On December 10, 1831 a six-gun barque named
the HMS Beagle set sail from Devonport, England bound for South America and
points East. She had been refitted for
survey work—the Naval moniker for “exploration”—and that’s what she was doing. Her commander, Flag Lieutenant Robert FitzRoy,
had felt the need for a “gentleman naturalist” on a previous trip, and a young
geologist (and future pastor) named Charles Darwin was recommended to him. The Lieutenant almost rejected him because,
as a acolyte of physiognomy—a pseudo-science that was all the rage at the time—believed
that a person's character could be judged by his facial features. As Darwin himself wrote, with deadpan humor, the
Lieutenant “doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy
and determination for the voyage.”
Of course, the world is lucky the lieutenant
relented. The voyage of the HMS Beagle
established Darwin as a preeminent geologist, but more importantly, it provided
both impetus and evidence for his publication, 23 years later, of On The Origin of Species. This monumental work is considered the foundation
of evolution science, which is the glue that holds the life sciences
together. Contrary to popular belief, the
book did not cause a firestorm in
most religious circles. Fundamentalism was
just a gleam in someone's eye, and most theologians
accepted some form of “theistic evolution,” wherein God sets things up and
designates evolution as the mechanism of biological adaptation to changing
environments.
Twenty-two years after the book’s
publication, and one year before Darwin’s death, a child was born across the
channel in the Auvergne region of France.
Given the name Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, his life would be closely
intertwined with Darwin’s work, and that of other evolutionary scientists. When he was about six, his mother was cutting
his hair when one of his locks fell onto the fire and was burnt up. This terrified Teilhard, who took it as
evidence that that life—including his own—was fleeting and infinitely
fragile. This sent him on a search for solidity, and later, for coherence, something eternal he could
hang on to, a search that at first led to his collecting every piece of iron he
could get his hands on and then, after he discovered rust, rocks. Fortunately for his peace of mind, he didn't
yet know about erosion.
As was
the family custom, he was sent away to a Jesuit boarding school, where he
developed an interest—perhaps inevitably—in geology and paleontology (they
weren't separate disciplines back then) as well as a vocation for the
priesthood. After his graduation, he
entered the Jesuit novitiate, and took up the two occupations that would define
his life: geological science and exploring his knowledge of Christ.
During his studies for the priesthood, his
superior allowed him to collect fossils from a nearby bed, and his life became embedded in a rich
stew of scientific exploration and theological rumination, which grew deeper
and more fecund every day. In 1911, he
was ordained a priest, and not too long after that, he began to work on a
doctorate in paleontology. It was about
this time that he read a book by Henri Bergson called Creative Evolution—still in print, by the way—that rocked his
world. It’s hard to overstate the effect
of evolution on his thinking. It's woven
into all his ideas about both science and
theology. The fact the universe is
dynamic, that it is different yesterday than it is today, and will be different
tomorrow as well, was fundamental to his
convictions about life, the universe and the divine. So intense was this revelation that it had
the force of a conversion experience. He
wrote “Is the world not in the process of
becoming more vast, more close, more dazzling…? Will it not burst our religion
asunder? Eclipse our God?”
In saying this, he meant the cramped,
limiting, orthodox image of God as out there, separate from us. Didn't Jesus himself put the lie to that when he asserted
that he and God—whom he called Abba—are within
us? Didn't he also say that the Kingdom
of God—associated with the Christ himself—is within us? And wasn't it brilliantly
summarized in that pivotal Colossians passage: in Christ all things hold
together? He had searched his whole life
for a sense of solidarity, of coherence, and here it was: Christ is the glue
that holds the universe together. Everything—every mountain, every tree, every
human, every flower—burns at its core with the fiery heart of Christ.
And here’s the thing: if the universe is
evolving, if it is “in the process of becoming more vast, more close, more
dazzling,” Christ is at the center of it
all. You could no more separate
Christ from evolution than from God the Creator and God the Comforter. What's more, his studies in paleontology
convinced him that evolution had direction,
that in every one of its branches, or fibers as he called them, it was moving
in the direction of increasing complexity, and as complexity grows, so does consciousness. And since Christ is at
the center of everything, holding it all together, it was not a leap to realize
that he is the captain, the motive force, the provider of direction for it all.
As Teilhard’s understanding of these things grew,
his studies were interrupted by World
War I, but instead of setting him back, in a weird way it solidified his core
vision. Instead of taking a comfortable
position as a priest, as he could have, he became an ambulance driver, one of the
most dangerous jobs in that hideous war.
