysticism (religious, poetical, social and scientific) can be explained without the hypothesis of such a faculty, by which we react synthetically to the spatial and temporal ensemble of things in order to apprehend the Whole behind the multiple."15 Naturally the usual Roman Catholic mind would not be immediately receptive to this affirmation and Teilhard says to de Solages: "You may, if you wish, speak of temperament ..."l6 At the next place, Teilhard says: "You see, then, how by degrees my initial faith in the world was irresistibly transformed into a faith in the increasing and indestructible spiritualization of the world."17 Evidently Teilhard is impressing on his Jesuit friend the mode in which the modern Christian should envisage religion. At another place, after being told that in the supreme universal personality we shall inevitably find ourselves personally immortalised, we read:
13.Utters to Two Friends, 1926-1952, p. 198.
14.Op. cit., p. 133.
15.Christianity and Evolution, pp. 102-03.
16.Ibid., p. 103.
17.Ibid., p. 113.
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"You may find this an astonishing prospect: but that is because the materialist illusion is still at work, in one of its many forms, and it is leading you astray, as it has led astray the majority of pantheists. We almost inevitably, as I recalled at the beginning of this section, picture the great Whole to ourselves as a vast ocean in which the threads of individual being disappear. It is the sea in which the grain of salt is dissolved, the fire in which the straw goes up in smoke. Thus to be united with that Great Whole is to be lost. But what I want to be able to proclaim to all men is that this is a false picture and contradicts everything that has emerged most clearly in the course of my awakening to faith. The Whole is not, definitely not, the tensionless, and thus dissolving, immensity in which you look for its image. Like us it is essentially a centre, possessing the qualities of a centre...."18
These passages provide the key to the nucleus of the readership Teilhard has in mind. It is the Roman Catholic clergy, whom de Solages stands for in general. A friend of Teilhard's, he could not be the sort of mentality that condemned and thwarted Teilhard all his life. But he too has his reservations. Like "the majority of pantheists", as Teilhard conceives them, de Solages, though not a pantheist but representing all Roman Catholics of the official type, is yet habituated to think of any universal Whole as a diffuse unit in which the personal human soul would be submerged by union. Teilhard points out that to think in this manner is to approach the Whole on the analogy of a uniform material substratum - like the ether of the old physics. Teilhard shows the Whole to be a Being commensurate with the physical cosmos but with a quality which carries to the supreme degree what the highest result of universal evolution possesses -personalisation - and in whose Super-Personhood this personalisation is itself super-personalised. The shying away from a religion of the Whole, from the worship of a cosmic Divinity, is hit off with precision by Teilhard in one of
18. Ibid., pp. 116-17.
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Rideau's citations:19 "In practice, if not in theory, our Lord has been too exclusively presented to our contemporaries in the form of a complement promised to their personality - a complement that is moral, extrinsic, particularist, and individual. They have been given a picture of Christ dissociated from the universe, as a detached fragment which brings men into conflict with one another. Is it in any way surprising if the Soul of the world, now that it has, in its turn, spontaneously disclosed itself to their consciousness, has appeared to them as an 'extra', or antagonistic, or stronger absolute - a new Messiah more desirable than the old?" (L'ame du monde, 1918, in Ecrits du temps de la guerre, p. 227).
Further, the extrinsic individual Christ stood in history for a God who was Himself expressed in religious texts "in terms of a typically neolithic symbolism" - that is to say, one belonging to "the age of a mankind (and, more widely, of a world) built up from the sky above to the village below, on the model and (practically speaking) the scale of the family and the ploughed field".20 In such a universe, monotheism could not have emerged "except in terms of a God who is the great paterfamilias and supreme landlord of the inhabited world".21 This was written in Le phenomene chretien, 1950, but round about the time of How I Believe there is the same attitude on Teilhard's part: "The expression of our Christology is still exactly the same as that which, three centuries ago, was sufficient for men whose cosmic outlook has now become physically insupportable" (Christologie et evolution, 1933).22 -"The time has gone when God could simply be imposed on us from outside, like a master or proprietor. The world will never again fall on its knees, except before the organic centre of its evolution. What at the present moment we all lack, in varying
19.Op. at., p. 319.
21.Ibid.
