Adelphiasophism
Le Milieu Divin: The Trouble with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Friday, May 19, 2000
The Trouble with Pierre
The trouble with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is that he confronted, throughout his life, the pantheistic naturalism, that his experience and practical work had led him to, with the supernatural fancies the Catholic Church, his chosen profession, obliged him to believe. Many modern French philosophical writers are obscure without the excuse that Teilhard de Chardin had—he had to throw off the suspicions of the Vatican authorities that he was not theologically sound.
In a letter written not long before he died and quoted by Pierre Leroy, another Jesuit who wrote the foreword to “Le Milieu Divin,” Teilhard de Chradin apologises for his unorthodoxy but avers that he sees Christ at the peak of a creation of which humanity is the topmost level and the Catholic Church is the chief activity. He feels that the organic realness of the world that he cannot deny converges on this supernatural creature called Christ—in the realness of the world a figment of the human imagination. People who have been brought up and indoctrinated so soundly in the superiority of a figment over reality, that they fight in their own intellect to retain it in the face of all experience, cannot tell us what is right. If, despite this, we admire him, what we might do is find in the veiled words he uses to describe his experience some idea of how his intellect tried to persuade him to be a pantheistic naturalist.
In some ways it is not convincing. Father Leroy, for example, quotes Teilhard de Chardin justifying a friend’s success in business. We are not told what the buisiness was but the notional question posed is: “How can the success of a commercial enterprise bring with it moral progress?” Teilhard de Chardin thinks that every human eneterprise contributes towards a romantic idea of onward and upward progress, a focusing or convergence on to the Cosmic Lord, Christ. So a business enterprise “spreads a little more health in the human mass” and therefore “more liberty to act, to think and to love.”
In particular instances this might be true, but it is not a cosmic law—quite the opposite—the biggest and most powerful corporations seem determined to extinguish the higher lifeforms on earth. That cannot be progress for anyone other than those who prefer to be dead. The sort of naturalism of Teilhard de Chardin was an idealised naturalism that took anything within nature as acceptable—indeed more—as progress. Doubtless that is why his Jesuit generals saw his theology as flawed, for it implies the acceptance of evil—nature condones good and bad—but hopes that “good” or “progress is the ultimate aim of the natural world.
The correct view is to accept “good” and “evil” as part of Nature and to see morality as our personal attitude to the choice offered. We choose! That is our pupose in life. We can choose consciously—something that no other animal has been able to do, so far as we know—between assisting the variety of existence or reducing it. That is the real difference between good and ill. The good promotes diversity, the evil restricts it. Perhaps some business enterprises can promote diversity, but they do not do so automatically merely because they are part of Nature. Teilhard de Chardin might have been moving here but could not get here with the Catholic baggage he carried.
Something of the Spiritual
Teilhard de Chardin speaks of “spirituality” and “spiritual ascent,” meaningless expressions because few people know what spirituality is except that it implies something supernatural. Fr Leroy tries to explain it with a naturalistic explanation based on the fact that everyone knows energy “trends upwards:”
Physical energy contains in itself something of the spiritual, and since the upward trend of energy is a fact we can observe and verify with the increasing complexity of organisms, the law of the universe must surely be a continually progressing, irreversible spiritualisation.
Has Fr Leroy been reading Bishop Butler? Arguing by analogy can be enlightening—a help to understanding—but it is not an explanation, it requires an accurate analogy and it does not permit a false identity of terms. Fr Leroy is conning naïve readers beguiled by the reputation religious people still have for honesty, despite all the contrary evidence. Or perhaps he is just ignorant.
Since when did energy trend upwards? The law of the universe is that energy trends downwards and that entropy trends upwards, the latter being dispersed energy manifest as chaos. Fr Leroy wrongly concludes that spirit behaves like his (mistaken) idea of energy (because it has something of the spiritual). A whale has something of a fish and so it is a fish? A cloud looks woolly so it is wool? Jesus had something of the animal and so he must have been an animal? Since Jesus was a man and a man is an animal the latter is true though no Christian can admit it.
