Teilhard’s Collectivist Salvation

Teilhard de Chardin’s works appear to some to lend Catholic thinking a new respectability in intellectual, progressive, even Marxist circles. Why not take advantage of this windfall, some churchmen seem to argue; while Teilhard’s writings are not exactly orthodox, they show a sincere attempt to reconcile religion and science, theology and evolution, the Church and our so-called changing, revolutionary world. Then there are beneficial side-effects: rapprochement with the Protestants, curiosity on the part of agnostics and a measure of favor with the Communists who have been making flattering comparisons between Teilhard and Friedrich Engels himself in the interpretation of the “dialectics of nature.”

Despite the Curia’s warning to readers of The Divine Milieu, The Phenomenon of Man and Teilhard’s other volumes, the Church, with one eye on possible concordats with some satellite governments and the other on the apertura a sinistra in Italy and on those of her sons who clamor for internal changes and for softness outside, cannot be expected to denounce these works unequivocally as ambiguous, anti-rational, slippery, and seductive of the naive.

TM

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Thomas Molnar

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Teilhard de Chardin’s works appear to some to lend Catholic thinking a new respectability in intellectual, progressive, even Marxist circles. Why not take advantage of this windfall, some churchmen seem to argue; while Teilhard’s writings are not exactly orthodox, they show a sincere attempt to reconcile religion and science, theology and evolution, the Church and our so-called changing, revolutionary world. Then there are beneficial side-effects: rapprochement with the Protestants, curiosity on the part of agnostics and a measure of favor with the Communists who have been making flattering comparisons between Teilhard and Friedrich Engels himself in the interpretation of the “dialectics of nature.”

Despite the Curia’s warning to readers of The Divine Milieu, The Phenomenon of Man and Teilhard’s other volumes, the Church, with one eye on possible concordats with some satellite governments and the other on the apertura a sinistra in Italy and on those of her sons who clamor for internal changes and for softness outside, cannot be expected to denounce these works unequivocally as ambiguous, anti-rational, slippery, and seductive of the naive.