Teilhard de Chardin: A Recollection and Rememberance

Fr. George Lemaitre
(1894-1966)

After the irony of it being a Jesuit priest, Georges Lemaitre, who first proposed the 'Big Bang' theory, it seems only fitting that another Jesuit, Telhard de Chardin, a paleontologist, would set out a noetic perspective of man's evolution. Both priests (even though de Chardin was banned from having his later writings published until after Vatican II) laid the grounds for a new ecumenical movement that has seen the Catholic Church embrace both the 'Big Bang' and evolution as the most likely processes of creation - an embrace that may perhaps be seen as being equalled only by Luther's protest against the Pope as a turning point in Christian theology and practice.

The work of Lemaitre, who was trained as a mathematician and physicist, has been viewed as less controversial than de Chardin's; perhaps because Lemaitre limited his work primarily to physics and did not propose any new broad and sweeping theological systems, and partly because his work was quickly recognized and built upon by greater public figures, such as Edwin Hubble, in an era (the first decades of the twentieth-century) when the world's understanding of physics was transforming rapidly in view of the simultaneous development of both relativity and quantum theory.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(1881-1955)

Teilhard de Chardin's work, on the other hand, was viewed with a fuller skepticism by the Church hierarchy from the very start, directly challenging - as it did - the Church's teachings on the origin of man and its teachings on 'original sin.' As a result, de Chardin was banished to China for much of his life and career (where he helped in the discovery of 'Peking Man'), and his writings (including his classic works, "The Phenomenon of Man" and "The Future of Man") were barred from publication during his lifetime.

In "The Future of Man," de Chardin observed, in part:

"When observed through a sufficient depth of time (millions of years) Life can be seen to move. Not only does it move but it advances in a definite direction. And not only does it advance, but in observing its progress we can discern the process or practical mechanism whereby it does so."

"These," he writes, "are three propositions which may be briefly developed as follows:

(a) Life Moves. This calls for no demonstration. Everyone in these days knows how greatly all living forms have changed if we compare two moments in the earth's history sufficiently separated in time. In any period of ten million years Life practically grows a new skin.

(b) In a definite direction. . . . While accepting the undeniable fact of the general evolution of Life in the course of time, many biologists still maintain that these changes take place without following any defined course, in any direction and at random. This contention, disastrous to any idea of progress, is refuted, in my view, by the tremendous fact of the continuing 'cerebralisation' of living creatures. Research shows that from the lowest to the highest level of the organic world there is a persistent and clearly defined thrust of animal forms towards species with more sensitive and more elaborate nervous systems. A growing 'innervation' and 'cerebralisation' of organisms: the working of this law is visible in every living group known to us, the smallest no less than the largest. . . . What else can this mean except that, as shown by the development of nervous systems, there is a continual heightening, a rising tide of consciousness which visibly manifests itself on our planet in the course of time?

(c) (T)he underlying process whose existence we can perceive in this continual heightening of consciousness (signifies) . . . that Cosmic Matter, governed at is lower end (as we already know) by forces of dispersal which slowly cause it to devolve into atoms, now shows itself to be subjected, at the other end, to an extraordinary power of enforced coalescence, of which the outcome is the emergence, pari passu, of an ever-increasing amount of spiritual energy that is ever more powerfully synthesized."

"The greatest discovery made in this century," de Chardin writes," is probably the realisation that the passage of Time may best be measured by the gradual gathering of Matter in superposed groups, of which the arrangement, ever richer and more centralized, radiates outwards from an ever more luminous fringe of liberty and interiority."

"The phenomenon of growing consciousness on earth," he notes, "in short, is directly due to the increasingly advanced organisation of more and more complicated elements, successively created by the working of chemistry and of Life."

"At the present time," he concludes, "I can see no more satisfactory solution of the enigma presented to us by the physical progress of the Universe."

[Teilhard de Chardin, "The Future of Man," pp. 67-69.]

