“From that point,
Teilhard proposes that evolution is sweeping man's thinking-consciousness
upwards toward the climax when all humanity will merge into a
"super-consciousness" with common thought and common will. He calls
this the Omega Point where, he says, all creation will be united with christ
(the cosmic christ, evolutor of the world) and absorbed in god”.
Wallace Johnson
I remember when Queensland (Australia) anti-evolutionist, Wallace “Wal”
Johnson (RIP), used to deliver his lectures publicly and on tape in his very
clear and distinct fashion.
Wal was unusual in that he believed in a global (Noachic) Flood, whilst,
at the same time, espousing Mesopotamian archaeological evidence for presumed
pre- and post- Flood levels. The typical Creationist, on the other hand, would
argue that the all-pervasive global Flood would not have left any such archaeological
traces whatsoever.
Wal also wrote and lectured extensively on Teilhard de Chardin.
Wal did have a tendency to be pessimistic for a Christian, focussing too
much on the ills of the world, prompting a colleague of mine, Frits Albers (see
Part Three), to say to him one day: “For God’s sake, Wal, give people
some hope”. Frits may have pointed him in the direction of Fatima, of which Wal
became a great promoter.
For Fatima and the hope that it offers to our modern world, see my:
Fatima, with its affirmation of all basic Catholic dogmatic teaching and genuine
piety, is the complete antithesis of Teilhardinism, which is the denial of all of
this.
Adapted from The Death of Evolution
by Wallace Johnson
The general theory of Evolution is
diametrically opposed to Christian revelation and creed. It opened a chasm
between modern thinking and traditional Christianity. Ostensibly to bridge this
chasm, and professedly to clothe Christianity in a garb acceptable to science,
there came a Jesuit priest, "Father" Teilhard de Chardin. Whatever
his personal motives may have been, his ideas have done more damage to orthodox
Catholicism than those of probably any other person in history. His
"evolution-theology" has raised a new religion.
Teilhard gained a reputation in
scientific circles, as we have already seen, for his part in the setting up of
the phony Piltdown Man as well as Peking Man, the real story of which is
tainted with equally discreditable procedures.
Teilhard's mind was firmly locked
into evolutionism on a grand scale. He proclaimed: "Evolution is not just
a hypothesis or theory… It is a general condition to which all theories, all
hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy if they are thinkable
and true." To Teilhard, evolution and polygenism were the essential
realities which Christianity must perforce satisfy (i.e. faith must be the
slave of science).
In 1922, he wrote an essay which
treated Original Sin in a way contrary to Church teaching. By mistake it went
to the Vatican, and Teilhard was nearly excommunicated. He was forbidden to
teach or preach; but he wrote secretly, and his pamphlets were passed from hand
to hand. He wrote several books formulating a Christianity which bowed to total
evolutionism. His books were refused a Church Imprimatur and remained
unpublished.
Bridges: (a) His
followers claim that Teilhard built a bridge between religion and science. As
regards the religious end of the bridge, even some modern theologians have
described Teilhard's work as "disastrous." As regards the scientific
end, it is hard to imagine any scientist using Teilhard's bridge to approach
religion. England's famous man of medicine, Nobel Prize winner, Sir Peter
Medawar, stated that Teilhard's works lack scientific structure and that his
competence in the field of science is modest. In The Art of the Soluble
(1967), Sir Peter dismissed Teilhard's works as a bag of tricks for gullible
people-for people whose education has outstripped their capacity for analysis.
(b) Teilhard's work is also claimed
to be a bridge between Christians and Marxists. Dietrich von Hildebrand (in Trojan
Horse in the City of God) quotes Teilhard's own words: "As I love to
say, the synthesis of the Christian God (of the above) and of the Marxist god
(of the forward)-behold! that is the only god whom henceforth we can adore in
spirit and in truth." Von Hildebrand comments: "In this sentence the
abyss separating Teilhard from Christianity is manifest in every word."
