Saturday, July 22, 2006

Of the Trouble With Teilhard

What is one to make of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin? My understanding of his thought is still rather impressionistic (and some would claim that his own was as well), but what I do understand of it I find simultaneously fascinating, attractive (in certain respects), and off-putting (in others). Was he profound or profoundly in error? Was he a saint or a heretic? Or, perhaps, was he a little of all of these things?

Teilhard is easy to despise, if one is of a certain temperament. He wrote in a style that is at once heartfelt, ecstatic, heady, pretentious, and obtuse. He was an idealist's idealist, a mystic's mystic. He was also a modernist, while at the same time a critic of modernistic materialism. The Incarnation of Christ was the central concept of all his thinking, but (from what I understand), he understood this as occurring gradually over millennia through the evolution of mankind towards its Omega point (Christ, who becomes a sort of personalized telos rather than the Savior of mankind), rather than the intrusion of the divine Word at a particular time in history. It's like he had this profound understanding of all the implications of Incarnational and Trinitarian reality, while finding the historical events that reveal that reality incredible or irrelevant.

How does grace apply to such a man as Teilhard, who personally denied Original Sin, and thought that evolution, in some sense, "saved" God, but nevertheless always remained in humble submission and willful allegiance to the Church, recanting the public profession of those of his beliefs that Church authorities pronounced unacceptable, while privately continuing to explore them? Who fervently believed that Christ would be made "all in all" through the intrusion of God's life into the world by means of the Body of Christ, but didn't seem to find Christ as an historical personage terribly interesting? Who understood that humanity (and by extension, the cosmos) would only be saved in and through Christ, but denied a Fall from which creation must be redeemed?

How could one man have been so profoundly right in certain central aspects of his theology, while profoundly wrong in other, similarly central aspects? How could one man have displayed the fervent life of the Spirit, and the confusion of a spirit of error? As I try to perceive the Body as more fundamentallly organic than ideological, I would like to believe that when Teilhard finally encounters the Parousia he longed for so desperately, he will be greeted rather as Bree the talking Docetist horse was by Aslan in The Horse and His Boy:

"Now, Bree," he said, "you poor, proud, frightened Horse, draw near.
Nearer still, my son. Do not dare not to dare. Touch me. Smell
me. Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers. I am a
true Beast."

"Aslan," said Bree in a shaken voice, "I'm afraid I must be rather a
fool."

"Happy the Horse who knows that while he is still young. Or the Human
either."

Currently Reading
The Future of Man
By Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

posted by Jeremy at 3:01 PM

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