The Christified Universe:

Experience and Existence in the Scientific Mind of Teilhard de Chardin

Steven P. Millies
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of South Carolina Aiken
471 University Parkway
Aiken, South Carolina 29801-6389
803.641.3383 (direct) 803.641.3461 (fax) steven.millies@sc.edu

















1

Because we are born and live in the very heart of this thing that is happening
we cannot move a finger without finding ourselves involved in the construction
of a total human act that includes what we see and what we make.
1

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J .


In his three-volume work on modernity, David Walsh called attention to a far-
reaching revision of Christianity he sees at work in the Scientific Revolution, one that
shaped Enlightenment and modernity.
2
This revision of Christianity began in the
confidence of the Renaissance, its mingling of a profound involvement [in] occult, mystical,
and magical practices and forces with the idea of a human being becoming a Magus who
posseses gnosis, a knowledge of the sympathetic harmonies within all things, a mingling
which changed, transformed, and eventually became the empirical and mathematical
sciences promoted by Bacon, Marsenne, DesCartes, and others under the name of natural
philosophy.
3
Walsh draws this resurgence of gnostic speculation into a historical
relationship with the development of the revolutionary ideologies of the last few centuries:
all similarly express a desire to master and re-shape the cosmos according to human desires.
4

As we approach the political and philosophical question of ideology, the necessity that we
should deal first with science might surprise us. What also might catch our eye is the way
thatfrom bold experiments to split the atom to ambitious efforts to clone human tissue
science still today expresses its debt to these gnostic roots. Science, as we understand it in its
most common sense, endures a restless relationship with reality. Frequently, it expresses our
dissatisfaction with the cosmos we inhabit and, perhaps inevitably, also evidences our desire
to change and to master the cosmos. We still desire to be the Magus.
2

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin appreciated the dangers to which science is susceptible,
but saw science somewhat differently from his fellow scientists. We exalt research and
derive enormous benefit from it, but our attitudes about science can reveal something less
beneficial.
5
Our science today is in lower and preliminary stages, seeking to serve our
material needs and wants, our desire for mastery over nature. But science, in its full
maturity, naturally culminates in the realization of some superior state of humanity.
6
To
state the contrast in the most blunt terms possible: conventional approaches to science, with
their roots in the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, seek to place
human beings in positions of control and mastery with respect to the cosmos and humanity
in their worst iterations, we seek to take the place of God, Himself; for Teilhard,
sciencewill find itself increasingly face to face with religion, and science itself must
come to terms with its more proper status as a primary accompanying condition of human
spiritualization.
7

The key to understanding Teilhards philosophical and scientific enterprise is to see
that Nothing is more certain, dogmatically, than that human action can be sanctified, that
God is inexhaustibly available in the totality of our action.
8
The obstacle, what renders
Teilhards dogmatic certainty problematic even for many Christian believers, is the
traditional Christian understanding of metaphysics. The traditional metaphysics of Catholic
Christianity sees a person as a mingling of form and matter, soul and body in which the
physical world exists for the sake of the soul.
9
This view subordinates existence to
essenceand, action with itin the interest of emphasizing our spiritual nature. That
metaphysical position, for Teilhard, represented a tendency to under-humanize us in the
rarefied atmosphere of too-lofty skies.
10