The non-Catholic biologist, Bolton
Davidheiser, Ph.D. (in Evolution and Christian Faith) tells us:
"The delegates of the Twentieth Annual Convention of the American
Scientific Affiliation were told that 'in Europe, both Christians and Marxists
find his thought the most helpful bridge this century offers between what once
seemed their irreducibly opposing views.'" It is noteworthy that Pope Pius
XII in Humani Generis drew attention to extreme evolutionists whose
monistic or pantheistic speculations are eagerly welcomed by the Communists as
being powerful weapons for popularizing dialectical materialism. Unfortunately
Chardin was not condemned by name.
Pantheism (?): In a
letter dated January 26, 1936, Teilhard wrote: "What increasingly
dominates my interest… is the effort to establish within myself, and to diffuse
around me, a new religion (let's call it an improved Christianity if you like)
whose personal god is no longer the great neolithic landowner of
times gone by, but the soul of the world… [emphasis added].
Matter and Spirit:
Essential to Teilhard's whole system is the assertion that matter and spirit
are one. He uses the Spinozan idea that matter has a "within'' and a
"without." From the outside it is matter; but, looked at from within,
this matter has consciousness and thought. Also, the "within" and the
"without" are developing in complexity.
Teilhard taught that primitive
particles of matter assembled into more complex arrangements until some of the
most complex arrangements burst into life. Lifeless matter had become alive,
and it continued to complexify until it reached a "boiling point,"
whereupon the living matter became conscious. The animal stage had been
reached. The complexifying continued. The brains of some higher animals
attained such complexity that, in one type of animal, thought was generated and
the animal became man. Matter, in the shape of man, had begun to think.
From that point, Teilhard proposes
that evolution is sweeping man's thinking-consciousness upwards toward the
climax when all humanity will merge into a "super-consciousness" with
common thought and common will. He calls this the Omega Point where, he says,
all creation will be united with christ (the cosmic christ, evolutor of the
world) and absorbed in god. (Much like Oprah describes Obama-man.)
To claim that matter and spirit are
the same leads to a denial of the spirit world followed by rejection of the
supernatural character of Christianity. I detect an element of cheating in the
proposition that the material and the spiritual are one. It is as if Teilhard
saw that he faced a problem in getting mind to evolve from matter, and he got
over the problem by pronouncing in advance that mind and matter are the same
substance. His disciples gravely nod in agreement, not because Teilhard produces
evidence, or even a good argument, but simply because Teilhard says so.
The "Cosmic Christ":
"Christ saves. But must we not hasten to add that Christ, too, is saved by
evolution?" Chardin's "christ" is no longer the God-Man, the
Redeemer; he is the initiator of a purely natural evolutionary process, and
also its end—the christ-omega. Any unprejudiced mind must ask: Why should this
cosmic force be called "christ?" Teilhard has dreamed up an alleged
cosmogenic force and has then tied onto it the label "christ." But
Teilhard, the obsessed evolutionist, has a basic conception of the world which
cannot admit traditional Original Sin. Consequently his world has no place for
the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, because, without Original Sin, the redemption
of man through Christ loses its inner meaning.
Teilhardism Invades:
Teilhard de Chardin died in 1955. Thereupon, a group of people who were extreme
evolutionists, many of whom were atheists, had his works published without the
authority of his Jesuit superiors. From that moment, Teilhardism invaded the
Catholic Church on a large scale. Teilhard's ideas entered modern catechetics
and many priests and nuns espoused them. Children whose parents had never even
heard of Chardin were subjected to his ideas.
It has been said that the real danger
to the Church is Modernism and that evolutionism is only a minor academic
exercise. Such a view misses the point that Modernism and Teilhardism have
their source and lifeblood in the General Theory of Evolution. Logic, theology,
and sweet reason usually will bounce off the Modernist. However, if you
discredit evolution, you collapse the foundation of it all and the Modernist is
left without support. While this might not cause a change of heart in a
dedicated Modernist, it should fortify the ordinary person against the
intellectual seduction of Modernism. Above all, if we can get through to our
young people that evolution is unscientific nonsense in the extreme, they will
be spared the religious doubts and compromises which propel them into the
pseudo-sanctuary of Modernism and Teilhardism. ….
Part Three: Frits Albers on Teilhard
“I ask myself
whether a single man, today, can fit together his view of the geological world
evoked by Science, and his view of the world commonly presented by Holy Writ.