Many such arguments used by religious confidence tricksters from astrologers and occultists to Karl Barth depend on the use of false analogies and words that are unknown or only vaguely understood in meaning—words like soul, spirit and spirituality, transcendence, and so on. These are lying arguments meant to gull the unaware. Beware of those who will grant you a “spiritual ascent” usually terminating in eternal life in the bosom of God. They usually want common old money in exchange for this supernatural knowledge.
The only meaning of a spiritual ascent in the world of the Goddess is an unfolding of her gnosis—in simple words, learning more about her! It ends in the realization of our place within Nature—a wonderful revelation. “The Divine Milieu” is nothing less than the world within which we live. The best we can say about Teilhard de Chardin is that he might have been trying to lead us to this conclusion without antagonizing his Catholic censors.
Eclipse our God?
Teilhard de Chardin asks whether the world is “more vast, more close, more dazzling than Jehovah. Will it not burst our religion asunder? Eclipse our God?” The answer is affirmative to each question. Or rather it would be affirmative if people were not so easily duped by the propagators of patriarchal religions. How could a man-made concept be grander and more dazzling than the visible cosmos—and much more of it is invisible to us—however many human minds think it? God is the foolish conceit of men! Men, not Mankind! Teilhard de Chardin knows that many people are in awe of Nature and he hopes to persuade them back into the fold of orthodox Catholic, or Christian, thought—the supposed glory of God.
Adelphiasophists can only concur that more people are beginning to appreciate the true wonder of Nature, disparaged by otherworldly religions for so long, but they have immense difficulty in giving up the faulty beliefs of their parents, and those that do substitute pseudo-Christianity in the various supernatural “isms” that use the same sort of false concepts. Adelphiasophism is a natural “ism.” It is far healthier for humanity and the planet than the insanity of spirits, angels, gods and demons.
Do Christians really believe that God created humanity so that they can seek Him? Just as we have teased a little brother or sister by hiding from them until they cry in despair, God hides Himself until humanity cries in despair—and He created humanity just so that He could taunt them in this way! Then His priests and prophets tell us that we should not despair because God is everywhere and in everything, even though we cannot see Him. All of which tortuous nonsense comes from believing the imaginery construct—the Christian God.
Believe in the Goddess and all this nonsense dissolves before your eyes and the truth appears plainly—so plainly that humankind refuses to see it, preferring, as they do, to build for themselves an artificial mystery. It is the Goddess Nature that is everywhere—plainly and openly and wonderfully and thankfully everywhere—not the hiding tormentor called God. All she demands of us is that we respect her, at least enough not to gratuitously destroy her whether directly or indirectly, as the Christian ingrates are doing.
The whole of the Goddess’s creation is sacred. It is not a sin to harm anything of her creation—it allows for that—but unnecessary or gratuitous destruction will be punished when her feedback systems react against the destructive imbalance. Caution and concern about the future of our species leads us to interpret this rule strictly today when human power is such as to make destruction of the biosphere possible.
In substitution for this reality and the positive goodness needed to preserve it and ourselves, Teilhard de Chardin urges us to exclaim:
Lord, let your universe be greater still, so that I may hold you and be held by you by a contact at once made ever more intense and ever wider in extent!
The rational mind can only wonder at the mania that makes someone pray for a universe bigger than the one we have, when the one we have is already far too big to be ever comprehended. The incongruity of the prayer must be intended to point to the incongruity of wanting any entity bigger than the one we have!
Consciousness
Teilhard de Chardin divides us into categories based on what we do and what we are done by, admitting that in what we do we are led to some extent by that which we think we are doing. One way of regarding consciousness in a naturalistic way is as the sum of the influences upon us—a Skinnerian type of approach but one which recognises that the influences become complex non-linear systems that become chaotic and therefore unpredictable. This is why human beings effectively have free will, though notionally we respond mechanically to stimuli. No two people have the same stimuli, and the smallest variations can lead to quite different outcomes in a “free will” butterfly effect. So it is impossible to say how different people might react or think. It means, however, that there is no clear distinction between a person as object and a person as subject.