Miraculously, he came out the other side with nary a scratch, but he was
hardly unchanged. In particular, his
love for matter, the stuff of the earth, of the universe, had grown enormously,
which culminated in his prose poem Hymn to Matter, which goes, in part:
“Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock . . . Blessed be you,
perilous matter, violent sea, untamable passion . . . Blessed be you, mortal
matter: who one day will undergo . . . dissolution within us and . . . take us forcibly into the very heart of
that which exists.” And here is the very
core of his thought: the sacredness of matter, an increasingly complex,
increasingly deep universe, and at
the very center of it all, the sacred heart of Christ.
Meanwhile, back in the land of science, though
it had become well-accepted that biological evolution did happen, experts were still squabbling over how it happened. [Darwin’s
natural selection (aka survival of the fittest) was viewed as only one of the
possibilities.] In addition, the implications of human evolution, which Darwin only hinted at in On the Origin of Species, had come out
of the closet. Human beings descended from
animals, scientists said; the most logical culprits were apes. This got religious folk all riled up, and helped
give birth to Christian fundamentalism, with its vehement rejection of both
modernity and liberal theology. And by
the end of the War, a lot of fundamentalists had zeroed in on evolution as the
symbol of all that is wrong—if not downright evil—with modernity. These developments,
of course, culminated in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925.
Well. If the position of Christian
fundamentalism was hardening, so was that of the scientific community overall. The notion that what we can measure—or have the potential to measure—is all we can study scientifically was morphing into the view that what we can measure
is all there is to reality. This hard, scientific materialism, which had
been brewing since the time of des Carte,
was taking on the unmistakable scent of dogma.
And the funny thing is, both the Christian
view that the only important thing is spirit, and the scientific view that
there is no such thing, ended up being
bad news for Planet Earth. Because if this
earthly vale of tears is only a temporary stopover on the road to eternal
bliss, and if it's kind of base and evil to boot, then it doesn’t much matter
what you do to it. Didn’t God give us dominion over it all in
the Bible’s first book?.
By the same token, if there is no spirit anywhere, either out there
or in here, within matter, then the logical thing to do is to exploit it for our own use—responsibly of course, so we won't
poison ourselves. Because after all they’re
“just” cows and chickens and pigs and trees and rocks and mountains and coal
and et cetera, they’re just matter, with no soul, and we’re bigger and
stronger, and the only ones with consciousness, we use nature and exploit
nature because we can. And from both sides of the debate—spiritual and
material—there is nothing preventing us from destroying the whole shootin’
match but self-interest, a desire not to “foul or own nests,” which we have
done a pretty good job of anyway over
the last couple of hundred years.
And that’s why Teilhard's vision is so
important today. If God is in matter, if
it's all sacred—Christ holding all things together—then the material
universe has value in itself, intrinsically, apart from what it can do for us.
If the divine is the ground of everything—in
Christ all things hold together—then
it is in all the processes of the
universe as well. Christ in evolution,
cosmogenesis and, yes, scientific discovery.
Christ in speciation, copulation and every nation on earth. There is no separation between sacred and
profane, fact or fiction, science or faith.
It is in fact all good, and
doesn't it say that in the Bible’s
first book as well?
The deadly separation between those who believe
that Spirit is all that is important and those who believe there isn't even such a thing rages even today. Smug “modernists” like Bill Maher and Richard
Dawkins insist on obnoxiously dissing anybody who doesn't believe like they do,
to wit the naïve, simplistic notion that matter is all there is. Meanwhile, the diss-ees, the folks they are
ridiculing, have for decades obnoxiously dismissed anyone who didn't agree with
their two millennia-old belief in a white,
male God who is “up there,” separate from “the world,” which makes it inferior
and therefore disposable in their all-important quest to save their own
skins. The combination of smug, naïve scientists
and smug, naïve Christians is killing our planet.
Teilhard's ideas—of an undivided, unified
cosmos, where spirit is inseparable from matter, where, where the material
world is just another face of spirit and spirit is just another face of matter—are
revelatory and—more importantly— salvific
for the earth and all that is in it. His ideas are coming to new consideration,
and are being re-examined in light of Quantum Physics, which is showing that
this his vision of a unified, ever-evolving universe are not so crazy after
all. String theory, strange attractors
and quantum entanglements all point to a universe that is much more weird and
at the same time much more unified and non-random
than we ever thought before.
As we prepare to use Teilhard's Mass on the World to inspire us and
illuminate our communion, I invite you to consider joining in what he called
“the great work:” the calling together of science and religion, matter and
spirit, for the re-vitalization—and I am convinced, the salvation—of our world.
No comments:
Post a Comment