Of Teilhard de Chardin and Imperfect Prophets

I am recently re-discovering the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard is one of a certain group of significant names that have come in and out of my life without me having sought them out, and which have shaped my thinking in various ways.

I first heard of him when I was quite young in the form of a grave warning. Well-meaning evangelical Christians concerned about the deceptions of the New Age movement cautioned against Teilhard’s influence on many New Age ideas. This led to a certain degree of danger being associated with his name.

Decades passed and I converted to Catholicism. I next heard the name when a fellow parishioner decided to liquidate her deceased mother’s library. Knowing I was a bibliophile, she asked if I would be interested in taking any of the books she was seeking to get rid of, and I was only too happy to oblige. In the many boxes of books I took were probably a dozen volumes by or about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Being a traditional Catholic, and retaining the sense of danger brought about by those early warnings, I quickly discarded those volumes.

More years passed, and I heard the name again, this time in praise of Teilhard’s ideas from sources as varied as Fulton Sheen, Flannery O’Connor, Valentin Tomberg, and even Pope Benedict XVI—all figures for whom I had great respect. Archbishop Sheen was perhaps most surprising in his approbation, considering his reputation as a traditional stalwart. In his 1967 book Footprints in a Darkened Forest, he says of Teilhard:

It is very likely that within 50 years when all the trivial, verbose disputes about the meaning of Teilhard's ‘unfortunate’ vocabulary will have died away or have taken a secondary place, Teilhard will appear like John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century. (Meredith Press, 1967, Chapter 6)

Perhaps, I thought, Teilhard was worth a second look. Shortly thereafter, as often happens to me, several volumes of his writings appeared at a local used bookstore. This time, I did not pass them up.

Rediscovering a Genius

One cannot read Teilhard’s Mass on the World or similar writings and come away with any other conclusion than that he was a true genius deeply inspired by the vision he had received. Let us remember that genius did not originally mean someone who was exceptionally intelligent but rather meant someone who was inspired by a guiding spirit. Ideas, in this way of seeing things, are not the product of human creativity or invention, but instead are intuitions received from a higher dimension of being.

Teilhard seemed unquestionably possessed by such an intuition, even vision, of the future. The fire he saw at the heart of the universe took hold of him and he could not help but communicate it. Teilhard knew what the prophet Jeremiah meant when he said, “there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones,
and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

Yes, Teilhard saw a vision of Christ in all things, as the Alpha and Omega of all creation. Christ it is that is the beating heart of the cosmos, the magnetism that draws all the world from its infancy to its culmination and consummation. Moreover, the vast universe is far from a dead and lifeless mechanism; it is profoundly alive, ablaze with the fire of the Sacred Heart which is a love that cannot be extinguished. Christ is the principle and meaning of all things.

Teilhard, in his own words:

What I discern in your breast is simply a furnace of fire [the Sacred Heart]; and the more I fix my gaze on its ardency the more it seems to me that all around it the contours of your body melt away and become enlarged beyond all measure, till the only features I can distinguish in you are those of a world which has burst into flame.

Glorious Lord Christ: the divine influence secretly diffused and active in the depth of matter, and the dazzling centre where all the innumerable fibres of the manifold meet; power as implacable as the world and as warm as life; you whose forehead is of the whiteness of snow, whose eyes are of fire, and whose feet are brighter than molten gold; you whose hands imprison the stars; you who are the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again; you who gather in your exuberant unity every beauty, every affinity, every energy, every mode of existence; it is you to whom my being cried out with a desire as vast as the universe, ‘In truth you are my Lord and my God.’ (Hymn of the Universe, Harper & Row, 1961, p. 34.)

This was the vision that took hold of Teilhard and drove him onward despite many missteps and misunderstandings. And this vision is profoundly compelling. Anyone who takes St. Paul’s teaching that Christ will be all in all seriously, anyone who longs for the coming of the Kingdom of God, should be moved by it.

…But a Flawed Genius

Teilhard had a profoundly beautiful vision of Christ at the center of reality. But Teilhard was not a perfect prophet, and he has his share of critics and detractors as all prophets do.

