NOTE: The following paper was delivered at the tenth biennial meeting of the International Society for the Study of Human Ideas on Ultimate Reality and Meaning (URAM) held at University College, the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 18-21, 1999. The paper is scheduled for publication in the URAM Journal, September 2000.

Teilhard Revisited:
Teilhard de Chardin's Vision of Ultimate Reality and Meaning in the Light of Contemporary Cosmology

Richard W. Kropf

1.INTRODUCTION

1.1 Teilhard's Life

The evolutionary ideas of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have now been public for nearly forty-five years since the posthumous publication of his masterwork, Le Phénomene humain in 1955. Born in 1881 into a family of wealthy land-owners in the Auvergne (with ties, through a paternal grandmother, to the painter Chardin, and on his mother's side, to the philosopher Voltaire) Teilhard joined the Jesuits in 1899, was ordained a priest in 1911, and, after serving as a stretcher-bearer in the trenches with the French Army from 1914- 1918, went on to earn a doctorate in geology from the Institut Catholique in Paris in 1922. Shortly after he began his teaching career he was assigned to do paleontological work in China largely because of the controversy that began to surround his theological ideas. This "exile" eventually brought him professional fame for his important work relative to dating the fossil evidence of Sinanthropus pekinensis or "Peking Man". Returning to Paris at the end of Second World War, he was exiled again, this time to New York where he became a research coordinator for the Wenner Gren Foundation and continued as a consultant to UNESCO, and where he died on Easter Sunday (April 10) 1955.

1.2 Teilhard's Work

Quickly translated into English and many other languages, The Phenomenon of Man (Teilhard 1959) soon became the center of discussion and of debate. This volume was quickly followed by the publication of his spiritual testament, Le Milieu divin (Teilhard 1960), and eventually some eleven other volumes of his collected essays, several collections of his letters and about ten more volumes of his technical papers. The key to this phenomenal success was largely due to the fact that The Phenomenon traced out, simultaneously on several levels, not only what seemed to be a coherent and recurring pattern in the evolutionary process revealed by modern science, but even more significantly, a purpose or goal for that process or, in other words, what amounts to a vision of ultimate reality and meaning. Nevertheless, Teilhard's thought has drawn sharp criticism. Some of the objections appear to have been rather ideologically motivated, such as that of biologist Sir Peter Medawar who rated it as a kind theological science-fiction (Medawar 1961, pp.99-106). Taking a contrasting position the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain condemned it as "a reversal of the Christian perspective" and "a new gnosticism" (Maritain 1968).

Other problems with The Phenomenon are more substantial. Four more or less distinct criticisms have been directed against Teilhard's thought:
1st. (in the realm of biology) -- his apparent anthropocentrism and its accompanying idea of evolutionary "progress";
2nd. (in terms of his "ultraphysics") -- his apparent "pan-psychism" coupled with his dual concept of energy;
3rd. (in terms of theodicy) -- his invincible optimism and his statistical approach to the problem of evil.
4th. (in terms of his theology) -- his insistent "high christology" and rather unecumenical "christocentrism".

After summarizing Teilhard's views (Part 2), this paper will proceed to examine each of the above objections, grouping them into two broad areas:
First (Part 3) -- dealing with Teilhard's phenomenological views and their interpretation -- an attempt will be made to show how contemporary science, particularly cosmology and planetary astronomy, tends to confirm Teilhard's basic intuitions about the ultimate structure of reality. Second (Part 4) -- dealing with Teilhard's more theological and specifically christological views -- it will be shown how the concept of the "Pleroma" suggests a final solution to the question of ultimate meaning, even while it, in turn (Part 5), raises further questions.

2. TEILHARD'S THOUGHT

Teilhard would not have been surprised by the diverse reactions to his thought -- in fact, he predicted them (Teilhard 1962, p.263). And to some extent he may have brought such criticism (even from his sympathizers) upon himself when he dared to present his vision blending elements of evolutionary science with philosophical, theological and even psychological speculation. Although he wrote in his introduction to The Phenomenon that his book was meant to be "uniquement et exclusivement comme une mémoire scientifique" (Teilhard 1959, p.21), few would see it simply as that. But there can also be no doubt that when the last three words of the above statement were translated, in the first English language edition, as "a scientific treatise", the impression given to the specialists -- especially the scientists among them -- was even more disconcerting.