One cannot keep the two representations, except by passing alternatively from
one to the other. Their combination jars; it sounds false. In uniting them on
the same plane we are surely victims of an error of perspective”.
Teilhard de Chardin (1922)
Dutchman Frits Albers, a mentor of mine over a
long period of time, had studied for ten years for the purpose of becoming a
Jesuit priest (e.g. at Nijmegen), but claims to have lost his vocation - though
never his Faith - due to the influence of père Teilhard de Chardin in the seminary.
Frits eventually completed another ten. He married in Victoria
(Australia) and had ten kids. Frits, early in the 1970’s, received a “commendation”
from Pope Paul VI for his writings on Teilhard de Chardin. He wrote in Teilhard de Chardin and the Dutch Catechism:
…. When a person states:
“God
does not exist,
so
life after death does not exist,
so I
do not have to worry about the fate of my soul
(if
I have one),
so I
can do what I like,
subject
to man-made laws,
which
can be changed if enough pressure is put on the Government;
so I
combine with others to put more pressure on the Government,
in
order that it will change the law to my liking,
so I
can be freer to do as I please …”
then one could
call such an effort a crude personal philosophy. But, although considered wrong
by many people, it would nevertheless be consistent, and, in that sense
alone, logical. And so this little exercise becomes a system which
must either be totally accepted or rejected. It is in this sense that one of
the great scholars on Teilhard de Chardin, Cardinal Journet, wrote in Nova
et Vetera (October-December 1962): “Teilhard’s synthesis is logical and
must be rejected or accepted as a whole.”
We cannot pick
out bits and pieces here and there to our liking.
What is missing
of course in the little “system” above is evidence and insight based
on evidence. The absence of these will make even the most “logical” system completely
erroneous. The first sentence is always the most important, because all the others
are made to follow from it. In reasoning only, it is called a “premise”,
or “major premise”; in a system it is called a “first
principle” or “fundamental principle”. It is obvious that it is of
the utmost importance for the whole system, that this first sentence is true
and based on evidence.
….
Catholics, when
dealing with Teilhard, must keep in mind that they are reading the works of one
of whom it can truly be said that the Church has resolutely refused to submit
and accommodate Her Dogmas to the opinions of his ‘philosophy’. Teilhard has no
fewer than fourteen known and official interdicts; prohibitions and outright condemnations
against his name and his works, and at least one Encyclical: Humani Generis;
easily a record in modern times. Furthermore, the Magisterium has been consistent
in the rejection of his books and his theories for over fifty years. If it
appears to be impossible, even for a Saint, to introduce into the Catholic
Church a new system of philosophy acceptable to the Magisterium, what chances
has a man got censured so many times? And yet, not only has Teilhard been
hailed by millions as a new St. Thomas Aquinas, he is being seriously studied
within the Catholic Church as if he was one ….
When the editor
of Triumph made the remark in the November issue of 1971: - “Teilhard
did not dare to assert his doctrines in the works he attempted to have
published during his lifetime. His ‘system’ can be understood only by studying
the privately circulated works. They are the norm” - he was echoing the very
words of Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis: “In published works some
caution is still observed, but more freedom is shown in books privately circulated,
in lectures and in meetings for discussions.”
….
When Dietrich
von Hildebrand made the following observation about Teilhard in his famous Appendix
to his book Trojan Horse in the City of God: “I do not know of
another thinker who so artfully jumps from one position to another contradictory
one, without being disturbed by
the jump or even
noticing it”,
he states a puzzling fact without pursuing the matter further. However, the
question is valid:
If Teilhard did
notice the jumps and is apparently not perturbed by them, could this be
because he has adopted (invented?) a new fundamental principle which
allows this unperturbed jumping from one position to a contradictory one as the
foundation of a new philosophy?
….
What is
Teilhardism ? How is it different from any other system?
And more
specifically: where is the catch? If there is a catch, it must
be possible to detect it and to express its difference from other systems in
simple words that anyone can understand. ….
In three
separate papers meant only for private circulation: Original Sin (first
paper, 1922) The Human Sense, (1929); and Original Sin (second
paper, 1947), Teilhard clearly poses the problem and submits his solution.
(His 1922 essay
landed by mistake in Rome where it caused a storm of indignation.
