“Teilhard’s vision of salvation is undeniably
escapist. His hope is not, as some pretend, in the renewal of all things, but
in the forsaking of all things.
It
is not hope in the restoration of a proper relationship between God and the
world and between the soul and the body, but in the eventual repudiation of the
body
and
of the world, of all that is material, through union with God.
That
is his idea of rectification, indeed of deification, and it is—not to put too
fine
a
point on it —a decidedly heretical idea”.
Sister Ilia
Delio, who lives and breathes Teilhard de Chardin, considers pope Leo XIV’s 2026
encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, to be constrained by an
out-dated metaphysics, and in need of a Teilhardian utrahumanism:
Pope Leo
XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a moment of
genuine civilizational urgency. Its concern for human dignity, its alarm at the
displacement of labor, its refusal to treat artificial intelligence as a
neutral instrument — all of these are worthy moral interventions. The encyclical
asks the right questions.
Yet a
reading alongside Teilhard de Chardin's ultrahumanism, and the theological
tradition running through Carl Jung and Paul Tillich, suggests that the
encyclical's answers are constrained by a metaphysics no longer equal to the
evolutionary world it seeks to address.
This essay
does not dismiss Leo's concerns; it argues that Teilhard provides a more
adequate — and ultimately more hopeful — theological grammar for engaging AI,
one that honors the church's deepest instincts about the divine-human
relationship while refusing to set evolution and grace in opposition.
The most
revealing word in Magnifica Humanitas is a verb: remain.
"Our duty in the age of AI," Leo writes, "is to remain
profoundly human." The governing images — for example, Babel set against
Jerusalem — are images of protection, of guarding a grandeur already given. The
encyclical understands the human person as a finished essence, dignified from
outside, to be preserved against a technological force that threatens to
dissolve it.
Leo builds
carefully on the tradition of imago Dei, on the relational
anthropology of the Trinity, on integral ecology extended into the digital
sphere. Against the transhumanist fantasy of escaping weakness, he makes
finitude the very medium of love and openness to God. This is the wisdom of the
cross, and it is right.
But the
verb remain is also a symptom. To remain is to hold a position
against a threatening advance.
It
presupposes that what the human is has already been determined — that the image
of God is a status to be defended rather than a process to be undergone. The
relational anthropology Leo invokes actually points in the opposite direction.
If the person is constitutively relational, then a new and vast web of machinic
and noospheric relations is not the death of personhood but its next medium.
Leo has laid the anthropological foundation for a bolder argument and he then
builds upon it.
Teilhard de
Chardin offers the theology of the other verb: become. Evolution is
not background scenery for the human story; it is the story. The human person
is not a fixed essence deposited into a changing world but the growing tip of
an evolutionary process that has always moved through convergence toward
greater complexity and consciousness.
….
The Problem with Teilhard
Nova et Vetera, English
Edition, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2018): 377–385 377
Douglas Farrow McGill
University Montreal, Canada
Nova et Vetera 16-2 Spring 2018.pdf
The Pontifical Council for Culture has voted to
request that the monitum issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith in 1962 against the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin be lifted
on the grounds that, though “some of his writings might be open to constructive
criticism, his prophetic vision has been and is inspiring theologians and
scientists.” Whether there are scientists who, qua scientists rather than
amateur philosophers, are inspired by Teilhard may be doubted. That there are
still theologians of a certain sort who are thus inspired may not be. Which is
why the monitum must remain in place. For it is not his association with
frauds like the Piltdown man that matters, but his assault on basic Catholic
orthodoxy in cosmology, Christology, and ecclesiology. A reminder of this seems
timely. Hence I offer here an abridged version of what may be found in full
elsewhere. ….
Let us begin with what attracted (and
still attracts) people to Teilhard, in whom the conflicting hopes and fears of
the twentieth century met and found expression. Positively, he wanted to
reconcile, to unite in a grand synthesis, “faith in God and faith in the
World,” or “the cult of progress and passion for the glory of God.” Negatively,
he wanted to combat with resolute determination an angst he thought rooted in
the trauma of the Copernican revolution. He recognized man’s loss of bearings
in the vastness of the universe and his sense of futility in a world subject to
the law of entropy. He knew the “malady of space-time” that manifests itself as
a “fundamental anguish of being,” a “sickness of the dead end,” a feeling of
confinement: “As the years go by, Lord, I come to see more and more clearly, in
myself and in those around me, that the great secret preoccupation of modern
man is much less to battle for possession of the world than to find a means of
escaping from it. The anguish of feeling that one is not merely spatially but
ontologically imprisoned in the cosmic bubble; the anxious search for an issue
to, or more exactly a focal point for, the evolutionary process; these are the
price we must pay for the growth of planetary consciousness; these are the
dimly-recognized burdens which weigh down the souls of christian and gentile
alike in the world of today.” ….