3

Our questions present themselves in this way, therefore: What is the nature of
science, as a sphere of human action, and what can it tell us about a philosophical
anthropology that gives validation to existence? To take the point further, if science is a
realm of action that verifies the sanctity available through existence, are there other such
realms of action in which we also value existence as we value essence? As David Walsh
describes a key claim of his most recent book, The Luminosity of Existence, existence
provides the deepest access to being.
11
When we entertain the existential turn of modern
philosophy, we find that, The practice of faith has ever and always been the only available
source of faith.
12
Seen in this way, we do not abandon essences when we elevate our
appraisal of existence. Quite the reverse. We must give our full attention to existence, for it
discloses essences to us. On this view, no longer is metaphysics most properly a question of
priority between essence and existence. Both are vital. Once we appreciate existence in this
way, we can appreciate human activities such as science in the light of their sanctity. This is
Teilhards contribution.
To take up these questions, it seems necessary to start at the beginning which, in this
case, is the question of human actionthose things done by humans in the temporal realm.
No agent acts unless aimed at a goal, St. Thomas wrote, and The goal of an action decides
what kind of an action it is.
13
Once more, we sense the contingency of actions, which are
subordinated to the ends that they seek. The ends we seek point toward an ultimate good
when they are rightly-oriented, and this is the way in which we distinguish those actions
worthy of praise from those worthy of blame. Certainly this is true in ethical reasoning, but
Thomass language encompasses actions in a much more comprehensive way. All human
4

acts are judged according to the ends to which they are ordered and, perhaps, it is suitable
here to examine the way in which Teilhard shares this fundamental predisposition.
In one sense, we might say that Teilhards approach to science does not seem so
different from his contemporaries. Teilhard was not indifferent to how science can help us
to gain some measure of control over the physical universe and, in a way, he endorsed this
impulse toward knowledge and discovery as an important force which drives our inquiries.
Yet, what gives his quest the boundary and humility that sets it apart is his engagement of the
human person as an object of inquiry, and the potent idea that the passionate interest that
drives our inquiries derives from a premise, strictly undemonstrable to science, that the
universe has a direction and that it couldresult in some sort of irreversible perfection.
Hence comes belief in progress.
14
Strictly, this confidence in progress appears quite similar
to Enlightenment expectations of inevitable human progress. To Teilhard, it would have
seemed to be a quite ordinary characteristic of scientific inquiry because, indeed, Teilhard
was a scientist. What distinguished his perspective from other scientists was that
undemonstrable premise: the universe has purpose and design. The collision between this
estimation of science and religious faith quickly becomes inescapable. We are reminded of
an Martin Heideggers insight, that no science can ever begin to give an account of itself
from within its own horizon.
15
Teilhards faith in the Omega, his way of expressing how all
material reality will be drawn back into Christ, certainly is different from Heideggers
agnostic despair, yet not so different from how Heidegger came to describe science and
technology in his last essays. We can draw this line from Aquinas to Teilhard to Heidegger
to express the contingency of all of our actions, phenomena which must be understood as
circumscribed within the frame of an immanent world they cannot escape. At the same time,
5

we must recognize that Aquinas viewed the matter differently from Teilhard, who was not
making exactly the same argument as Heidegger. Together with Aquinas, Teilhard argues
for the ethical content of actions drawn from their relationship to essences.
16
With
Heidegger, Teilhard argues existentially that we must encounter Being through experience.
We can find in Teilhard a vital link between our philosophical past and the questions of the
present that challenge us to look toward the future of how we shall regard experience,
existence, action, essence.
It is important that Teilhard speaks of a milieu, rather than discrete actions or any
arbitrary grouping of actions. In part, this choice reveals to us that Teilhards vision
encompasses far more than empirical scientific investigation and, indeed, sees science as part
of a much more wide field of human activityone that can sit comfortably within the
theological environment of Catholic Christianity. We can summarize Teilhards work as a
project situating action prominently within metaphysics, as the foregoing reflections on
Aquinas and Heidegger must suggest. Much more important, however, is to see the
description of a Divine Milieu fitted into the circumstances of Teilhards own life, and
what motivated him. An editor introduces Teilhards short, autobiographical essay, My
Universe, by telling us that This is a key-text for an understanding of Pre Teilhards
fundamental attitude.
17
When we set it against what we have seen here so far, it is easy to
see why this is so. However far back I go into my memories (even before the age of ten) I
can distinguish in myself the presence of a strictly dominating passion: the passion for the
Absolute, Teilhard writes of himself, even as he places before his reader his conviction that,
Science (which means all forms of human activity) and Religion have always been for me
one and the same thing; both have been, so far as I have been concerned, the pursuit of one
6