Teilhard de Chardin argues with the Church not us that human actions can be “sanctified,” and not just actions of Christian ritual or duty but the activities of living and searching for natural truth. He thinks the justification is needed lest the generals of the Church sense he is again lurching theologically. How can anyone believe in heaven and the cross and continue to believe that worldly existence has any value? The world is merely “vanity and ashes.” If they do, how do they avoid being torn on a spiritual rack, while the psychological inquisitor demands: “God or Nature?”
Christians faced with this choice have to choose one of several courses. One is for them to repress their love of the world and substitute it with a sterile piety or devotion that banishes the world as a temptation. Another is to abandon all attempt to make sense of the conflict and live an insincere double life in which they accept the world in practical or material terms while professing a theoretical or “spiritual” love of God. The honest course is to reject God—reject patriarchal religion as a misdirection and a dead end and seek a complete human existence within the womb of the Goddess, accepting natural aims as the proper guide of good and bad.
The second—the most dishonest and unprincipled—is the choice of preference for most Christians who live insincere lives. A smaller number—who the Christians often pick out as saints, proving how rare they are—choose the first. Yet, if they do not soon begin to choose the last, their aim of the end of the world, at least for humanity, will be achieved—shame if they are sadly in error and there is no heaven for us all to live in as an eternal spiritual species.
Acknowledging the insincerity of the second option, Teilhard de Chardin tries to find a more sincere way of justifying it, but why bother when the third offers a complete and happy solution. The solution offered by the Church is to live your life according to the will of God—in short, to be good—because the world is a trial for your suitability for the balmy place. The earth is worthless, as Christians believe, but it is a blank canvas for them to paint pictures of their love of God and their faith in Him. It leaves aside the meaning of “goodness” or the “will of God” except to invite you to read how evangelists and priests have explained it in their “holy” books. Why not be naturally good—be good for the Goddess by learning how to live symbiotically in her kinunity, not as the self-appointed gods of the world.
Incontrovertible?
In trying to go further, Teilhard de Chardin gives us more Catholic jiggery-pokery in which he takes it as “incontrovertible natural fact” that “all that is sensible exists for the soul,” and “each soul exists for God.” The naturalist wants to know what a soul is and what natural evidence the Catholic has for it, and for the assertion that all the material world exists for it. Teilhard de Chardin tells us proof is “unnecessary,” a surprising attitude for a supposed scientist, but logical since the statement is apparently incontrovertible.
There is not only no “incontrovertible” evidence in Nature for this “fact,” there is no evidence for it at all, just as there is no evidence outside of the human imagination for a big soul at the center of the universe—or is it outside of it?
These are typical Christian lies aimed at the unwary, and dependent on the unwarranted trust that people are indoctrinated to place in God’s clergy. It was not the Nazis who dicovered the technique of the “big lie.” They just copied it from the Christians who had used it for 2000 years. Big lies are self-sustaining because nobody is allowed not to believe them on pain of death or excommunication from society. So, people find it expedient to sustain the lie even though the lie is not in their best interests.
Teilhard de Chardin wants us to believe that we are all spiritually nourished by the energies of the sensible world. This imports a supernatural meaning because of the use of the weasel word “spiritually.” The use of such words is a theological trap meant to draw people out of the natural world into the world of Christian fantasy. We are, indeed, spiritually nourished in the real world by the impulses that stimulate our actions, but their sum total is only spiritual in the sense that the weather is—our response to all this nourishment is unpredictable and so seems supernatural—a manifestation of our soul or spirit.
Because we experience a multitude of subtle influences in our lives that are too complicated or slight or infrequent or peculiar to ourselves to understand does not mean that we should invent or re-invent a supernatural vehicle to carry them. Admittedly, we often have to use similar fudge factors in the course of discovery—God is the ultimate fudge—but mostly they are subsequently unravalled by further discovery. The use of words like soul and spirit by the church precludes their use as scientific terms, and science uses different words, like personality or psyche, for the same concepts. The soul of the living is their personality—the sum total of the act of living upon them. When people die, their personality or soul dies with them. We have no need of the hypothesis of souls or spirits so why pretend that they are “incontrovertible” facts?
