Yesterday at the University of Victoria, Cynthia Bourgeault introduced an attentive and appreciaitve audience of 130 to the person and teachings of the early twentieth century paleontologist, mystic, and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Here are my notes:
I find five major takeaways in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
1. He points us to a reintegrated cosmology that moves beyond the science against religion / religion against science paradigm which has prevailed for the past 500 years during which we have had to live with a desperately fractured cosmology that has been a great source of hurt as the old scientific paradigm began to break down with Copernicus and Galileo.
Teilhard replants the Christian vision in a 14 billion year wide pot that is big enough to embrace the vast emerging cosmic vision that science is providing today. He points the way to the possibility of a vision that we live in a coherent universe.
2. Teilhard was one of the pioneers who viewed the earth as a unitive whole. He insisted that we consider our earthly home as a whole. He saw the cosmos as a self-specifying system.
He was among the first to see that everything is connected to everything else. Everything is intersected. The whole universe is in touch with the whole of itself. We are all inescapably involved in everything else.
He saw: wholeness, articulateness, and the preciousness of the whole.
Teilhard calls for the end of any dichotomy between matter and spirit. The spiritual journey is not an ascent up a ladder away from the physical into some disembodied spiritual realm. Spirit and matter are two different phases in a single dynamism of transformation.
We must not start by renouncing matter.
Spirit is an alchemical transformation of the stuff of the universe.
3. Everything is flowing.
We need to get back to thinking about spiritual practice. How do we transmit wisdom in our culture? The answer must involve body, mind, and spirit.
We need to reclaim embodiment.
4. The process of evolution has has an inherent propulsiveness. Teilhard provides a map that is grounded in a vision that sees evolution not as random, or controlled by the survival of the fittest as a flow that has something in it that is moving it.
We can see and trust the presence of a thread in the processes of life that calls us to embrace the conditions of the world we find ourselves in.
The conditions in which evolution happens are: process, convergence, and collectivity. The conditions in which we find ourselves are our spiritual path. We need to lean into the world of escalating technology and collectivity not flee from it in fear or wall ourselves off from these realities. We need to find the life and vibrancy that are there. Where is the energy throbbing?
5. Teilhard offers a basis for deep hope.
Everywhere he sees that surprise and play are always able to enter into the story.
We need to approach the realities we face with a sense of serenity and spaciousness. We need to ground our stewardship of life in deep hope and the conviction that something deep is rising to meet us. It lives in our hearts as love.
Our faith and the earth’s faith are inextricably tied.
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Question and Response:
When I look at Teilhard, I see four touchstones:
1. cosmogenesis – everything is under construction
2. complexification – there is a privileged action
3. convergence – evolution is not openended but converges to an end-point
Evolution only works through self-tensioning. Because the world is a sphere, we are under cosmic self-tensioning that has a final point of implosion rather than explosion.
4. cosmic Christ – we are emerging into the cosmic Christ in which all things are reconciled. Spirit goes back to spirit. This gives us a religion that is big enough to incorporate a legitimate cosmic vision
Teilhard resisted saying that the universe is impersonal. Consciousness is bound up in a journey towards the personal. It posits a universe that is a relational field in which we are embedded. Consciousness is based on exchange. We live in a relational field.
To say “God is a person” is to find the irreducible reality of existence in the relational. We are drawn into “Thouness”. The nature of the luminous ground of being is that it is passionate, loving, and personal. God is the inherent intelligence, compassion, coherence, love that sparkles throughout the whole system.
Teilhard wants us to feel the heartbeat of the Divine resonant throughout the whole system.
Post-modernism died with the boomers. The new generation are more unashamedly idealistic. They are able to sense the organic wholeness of the planetary oneness. They are more comfortable dealing with heart and passion.
The youngers are not frightened by religion. They are bored to tears with liberal intellecualistic whimpishness. They are willing to embrace mystery.They find themselves unable to locate an institutional expression of their spiritual drive that is big enough to meet their emerging vision of the cosmos. Teilhard points the way to this.
The future course of the planet is in the process of being handed off to a next generation. There is hope.
In A Spacious Place 
9 comments
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September 25, 2016 at 8:58 am
tressbackhouse
Brilliant ! thank you for sharing!
September 25, 2016 at 11:02 am
Jaqueline
This is wonderful and clear and concise summary of Teillhard de Chardin and ties in so much with what I know of Taoist teaching .
September 25, 2016 at 11:10 am
Jaqueline
…….but me being me…a post- boomer / pre Gen- Xer, I notice yet again in this, the use of “post modernism” as a dirty word.
Contrary to the claim in this article post modernism did not begin or end with the boomers. It is post boomer, post prosperity, post modern, post idealism, post change the world, post heroic….
It is the culture that emerged in the late 70s after the boomers had grabbed all the opportunity, jobs, real estate, and left those who were born too late to pick amongst the left overs. The culture that put those left overs and forgotten pieces of culture back together in original ways whether in art or music.
It is the culture that took what came before and put it together differently. The culture that put it’s clothes together with safety pins and wore holes down the street because we never learned how to sew in school and were too poor to buy new clothes; or conversely aimed to look sharp and prosperous in reaction to recession…touting greed is good. It is the culture that had each of it’s cohorts come of age in recession. Yet contrary to the way it is often described in Christian circles it was not an ending it was the precursor to the new.