Teilhard made it his aim to address this
anxiety, to restore confidence in progress, and so to make the Christian faith
relevant once again. To that end, he undertook what he called a
“re-cosmologization of our religion,” commandeering evolution as the vehicle
not only of creation but also of redemption. Evolution, if we ourselves took
charge of it, would lead us to what he called Omega, that final issue our
hearts desire, a point of complete cosmic convergence that quells all fear of
perpetual, meaningless becoming. With this combi nation of evolutionism and
eschatology, he hoped to cure the spiritual crisis of the modern world.
Humanity needed a common center, a new hope, a uniting faith and vision.
That is just what he hoped to achieve by
breaking down the disastrous barrier dividing devotion to God above from
commitment to worldly progress here below. These “rival mysticisms” must not be
allowed to divide mankind any longer.
Advance toward God must be linked with social progress
for the benefit of both. In an article entitled “The Heart of the Problem,” he
offered the following diagram, in which OY represents, he says, Christian faith
aspiring upward, while OX represents humanistic faith driving forward, and OR
is a “rectified” Christian faith capable of reconciling the two:
[See original article]
Through this rectified and rectifying
faith, mankind would “achieve a breakthrough straight ahead by forcing its way
over the threshold of some higher level of consciousness.” All who, in their
own fashion, shared this conviction would advance in step together, be they
Chris tian or otherwise.
I call this “diagonalism.” Teilhard
called it “noogenesis.”
By that, he meant the “ascent of the Universe towards
consciousness,” the “drift of matter towards spirit,” a gradual liberation of
consciousness from the primitive, material layers of the world—the triumph of
the interior over the exterior, of mind over matter. Time itself is “the rise
of the Universe into high latitudes where complexity, concentration,
centration, and consciousness grow and increase, simultaneously and
correlatively.” As diversification gives way to unification, creation’s
spatio-temporal dimensions will be reduced to a vanishing point. The newly
emergent consciousness, satiated on “the whole divinisable substance of
matter,” will break away “to join up with the supreme and universal focus
Omega”—that is, with its divine Origin and Destiny. Is it not conceivable, he
asks, “that Mankind, at the end of its totalization, its folding-in upon
itself, may reach a critical level of maturity where, leaving Earth and stars
to lapse slowly back into the dwindling mass of primordial energy, it will detach
itself from this planet and join the one true, irreversible essence of things,
the Omega Point?” That may be “a phenomenon perhaps outwardly akin to death:
but in reality a simple metamorphosis and arrival at the supreme synthesis.” It
will be “an escape from the planet, not in space or outwardly, but spiritually
and inwardly, such as the hyper-concentration of matter upon itself allows.” ….
Did I say attractive? It should not be
necessary to point out that that all of this is far closer to the gnostic
cosmology and eschatology than to the Judeo-Christian. Teilhard’s vision of
salvation is undeniably escapist. His hope is not, as some pretend, in the
renewal of all things, but in the forsaking of all things. It is not hope in
the restoration of a proper relationship between God and the world and between
the soul and the body, but in the eventual repudiation of the body and of the
world, of all that is material, through union with God. That is his idea of
rectification, indeed of deification, and it is—not to put too fine a point on
it—a decidedly heretical idea.
It goes without saying that this
heretical cosmology requires an heretical Christology to support it, and that
Christology is found in Teilhard’s exposition of the “Cosmic Christ.” The
expanding cosmos seemed to have rendered our planet and our race, and hence
also Jesus of Nazareth, virtually irrelevant, leaving individualistic
materialism as the only option. One recalls here, more recently, Paul
Feyerabend’s challenge to Cardinal Ratzinger that the Church ought to have
foreseen this problem long ago. Père Teilhard was certainly aware of it, and
his answer was to shift the emphasis to something or someone more grand than a
mere man. Jesus, he suggested, was only one expression among many of the Cosmic
Christ, a local expression appropriate to the needs of our particular planet
and race.