One of the most common criticisms is that Teilhard does not express himself in theologically or philosophically precise terms, a fact that can easily lead people into erroneous ideas. Ironically, his use of more precise scientific language often complicated matters further. Many passages about the universe being Christ’s body, for example, may smack of pantheism. Other passages about cosmic and spiritual evolution might seem to imply that God is in an imperfect state of becoming.

Of course, Teilhard attempted to defend himself against such misreadings, and in letters, writings, and talks, he corrected many misunderstandings about what he was trying to say. If there was a fault in him, it was an over-reliance on poetic language in a Church that was still deeply immersed in the linguistically precise mode of manualist-scholastic thought.

Yet, poetry is not a fault—not understanding it is. Poetry is a necessity for souls who hunger for beauty, and Teilhard was just such a soul. What he saw, what he felt, simply could not be communicated in conventional language, much less dry philosophical formulations. It was a vision of the heart, and thus it could only be communicated in the language of the heart, which is poetry.

A more disturbing accusation, especially in light of the horrors and cataclysms of the 20th century, is his embrace of eugenics. I have investigated this, and he does indeed advocate and defend eugenics in some of his works, such as Human Energy, a fact which is most unfortunate. Lest we forget, however, eugenics was en vogue long before Hitler in many sectors of American intelligentsia as a logical consequence of evolutionary principles. Experience has proven, nonetheless, that in practice it is nothing less than barbaric. Thus, his advocacy for it is, in my opinion, indefensible.

Flawed Prophet, Genuine Vision

Teilhard was not perfect. Yet, it is important to acknowledge that flawed prophets can still have authentic insights.

Genuine intuitions are received in flashes of mystical illumination and insight. What follows that illumination, however, is reflection—the human intelligence’s working on what it has received. St. Julian of Norwich, for example, when she was a young adolescent, received a vision of Christ during a severe illness and spent the rest of her life meditating on and writing about that one vision.

It is during this process of reflection, when the intelligence works on the mystical insight, that mystics often make mistakes. Perhaps their fallen human intelligence misunderstands, exaggerates, or otherwise misinterprets what it has received. Perhaps it makes connections that aren’t there or simply fails to accurately communicate what it sees. Whatever the case, mystics, like all humans, can make mistakes, and this is why many mystics have been censured or labeled heretics, even those who are now admired by all, like St. John of the Cross. The failures and mistakes of mystics are to be expected. Their authentic vision, their insight, however, can remain true.

The great geniuses, the great contributors to humanity, were often flawed, sometimes foolish, and in many ways mistaken. Yet, we remember them because they contributed one piece, one color, to the vastly complex and beautifully ornate rose window that is the sum of human knowledge and experience.

Was Teilhard’s vision of reality the only vision? Was it complete and perfectly articulated? Of course not. But it was a mystical insight of great value; a true contribution to the Church’s understanding of the cosmic influence of Christ and his resurrection and of the future growth and destiny of humanity. It is worth meditating upon.

For me, my God, all joy and all achievement, the very purpose of my being and all my love of life, all depend on this one basic vision of the union between yourself and the universe. Let others, fulfilling a function more august than mine, proclaim your splendors as pure Spirit; as for me, dominated as I am by a vocation which springs from the inmost fibers of my being, I have no desire, I have no ability, to proclaim anything except the innumerable prolongations of your incarnate Being in the world of matter; I can preach only the mystery of your flesh, you the Soul shining forth through all that surrounds us.

It is to your body in this its fullest extension—that is, to the world become through your power and my faith the glorious living crucible in which everything melts away in order to be born anew; it is to this that I dedicate myself with all the resources which your creative magnetism has brought form in me: with the all too feeble resources of my scientific knowledge, with my religious vows, with my priesthood, and (most dear to me) with my deepest human convictions. It is in this dedication, Lord Jesus, I desire to live, in this I desire to die. (Hymn of the Universe, Harper & Row, 1961, p. 36-37).