PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN MYSTIC AND SCIENTIST

April 11, 2018

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Virtutis Prime MTh

 

 

We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic 'temperature' are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet 'as a whole.' Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.  The Heart of Matter, 1950

 

The importance of Tielhard De Chardin’s writings for twentieth century philosophy and mysticism has often been overlooked if not actively suppressed. This paper will briefly show some of his contributions towards an understanding of the future of humanity, the planet and the cosmos.

FAITH AND VISION

Many Catholics have long cherished Chardin and his unique vision. He was a man possessed of rare vision who was capable of remythologizing his faith to fit the "facts" of which his scientific studies convinced him. His was not a “wholly other” God who disapproved of humans hypothesizing about or even remolding Creation. His God was immanent entity who lived and breathed the life and breath of the Creation, a Creator who was simultaneously giving birth to and being born from the magnificent organism of the universe. His views are profoundly Creation-centered, and are worthy of our present consideration not only because his thought was ahead of its time, but because his predictions; which seemed so unlikely in his own time may be coming to pass relatively unnoticed in our own day.

Chardin was neither a psychologist, nor even a philosopher in the usual sense. He was a priest and mystic, but he was also a scientist, to whom the concept of evolution held great weight. "Evolution" is the basis for Chardin's entire cosmology. Not, as Darwinian evolution would have it, a random product, or the "survival of the fittest," but an evolution planned and guided by divine agency. "The magic word 'evo-lution' which haunted my thoughts like a tune," he writes, "was to me like unsatisfied hunger, like a promise held out to me, like a summons to be answered." Chardin's universe is one of continuous and interwoven evolutionary threads, incorporating plants, animals, the planet, the cosmos, and, most peculiar to him, not merely the physical and mental evolution of humankind, but our spiritual ascent as well. Michael Murray in The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin writes, "In Teilhard's hands the theory of evolution, far from diminishing man by relating him to the apes, as so many churchmen used to fear, actually re-establishes him at the moving apex of time-space, well above the fixed central position which he lost in the Copernican revolution." In Teilhard's estimation, humankind is the crowning achievement of the universe, because it is in us, and as far as we yet know, only in us, that the Creation has become self-aware. Our eyes are the eyes through which the Earth finally beholds her own beauty, and, just as importantly, knows that she beholds it. Human beings are not above the Creation, but are themselves the Creation; that part of Creation that is self-conscious.
THE NOOSPHERE
When a level of complexity reaches its point of maximum complexity, it jumps to a new different level and organization of its wholeness.
The more matter becomes complex, the more it approaches to awareness.
The propellant force of this evolution comes from the cosmic and all-encompassing physical and moral force of Love. With the human being, Love begins to actualize its potential in tangible form. Yet the human being is only one of the stages: the unification of humanity on a world scale coincides with the emergence of noosphere, a global consciousness.
There is no doubt though: "Willingly or unwillingly, all our directions and needs converge to the same place". We all converge to the final goal, everything is directed towards the Omega point, humanity's natural point of convergence, of access, through the Second Coming of Christ in glory, to the creative unification of the world in God.
"The idea," writes Chardin, "is that of the Earth not only covered by myriads of grains of thought, but enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection." One hesitates to invoke the term "group-mind" but other creatures may presage our own ascent. We know that such a thing can and does exist in a variety of species, especially ants, migratory birds, and others. We also know the evidence regarding the "hundredth monkey" (once a learned behavior is taught to a significant portion of a population in this famous example, monkeys, the behavior seems to become instinctual even for those completely isolated from the community which acquired the behavior). If Carl Jung has given us the notion of the "collective unconscious," Chardin speaks of the "collective conscious."
 