and the same object.
18
That object, we may deduce, is what Teilhard described later as the
Absolute, the Omega.
Such descriptions evoke Anselms fides quaerens intellectum, but of course they also
go much further. Saint Anselm pursued his method in the study of theology and, we may say
also, in a more abstract and speculative context than where a geologist or paleontologist
might find himself, literally, digging for the truth. The distinction is far greater than a
measurement of how dirty the researchers hands get in the search for the Absolute. Prayer
and contemplation may illuminate the mind of Anselm or any student of the humanities,
probing ideas comfortably in his or her faculty office. They will not change the rocks or the
fossilized evidence of the past encountered by Teilhard. In the end, not only does Teilhards
action belong to a different category when he searches for the Absolute (as empirical
investigation, rather than reflection), but that difference raises a new set of challenges that
force a re-evaluation of what it means for faith to seek understanding. Teilhards quest for
understanding must begin with faiththis is the necessary premise, for What is Our Lord
J esus Christ if not this synthesis of the created Universe and its Creator?
19
Yet, that faith
must work through our experience. No prayerful insight can brush aside the fossil record and
disconfirm a primeval history not found in Scripture. Concrete experiences and actions can
confirm our faith, but they also may force us to re-think it or to approach it in a new way.
This expresses the distance between human understanding and the metaphysical realities we
attempt to grasp. The deficiency only can be on the side of human understanding, the
insufficient ways we have explained the Cosmos to ourselves. Yet, as a datum, the Cosmos
itself is as unyielding as those rocks and fossils: our reflection on it cannot alter it. Stubborn,
empirical facts intrude upon our reflections, and they force our faith to seek understanding
7

from a different angle of approach. Our intercourse with the Cosmos, our experience and
action, is vital not only to our understanding, but also to our faith.
This is what is meant by the sanctification of our action, and by the need to approach
action as a totality or a milieu. We are immersed in the field of human action not only as it
mediates and transmits our faith in the world, but also for how the totality of human acts
across time draws all men and womenindeed, all realityinto convergence with Christ,
the Omega, through the accumulation of our experiences and actions. In the same strange
way that existence discloses the essences on which existence depends, science, as a
manifestation of our inquiry and action in the world, reveals to us the wholeness and fullness
of a Universe in which we see Christ whose life and law of love shape our human actions.
We know from the physical sciences that the more deeply we gaze into the Heart of
Matter, the building blocks of the physical Universe, the more we find that matter draws us
to reflect on its creative source that amorizes not only matter, but our lives. As Teilhard put
it, somewhat provocatively, when it comes to pass, that, men, having been awakened to a
sense of the close bond linking all the movements of this world in the single, all-embracing
work of the Incarnationthere will be little to separate life in the cloister from the life of the
world.
20
This can be a potent social and political idea, as much as a scientific one.
In all of human life, we are participants in a Human Phenomenon of Co-Reflection,
one that orients us toward convergence in Christ. Our activities as parents and children,
teachers and students, citizens and leaders, workers and managers all bring forth the
Kingdom, each in its own small way because at every time and in every place, God draws
close to us.
21
Nothing we do can evade this plan of Creation because our Universe is
subject to direction, and, Phenomenally speaking, we see the World not merely as a
8

system that is simply in movement, but as one that is in a state of genesis aimed at
convergence.
22
This convergence is as apparent in the tumultuous process of
Cosmogenesis, as it is in Biogenesis, as it is in Anthropogenesis and Noogenesis
which all are stages in the process of Christogenesis.
23
Wherever we can look, and in
every way, the physical universe and all we find in it gives evidence of the apparently-
chaotic process that orders the Universe toward the Arranged-conscious design we may
call the Christic Omega, or the Christified Unvierse. Yet, whatever we call it, our
contributions to a total human act that makes this progress a process of human co-
reflection is the indispensible ingredient. Our action, and the Noogenesis it brings about,
are the Incarnational expression of a World whose two halves (the physical and the
mystical) are slowly closing in with planetary force upon a Mankind that is born of their
approach to one anothermoving into a hyper-milieu of Life, produced by the coincidence
of an emergent Christ and a convergent Universe.
24
Our consciousnessand, Christs
participation in our consciousnessdrives this convergence so that science and religion
come face to face, experience discloses being, our actions, activities, and experiences bring
forth the convergent plan of Creation as a work of grace through Christ in us and the physical
Universe.
This sensibility must, inevitably, draw us to see the sanctity of actions that go far
beyond the realm of science. When human life is seen to be a mystical contemplation of the
Incarnation in all of its activities, no longer can we distinguish meaningfully among the
values of particular actions. It must change the way we live. Teilhard entertains this idea
quite specifically, naming some of those other activities when he reproaches that feeling we
find among the general run of the faithful [who] dimly feel that time spent at the office or
9