Thus, a special caution is needed about his use of the word "science". By that word, of course, we can mean empirical knowledge gained strictly through the scientific method -- something that, if published in an extensive form, might indeed rate as a "treatise". Or, more broadly speaking, we can mean a generally phenomenological approach -- even when this latter involves quite a bit of speculation (hence Teilhard's choice of the word "mémoire"). No doubt Teilhard engaged in quite a bit of the latter, particularly when argued by way of "extrapolation". However, as soon as one passes into this more speculative realm, one then also moves into that philosophical mode of reasoning that Teilhard called a "hyperphysics" (Ibid., p.30) or alternately "ultra-physics" (Teilhard 1969a, p.70). While it is almost impossible to separate these two elements in Teilhard's thought as they intermingle in points 2.1 through 2.4.2 (covering the basic ideas of his system) below, items 2.4.3 (The Omega-Christ) and 2.5 (the Pleroma) seem to fall clearly into the philosophical-theological realm, while point 2.6 (concerning "Energetics") appears to fall into the general area of psychology.

2.1 Matter-Spirit and the "Law" of Complexity-Consciousness

Absolutely basic to Teilhard's thought is his conviction that matter and spirit are fundamentally two dimensions -- the "without" as contrasted to the "within" -- or vectors of one and the same reality. Spirit is not opposed to matter, but the two are seen as poles of a single Weltstoff (Teilhard 1959, pp. 39 & ff.; 1969a, p.362) and what appears to be pure materiality evolves, through a process or a "law of complexification" (Teilhard 1959, p.48) or of "complexity- consciousness" (Teilhard 1965, p.215) into what is more and more capable of self-determination and freedom.

While it is not exactly an accurate characterization of his thought to say he believed that "rocks think", nevertheless he did believe that it is impossible to explain the evolutionary pattern of development unless one admits a certain potentiality toward complexification leading eventually to the emergence of life, awareness, and thought even in what appears to be mere matter. While some may dismiss all this as "panpsychism", from Teilhard's point of view the burden remains on them, even on the purely biological level, to otherwise explain this evolutionary advance from non-life to life, and from simple psychisms to reflective consciousness -- other than simply denying that this represents any kind of an advance.

Admittedly, it may be hard to say exactly when the crossing of such "thresholds" do occur or how they are to be defined (Emmeche 1997, pp. 244 & ff.; van der Steen 1997, pp. 265 & ff). In addition, in The Phenomenon, Teilhard resolutely tries to avoid causal speculations and to concentrate on the phenomenon of reflective thought itself (Teilhard 1959, pp. 164 & ff.). These transitions fit logically within Teilhard's law of "complexity-consciousness" and might be explained in terms of his theory of energy (2.2 below). They suggest that, for Teilhard, the evolutionary process itself is the sufficient if not the ultimate cause in terms of the scientifically- established or attributable explanations (North 1967, pp.62-3). This is not to rule out a certain divine causality, but neither does it invoke it at this level. While this evasion of the question of ultimate causality may not have satisfied his critics in the Vatican, there can be little doubt it is this philosophical and theological reticence that allowed The Phenomenon (minus its christological epilogue) to pass the Communist censors in its Russian and Chinese translations.

2.2 The Two Forms of Energy

Teilhard divided energy into two forms: first, "tangential energy which links the element with all others of the same order...", and, second, "radial energy which draws it towards ever greater complexity and centricity ..." (Teilhard 1959,pp.64-53). Here we enter into a more philosophically speculative mode of reasoning -- as well as a more problematic one. While the overt reason Teilhard gives for this division of energy is the evolutionary phenomenon itself, it would also seem to be invoked to explain how entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, does not determine the ultimate fate of the universe (Ibid., pp. 66, 271). In other words, in Teilhard's view, as the primal material aspect or vectors of evolution run out, a more rarefied or spiritualized phenomenon takes its place. But as to why this should be so, or if this result is in some way guaranteed, certainly might be a matter for debate.