If the word “spiritual” must be used, then it must be used to mean “spirituel,” pertaining to the higher qualities of the mind, or sacred in the sense of inviolable or reverend, and not to imply any belief in spirits or supernaturalism—that is what confuses people. It is the welding into our personality of our multifarious experience into a psychological comprehension of Nature’s nature—her kinunity. That can come as a revelation or a mystical experience, but it is not supernatural—it is gestalt.
Kinunity
We surely have “roots of being” and, as Teilhard de Chardin says, they are traceable in this natural world that we live in with no need of fairies or goblins. Teilhard de Chardin expresses clearly the kinunity of Nature when he says:
In each of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is reflected.
And one might add in every other animal and plant because Nature’s kinunity is like a huge hologram—each part contains the whole, but less clearly defined. A Catholic priest could not go so far but the pantheism suspected by the Catholic Generals is plain. Is all this talk about the soul camouflage to fool the Catholic Inspector Generals.
We must overcome that insensitivity which tends to conceal things from us in proportion as they are too close to us or too vast.
Teilhard recognises that very failing that humans have traditionally shown in looking upon Nature—it is “too close to us or too vast” to be seen as truly divine. The Christian might reply that God is bigger than the universe and yet also closer to us, and He captures the human mind. The answer is, of course, that God can be declared bigger and yet closer to us because he is really no more than a tiny construct of the human mind, close to anyone, yes, because he is their own construct, and magnified by the human imagination to be bigger than the universe when he is plainly no bigger, in fact, than the extent of the human brain.
What we call kinunity, Teilhard de Chardin seems to understand as collaboration. He wants us to move away from our awareness of ourselves as people to consider the spread of our being. We shall then “be astonished at the extent and intimacy of our relationship with the universe.” This is a good description of the awareness of the kinunity of Nature. Passages like this suggest that Teilhard was consciously or more probably unconsciously subverting the old lie of the patriarchal faiths. We are at one with Nature. No one can dispute that even if the full import of it is not recognized. The best that can be said for God or Christ is that they are masculine synonyms for the same thing, but not something superior or transcendent. In “Le Milieu Divin” Teilhard de Chardin tries to convince us that we should identify the divine world with the body of Christ, but why do we need to do that? The concept of the body of Christ is generated in Nature by natural beings called humans. Which is primary, Nature or the figure on the cross?
Teilhard de Chardin explains to us how waves of “cosmic influences” come upon us “from all sides and from the farthest horizon… food for the body, nourishment for the eyes, harmony of sounds, and fulness of heart, unknown phenomena and new truths, all these treasures, all these stimuli… cross our consciousness at every moment.” And it is all natural, he leaves us to deduce ourselves. Yes, he does talk endlessly about God, soul and spirit, concepts that seem to be stuck on out of theological necessity or a personal need to hang on to dogma despite the direction of his intuition. His arguments make more sense without them.
Better, perhaps is to accept them as what they were at the outset of human understanding—imperfect expressions of the human personality, and how it emerges out of the totality of experience in the kinunity of Nature. This, though, is not supernatural. As Teilhard de Chardin has shown to us, it is entirely natural, even if complicated. Because it is so complicated, it is supernatural to the extent that it is not understood. The supernatural in its manifestations of gods, spirits, souls, and so on, was invented as an explanatory fudge to “explain” what was not understood.
Natural Processes
Deep and complicated natural processes remain unknown, and some might be unknowable to feeble humanity, but they are natural. Complexity demands respect, especially by learned men like scientists, because it refutes simplistic ideas of linear cause and effect. “A therefore B” is not necessarily true in systems that are more complex than we have surmised—but supernatural gods and spirits are no more explanations than Jack Frost, Will o’the Wisp or fairy godmothers. All of Nature impinges on us and influences us, as Teilhard de Chardin says, but God does not. We would be wise to be guided by our respect for Nature—the divine entity that effects us—than by God—a hubristic vanity of the human mind.
