Teilhard de Chardin: Petrification of Christ, Aping God, Mystic Tech-Totalitarianism

Some great people think de Chardin is great. I don’t.

Reboot?

The New World is predicated on removing old religions and fashioning a new one. That new religion is most likely to be related to its origins in the Empire of Scientism. Many seek the fusion of science and religion. However the greatest pressure is to make religion submit to science, or rather scientism, by mixing up apparently credible scientific observations with critique of existing worldviews in a new theology. Such a theology tends to emphasise a scientifically-described process which can be presented in the language of cosmic poetry to portray a new divine vision. Many fall for nice words that appear unchallenging and that release you from adherence to any system which might limit your licence. The new religion however will be a bootleg copy, bootstrapping from new technology, bootlicking military science until (as Orwell predicted) the boot is stamping on the human face. We are already well into our TechBondAge.

We must alert ourselves to the slide of scientism and sleight of hand in suggestive symbols that we mistake for reality in succumbing to sinister manipulation and suddy stories. Teilhard is one of those figures that separate two very distinct worldviews. He proposed that there was a process of human evolution that involved a future Omega Point where we would converge in complexity with Christ and the cosmos. It was a sketchy synthesis of theology and science, or purported to be in some way. Matter is evolving and becoming spirit. Even God is evolving insofar as God really exists. It has been described as ‘Gnostic, cosmo-theology of a Hegelian variety.’ Teilhard was one of the main inspirations behind a generalised Christ-consciousness that never troubles those who are often ostensibly otherwise troubled by Christ. It could gloss over evil, support tyranny and do away with God or Christ in any meaningful manner. He was indeed revolutionary. But he appealed to prelates in recent times in a worrying way. This ambivalence comes from his hypnotic obfuscation, wordsmithing, adjectival inundation and studied ambiguity.

Alternatively we can remain human with spiritual consciousness. I think one can give him the boot or have a reboot or else succumb to our demise. The story from among the runes he found in stone seems to change what we should be but will ultimately leave humanity in ruins.

Apes, God and Naturalism

The fossil record was critical in geology, science and anthropology. It began to re-define who we were and questioned the stories we told. In particular, it questioned the religious narratives of creation and then the very idea of spirit itself. The new commandments would be written in scientific stone by a god unknown. But much questioning stops when the initial findings appear authoritative. Geology was informed and complemented by, or related to, later ideas of evolution. But a concatenation of partial assumptions and extrapolations can be marshalled to make fantasy appear as proven fact.

There is a very strong argument or misrepresentation that proceeds from ideas of natural selection to the effect that humans are only apes. It has special manifestations in discussions which assert that we are violent apes and nothing special. Worse we are worse than them now. Without refuting here more than has been done by science itself, there are two aspects that are wrong. Firstly, is the idea that we are only apes rather than having some commonality. Secondly, is that we have an ineluctable propensity to violence as a result. Both have been rejected by science itself. Violence is more contextual, multiplied and facilitated by engineers and military industries. That the human is a nasty, naked ape and so on has been overstated for propagandistic reasons to create a past story in order to make another one for our future in the present. That scientists have seemed to uncover irrefutable evidence of a comprehensible and inevitable progression of humans in the material world from the material world somehow implies a materialist future without any pretensions to old religious orthodoxies.

In the context of imperial examination of evolution and the associated interest in eugenics, the fossil record, geology and finds became critical in the chain of explanation of the origins of humans. The standard conclusions in the Empire of Scientism obscure difficulties. Science has swept under the carpet its significant contribution to both empire and racism. In addition, some of the smooth stories are as holey as the holy ones they present to criticise and want to replace.

The focus on humans as apes is part of a de-humanising story. That is not dependent on any refutation of natural selection in its optimally described way. It also has another curious link to another idea which is darker. That was the idea adversarial forces to human spiritual evolution, which for some are Satanic, would ‘ape’ God. Ape here meant to imitate or mimic perhaps like a monkey would. The Church fathers recognised the adversarial aping of the holy and sacramental and this idea widens to the world.