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degrees, is a new formulation of holiness" (Le phenomene spirituel, 1937, in L'energie humaine, p. 136).23
"The organic centre of the world's evolution" is Teilhard's Universal Christ. And the essence of all these passages is distilled in the words24 with which, just before its "Epilogue", the main body of How I Believe closes and from which we have already culled a phrase: "A general convergence of religions upon a Universal Christ who fundamentally satisfies them all: that seems to me the only possible conversion of the world and'the only form in which a religion of the future can be conceived."
These words indicate that the essay was centrally written for those who want to convert the world to Christianity. It calls for the abandonment of the old apologetics and the adoption of a new line by the Church.
The right way for the Church to set about in its work of reassuring dissatisfied Christians and of Christianising unbelievers, the Gentiles, the "infidels" (to use another bit of the old terminology): such is the main general purpose that can be ascribed to How I Believe, apart from its character of a personal document contributing to the study of the psychology of belief. And the Christianity in which love of the World and love of God are combined has its true apologetic colour properly brought forth in a letter of 1948-49 which again discusses "faith in heaven" and "faith in earth" as both leading to the same religious conclusion: "The synthesis of the two forms of faith in Christo jesu is not an arbitrarily chosen tactical move ad usum infidelium. It represents hie et nunc a condition of survival for an increasing number of Christians. We have to choose right now between the Christianising of neo-humanism and its condemnation. The problem is with us now, and the time is short."25
23.Ibid., pp. 318-19.
24.Christianity and Evolution, p. 130.
25.Quoted by Claude Cuenot, Teilhard de Chardin: A Biographical Study (Burns and Oates, London, 1965), p. 271.
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The entire drive of How I Believe, with its synthesis of scientifically evolutionary pantheism and the Universal Christ who fulfils in a personalist manner Teilhard's innate pantheist tendency and who breaks through Christianity as it has been presented up to now is caught in an early communication of Teilhard's, bearing on his master-passion for a "converted" Christianity which could "convert" mankind: "What continues rather to dominate my outlook is the realization, sometimes overwhelming, of a lack of proportion between the greatness of the realities involved in the world's forward progress (physical, biological, intellectual, social, etc.) and the pettiness and narrowness, the makeshift nature, of the philosophico-dogmatic solution which we claim to have built up as a permanent bulwark for the universe. We're trying to put the ocean into a nutshell" (Letter of 16 March 1921).26
We can now discern with accuracy not only Teilhard's primary purpose, but also his basic belief as it emerges from his famous essay. Merely because his limited vision of historical spirituality could embrace Christ alone as a divine incarnation, he calls by the name of "Universal Christ" the Personal Pantheos whom he has intuited and loved from birth and in whom all God-lovers will attain by their union with Him a fulfilling super-personalisation. Accepting Christ, Teilhard naturally remains within the Roman Church that, in his eyes, derives from this incarnation, but he finds all traditional dogmas and apologetics most faulty, and strives, by reading his own Personal Pantheos in St. Paul's Epistles, to metamorphose Roman Catholicism into, first of all, a pantheist Personalism and, finally, an evolutionist form of this faith in a World single, infallible, all-guiding.
It is thus that we can evaluate correctly the conventional-seeming sentence at almost the start of How 1 Believe: "...I have
26. Rideau, op. cit., p. 316.
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tried to pin down in what follows, the reason for my faith as a Christian."27
Such an evolution means that actually there is nothing of Christianity in the accepted sense in Teilhard's Christian faith. And perhaps we cannot do better than make a gloss on basic Teilhardism with an excerpt from another credo of our author - the commencement of My Universe (1924). There, after asserting "the primacy of consciousness", the faith that it is better to be than not to be and better to be more than to be less; he adds that "directly side by side" with this "comer-stone" of his "interior life" he "can distinguish another: Faith in life, in other words the unshakable certainty that the universe considered as a whole
a.Has a goal
b.Cannot take the wrong road nor come to a halt in mid-journey."28
Then Teilhard speculates on what the assurance of success may be due to. He gives four possible causes: it "may be due to a providential transcendent action; or to the influence of a spiritual energy immanent in the whole (some soul of the world); or to a sort of infallibility which, though not accorded to isolated attempts, attaches to indefinitely multiplied attempts ('the infallibility of great numbers'); or again it may, more probably, derive from the hierarchically ordered action of these factors, at the same time."29
In the last clause we have a clear pointer to Teilhard's full vision: transcendentalism fused with pantheism as well as with a progressivist naturalism in which a forward-tending "grope" of elements moves through the multitudinous play of "chance". But Teilhard, at this stage, hastens to add: "the precise reason does not matter for the moment. Before looking for an explanation of the thing, 1
27.op. cit., p. 96.