Telhard de Chardin informs us that “the human soul, however, independently created our philosophy represents it as being is inseparable in its birth and its growth from the universe into which it was born.” The Jesuit priest declares the soul itself to be natural because it is the product of the sensible universe and the many influences that it exerts upon it. The human being complete with nervous system and brain is born with certain qualities inherited from its parents, and from then on its soul is formed by its experience in the world. Quite so, or Amen in this context.
It follows that all creatures that have some sort of nervous system and memory and are subject to Nature’s pleasures, slings and arrows in their own unique way, have souls. They simply are unable to express the concept themselves. Conversely, insensible things, with no nervous systems or way of remembering things, cannot have souls—or be souls! By the same token, because of human inadequacies, Nature will never be fully known by us.
Teilhard de Chardin doubtless gets into all sorts of theological trouble by showing that we will discover things by our own industry not by revelation—we must work to understand. Neglect and self-abuse—the stock in trade of mystics throughout the ages, most of whom were mad or charletans—can only give an illusion of understanding caused by neural damage, akin to the initial revelation that might be experienced through drink or drugs. Such mystical experiences never last or give us any permanent knowledge, but leave us feeling frustrated that “something is out there” when some brain cells inside here have suffered irretrievable damage.
We Build Our Own Souls
It is “we” who save ourselves or lose ourselves.
”People make their own souls,” Teilhard surprisingly but rightly tells us—denying that God does. Human souls are built collectively because human society is the main influence on people and that is obviously collective. People discover natural laws in human society and pass on their experience by teaching to others. Thus not everyone has to follow the same difficult path and process of discovery as their predecessors. The evolution of human souls effects the evolution of other human souls and the later souls understand more about the Goddess than the earlier ones. Each of us, like Newton, stands on the shoulders of giants to see more of Nature than our parents. The trouble is that for long, the giants stood in front of us obscuring our vision. They were called Christian priests, and our failure to respect the Goddess now, is their fault.
With the view unimpaired by patriarchal cheats out to keep themselves in comfort while the rest are in ignorance and the Goddess is multiply ravaged, we would do our duty to the world that sustains us. Personality should grow with human knowledge not be held back by illogocal reverence for the dusty books of superstitious primitive thinkers. Given a clear view, we have the prospect of comprehending the kinunity of the Goddess and therefore consciously seeking ways cautiously to strengthen it rather than tearing it apart. The moot point is whether enough people will realise this before the Judaeo-Christian delusion leads us to destroy the world and ourselves.
He sees creation, not as a one off thing or even a continuous creation by God, but as a process which we, as creative beings, participate in. Human creation, though natural, is not, however, necessarily good. What humanity is capable of doing should not necessarily be done. We could go about killing each other but most societies think we should not. We could kill every human being on earth by letting off all our megaton bombs, but most people, even politicians, do not think it a good idea. We could make GM bacteria that would invade our guts and poison us all, and we might well be already doing it with food. Human inventiveness is not bound to be progress, and it will be a measure of our maturity as an intelligent species whther we condone unrestricted human interference with the natural world. Progress is not inevitable as Teilhard de Chardin seems to think.
Teilhard de Chardin wants us to think that it is all contributing to the “Pleroma” of Christ, whatever that is. There are many combinations of species and gene that Nature has not tried or that have not survived. Perhaps some have never occurred so far because Nature has not had time to throw them up. In that case, it might be easy to see human beings as acting for Nature in speeding up the process of trying out genetic combinations. That seems to be how Teilhard de Chardin would have seen it.