In the following video, renowned spiritual teacher Jean Houston recounts to Deepak Chopra how, as a teenager growing up in Manhattan, she was befriended and taught by an elderly de Chardin who passed on to her his vision of the Earth as a 'noosphere' embued throughout with consciousness.

New and Enlightened Views from the Vatican

In the rising awareness of and interest in the transcendental - not just in the world's great wisdom traditions, but in science, religious institutions and our culture generally - perhaps the growing acceptance of (and acknowledgment by) the Catholic Church of the truth revealed by leading-edge science is one of the most promising signs that physics, metaphysics and psychology are at last coming to a common understanding (albeit in different terminology) that there is a single, transcendental Unity that undergirds our perceptions and conceptions of "reality."

In a post several years ago, we reported how the head of the Vatican Observatory acknowledged the 'Big Bang Theory' as the most likely explanation of the Creation, a position overwhelmingly more enlightened than that held by fundamentalist Christians, particularly so-called 'mainstream' fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant sects in the United States, that insist on the "literal truth" of the Bible, despite its inherent contradictions and C.S. Lewis' reported observation: "If we are going to talk about the Bible, let's all agree that it's a work intended for grown-ups, or not have the discussion at all."

From Reuters report on Pope's address.

Now, in an address on January 6, 2011, Pope Benedict (as reported by Reuters), took an even bolder, if not further, step in the direction of reconciling the Catholic faith with the findings of reason and logic. As Reuters notes, "(t)he Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism -- the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible -- and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world." Nevertheless, it still objects "to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation."

But, perhaps most importantly, given the long running controversy over teaching evolution as opposed to creationism in U.S. public schools (or now Intelligent Design, a "politically correct" and watered-down version of creationism), the Church opposes "using the Book of Genesis as a scientific text."

"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict reportedly told the crowd in St. Peter's Basilica on the appropriately chosen feast day of the Epiphany. "Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God."

"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality," he continued, "we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth."

Pope Benedict's timely remarks celebrating the Epiphany (the anniversary that Christians celebrate as the day that the Three Magis worshipped the infant Jesus) are part of a larger effort to bring the Catholic faith into the scientifically-informed 21st century. Part of that effort has included rehabilitating the ex-communicated Gallileo, the father of modern physics, and the speech, below, that Pope Benedict gave to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences' conference on " Scientific Insight into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life."

Reading the text of the Pope's remarks, one can only be impressed by the 'transcendental times' we are living in; a time when what was once the most conservative of Western institutions is addressing the roadblocks that have blocked it from recognizing the same 'Unity' that physics and psychology are rapidly moving towards.

In part, these are the remarks that Pope Benedict conveyed to the Vatican's own conference into the origin of life in the universe, on another appropriately chosen date - All Saints' Eve - October 31, 2008:

In this context, questions concerning the relationship between science’s reading of the world and the reading offered by Christian Revelation naturally arise. My predecessors Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II noted that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences. Philosophy in its early stages had proposed images to explain the origin of the cosmos on the basis of one or more elements of the material world. This genesis was not seen as a creation, but rather a mutation or transformation; it involved a somewhat horizontal interpretation of the origin of the world. A decisive advance in understanding the origin of the cosmos was the consideration of being qua being and the concern of metaphysics with the most basic question of the first or transcendent origin of participated being. In order to develop and evolve, the world must first be, and thus have come from nothing into being. It must be created, in other words, by the first Being who is such by essence.

"In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. The same was
in the beginning with God." John 1:1-2                    

To state that the foundation of the cosmos and its developments is the provident wisdom of the Creator is not to say that creation has only to do with the beginning of the history of the world and of life. It implies, rather, that the Creator founds these developments and supports them, underpins them and sustains them continuously. Thomas Aquinas taught that the notion of creation must transcend the horizontal origin of the unfolding of events, which is history, and consequently all our purely naturalistic ways of thinking and speaking about the evolution of the world. Thomas observed that creation is neither a movement nor a mutation. It is instead the foundational and continuing relationship that links the creature to the Creator, for he is the cause of every being and all becoming (cf. Summa Theologiae, I, q.45, a. 3).