the studio, in the fields or in the factory, is time taken away from prayer and adoration
25

Instead, he observes, we can participate in sanctification through fulfilling the duties of our
station, urging us to, Try, with Gods help, to perceive the connectioneven physical and
naturalwhich binds your labour with the building of the kingdom of heaven; try to realize
that heaven itself smiles upon you and, through your works, draws you into itself.
26

Thomas Merton has spoken to this point, observing that, for most people, Christian
social action is not Christian in itself, but only because [they believe that Christianity] is a
kind of escalator into unworldliness and devotion.But Christian social action, on the
contrary, conceives of mans work itself as spiritual reality.
27
Merton drives his point home
by giving weight to this as an Incarnational idea, writing that Christian social action is first
of all action that discovers religion in politics, religion in work, religion in social programs,
for better wages, etc., not at all to win the worker for the Church, but because God
became man, because every man is potentially Christ.
28
The potency of this idea can be
realized fully only in the free, liberal politics of our time, when every Catholic citizen can
assume this kind of responsibility in our living, voting, etc. It also requires that we should
give a bit more attention to what experience teaches us, be more open to existence for how
we find our Christian selves in our actions in the world.
When we read Teilhard in this way, we begin to sense an upheaval of traditional
Christian metaphysics that he has brought forth from within the heart of Christian
metaphysics. Everything Teilhard has written is stubbornly Incarnational in its fullest sense.
In order for a Christified Universe to make any sort of sense or have any kind of purpose,
Teilhard must maintain an orthodox Christology: Christ must be Christ, the Omega toward
which all reality aims, at once fully-God and fully-human. At the same time, our temporal
10

reality that falls between the Omega Point and its beginning in the creative Word cannot be
any less than a Divine Milieu. The reality inhabited by the men and women who live
between those poles must be constituted by their participation in the progress toward Omega,
a totality of action which, if we could view it in a timeless, eschatological perspective (in
Gods frame of reference) must be what draws us back into Him. Yet, humanity not always
has been at such a point of development as to appreciate our actions as Christogenic on a
mass scale, nor has the Church and its metaphysics been quick to embrace the total human
act as a basis for its understanding and teaching.
Human circumstances have changed since the fourteenth century emergence of the
metaphysics we recognize today as Christian. Progress and historical development have
made our world conscious of its own existence in a way it had not been before, and that
emerging consciousness has been perceived by the Church as the rival who was gradually to
halt its progress and eat away at its power.
29
The relationship between the Church, its
philosophic anthropology, and this emerging role of human action never has been untroubled,
and the Church has never understood, as we understand it, the fine pride of man, nor the
sacred passion for enquiry, which are the two basic elements of modern thought.
30
As much
history from the Council of Trent to the Americanist Crisis can testify, we may draw these
conclusions as easily about political life as we can with respect to science. We know in the
United States today, for example, that the political positions of the Catholic bishops
sometimes do not reflect the political views formed by the lived experiences of American lay
Catholics. Yet, the same confidence in human experience, action, existence that privileges
science to make claims about reality that must disclose religious truth to us also apply to
political activity, and to other realms of human endeavor. We have reasons to hope that men
11