Mutation rates are slow enough to allow useful genes to be expressed while useless ones are not, or even die out. We might finish up with a large number of new genes mixing together in plant species in unwanted and unpredicted ways, if testing or commercial growing becomes excessive. The whole of the biosphere of the earth might be in a hundred years time a gigantic test bed for bizarre genetic combinations. We might be spawning monsters or even become them. Similar species of plants can cross fertilize or hybridize fairly easily, and mostly these hybrids would die out but the filtering process might be so slow that we have been filtered first.
Nature has tried many experiments in the myriads of millennia she has operated on planet earth, and most have failed. The development of an intelligent human being was probably one of them—failed because it was not intelligent enough to be cautious when caution was needed. Or because terminal greed and selfishness were too prominent in this particular intelligent trial. Or because intelligence was not accompanied by the elimination of superstition so that an idol of the imagination was considered more important than the mother that sustained us.
The Divine World
Teilhard de Chardin also denies Christian tradition in boldly pronouncing nothing as profane—everything is sacred. That sounds pretty pantheistic and in practice acknowledges the Goddess, for she is Nature—in other words, everything—for millennia the profane if not evil world of the Christians.
By means of all created things without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us… The world is, in truth, a holy place—and we did not know it.
If the whole world is holy, why invent a specially holy being? What then are the criteria of these degrees of holiness? Teilhard de Chardin admits that the world is only sacred to some people—people like him—but they, at least, could dispense with the need for Jesus Christ, the protean god of the Christians. Despite this Teilhard de Chardin cannot bring himself to do so, and spends a lot of the pages in the “Divine Centre” trying to identify Nature and the body of Christ, though none of it makes any sense.
What is the point of manufacturing entities? If Nature is sacred, it has no need of being identified with a body hung on a tree. Does the divine need a God? If so, who is God to God? “No one,” the Christians will disdainfully reply. Why then should the Goddess need a God? Teilhard de Chardin declares Nature to be divine—it therefore needs no higher divinity. To escape this theological mess, Teilhard de Chardin makes Christ the focus or convergence of Nature—“Le Milieu Divin” of the title—but it is manifestly a way of trying to save Christ, not the Goddess.
Since the world is holy, the activities of human beings in it are holy too. Yet Christian divines rarely spend their time doing anything useful in the natural world, but instead see dedication to God as expressed in wasting their time indulging in prayer, meditation, empty liturgy, contemplation of God, detachment, exorcism, and a multitude of wasteful and, at best, self-gratifying tasks. None of this contributes to the sum total of human endeavour, nor to the good of the species or the world.
So, Teilhard de Chardin berates the Church for leaving progress to the irreligious. Presumably he means by this those who do not practice devotion like their professional mentors, because most people in the western world, most certainly in the modern USA, will still claim to be good Christians, even if of some obscure denomination. Like the ruling nobility of the UK, the managerial and political elite of the USA regard it as essential to display their devotion to God. They are Christians by profession, upbringing, inclination and expediency, and they constantly make wilder plans to tear apart the earth, pollute the heavens, sterilise the seas and infest nearby planets, giving nothing but token attention to the consequences. They demand their God-given right as stewards of the world to do as they like in it. They interpret “steward” to mean slave-master, and do accordingly. If these men are not practising Christianity in their greedy exploitation of the world, why are the Christian priesthood not condemning them with all the vigour they can muster?
Taking on the voice of an unbeliever to express some of his criticisms of Christianity, Teilhard de Chardin says it makes people “false to their nature” and when Christians work with lay people it is “in a spirit of condescension.” They think they have something that the unbeliever does not have—the body of Christ, whereas the unbeliever only has Nature! Christians have no need to know the real world because they are already meant for a balmier place. Confident in this, the Christian should want to join wholeheartedly in the recognition of the divine world.
He says, “Christianity is not an additional burden of observances and obligations” to weigh down the believer. It is, or ought to be, a participation in the real world, “the heights we are climbing naturally,” not some steeply inaccessible route to unsuspected heights. The conclusion can only be that we should shout out to the Christians in their self-imposed task of climbing unscaleable rock-faces, “Heigh, Christians, come down here with us and work for the truly divine—the real world of Nature in which our children will have children!”
