Teilhard de Chardin: Pioneer of EVOLUTIONARY Religion

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Introduction
As described in a previous post (Defining Evolutionary Religion), what we refer to as the “strong” version of evolutionary religion argues that the evolutionary process itself has a spiritual quality, in the sense that the evolution of the Cosmos is the product of the slow but persistent and progressive manifestation of Spirit in the Universe.
 
There are several examples of strong evolutionary religion throughout history, going back as far as the Hindu Upanishads, the Chinese model of evolution from the Great Ultimate, and Plotinus’ teaching on evolution from the One. But from a contemporary perspective which fully incorporates a modern scientific sensibility, perhaps no thinker has been more influential than the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Praised by some, dismissed as undeserving of serious consideration by others, Teilhard led a complex life that produced a unique and inspiring vision of the nature of our evolving Cosmos. His writings can be hard to fathom at times, and he frequently acknowledged that he struggled with communicating his vision in words. While the reader needs to plunge into Teilhard’s own writings to fully appreciate his work, here we present a short summary which hopefully will motivate some to further explore his vision of an evolutionary spirituality.
 
 
A brief sketch of Teilhard’s life
Teilhard was born into a devout Roman Catholic family in France in 1881. At an early age he joined the Society of Jesuits, of which he remained a member his entire life. Although ordained as a priest in 1911, Teilhard pursued a scientific career, achieving widespread recognition through extensive field research in paleontology and geology, including the discovery of “Peking Man” in China.
 
From an early age, Teilhard sought answers to “Big Questions,” and through his academic and scientific pursuits, he came to embrace evolution as the key to understanding the unfolding of the endless variety of Earth’s life forms. Teilhard’s entire adult life was spent developing a vision that reconciled his scientific commitment to evolution with his equally firm experience of the reality and presence of Spirit. Unfortunately, the Roman Catholic Church of the early twentieth century did not share Teilhard’s acceptance of the theory of evolution. After learning of Teilhard’s early speculations on the religious implications of an evolutionary cosmology, his superiors in the Church revoked his teaching position in Paris and prohibited him from publishing any of his work on the relationship between evolution and spirituality.
 
Teilhard fought in vain against this prohibition, leading to a lifelong struggle with the Church. In practical terms, he was exiled to China by the Church, where he continued his work in paleontology for over two decades, all the while continuing to work out his reconciliation of religion and evolution in his personal writings which were shared only with his closest friends.
 
The pathos of Teilhard’s life is heartbreaking: he was burning with a vision of an evolutionary spirituality which he believed would offer humanity in an age of science a path to retain and even deepen its spirituality, but forbidden by  the Church to publicly share this vision. Privately, however, he never stopped refining that vision and sharing it with confidantes, right up until his death from a heart attack in New York City in 1955.
 
After his death, however, things changed quickly and dramatically. As sometimes happens with a repressed vision, once released from control of the Church, Teilhard’s thought burst forth in worldwide recognition. Writings that once were secretly shared only with close friends through mimeographed copies were published worldwide, including the book which established his international reputation, The Human Phenomenon (originally published in English under the title The Phenomenon of Man); another book-length treatment of his vision, The Divine Milieu; and multiple collections of his dozens of essays (the collection of essays published in book form under the title The Heart of Matter is an excellent starting point for exploring Teilhard’s thought, as is John Haught’s The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin).
 
Teilhard’s work continues to be controversial, and is certainly not without critics, but he remains the forefather of evolutionary spirituality, influencing figures such as Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Ilia Delio, and many others working to reconcile science and religion.
 
Teilhard’s Evolutionary Spirituality
The foundation of Teilhard’s thought is the acceptance of an evolutionary cosmology, and it is from the evolutionary process that Teilhard sees spirituality and religion emerging. The theme that runs through every page of Teilhard’s vision is the recognition that we live in a Universe that has evolved over a period of close to 14 billion years. Teilhard may have remained a committed Catholic, but his writings contain only occasional references to Bible passages or church dogma. Where references to Scripture and Christian dogma are found, they are often in the context of a cosmicized interpretation that many traditional Christians are not likely to recognize. For Teilhard, religion, or the human consciousness of Spirit, is best understood primarily as the product of the natural evolutionary process rather than a discrete supernatural revelation.
 