Post modernism does not belong to the boomers , it belongs to Post Boomers and Gen X ..the “in -between boomer and their babies” people who are now approximately 40-55 years old, who are often forgotten in discussions about the old and the new….and who are still alive and kicking. ( that is me referencing a song by Simple Minds- for those who’ve never heard about them cause they are not Leonard or Bob. )
September 26, 2016 at 11:24 am
Bruce Bryant-Scott
Jacqueline, I’m not sure that post-modernism means much of anything until one defines it. It presumes that we know what “modernism” is and that “post-modernism” is what comes after, but that can be really problematic. I am sure that Cynthia Bourgeault has an understanding and critique of modernism and post-modernism, and seems to suggest we are in a post-post-modernism, but from the summary that Christopher offers I hesitate to say that I know what that is.
I sometimes wonder if post-modernism really belongs to my grand-parents. According to the OED the term was first used in 1916 – ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO!!!! – in the context of painting. Toynbee used it in a historical sense in 1939 to refer to the era after the Great War – so modernism died in 1918? Po-Mo as an architectural style emerged in the 1980s as a reaction to modernist glass skyscrapers and concrete brutalism. I’ve heard philosophers such as Heidegger referred to as post-modern, although its usually associated with the generation after him whose writing came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Derrida and Levinas. It was first used in a theological sense in a Church Times article in 1932.
I like to describe myself as theologically post-modern, but only in the sense that I am not a woolly liberal Christian who likes Bultmann and Spong. I would like to think that good post-modern theology incorporates a range of theological perspectives and practices – Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant – without being strongly identified with any denomination. It incorporates the learnings of the historical-critical method but goes beyond mere positivism to see that we live the scriptures and not just think about them. It is kenotic in the senses of Philippians 2.5-11, in that it leads to practices that are self-giving, respectful, and humble. Good post-modern Christianity is profoundly ethical, and has hope in the midst of despair. It is less tied to a cohort of a generation and more to an attitude that is rooted in the past and looks towards the future with concern and excitement.
September 26, 2016 at 10:34 pm
Jaqueline
“I’m not sure that post-modernism means much of anything until one defines it. It presumes that we know what “modernism” is and that “post-modernism” is what comes after, but that can be really problematic.”
You do realise that that is a very post – modern thing to say…..
September 26, 2016 at 11:04 pm
Jaqueline
“I am sure that Cynthia Bourgeault has an understanding and critique of modernism and post modernism”
Perhaps I will clarify the point of my post, it is not so much whether Bourgeault does or does not know what post modernism is …
It is that in this summary post modernism is described as having died with the boomers.
What I am objecting to is the chronic ignoring by boomers of two generational cohorts – Generation Jones (or Boomer 2 in the USA dept of demographics, known as the “79er” cohort in Germany) and Gen X- who came of age in post modern times and have post modern attitudes and who are still functioning in our society. We are not dead, neither is post modernism.
Something else is arising out of post modernism, yes…a rediscovery, a reintegration of the past, not as cut and paste but as influence, a reawakening of originality as authenticity…notably “illustrated” by the recent Forever Now exhibit in New York.
September 27, 2016 at 9:30 pm
Jaqueline
PS….I liked your reply, btw it was interesting and informative.
September 28, 2016 at 7:34 pm
Jaqueline
It’s me again 😉
I really liked your comment but it’s been bugging me….and I think it bugs me because to tries to dismiss the understanding of post modernism being an acknowledged period of time with it’s height in the 80s and 90s. So what if the term was used earlier…was “impression ” not used prior to impressionism to describe painting? To pretend that post modernism is not a distinct era pretends that no-one else acknowledges that it is.
As for it not necessarily belonging to a generation……do we not think of the 60s and 70s belonging to the boomers even though obviously other cohorts were living then? The 60s and 70s defined the boomers,. My point about the 2 cohorts that came of age first in the late 70s and early 80s and then the early to mid 90s. Those times defined us.
Many mistake late modernism for post modernism. Mistaking the 60s and 70s dismantling of old paradigms as post modern dynamic. But that misses the point of post modernism in that it was a time that had no paradigm to cling to, or to rebel against. It had no cohesive narrative, no sense of identity other than trying to make something from the dismantled pieces of the past.
By the way since the mid 2000s it has been considered that the times we live in are atemporal…without it’s own sense of identity yet with having the styles and attitudes of many eras being active in the present. Unlike post modernism itself which tried to cover up a sense of loss of identity and narrative by patching pieces of past almost nihilistically….taking one then discarding it and taking another ( eg Madonna ); atemporal dynamic synthesizes influences sometimes many at a time to produce something new and integrated transforming non- identity into a new sense of wholeness.
For some fairly decent and easy talks about what post modernism is:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/postmodernism-is-dead/2935308
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/has-postmodernism-run-out-of-steam3f/3731512
January 8, 2017 at 12:16 pm
michael hoffman
The Tao indeed! de Chardin may well be one the first (Christians) to sense the cosmos as interconnected and whole. Good for him.