Death
Looking at humanity as object, Teilhard de Chardin seems to think we need not be purely passive. In some sense that might be true, but many things in the real world affect us without our having any choice about it. We cannot decide to reject death, though we can face it with equanimity. For Christians, death is “evil,” and only overcome by finding God in it! For Adelphiasophists, and Pagans generally, death is the ultimate good, the final joy of life is to know our departure nurtures new life. There is no birth without death, so why is death evil?
”Evil” is one of those words bandied about by Christians as implying some sort of supernatural cause—demonic or even Satanic! It has nothing to do with anything declared good or bad in law, but entirely with what is contrary to the religious dictates of the dominant religion—Christianity here. Satan is the evil spirit because he opposes God, not because he does bad things. When the Hebrew God destroys armies or even nations, as he does often in the scriptures, it is by definition good. But, if Satan saved all those soldiers and people from destruction he would be doing evil!
It suits Christians to pretend that evil is what is not desired by society. If that were true, no just society would permit Christianity which has more blood on its hands over a far longer timescale than the Nazis (Gott Mit Uns). Is an institution with a murderous history evil? The Christian has to say, “Yes, except for Christianity, which cannot be evil because it is God’s own institution.”
Death is evil for the Christian because it has to be so to allow the theology that the ultimate good, Christianity, can overcome it and provide eternal life for Christian believers. In truth, it is this “theology” that is evil in any real sense because it is the basis of sustained robbery of the ignorant and weak over two millennia. Death is not evil. The people who say it is, and falsely promise an eternal life of which they know nothing and have no power to grant are truly the evil ones. Those who demand eternal life prove only one thing—greed and selfishness. They would deny life to others so that they can live forever. It is against the law of Nature and they would do better to think of what they can do that is useful while they enjoy the life they have.
Teilhard de Chardin joins in another theological struggle here. The natural world is divine and indeed it is God’s own place, yet it requires death. Why? Because it helps us, with God’s assistance, to overcome evil. Like the individual soldiers who die to bring about peace, we all die in the God’s divine world to bring about an ultimate triumph. And besides that, death gives us access to our “inmost selves.” None of this tortuous and unreasonable argument is needed if Death is seen as good not evil. It is the ultimate sacrifice that we all—not just some god called Christ—make for the benefit of future life! And, for most people, it comes as a welcome relief from pain or decrepitude.
Resignation to evil (death) is merely the “melancholy and questionable consolation of stoicism”—the “beauty and consistency” of which is “faith in the value of sacrifice.” Teilhard de Chardin is admiring what he says is not enough, preferring, instead of “beauty and consistency,” the ugliness and inconsistency of patched-up inventions and the supernatural planes and insensible dimensions where God turns death into life and evil into good.
We see the stoical acceptance of our personal sacrifice for future generations as a noble commitment to future life on the planet. If we give a life for future life, it is absurd that we should create conditions where no higher lifeforms will exist for millions of years. Our sacrifice of life at death requires us to ensure that the planet is habitable. Otherworldly beliefs like Christianity are the antithesis of this. It is of no consequence at all to the Christian, confident in the future life in the balmy place, to defend the tattered remnants of the world of Nature. And they will never know of their tragic error—they will “be” dead.
Eternal life, Teilhard de Chardin warns Christians, was only a “quasi-personalization.” Christians will not be walking around in heaven with their former lovers, colleagues and parents, just as if they lived on earth. The essence of the Christian’s personality after death is transferred to that of Christ. So, it is an illusion that they are themselves. The Church today accepts that heaven is not the balmy place of popular imagination but a nestling of the soul in the bosom of Christ. Christians must take comfort in an eternal cuddle not an eternal life—do they know this? Teilhard de Chardin likes the idea because he wants to renounce egoism. Why not then just accept that the self is renounced at death, like it or not, because personality is a function of life. If we love life, we should love this law of Nature because it allowed us to live and it will allow life after us. Death is resurrection, rebirth, revivication. “Out of death, life,” is Nature’s law.