After its
discovery Teilhard was never permitted to teach. His highly polished
second paper on the same subject of 1947 shows, that Teilhard himself never
abandoned his system, and personally kept its dissemination and study alive.
But the most secret of the three, the 1929 paper The Human Sense is the
most embarrassing of them all. Until 1971 it had not been published in any
language ….
….
In the very
early stage Teilhard starts by posing the problem like this “I ask myself
whether a single man, today, can fit together his view of the geological world
evoked by Science, and his view of the world commonly presented by Holy Writ.
One cannot keep the two representations, except by passing alternatively from
one to the other. Their combination jars; it sounds false. In uniting them on
the same plane we are surely victims of an error of perspective.” (1922)
We will all
readily admit that it is not easy to look at our world with our natural eyes
and scientific knowledge, and to look at the same world with the eyes of Supernatural
Faith, the way God sees it, as reflected in Holy Writ. However, that is not a new
problem. Because of a change in outlook, Teilhard now goes one step further: “One
cannot keep the two representations.” And what is this change in outlook?
The answer, we will understand more clearly every time, lies in what Teilhard
means by on the same plane: evolution. He clearly expresses here
his initial uneasiness of having to maintain two. He is well aware that
even if we try to unite them in the one world-view of evolution, we still
have two.
“Since there is
no place in the scientific history of the world for the turning-point of
Original Sin, since everything happens in our experiential series as if there were
neither Adam nor Eden, it follows that the Fall as an event is something unverifiable.”
(1922)
Here we see
Teilhard trace the modern problem (of having to maintain a scientific
outlook and a Supernatural view in the same plane: evolution) directly to its origin:
Original Sin. And he will stay there, until he has obtained his solution
right there. Here at the origin the “two” that caused him so much trouble is
the combination of an apparent absence of a physical discontinuity in
the evolution of the human race with a presence in Faith of a supernatural
discontinuity of the first magnitude: the Fall. It now starts to become clear
that, if for him “two is a crowd”, then which of the two has to go:
“Without
exaggeration one can say that Original Sin, in the formulation still current
today, is one of the principal obstacles to the intensive and extensive movements
of progress in Christian thought. An embarrassment or scandal for those of
goodwill who are hesitating, and at the same time a refuge for narrow spirits.”
(1947)
So, the absence
of a physical discontinuity (although only apparent) to him becomes the reason
to reject a Supernatural discontinuity: Original Sin. And what went on in his
mind between 1922 when he rejected the philosophy underlying the Dogma of Original
Sin (“there is no turning-point in human history”) and the rejection of the Dogma
itself in 1947? His 1929 paper The Human Sense.
“The Human Sense
believes in a magnificent future of the tangible world, the Gospel seems to
disdain it. The Human Sense preaches zest and effort in the conquest of things,
Christianity calls for indifference and renunciation. The Human Sense perceives
a Universe emerging radiantly from the milieu of struggle for being;
Christianity keeps us in the perspective of a nature fallen and fixed.
Between the Gospel of the theologians and preachers, the Gospel of the Encyclicals
or episcopal letters and the Human Sense there exists at present a deep
discord. The Church no longer gives the impression of “thinking with humanity”.
Such is the profound reason for the atmosphere of hostility and disdain which
floats around her. And such is also the explanation of her present sterility …”.
Part Four:
U.S. nuns embracing “conscious
evolution”
“Cardinal Gerhard
Müller, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith …
warned them that if the nuns persist in pursuing such dangerous ideas,
Rome could cut them loose”.
One may find that religious wholly involved in charitable works can sometimes be woolly about truth (doctrinal) matters; whilst, conversely, the champions in matters
of truth can sometimes be judgmental and somewhat lacking in charity.
I recall that friends and I were once surprised to find those most
charitable of the charitable, Mother Teresa’s missionary nuns, reading the
writings of Teilhard de Chardin. When we commented critically about this, one
of them suggested that we “leave him alone, he is dead”.
Or something like that.
I then tried a different tack. I gave that particular nun whom everyone
liked, who was Indian - and who admitted to being “just a simple person” - some
literature on Teilhard de Chardin that showed him to be a racist (and not
highly favourable about Indians).
The nun got a shock, and then admitted: “We need to be careful”.