To “evolve” literally means “to unroll a scroll”, that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos. Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is “legible”. It has an inbuilt “mathematics”. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a “cosmography” studying measurable phenomena but also in a “cosmology” discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos. We may not at first be able to see the harmony both of the whole and of the relations of the individual parts, or their relationship to the whole. Yet, there always remains a broad range of intelligible events, and the process is rational in that it reveals an order of evident correspondences and undeniable finalities: in the inorganic world, between microstructure and macrostructure; in the organic and animal world, between structure and function; and in the spiritual world, between knowledge of the truth and the aspiration to freedom. Experimental and philosophical inquiry gradually discovers these orders; it perceives them working to maintain themselves in being, defending themselves against imbalances, and overcoming obstacles. And thanks to the natural sciences we have greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos."

 We live in "transcendental times," indeed!

Transcendent Times, Indeed! The Convergence of Science & Religion

As I've long suspected, we live in in the most transcendent of times. "Bliss it is in THIS dawn to be alive!"

The Vatican's Chief Astronomer, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, confirmed in an interview published May 12th in L'Osservatore Romano, the Catholic Church's daily newspaper, what many I suspect have long since known: It is not antithetical to know and understand that the 'Big Bang' was the Creation!

Rev. Fune, the Jesuit scholar from Argentina who was "infallibly" chosen to be the Vatican's chief astronomer and to direct the Catholic Church's observatory in Vatican City, confirmed the position endorsed by Pope Benedict , that science does not contradict religion - a position explored in great depth by the Dalai Lama in his wonderfully affirmative book, "The Universe in a Single Atom".

Rev. Fune said Tuesday (as reported by Reuters UK):

"Dialogue between faith and science could be improved if scientists learned more about the Bible and the Church kept more up to date with scientific progress.

Funes, an Argentine, said he believed as an astronomer that the most likely explanation for the start of the universe was "the big bang", the theory that it sprang into existence from dense matter billions of years ago.

But he said this was not in conflict with faith in God as a creator. "God is the creator. There is a sense to creation. We are not children of an accident ...."

Transcendent times, indeed . . . . Could this put the other bookend on the sad 300+ year litany of debate that started with the faux-Enlightenment that saw Galileo condemned as an heretic, and the most-brilliant of modern-Jesuit scholars, paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, silenced under a Vatican publication ban and external exile to the avowedly atheistic 'People's Republic' of Maoist China?

Galileo is no longer spinning in his grave, I suspect, but rather dancing the Macarena while Teilhard de Chardin smiles knowingly from the palaroma of Unitive Consciousness in which we, and this Universe, "live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:28)

John, the most mystic and beloved of the Apostles, gave us the New Testament's account of creation when he wrote:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God." (John 1:1-2)

Now the New Testament itself is fairly old in relative terms at this stage in the game. Thankfully, the physical sciences finally found and clarified the voice of its own testament to the creation of the heavens and the earth this past century when the physicists Gamow and Herman first detected that voice - the cosmic background radiation which still radiates out the radio waves that carry the Word of the Big Bang to us from far across all the reaches of the Universe. And the social sciences too found their testament when Carl Jung wrote of the synchronystic, universal experience which is the unity of our being with Wholeness. This universal adventure and the indications of an awakening of a newer Enlightenment than that of old that Rev. Fune's interview herald make now the best and only time that we can live up to our potential. This universal adventure which continues to expand all that is - and us along with it - is itself a testament to that original creation out of G_d (whatever that word might mean to each of us) some 18.3 billion earth years ago.

These are truly transcendent times in which we are fortunate to be alive! Sit up and take note Messrs. Dawkins and Hitchens, and all you intelligent designer label fans out there! It is time to clarify your terms and visions and join the unfolding of this greatest of stories. Keep an open mind and expand your horizons. . . .