The End of Evolution
Towards the end of “Le Milieu Divin,” Teilhard de Chardin declares that he is not a pantheist even though its “vistas of perfect universal union” are seductive. The reason, he explains, is that the “elements of the world vanish in the god they create.” The Christian God, on the other hand, differentiates the creatures he concentrates within himself. Teilhard de Chardin considered himself a scientist, but this gobbledegook is just that—gobbledegook. It is meaningless fantasy intended to rationalise his underlying monist beliefs, or present them to the Catholic Church as acceptable.
No one has formulated a scientific theory of the end of evolution and since it is hard to see how such a theory could be falsified, it is hard to see how any such theory could be scientific. So, Teilhard de Chardin knows nothing more about it than anyone else and his distinctions are his own fancies or variations of Christian eschatological myth and anti-Pagan slander. It is arbitrary, subjective, non-scientific and frankly dishonest to present such views as “incontrovertible scientific fact.” In doing this, Teilhard de Chardin makes himself acceptable to the theologians of the Church, the true Christian priest—a confidence trickster and cheat—a true Catholic.
The Pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself in it—the Christian in order to make it purer and to draw from it the strength to escape from it.
The earth for the Christian is a sort of gravitational sling-shot to project the Christian soul to God, while the Pagan loves the world for what it is. Does no Christian feel regret for leading people for almost 2000 years to disdain the world they were born into in favour of an unproven dream? The Christian lives a lifetime hoping for heaven and still fears death. The Pagan savours every moment of this life knowing it to be the last, and has no qualms about dying. The Christian cannot be disappointed because dead minds do not experience feelings. The sadness is that Christian belief detracts from the enjoyment of the world that we know. Teilhard de Chardin is really trying to say this.
Nevertheless, what is confusing about this work is that he always returns to Christian mysticism just when he is on the verge of convincing the Christian reader that the visible world is indeed divine. Ultimately the Christian enjoys a communion, a depersonalization, with God. The Pagan sees only what is perceptible, but the Christian sees what is imperceptible!
When Teilhard de Chardin wrote, the priests still said the mass in Latin. When he declared, “Hoc est Corpus meum” the wafers became the flesh of God! How could a scientific man believe such nonsense? He knows that any scientific inspection of the wafers will confirm their constitution as flour and water and not as flesh. Does, “I am the bread of life” mean that God is made of bread? It is impossible for any scientist to believe this, yet Teilhard de Chardin did. He believed the bread was flesh contrary to all his reason and the plain facts of the world that he takes, as a scientist, to be natural and therefore subject to the laws of Nature. The wafer is flesh but God choses to disguise the fact.
Teilhard de Chardin makes the best of a bad thing and gives himself some toffee by claiming that the recognition of such Godly interventions is a gift. A delusion would be a better word. People who claim to see what is imperceptible and tell us it is a gift have to be insane or mountebanks and, in either case, should be locked up until they are cured. So, when Teilhard de Chardin uses expressions like “by sound scientific rules” he confirms that he is a dishonest fraudster because those rules do not apply to his holy wafers. The best way to read him is as a closet pantheist who is too dependent on the Church or too scared to reveal himself honestly.
Finally, Teilhard de Chardin asks if Christians might not be “bestowing their adoration on an idol.” His answer is the whole book in which he asserts that the natural world is divine, but which he re-Christianises by putting the body of Christ at its centre—“Le Milieu Divin.” He sees that the crucified Christ is precisely an idol and seeks to find theological soundness in the divinity of the world. Since that would be heretical, he puts the idol back into the centre—but he must expect us to notice the crude sleight of hand.
His conclusion is the sexual fantasy of the repressed Catholic priest, or is it a description of the divinity that he really cherished?
The earth can certainly clasp me in her giant arms. She can swell me with her life, or take me back into her dust. She can deck herself out for me with every charm, with every horror, with every mystery. She can intoxicate me with her perfume of intangibility and unity. She can cast me to my knees in anticipation of what is maturing in her breast…