Teilhard
de Chardin was xenophobic and a racist:
…. Later as a palaeontologist, he
becomes convinced that there is not a single evolution from one stock. For
Teilhard the different “races” are evidence of differing evolutions. It was his
determination to produce proof of this which ended up in the scandal of the
Piltdown man. This, proof of a separate European evolution, turned out to be a
massive fraud. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote to Jaimie Torres Bodet (then
Director General of UNESCO) concerning UNESCO’s 1950 Declaration on Race which
Teilhard refused to sign. In this Declaration Geneticists had declared the
biological equality of races.
In his letter Teilhard de Chardin wrote: “The diverse human Races are not
biologically equal, but different and complementary. …. Such a perspective, not
on the equality of races, but of their complementarity by convergence, is the
one thing which may explain the fact (historically evident) that before the
modern movement of compression which has forced them to come together, the
various human ethnic groups have followed cycles of development that were
partially independent to the point where many of them would have remained
stationary forever (or fallen tomorrow into stagnation) if they had not been
revived …. by more progressive and younger groups. …. And even if certain
spirits, insufficiently humanised, are upset because in the common human
advancement there exists not only individuals, but groups which are more gifted
than others, the group-leaders, what can we do about it? In Sociology as in
Physics, it is necessary that we at last recognise that there are laws against
which one does not play ….” (My translation from the French.)
The letter is extraordinary it states clearly that “complementarity” and
“difference” are not equality. “Convergence” is meant to be under the
leadership of certain groups that are more highly gifted than others. In this
“complementarity” and “convergence” Teilhard presents what by 1950 was known as
the classic justification for the European colonisation of India and
semi-colonisation of China i.e. their cultures were stagnant. As such they
could not proceed to capitalism without colonisation by Europe. Evolution
turned out to be not only science. It could be used as a handy component of
racist ideology. ….
David Gibson writes about the U.S. nuns:
U.S. nuns haunted by dead Jesuit:
the ghost of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Are American nuns paying
for the sins of a Jesuit priest who died in the 1950s?
It might seem that way,
given the ongoing showdown between doctrinal hard-liners in the Vatican and
leaders representing more than 40,000 U.S. sisters, with one of Rome's chief
complaints being the nuns' continuing embrace of the notion of "conscious
evolution."
To many ears,
"conscious evolution" probably sounds like a squishy catchphrase
picked up after too much time in a New Age sweat lodge, and that's pretty much
how Cardinal Gerhard Müller, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, views it.
The
German theologian bluntly told heads of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious
last month that the principles of "conscious evolution" -- that
mankind is transforming through the integration of science, spirituality and
technology -- are "opposed to Christian Revelation" and lead to
"fundamental errors."
That's tough talk, and
Müller warned them that if the nuns persist in pursuing such dangerous
ideas, Rome could cut them loose.
Yet those principles, and
indeed the very term "conscious evolution," also lead directly back
to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit who was by turns a
philosopher and theologian, geologist and paleontologist.
It was Teilhard's
thinking about humanity's future evolution that got him in trouble with church
authorities, however.
Teilhard argued, for
example, that creation is still evolving and that mankind is changing with it;
we are, he said, advancing in an interactive "noosphere" of human
thought through an evolutionary process that leads inexorably toward an Omega
Point -- Jesus Christ -- that is pulling all the cosmos to itself.
"Everything that
rises must converge," as Teilhard put it, a phrase so evocative that
Flannery O'Connor appropriated it for her story collection. This process of
"complexification" -- another of his signature terms -- is
intensifying and Catholic theology could aid in that process if it, too,
adapts.
Now, that's a perilously
brief sketch of what is an intricate and often impenetrable series of concepts,
but that language is enough to show why, as early as the 1920s, Teilhard's
Jesuit superiors barred him first from publishing and then from teaching, and
then effectively exiled him to China to dig for fossils (which he did with
great success).
In fact, most of
Teilhard's works were not published until after his death, and in 1962 a
nervous Vatican issued a formal warning about "the dangers presented by
the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his followers."
Yet if few remember who
Teilhard was, his views on faith and science continued to resonate, and today,
remarkably, he's actually enjoying something of a renaissance. ….