and women today, in the progress of human co-reflection and the Christogenic emergence
of the Noosphere, act and experience in ways that seem strange to the traditions and authority
of the Church, but which are not necessarily out of step with the plan that draws us in a line
of progress from creative Alpha to eschatological Omega.
At the same time, we must express a proper note of caution. Science may disclose a
wondrous Creation to us that expands and deepens our wonder and awe at the God who has
given us life, just as science also may be the scientific pursuit of the natural philosophers
the quest for gnostic mastery that ultimately seeks to fulfill the Promethean dream to take
Gods place. Similarly, our political reflections may deepen our feeling of existential
responsibility for the whole human family and aim to achieve the authentic communio that
Christianity seeks in human society, or it can pervert our eschatological longings and become
a deformed ideology that spares no bloodshed or inhumanity in the search for some terrestrial
paradise. We must keep a guard on our devotion to existence and action, and we must not
permit them to become unmoored from their source and origin in the Being that they disclose
to us. This is why Pre Teilard is such a marvelous example to us, the figure whose
Incarnational sense is so deeply felt that the world and all of the cosmos becomes a living
host, a sacramental offering.
31
In the final analysis, only such a most profound faith can
guard our experiential reflections against such excesses.
The Apostle wrote of J esus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb.
13:8), and nothing in Teilhard should suggest to us that anything about Christ would or can
evolve. There is no improving on perfection, Itself. Yet, our human understandings grow
and evolve. Worldly circumstances teach us, and even our knowledge of an unchanging God
can change. We see this pattern of evolution and change in the cosmos and in nature, as
12


much as in human life, philosophy, and in the Church. The ideas of Pre Teilhard, the
suggestion that the world is in continual evolution, can be condemned by Pope Pius XII in
1950 as, fictitious and as repudiating all that is absolute, firm, and immutable, and
neglect[ing] all consideration of their immutable essence.
32
Time corrects these
misperceptions, our view evolves, and in 2009 Pope Benedict can praise the great vision of
Teilhard de Chardin.
33
Experience matters. Our experience of existence is important.
Existence is important, not at the expense of essence, but in order that essence can be
understood differently, better, more truly. This is true for science, for politics, and for every
sphere of human activity. Nothing in this world is eternal, nor has been since eternity was
glimpsed briefly in the Incarnate God who walked the earth for thirty-three short years. To
supply that defect, we have been given a great gift of co-reflection, the total human act we
undertake together as we seek better and better to understand Being, aiming for that eternity
glimpsed only a bit through the Gospel.
We have been given a great gift, as well, in Pre Teilhards writings that have helped
us to understand our role in co-reflection and Christogenesis.

1
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Christic, The Heart of Matter, trans. Ren Hague
(New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1978), 86.
2
David Walsh, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom
(New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 110. This is not only a matter observed by the
philosophers. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council also looked to the influence of the
scientific spirit when they addressed the profoundly changed conditions of modern men and
women because of an intellectual formation that is ever increasingly based on the
13


mathematical and natural sciences and technology in daily life that takes on mounting
importance, in: Gaudium et Spes 5.
3
Ibid., 107-116, passim.
4
David Walshs debt to Eric Voegelin on this point is considerable, and one that Walsh
acknowledges freely. We might as easily begin this study from Voegelins New Science of
Politics. But, owing to the other features of Walshs work, it seems desirable to pair Walshs
treatment of gnosticism in After Ideology with his later treatment of existence in Modern
Philosophical Revolution.
5
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Row
Publishers, 1959), 278.
6
Ibid., 284.
7
Ibid., 283; The Christic, 98.
8
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life (New
York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1960),50, 63.
9
See: Summa Theologiae I, Q.76, A.5. Matter exists for the sake of its forms, not the
forms for the sake of their matter, so we explain the sort of body a man has by looking at
what his soul needs. Etienne Gilson puts it this way: We must not regard a living being as
a machine inert in itself but with a soul as its motor. This is what DesCartes wanted to
substitute for Aristotles notion of a living being. For St. Thomas, following Aristotle, the
soul does not make a body move, it first makes a body.In this complete sense, the souls is
its first act; that is, is what makes it to be. Thanks to this first act, the living thing can
exercise all its second acts, the vital functions which are its operations, in: Etienne Gilson,
The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. I.T. Eschmann, O.P. (Notre Dame,
14


IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956), 187. Even as Aquinas (and, Gilson) stress the
integration of body and soul, we sense the contingency of action and existence in this
description. Of course Teilhard does not argue that essences are not at the heart of existence,
or that existence is not contingent on essencein The Divine Milieu, he wrote that, all
reality, even material reality, around each one of us, exists for our souls(56). The difference
here is not that Teilhard diminishes essences, but rather that he has re-prioritized the
importance of existence. Essence does precede existence, and yet existence discloses
essences and so is at least so a fit object for exploration and discussion as the essences it
discloses.
10
Teilhard de Chardin, The Christic, 98.
11
David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 42-43.
12
Ibid., xiv.
13
ST I-II, Q. 6, A. 1, and; ST I-II, Q. 18, A. 4.
14
Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 284.
15
Walsh, Modern Philosophical Revolution, 281. Heidegger observed that Physics as
physics can make no assertions about physics, at: Martin Heidegger, Science and
Reflection, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt
(New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977), 176.
16
Teilhard gives an explicit statement of this conviction elsewhere: moral science
and metaphysics must inevitably be seen as, structurally, the two aspects (the intellectual and
the practical) of one and the same system. A metaphysics is necessarily backed by a moral
science, and vice versa. In: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Can Moral Science Dispense with
15


a Metaphysical Foundation? Toward the Future, trans. Ren Hague (New York: Harcourt,
Inc., 1973), 131.
17
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, My Universe, The Heart of Matter, trans. Ren Hague
(New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1978), 196.
18
Ibid., 197, 198. It is interesting to note, also, that this all-embracing view of science
(all forms of human activity as part of the search for the Absolute) could be construed to
seem much like the natural philosophy of Bacon, Marsenne, and DesCartes if Teilhard did
not labor so persistently to keep his work within the Catholic orbit. Pre Teilhard walks a
very fine line, indeed.
19
Ibid., 201. Also on the same page: Now, a Christ who extended to only a part of the
Universe, a Christ who did not in some way assume the World in himself, would seem to me
a Christ smaller than the RealThe God of our Faith would appear to me less grand, less
dominant, than the Universe of our experience! Our conception of the divine cannot appear
less marvelous than the natural world, the Universe, created by divine power. Not only does
Teilhard exploit a logical demand of Creations relation to its Creator, but he does so to
demonstrate how needful it is to mediate faith through experience.
20
Teilhard de Chardin, Divine Milieu, 67.
21
Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997), 1.
22
Teilhard de Chardin, The Christic, 84, 85.
23
Ibid., 82-94, passim.
24
Ibid., 86, 90.
25
Ibid., 65.
16


26
Ibid., 65. In Teilhards reply to the feeling that our daily labor is time taken away
from prayer and adoration, we cannot fail to hear an echo of J ohn Miltons sonnet, On His
Blindness: God doth not need/Either mans work or his own gifts. Who best/Bear his
mild yoke, they serve him best. His state; Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,/And post
oer land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait. It is not that the
work of lay men and women does not build up the Kingdom. It is, instead, that even those
who stand and wait do that day-labour according to their station, according to a plan of
Salvation we cannot know fully yet in which we participate through our action, whatever it
be.
27
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1966), 68.
28
Ibid., 69.
29
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Sense of Man, Toward the Future, trans. Ren
Hague (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1973), 29.
30
Ibid., 29
31
Benedict XVI, Homily, Celebration of Vespers with the Faithful of Aosta (24 J uly
2009), accessed at:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-
xvi_hom_20090724_vespri-aosta_en.html.
32
Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Humani Generis (12 August 1950), 5-6.
33
Benedict XVI, Homily, Celebration of Vespers with the Faithful of Aosta (24 J uly
2009).