Review of Current Religious Thought: March 27, 1961

A new mystic has burst upon the contemporary consciousness in the person of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French savant who died some half-dozen years ago but whose writing are only now being translated into English. Besides being a Jesuit priest, de Chardin was a paleontologist of distinction who spent many years in China. The last four years of his life were lived in New York. The translation of his book The Phenomenon of Man, which appeared in 1959, has already gained for him a remarkable posthumous reputation in the English-speaking world, despite the difficulty and novelty of much of its thought and language. In it he presented an evolutionistic perspective of man as developing into a new species, the category of which has been defined by the Incarnation.

It is evident that in setting before himself the task of reconciling the concepts of evolution and incarnation de Chardin has been faced with the necessity for breaking with the classical mystic concept of matter as an impediment to the soul and of bringing about some kind of reconciliation between the categories of “nature” and “grace” which for so long have been divorced in the theology of Roman Catholicism. This he has attempted to achieve through the development of a kind of “materialistic” mysticism which sees God everywhere—“in all that is most hidden, most solid, and most ultimate in the world.” The meaning and method of this mysticism, which is central to the thought of de Chardin, are expounded in his book Le Milieu Divin. An English translation has appeared under the same (untranslated) title.

In the first place, de Chardin calls for the “divinization” of our activities. Viewing the universe as a single whole, the centre and sun of which is Christ in whom all things consist, he conceives the power of the Incarnate Word not only as animating the higher reaches of existence but even as penetrating matter itself. “Nine out of ten practising Christians feel that man’s work is always at the level of a ‘spiritual encumbrance’ … that time spent at the office or the studio, in the fields or in the factory, is time taken away from prayer and adoration,” with the consequence that they lead a “double or crippled life in practice.” The Christian, however, should experience the “sur-animating” power of God in his daily activity which enables him to collaborate in building the Pleroma and thus to “bring to Christ a little fulfillment.” Moreover, his work should be to him “the very path to sanctity” and “a manifold instrument of detachment,” so that, through the divinization of his actions in Jesus Christ, it is not selfish ends but “God alone whom he pursues through the reality of created things.”

The next stage on this spiritual journey is described as “the divinization of our passivities,” that is, of the things which we endure or undergo. There are “passivities of growth,” such as the life force within man, and there are “passivities of diminishment,” such as misfortunes suffered outwardly and, in the inward sphere, “natural failings, physical defects, intellectual or moral weaknesses, as a result of which the field of our activities, of our enjoyment, of our vision, has been pitilessly limited since birth.” There is, too, the inescapable deterioration of old age. Death, finally, is “the sum and consummation of all our diminishments.” But we must welcome death by finding God in it, by embracing it as our “excentration,” as our “reversion to God” and the step “that makes us lose all foothold within ourselves.”

A consideration of de Chardin’s doctrine of matter in relation to the mystic’s ascent to the contemplation of God in his essence indicates, however, that it is not radically different from ancient Pythagoreanism, even though he avoids the crude dualism of the latter by placing matter within an evolutionary process that leads to an ultimate spiritual state. He is, indeed, able to speak of “holy matter,” redeemed by the act of the Incarnation and informed with a spiritual power. Matter, for him, is not so much a weight as a slope, up which we may “climb towards the light, passing through, so as to attain God, a given series of created things which are not exactly obstacles but rather foot-holds”; and he maintains that “the soul can only rejoin God after having traversed a specific path through matter.” De Chardin would have been quite at home with Socrates!

But it is not only the soul that is to achieve this spiritual fulfillment: the world itself, by means of progressive sublimation, is to attain its consummation in Christ Jesus, so that de Chardin is able to speak of “the general ‘drift’ of matter towards spirit,” until “one day the whole divinizable substance of matter will have passed into the souls of men; all the chosen dynamisms will have been recovered: and then our world will be ready for the Parousia.” His, however, is still the age-old objective of mysticism, namely, to escape from the world. Thus he writes: “The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confines himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.”

What de Chardin envisages is, in fact, nothing less than the transubstantiation of the universe, brought about by “the omnipresence of christification,” the dynamism of the divine milieu. “The eucharistic transformation,” he says, “goes beyond and completes the transubstantiation of the bread on the altar. Step by step it irresistibly invades the universe.… In a secondary and generalized sense, but in a true sense, the sacramental Species are formed by the totality of the world, and the duration of the creation is the time needed for consecration.”

De Chardin’s writing is beautiful and calmly passionate. But it is gnostic rather than distinctively scriptural. His philosophy is incarnational in the sense of an evolution which gradually incorporates all into the Incarnation. His theology would seem to leave aside the Cross except as significant of a divine participation in the sufferings of his creation. It will be a great day when at last a Roman Catholic thinker breaks free from the tyranny of the analogia entis.

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