That idea was echoed in the Gnostic belief that we were living in a counterfeit world. Today people hear we are living in a simulation. The simulation apes real life. The counterfeit world does too. The idea of the human as merely an ape, often advanced by scientists who deny God and religion, is continued in the idea that this ape will live in a cage or zoo. Serious philosophers are talking about the human zoo we will live in. This is not new. It was predicted by John D. Bernal in his work The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul(1929).

The caged ape increasingly lives in a faux reality that apes creation for its own purposes. Somehow there is a connection between those who want us to live in a more artificial world and rejection or reduction of nature as well as us. As the artificial world grows, we are now told we are blind apes who cannot see what machines can and thus we are more inferior and cannot even know what reality is. As we cannot know what reality is we must be content with the new world and reality shaped by machines and their makers or controllers who can tell us what is what. They really know.

The focus on ‘naturalism ‘ is a curious name for those who are not in love with organic nature and use its produce as something lesser that needs to be contained and improved with machines and technique. It stands in contrast to supernaturalism and rejects the idea of anything beyond the measurable, empirical and sensible. Then with increasing computational power it denigrates the organic human and finds them weak in comparison to technology. The world evolved, was not created and now must somehow be created or re-created by humans with networks. Not only are we de-evolving relative to machines but we must now treat them as Godlike and be returned into their mystic body. The Zoo is made with Zoom pending deeper integration.

Teilhard De Chardin: Concerns of Smith, Maritain, Hildebrand, Schumacher, Étienne Gilson (and me)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died in 1955. Teilhard de Chardin was a leading palaeontologist and theologian. He was (and remains) very popular. Many see him as a great thinker. Many laud his vision. Many believe he had a unique role in foreseeing our future and melding of humans and creation. I cannot see that. I am unsure that people are reading him closely. He is confusing even if nice in some cloudy way. The official Catholic Church itself has been reported to be oscillating. However that misses the nuances.

The Catholic Church may appear to offer a less critical perspective on Teilhard today but that does not bear deeper scrutiny. He was regarded as New Age as well as a pantheist with some disturbing statements about totalitarianism. His Super-Christ was consistent with the Superman perhaps. Critics say he was promoted by communists, atheistic materialists or globalists. His supporters present his evolutionary natural theology as innovative. However that seems to be more a part of a great selling and a very favourable telling of his vision. He was criticised all along and his works suppressed insofar as they went against Catholic teaching. This never really lifted and his relevance to New Age and influence on esoteric thinking separates him from its main body still. He appears more revolutionary (or a Trojan Horse as critics complain) insofar as he did maintain church connections.

Despite the support of many contemporary thinkers, including at high levels within the Catholic Church, critics like Wolfgang Smith (who died last year) have continued a critique that began when Teilhard was alive. Many thinkers vigorously defend him. Teilhard de Chardin was accused of presenting an heretical view limiting God to evolution. The critique flourished when Teilhard started presenting his grand vision. Jacques Maritain criticised the foundation of Teilhard’s view and abstraction of Christ into some cosmic force. Teilhardism was a futurism that de-emphasised incarnation. Deitrich von Hildebrand was another critic, after he talked with Teilhard and encountered his confused idea of the person and disregard of the supernatural. Monsignor Leo Schumacher accused him of attempting to form a new religion. Étienne Gilson also criticised the work of Teilhard de Chardin to undermine the Church.

I will leave aside the contested but puzzling proximity of Teilhard to a major hoax (Piltdown) and the peculiar loss of evidence related to his work on the ‘Peking Man.’ That find proved politically relevant at the time in China. These two paleoanthropological episodes were part of an overall scientific entrenchment of human evolution presented as a displacing rejection of theological indications of creation.

Here are a few facts that have been relevant to me.