 
 
 
 
 
REFERENCES
PERSONAL REFLECTION

 

 

HUMANKIND’S EVOLUTIONARY ASCENT

The evolutionary ascent of human beings occurs, according to Chardin's theory, in two stages of what he calls "planetization." The first stage is the "Go forth and multiply" stage, in which humanity expanded, in both quantity (in the very number of persons), and in quality (psychological and spiritual development). As Blanche Marie Gallagher explains in her introduction to her Meditations With Teilhard de Chardin, "During the long period of expansion, physical and cultural differences isolated the peoples of the Earth from each other as they spread to fill the Earth. At the beginning of our present century, with most of the habitable surface of the Earth occupied, the races began to converge. Through technology, tangential energy becomes evident in the response of the people across the Earth to each other; people are sharing their wars, their coronations, their concerns. Thus the law of complexity-consciousness develops." We have reached the end of the expanding, or "diversity" stage, and are now entering the contracting, or "unifying" stage. At this point, Chardin's theory runs counter to Darwin's, in that the success of humanity's evolution in the second stage will not be determined by "survival of the fittest," but by our own capacity to converge and unify. The most important initial evolutionary leap of the convergence stage is the formation of what Chardin termed "the Noosphere."

 

According to Teillhard, there exists, beyond the laws of physics, another fundamental principle of organization of the universe, another dimension: the infinitely complex. Starting from the simplest to the most complex, all matter can be put in alignment along an axis, from the most elementary particle to the most complex organism. In this progression towards an ever-increasing complexity, of which the human being is the highest grade, evolution is not linear but proceeds by a series of quantitative then qualitative leaps.

 

EVIDENCE FOR THE EVOLUTION OF THE NOOSPHERE

Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It may sound too sci-fi-ish until you consider the exponential growth of the World Wide Web, that vast electronic communications envelope encircling the Earth, running node to node through a nerve-like constellation of wires, cables and satellite connections. But the Noosphere is more than this. It's formation, as Michael Murray explains, begins with "a global network of trade, communications, accumulation, and exchange of knowledge, cooperative research ...all go into the weaving of the material support for a sphere of collective thought. In the field of science alone, no individual knows more than a tiny fraction of the sum of scientific knowledge, and each scientist is dependent not only for his education but for all his subsequent work on the traditions and resources which are the collective possession of an entire international society composed of the living and the dead. Just as Earth once covered itself with a film of interdependent living organisms which we call the biosphere, so mankind's combined achievements are forming a global network of collective mind."

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Are we therefore, in this new millennium, witnessing another great leap in evolution, the contraction and unification of the human species, the construction of the Noosphere, the focusing of our psychic energies? "The powers that we have released," Chardin states in, "could not possibly be absorbed by the narrow system of individual or national units which the architects of the human Earth have hitherto used. The age of nations has passed. Now unless we wish to perish we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth." How we accomplish this is by correcting our errant perception of reality as being made up of separate units. Chardin insists that "to love is to discover and complete one's self in someone other than oneself, an act impossible of general realization on Earth so long as each can see in the neighbor no more than a closed fragment following its own course through the world. It is precisely this state of isolation that will end if we begin to discover in each other not merely the elements of one and the same thing, but of a single Spirit in search of Itself."

 

 

 

 

Chardin, Teilhard de  - The Heart of Matter, 1950 New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

 

Chardin, Teilhard de  - The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1968

 

Chardin, Teilhard de  - The Phenomenon of Man New York: Harper and Row, 1961

 

Chardin, Teilhard de  - Christianity and Evolution New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1971

 

Chardin, Teilhard de - Human Energy New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971

 

Gallagher, B. M. - Meditations With Teilhard de Chardin Chicago: BVM Press, 1980

 

Lukas, Mary and Ellen - Teilhard  Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977

 

Mabry, John R.  – Cyberspace and the Dream of Teilhard de Chardin in Creation Spirituality Magazine, Summer 1994

 

Murray, Michael - The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991

 

 

Chardin has been the single most important influence on my spiritual and philosophical development. His words resonate with me now as we approach the new millennium. Like Chardin, I embrace the philosophical concept of Panentheism, and reject the Pantheism of New Age Movements. My passion for technology and its applications, my background in Anthropology, my constant reading of works on the New Cosmology, and my inner-search for Truth have all been inspired and to a seminal extent formed by the speculations of this most Christian mystic. I eagerly await the continuing evolution of, and participate in the dawning of the Noosphere and sincerely hope that hubristic humanity does not commit suicide before the noosphere flowers.