2.3 Noogenesis

As a result of these processes, another phenomenon is occurring, one that Teilhard described as "noogenesis" -- the formation of a thinking layer of the earth's biosphere, thus forming a "skein" or "envelope" of thought or reflective awareness upon the curved surface ("noosphere") of the earth (Teilhard 1959, pp. 181-84; 1966, p.63). As the world's population grows, so the effect of global "compression" will tend to intensify this interaction, thus accelerating this process, which includes the advances being made in the realms of communications. However, this process would certainly seem to include more than just demographic and technological factors. Hence the appeal to a sort of pole or center of cosmic or evolutionary attraction or convergence.

2.4 Omega

This pole of convergence was termed the "Omega" by Teilhard. For him it represented a triple (but often later on often reduced to a double) focal point of evolution:

2.4.1 The Omega-Point

The Omega Point is the final concentration of the noosphere upon itself, or, in other words, the convergence of humanity with the whole cosmos (Teilhard 1959, p.260; 1969a, p.145); or again, put differently,"the cosmic personalizing center of unification and union" (Teilhard 1975, p.214). The choice of the particular words "personalization" and "unification/union" seems to have been dictated by Teilhard's conviction that the evolution of the individual human spirit is irreversible and by a fear of anything that suggested a monistic reabsorption of the personal. As he always insisted "union differentiates"(Teilhard 1969a, p.144; 1968a, p.138).

2.4.2 The Omega-God

The Omega-God is the actual pole of psychic convergence "already ... supremely present", as opposed to the conjectural (as above) as an attractor of evolution toward "total synthesis" ... "ahead in time and space" (Teilhard 1959, p. 269; 1968a, p.145). There is little or no discussion of the "Alpha" or Creator God in Teilhard's writings. For Teilhard creation is primarily an on-going process of union (Teilhard 1969b, pp. 259-60, 262, 272.), a "cosmogenesis" yet to be fully consummated.

2.4.3 The Christ-Omega

The Christ-Omega is the meeting point or synthesis of the two omegas of experience and faith, "a Christ finally identified ... as the final summit of an evolution firmly recognized as a movement of convergence", the final synthesis of the cosmos and the divine (Teilhard 1971, p.291).

2.5 The Pleroma

Perhaps even more than "Omega", the Pleroma, a Greek term of Stoic philosophical origin but utilized freely in the later Pauline "captivity" epistles (especially Colossians and Ephesians), eventually became for Teilhard the prime symbol of the ultimate state of the universe, indeed, for the ultimate state of God. In his 1924 spiritual testament, Teilhard defined this Pleroma as:

the quantitative repletion and qualitative consummation of all things...in which the substantial One and the created many fuse without confusion in a whole which, without adding anything essential to God, will nevertheless be a sort of triumph and generalization of being (Teilhard 1960, p.100).