28.Science and christ ( Collins, London, 1966), p
29.Ibid., p. 41.
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that is to say (in virtue of our first principle) of arriving at a certain higher degree of consciousness."30 Then comes the grand finale of the Teilhardian confessio fidei:
"I believe it by inference: because if the universe has hitherto been successful in the unlikely task of bringing human thought to birth in what seems to us an unimaginable tangle of chances and mishaps, it means that it is fundamentally directed by a power that is eminently in control of the elements that make up the universe. I believe it, too, from necessity because, if I thought that the solidity of the substance in which I am implicated was not proof against any test, I would feel completely lost and despairing. Finally, and perhaps most of all, I believe it from love: because I love the universe that surrounds me too dearly not to have confidence in it."31
The closing note of the confession has the gist of the "controversial" passage and the same accent of pantheist Personalism as in those keywords of How I Believe: "the universe which I adored from birth."3Z
Note
We have used a quotation by Rideau from Teilhard's essay Le Christ evoluteur, having the words: "...a section and dimension of which there is no explicit mention in the Gospel."
In the essay's English translation, Christ the Evolver, included in the collection Christianity and Evolution (Collins, London, 1972), the words carry a footnote (p, 142) by the Editor, N.M. Wildiers, Doctor of Theology: "Christ had foretold it: 'I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you in all the truth'" (John 16:12-13).
30.Ibid.
32.Op. cit., p.128.
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Teilhard is speaking of the new conception of man's destiny that has emerged with the evolutionary vision of the world - the destiny of " 'humanization' of mankind" which is a further step beyond the "'hominization' of life" and which shows the human group no longer as forming "a static aggregate of juxtaposed elements" but as constituting "a sort of super-organism subject to a global and well-defined law of growth".33 In short, Teilhard is looking towards a state of collective "co-reflection", awaiting us in the distant future, and he asks: "How can one expect [the Christian], without breaking through the framework of tradition, to expand his faith, his hope and his charity to the measure of a terrestrial organization which is destined to continue throughout millions of years?"34 The Editor's purport is: the Spirit of truth, representing Christ after his departure, was meant to reveal even the Teilhardian evolutionary vision which Christ was aware of but kept silent about because the time was not ripe for it!
It is difficult not to laugh at the footnote's extravagant claim. But it is not merely its absurdity that strikes us. We are struck too, in the first place, by its attempt to cover up the obvious. Christ, who is addressing his disciples, refers obviously to matters which would be revealed in their own lifetime and not in after-ages. In the second place, it is easy to prove from both the Bible and the Church's pronouncements that the doctrinal scope of Christ's "many things" and "all the truth" is severely restricted and can never be made to extend to whatever one wants. We may draw upon The Mystical Body of Christ by Fulton Sheen, Ph.D. {Sheed and Ward, London, 1938) to fix the correct relevance of Christ's declaration.
Fulton Sheen, himself a distinguished Roman Catholic thinker, is aware (p. 254) of the quotation Wildiers has made but his readers can never interpret it as Wildiers does, for
33.Ibid,, p. 140.
34.Ibid., p. 142.
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already on p. 182 we have the proper setting for its drift. Discussing Papal Infallibility, Sheen writes:
"As the Council of the Vatican stated it: 'For the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter, that by His Revelation they might make known new doctrines, but that by His Assistance they might inviolably keep and faithfully expound the Revelation on the Deposit of faith delivered through the apostles'.35 Infallibility, then, lays down nothing new; it only safeguards and explains what is old. The contents of revelation closed with the Apocalypse."
Hence "many things" and "all the truth" cannot go beyond what the New Testament already holds. Roman Catholicism, whether explicating the saying of Christ (John 14:26) or understanding from the Spirit-inspired Apostles' writings all that he left unsaid during his life (John 16:12-13), cannot, without contradicting itself, trace to the Gospel the promise of anything like the Teilhardian vision.
Wildiers's footnote is one more example of how Teilhard's co-religionist admirers, when they are not trying to demonstrate that Teilhard merely formulates in a modern mode something the Church has already said, are trying to show that even if the Church has been silent in the past she can take as something implicit in herself any truth found in Teilhard!
35. Const. Dog. de Ecclesia Dei, c. 4.
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