The biographies of Teilhard suggest a deeply materialistic or physicalist worldview and psychological attitude or anxiety qualified somewhat (initially at least) by Christ. However the question is whether Christ was then assimilated into a materialist perspective that comforted Teilhard and reconciled a fundamental left-brain preoccupation with the physical world. Christ is later merely a placeholder for physical complexity and emergence in a simulacrum vision of the heavens. Some saw Teilhard as a bridge between Marx and Christ.

His materialist philosophy appears to have altered into a perspective which was an evolutionary-materialist one. Wolfgang Smith criticised him and on this too and pointed to the divine immanence which assimilated humans.

Teilhard appeared to be transhumanist. The implications of his work are consistent with transhumanism. He had close connections and support from Julian Huxley who coined the modern term.

His work also implies the Singularity. His apparent disposition is worrying. It betrays a very specific idea of what human spirituality is. His articulation of an Omega Point has been cited by other futurists and thinkers who speak of the Singularity.

Theologically he downplays Christ, the Incarnation and Redemption as well as the individual, in favour of collectivist perspective which subsumes free will into a vortex of materialist progress converging to the detriment of Christ and creation.

Teilhard echoes the influential Russian Cosmist thinking that informed the Bolsheviks, is influential in Russia still, influenced space travel and is manifest in British futurism and contemporary US techno-futurism. Antecedent or parallel elements of his supposedly original perspective can be found in Nikolai Federov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Vladimir Vernadsky. The link with imperial scientism can be found through a H.G. Wells - Julian Huxley axis. Evolution itself becomes God, teleology and spirit.

Teilhard presents a view that is not only transhumanist but posthumanist on a close reading. Somehow people do not see that or maybe accept and desire it. I believe this is the antithesis of the Christian view. Some would see it as anti-Christian. It is in my view. I do not buy his vision.

Reduction of the transcendent to the technique of the transactional-technological involves an elevation of a new Promethean construction through physicalist and biological transcendence. This is justified in a pseudo-cosmic melange of immiscible ideas joined together with loose language. The consistent claim to disciplined science, hard as a rock, is refuted in an amorphous cloud of concepts suitable now to an age of technological ‘cloudalism’ where our emerging prison is hidden in plain sight.

His very vagueness makes it difficult to tie him down at times but the gestalt of his work is clear. While a number of people I know and respect really admire him, I do not. But it is not merely me that was concerned about what he was saying.

Smith, Martin, Ellul, Charbonneau, P.B. Medawar

Malachi Martin was a traditional Catholic. However he had been more progressive early on. His exposure to the Vatican and his in-depth knowledge of the ideas of the New World Order, led towards a traditional view with an emphasis on the supernatural. Initially he was disposed to Teilhard de Chardin it seems. Then he changed. We see a dark shadow emerging in his novels that suggests Teilhard. Martin re-interpreted and became highly critical of him. Martin did correspond with Wolfgang Smith. Teilhard was about something else and it seemed sinister in its implications. Some other notable thinkers had also perceived darkness in the false light of Teilhard. There are some suggestions that Teilhard may even have made Martin come to a traditional view.

Jacques Ellul was a great critic of the technological society and triumph of ‘technique.’ He correctly, in my view, identified that Teilhard was presenting a secular eschatology taken over by a naïve sense of progress. His friend and fellow tech-critic Bernard Charbonneau was particularly prescient. Teilhard de Chardin, Prophète d’un âge totalitaire ("Teilhard de Chardin, Prophet of a Totalitarian Age") of 1963 emphasised that this collectivist view focused on conformity and technological determinism leading to totalitarianism.

P.B. Medawar was even more scathing in 1961 when he reviewed The Phenomenon of Man. He found it distressing in its lack of clarity and deceptiveness. The work was incoherent nonsense in his opinion.