Already in 1916, the young Jesuit wrote
in his journal of “surrender to the Cosmic Christ” as the option that would
secure what is best both in classical spirituality and in a more
world-affirming posture. Beyond the traditional two natures of Christ, he
claimed, we must reckon today with his third nature: with his relation
to the Universe, rather than to the Father and the Spirit. This he posited as
our most pressing theological problem. We must get to grips not with “the
Man-Jesus and the Word-God,” but with “a third face of the theandric complex,”
with “the mysterious super-human person everywhere underlying the most
fundamental institutions and the most solemn dogmatic affirmations of the
Church.” We must get to grips with “the consummating and cosmic Christ of St.
Paul,” who alone could hold everything together. ….
But Teilhard’s Cosmic Christ, who
underwrites noogenesis, has in fact nothing to do with the risen and ascended
Lord Jesus Christ to whom Paul bears witness. He is not Lord at all, really,
but rather the product of the cosmic process. There is a sense in which he does
not yet even fully exist. If evolution is noogenesis, noogenesis is Christogenesis.
“Christ is the end-point of the evolution, even the natural evolution, of all
beings; and therefore evolution is holy.” “Quite specifically,” says Teilhard,
“it is Christ whom we make or whom we undergo in all things.”
So who was Jesus? In him, this future
Cosmic Christ appeared proactively, or perhaps we should say retroactively, as
a particular man. He did so in order to infuse into human nature a grace
essential to evolution’s “hominization” phase. By his sacrifice on the Cross,
Jesus provided the impetus to self-transcendence, without which
unification—incorporation into one infinite Person—is ultimately impossible. In
his resurrection, he anticipated our liberation from “the temporal zones of our
visible world” into the oneness of the Pleroma. Having thus demonstrated
a law common to all life, he began to draw the whole world after him as the
enormous body of his ascension. The Cross now represents “the deepest
aspirations of our age,” and “towards the peaks, shrouded in mists from our
human eyes, whither the Cross beckons us, we rise by a path which is the way of
universal progress.”
For Teilhard, the incarnation was a
decisive but temporary affair, then.
The Christ “appeared for a moment in our midst” that
we might see and touch him “before vanishing once again, more luminous and
ineffable than ever, into the depths of the future.” His withdrawal—both a
going up and a going ahead, an ascension and an advance—means a going beyond
the humanity he once shared with us. He has become “an immense and living
force” to be encountered already, and worshipped, in all creatures. His
presence is “silently accruing in things” until, in the Parousia, as if at a
kind of flashpoint, it will suddenly break forth in all its splendor. For, as
the twin vectors of our rectified faith “veer and draw together” they point us
to the consummated Christ, the divine soul of a divinized creation.
To meld two opposing worldviews requires
a powerful bond. Since Jesus of Nazareth could not supply that bond, Teilhard
turned to the Cosmic Christ. But is that Christ something more substantial than
a diagram, an invented metaphysic, an empty guarantee that forward is upward?
And if so, can we follow Teilhard in addressing him as “Jesus”? For this much
is clear: the first task of the Cosmic Christ is to dispose of the scandal of
particularity with which Christianity has hitherto been burdened. Jesus of Nazareth
is retained only as a reference point on our evolutionary chart, stretched out
on the cross that is constructed for him by the intersection of Teilhard’s twin
axes or aspirations. To expect belief in him today, as a living man, as “this
same Jesus,” would not unite, but divide. The resurrected Christ, whose
strength bends these axes until they touch again at Omega point, is someone
quite different. He is no longer the incarnate one, with his own human and
bodily specificity, but the immanent one. “Why should we go searching the
Judaea of two thousand years ago?” asks Teilhard. “You do truly appear to me as
that vast and vital force which I sought everywhere that I might adore it.”
On the basis of his Christology alone,
it is impossible to speak, with the Pontifical Council, merely of reservations
or room for constructive criticism. We are talking about heresy, full stop.
Were the monitum to be lifted, what Pius XII called a “cesspool of
errors” would slop out all the more readily into the Church. ….
