The phony pedantry and empty metaphysical thrill of Teilhard de Chardin

The resurgence of the ideological, political, and emotional aura or atmosphere of the 70s, that incalculably influential decade (bursting forth as it did on the petard of one year, 1968, though of course having been sparking for much longer) means that we today must take care not to forget the figures and events of that time -- not if we want to escape its clutches. (And those of us who lived through that time would dearly love some respite!)

In the realm of theology, if we are going to identify some of the causes of our current plight, one priest, Teilhard de Chardin, exerts an influence far beyond his name-recognition today, yet his errors remain with us in myriad ways.

His ideas were formless from the start. He never had a theory or position that could be stated with much confidence. It's the very penumbra of drama, of poetic, vague spiritualism, braced up by the settled-science-y cachet of evolutionary theory that characterized his attraction and of which, today, his magnetism consists. For the confused and those who wish to confuse, his theology is perfect.

In one message to my husband and me, Fr. Paul Mankowski put it this way: 

Teilhard has always struck me as bogus the way Matthew Fox is bogus: his language is designed to make clear things cloudy rather than the reverse, and always promises some kind of metaphysical thrill he never delivers on.  He has his admirers, but nobody has been able to build anything on T's work, the way bright grad students go on to advance the arguments of the thinkers they study.  You either get intoxicated by the guy or you don't.

The Jesuits and the corruption of their charism exert a disproportionate influence on the Catholic Church today. Obviously, the Pope is a Jesuit. His closest friends and influencers are Jesuits. And Pope Francis clearly admires Teilhard, a Jesuit. 

So, as I say, even if trying to grasp the man's thought is hopeless, the way, as we used to joke, nailing Jello to the wall is hopeless, we do need to know what it is and what its current cognates are. His ideas lend themselves to endless iterations (without necessarily any acknowledgment of their source -- who needs to footnote a feeling?).

I recommend reading the four Substack posts on the topic by Peter Kwasniewski as a primer in the era and its confusions. In the first part, he remarks about the long passage quoted by Pope Francis recently, "A bit wild and wooly, but one might be able to read it all in an orthodox way." 

An aside: How often one has sat in the pew listening to some grandiose verbiage from the pulpit, words spinning around, creating a tangled ball of something that, overall, gives us a squirmy sense; yet as we attempt to resist spending yet another Sunday riled up about the state of things, we find ourselves saying, "Wellll, I suppose one could interpret it in a not-wholly-erroneous way..."

But why? Why do we have to do this? Why are things not clear, spiritually healthy, ringing with the familiar clear bell-like tones of the past? Why are we perpetually in a state of having to quell our uneasiness (at best) or standing athwart destruction (at worst, and who are we to take on this task)? 

Back to Teilhard. Peter Kwasniewski goes on to say, after the "wild and wooly" bit:

Yet Teilhard de Chardin, the Piltdown paleontologist and “Omega Point” mystagogue, is not exactly an uncomplicated and uncontroversial figure. Phil Lawler describes him as "a French author whose odd mixture of eugenics and evolutionary theory drew several cautions from the Vatican during the pontificates of Pius XII and John XXIII. More recently his work has drawn interest from exponents of New Age spirituality."

In the third of Kwasniewski's posts, he looks at the assessment of recent authors, including Fr. Mankowski, who writes:

Tall, dapper, handsome and aristocratic—I’ll have to take Kirsch’s word for it here—Teilhard de Chardin was essentially a fraud. At bottom, he was a Ramada Inn lounge singer posing as a metaphysician.

I cringe to admit I have weighty opinion against me. Both Joseph Ratzinger and Flannery O’Connor were deeply impressed by Teilhard. I can only explain this admiration by the surmise that neither admirer had any formal education in science, and both were thus innocently susceptible to Teilhard’s pseudo-scientific pedantries...

Had Teilhard stuck to his cotton-candy metaphysics, he probably would have been ignored by his principal antagonists both inside and outside the Church. It was his claim to be a serious paleontologist and unflinching respecter of scientific fact that put his theology in the crosshairs.

 

I must chime in here on the general assumption that Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, admired and was even influenced by Teilhard de Chardin. Maybe. 

Keep in mind that one way Teilhard retains his hold among the theological elites is by evoking that slipperiest of "settled theories," evolution. Most academics are loathe to challenge it, lest they be branded anti-intellectual, so tight is the fist that strangles true scientific inquiry -- or, I should say, so absolute is the dictatorship on this matter. Question evolution (as a unified theory of the world, that is; spotted moths aside) and be shunned forever, is how it goes.

I don't know why Flannery O'Connor couldn't sniff out Teilhard. Normally she had exquisite common sense. And it's true that on occasion, Ratzinger took Teilhard's ideas seriously, perhaps because he had that gentleman-scholar's way of graciously giving the benefit of the doubt, combined with the universally observed caution to avoid foreign, and in this matter, dangerous, academic ground. From what I've read, though, it seems more a case of the smarter person allowing someone's insights, however odd, to spark his own more profound thoughts, rather than delving into them on their own merit. 

Certainly, portraying someone's position should not be mistaken for agreeing with it, necessarily. Teilhard was influential enough to merit at least that, at least at the time. 

I'm not suggesting that some of Ratzinger's assessments weren't positive -- it seems as if they were. However, in our polarized age, we don't have what his attention could also be: patience. Ratzinger's overall demeanor was that of a gentle academic willing to hear everyone out (to the detriment, ultimately, of his disciplinary role as pontiff). My impression is that sometimes he was employing a Thomistic approach; he seems often simply to be holding Teilhard's position out at arm's length to get a good look at it for description's sake. To give him credit, how many of us are willing to do that -- to characterize our opponent fairly, even at the risk of being thought of as giving assent?

The point I want to make is that when Ratzinger was on his ground, he dismissed the man pretty decisively. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, one of his later, more mature works, Ratzinger spends a paragraph summarizing Teilhard's conception of the universe, which he saw as an evolutionary process in which the cosmos undergoes a "series of unions" towards "a growing synthesis, leading to the 'Noosphere', in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are bended into a kind of living organism... In his view [emphasis added], the Eucharist... anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on." 

In the immediately following paragraph, Ratzinger offers a quite different, even opposing, view, and it is the one he commits to and expands upon for the rest of the chapter and, indeed, book. "The older tradition starts from a different conceptual model. Its image is not of an upward flying arrow, but of a kind of cross-shaped movement... " 

The ensuing treatment simply leaves behind Teilhard's idea -- his main idea -- and never picks it up again. It does seem to be the case that in his writings, Ratzinger never directly refutes Teilhard. But if we look at what he does say about his own thought, we understand that he seems to regard Teilhard as requiring mention, if only to juxtapose him against his, Ratzinger's, own solid grasp of "the tradition." 

In the same way, Teilhard requires mention today; he is that influential. If he didn't himself create the loopy, gnostic, pseudo-scientific claptrap passing for theology we endure today, he is a handy emblem of it. Sometimes it's helpful to put a face on bad ideas so they are recognizable. 

NB: Happy to know, thanks to Peter Kwasniewski, that along with Fr. Mankowski, my bestie C. S. Lewis also had no time for Teilhard: 

Ironically, the Anglican C. S. Lewis showed a much more “Catholic” sensibility than current Church leadership when, in 1960, he wrote to a Jesuit friend: “How right your Society was to shut up de Chardin!”