Conclusion: The Petrified Ape

Maybe it is the lawyer in me that makes me examine what a person says and contemplate the consequences. I have been cautious about Teilhard at times to give him the benefit of the doubt. Having done so, I cannot see any other reading but that the critics were correct. They chime with my own critique and instincts here. Teilhard took momentum of the long imperial forces transmuted into scientism and applied it to theology. Like many deeply physicalist philosophers, the theology becomes subjected to a new teleology. That teleology is a product of a commitment to a left-brain focus on materialism, progress, dynamism, technology and technique. Identification of the political and technological processes of convergence slips into an assumption that humans must converge in collectivity as the technological net tightens. The nets that metaphorically fished for people now capture souls digitally. The human becomes a fossil in the features of future networks. Peter as rock is replaced by a process of technological petrification of being, capable of being appreciated by palaeontologists and involving appreciation for globalists. Humanity coalesces into the system and Christ is reduced to a vague complex within the mechanical mother matrix.

For a palaeontologist the ‘matrix’ is the surrounding or host material in which a fossil is located. This idea of the matrix applied to the human implies we might be buried in the material world of our extended phenotype. The digital matrix of ectogenesis replaces Mary’s womb as matrix and the human passes out of history through Mary’s Room into mathematical matrices and stony, spiritual desert and oblivion.

Teilhard de Chardin and his ilk are intent on proving that we are something much less than we are. Teilhard misses the meaning of Christ in the personal, human, incarnated sense and thus reflects his own materialist preoccupations onto an impoverished view of God. Once an ape, then an ape in the zoo, then a blind ape in a zoo, we become more confined till at last the Medusa or White Witch of technology turns us to stone in a world that apes the fantasy of the created one that preceded it. Christ?

God not being enough was roughly deconstructed and is being built back better in the eyes of tough AI advocates without any spiritual guff or dogmatic stuff. Our world is literally crystallising and you will be added into the great crystal palace through crystalline substances operating within your body to interact with the crystal cloud. All will be compelled signal without noise, controlled pulse of light simulating life with free will. God?

As we allow the simulacrum, simulation, counterfeit or aped-world be created or extrapolated we will be less able to deny its reality. It will become real because we have let it. The narrative that created and permeates it will become the truth of the new world. Stories can be marshalled to present an irrefutable idea of continual materialistic progress which is the only revelation. Such a revelation is a process of permanent revolution and unfolding of technique elevated to a teleology and theology. That dream is sufficient to quell the left-brain concerns, to satisfy the desires to control and to provide some predictability to those who really hate mystery whilst purporting to be open to it. Teilhard de Chardin attracts many. Maybe they do understand what he is saying. Julian Huxley did. He said they were on the same quest. As he made plain, Teilhard de Chardin saw us as merely another phenomenon to be studied, analysed and no doubt altered.

I respectfully ask you to think a little more about what you have committed to exactly when you advocate Teilhard and what you are implicitly or explicitly rejecting. While we cannot ask Teilhard de Chardin, we can ask ourselves what we are saying. Some accept the total package of a new evolutionary theology consistent with elements of Russian Cosmism and imperial scientism, probably tending to neo-imperial global governance of a transhuman and posthuman world based on technique and techno-science as Christ and God. Some will claim I am missing some deeper element. If people see him as mystical, then I’m missing something unless that extra dimension is made explicit. It may be something other than you thought. That his argument mystifies is not the same thing. Technogenesis and techno-mysticism are something else that replace the cross with the curve, spiritual consciousness with code. Metaphysics are shifted to a new priesthood who eschew grace for upwards thrust instead.

The zoom to Zeus displacement, rocket of the military god Mars to Mars and the Valley of the Silicon Dolls in California are part of an effort to recover the Garden of Eden through knowledge and rebuild the Tower of Babel with one digital language for some. Some will be as gods. Some believe that they will be part of God. Some believe that they will create God. Some will be midwives to the new matrix that makes a new God. In the light of such madness, the mystery of incarnation and The Incarnation proposed a radical restatement of who we are and a remarkable anticipation of the choice we would and will be presented with.

It is harder for me not to see the Passion and the prelude thereto as a prefiguration or warning of the Passion of the species to a new techno-empire in a post-Christian phase. But it is a mistake to see it only as an issue within Catholicism. The posthumanist view will destroy all spirituality save the darkest form.