2.6 Teilhard's "Energetics" and Faith in the Future of Man

Clearly, as we pass from the basics of his phenomenological analysis into these more philosophical interpretations and theological concepts we have also passed into the realm of what was, for Teilhard, both as a scientist and as a Christian, the locus of "ultimate meaning". Although he seems to have never used this phrase with any special connotations, there emerges a neologism which expresses his special slant on the subject -- it is the term "energetics". For Teilhard this word designated the science which has to be developed "in order to make all the forces provided by the earth serve to advance the progress of the improbable" and "to insure that the human mass retains its internal tension" and thus must be concerned with "the maintenance, canalization, and increase of human hopes and passions" (Teilhard 1968a, p.96). Or, to put it another way, would the future see any further evolutionary advance on the human level, or is everything, without exception, destined to succumb to the inexorable effect of the law of entropy? Thus, one of the greatest fears that Teilhard had, as outlined in his 1939 essay, "Le grand option" (Teilhard 1964, pp. 37-60) was that the human race might be running of its evolutionary drive -- psychologically speaking. It was not the case that he envisioned any significant biological advances in the human species. Rather, he was talking about our socio-cultural evolution. Can the human race advance to even higher levels of "socialization"(i.e. civilization) or will we retrogress into various forms of barbarism? He saw this danger revealed in the challenge of two choices in this regard: first, the choice between pessimism and optimism, and second, (should it be the latter) would it be an "optimism of withdrawal" or an "optimism of evolution" -- i.e., engagement with the world? Written as it was at the outset of World War II, certainly the air of pessimism was all but palpable. Significantly, the essay was finally published in 1945 -- just as the war which had reduced Europe and major parts of Asia to a smoking ruin, was finally coming to an end.

It is clear from this great concern of his that, for Teilhard, ultimate meaning had to be something more than a purely contemplative vision. It must be an "Operative Faith" -- the title of an early essay of his -- a force to be reckoned with for the sake of the future evolution of the human race (Teilhard 1968b, pp.225-248). This same sentiment is often repeated in one way or another with increasing intensity in Teilhard's writings, not just in the World War II essay already mentioned, but many other of his essays on human progress collected in the volume titled The Future of Man. Either the human race puts aside its pessimism to evolve into a greater unity (an "ultra-humanity") or it is going to fragment itself into a paroxysm of violence and mutual self-destruction. Later, in Paris in the aftermath of World War II, and still later on in New York, it was essentially the same message, even if the terminology varied with the occasion or audience.

3. TEILHARD'S VISION WITHIN A COSMOLOGICAL CONTEXT

While some contemporary authors, especially biologist Stephen Jay Gould ("The Piltdown Hoax", Gould 1983, pp. 201-226) have attempted to discredit Teilhard because of his unwitting association with the so-called Piltdown Man back in his student days and his somewhat embarrassed silence (along with many other paleontologists of his time) when the fraud was finally uncovered, the real source of criticism of Teilhard's scientific ideas center around his interpretation of what all the paleontological evidence means in terms of evolutionary progress. In this regard, the foreword to The Phenomenon, entitled "Seeing" (Teilhard 1959, pp.26-31), with its emphasis on the centrality of the human phenomenon as the key to unlocking the riddle of evolution, addresses what is perhaps also the greatest cause of misgiving about his thought for many contemporary minds. Yet, as this paper will attempt to show, the problem is fundamentally one of perspective. Viewed narrowly, especially within the context of recorded history, we may well dispute the inevitability of evolutionary advance. But viewed within a cosmological context, both new answers -- as well as new questions -- invariably arise.

3.1 Objections to "Orthogenesis" or the Inevitability of Evolutionary "Progress"

Arguments over the "advance" (or lack of it) in evolution, and even more, arguments over claims to see "purpose" in what appears to be advancements, are really issues that are more philosophical rather than biological, although arguments can be marshalled from the fossil evidence to support both camps. Even Teilhard's close friend, George Gaylord Simpson, whose study of the evolution of the horse made him famous, argued with Teilhard over this point. However, more recently, Gould (e.g. Gould 1995a, 1995b, 1995c) has repeatedly attacked all those whom he suspects of "teleology", that is, holding a concept of "direction" or "advance" in evolution. Needless to say, there are plenty of other scientists and philosophers who would take issue with Gould, not the least being those who would still stand by Julian Huxley's definition of evolution, published as part of the proceedings of the University of Chicago Darwin Centennial as "a one-way, irreversible process in time, which during its course generates novelty, diversity, and higher levels of organizationþ (Huxley, 1959, p.18).