Teilhard believed that an honest, empirical, rational examination of evolution, free from both sectarian religious prejudice and the prejudice of scientific materialism, demonstrated that there is an orderliness, or teleology, to the evolutionary process. Specifically, over very long periods of time (and with periods of regression), evolution eventually produces increased levels of complexity in the Universe (from simple particles to elements to compounds to unicellular life forms to multi-cellular life forms to, eventually, entities with sufficient complexity for something new to emerge in the Universe: consciousness, thought, subjectivity, interiority).
In the human species consciousness eventually evolves to the point of achieving an awareness of the non-physical, or spiritual dimension of the Cosmos. In a sense, in humanity, the Cosmos awakens and evolving matter becomes conscious of itself. Religion is the product of humanity’s attempts (necessarily groping, partial, and often inaccurate) to make sense of this awakening sense of Spirit.
 
Teilhard referred to the emergence of a layer of conscious beings across the planet as the Noosphere, or layer of thought/mind/consciousness. Just as at an earlier point in Earth’s planetary evolution the realm of matter had evolved to the point of the emergence of living entities, or a Biosphere, so the Biosphere, over the span of millions of years of evolutionary development, culminated in the emergence of the Noosphere.
 
But Teilhard saw no evidence to suggest that this evolutionary process (which he called the law of complexity/consciousness) would cease with the emergence of the human species, and suggested that evolution will continue in the direction of increasingly complex entities with increasingly expansive consciousness. In his boldest speculation, he suggested that, as per the universal tendency toward increasing levels of unified complexity, the human species would eventually develop a unified global consciousness in which individual human units would expand their consciousness to become, in essence, a global, Earth consciousness (thus anticipating the concepts of trans/post-humanism and Gaia consciousness that would develop in the decades following Teilhard’s death).
 
Teilhard saw the evolutionary process culminating in what he called (some would argue quite ambiguously and mysteriously) the Omega Point. Teilhard seems to employ a dual usage of Omega Point, both as the conscious global entity that emerges as the pinnacle of human evolution, but also as the already and always existent Transcendent Spirit (“God” for traditionalists). Teilhard never fully worked out the implications of this dual sense of Omega. In more traditional terms, it seems to represent a sense of both the transcendent nature of Spirit (God) and the immanent presence of Spirit in the Cosmos, with the added dimension of being an immanent presence that is not static but rather constantly evolving toward ever greater fullness of presence in the world.
 
Clearly, Teilhard believed that we can’t explain either the orderly, progressive nature of evolution, or the emergence of a non-physical reality (consciousness) from matter, in purely materialist terms. For Teilhard, the explanation requires acknowledgment of a Spirit which initiates, drives, and is the goal of the process: God/Omega – although a God that might not look very familiar to traditional theists.
 
But Teilhard was not naïve. He recognized that even though the evolutionary process produced something sublime and beautiful in the emergence of life and conscious beings with the capacity to intuit the presence and nature of Spirit, he also recognized that the evolutionary process is a brutal and wasteful one, presenting the contradiction of how a spiritual process could be so cruel. This, of course, is a contemporary, evolution-based version of the classic problem of Theodicy: how can a good God be responsible for a world full of suffering, pain, cruelty, etc.? Teilhard acknowledged the issue, but never developed a meaningful response to the problem (although, in fairness to Teilhard, neither has any human, over millennia of philosophical and spiritual speculation, managed to resolve this question).
 
Response and Legacy
Like any human attempt to comprehend and communicate to others the nature of the Absolute through the epistemologically and spiritually limited vehicle of human language, Teilhard’s’ work has its share of flaws. Not surprisingly, both the religious and scientific communities were split on their response to Teilhard, with both religious and scientific traditionalists condemning his thought (for quite different reasons) and more progressive voices in both communities praising him as the creator of a science-compatible religion that fully-informed 20th century citizens could believe in.
 
Teilhard continues to be a polarizing figure, but his legacy will remain as perhaps the first person to create a cosmic spiritual vision that fully recognizes the immensity of the Cosmos, the vastness of time, and the evolutionary process driving that Cosmos - a spirituality which is firmly grounded in an experience of Spirit, but is still compatible with not just science but with the full range of 21st century sensibilities. As such, Teilhard de Chardin will continue to exercise profound influence on the evolution of religion in this century and beyond.
 
(Curiously, while Teilhard was developing his evolutionary theology, the one-time anti-British Indian revolutionary, Aurobindo Ghose, was developing a remarkably similar evolutionary model in India, apparently without knowledge of Teilhard’s similar and near-simultaneous work. We will look at Aurobindo’s thought in a later post.)