What particularly seems to disturb Teilhard's critics in this regard was his rather singular use of the word "orthogenesis", which, to most biologists, implies a predetermined development of characteristics inherent in a specific line of evolution. For Teilhard, this term was understood in a more global sense to describe the two major phenomena which he saw as characteristic of evolution as a whole -- increasing complexification and increasing consciousness. In no way did he intend the term to rule out the role of chance or of opportunistic selection in the process (Compare Teilhard 1959, p.108, n.1 with the statements in "The Reality and Significance of Human Orthogenesis" [1950] and "In Defense of Orthogenesis" [1955] in Teilhard 1966, pp. 250-1 and 273).

3.2 Objections to Teilhard's "Hyper-physics"

While some may find in Teilhard's appeal to a "hyper-" or "ultraphysics" a semantic dodge -- he never felt comfortable with pure metaphysics -- they are likely to raise a more serious objection to his contrast between two kinds of energy, as encountered in The Phenomenon and many of his later writings. Teilhard's concept of "radial energy" in particular seems reminiscent of Bergson's now widely-repudiated "élan vital".

However, it should be realized that Teilhard himself was never completely satisfied that he had hit upon the best formula. In fact, notes in his later, and still unpublished, journals indicate that he was casting about for a more satisfactory formulation regarding the relationship of spirit and matter, especially as it involves the basic energies of the universe. It is not that his earlier formulations were so much wrong -- there is but one fundamental energy -- it is rather that the descriptions "radial" and "tangential" are functional descriptions, not unlike the dual descriptions of light as both "waves" and "particles". So he was beginning to find his earlier formulation to be rather problematic. Indeed, if matter and energy are convertible, and matter is, in fact, simply a congealed form of energy, then it would seem logical that the evolutionary advance into psychism be seen as a permutation of energy at its most basic or fundamental level.

It should be noted, however, that for Teilhard it was matter in all its various forms, rather than simply energy as such, that held the great fascination, almost from the beginning of his life (See esp. "The Names of Matter" [1919] in Teilhard 1978, pp.225-39) and as the "matrix" of the spirit, continued to hold his attention until the very end (See "The Heart of Matter"[1950] in Ibid., pp. 35 & 45). One other development, that of computers (included by Teilhard in his 1953 reflections "On Looking at a Cyclotron", Teilhard 1969b, p. 352), also throws his twofold division of energy into question, even while it perhaps reenforces, in a rather paradoxical way, his convictions about matter as the "matrix of spirit". So, too, in his 1947 reflections on "The Place of Technology" (Teilhard 1969b, pp.158- 61) in human evolution. Can we not see here, especially in the science of cybernetics, the emergence in the machines themselves of a kind of prolongation or intensification of human psychic activity? Here Teilhard had already spoken, as had Bergson, of the impossibility, from an evolutionary perspective, of making "any distinction between the artificial and the natural, between technology and life, since all organisms are the result of invention" (Ibid., p.159). But whether or not "information theory" makes Teilhard's theory of energy obsolete as some might claim (Barrow and Tipler 1988, p. 198)depends on both one's definition of life and of intelligence. Paraphrasing Teilhard's famous dictum contrasting reflective thought to mere knowledge, we might admit that in a very real sense computers "know" but we might still ask if computers "know that they know" (Teilhard 1959, p.164).

3.3 Objections to the Omega

Finally, many have problems regarding Teilhard's postulation of an Omega-point towards which humanity or even the whole universe is progressing -- not so much as a philosophical concept, but as a supposedly or even strictly phenomenological observation.

Even Julian Huxley's "Introduction" to the English translation of The Phenomenon expresses reservations about this matter (Teilhard 1959, p.19). However, it has been Frank Tipler, someone who has been enthusiastic about an "Omega-Point Theory" (Russell, Stoeger, and Coyne 1988, pp. 313-31) who may have done the most to throw Teilhard's views into doubt. The reasons for saying this will follow a discussion of a topic that, had Teilhard lived to be a centenarian, would have surely intrigued and engaged him.

3.4 Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle

Beginning with the 1974 speculations of physicist Brandon Carter (Carter, 1974) and the claim of some other scientists to have discovered some sort of "Anthropic Principle" at work in the evolution of the universe, the AP (as it is generally termed) has been variously defined and even more extensively discussed (Nesteruk 1994, pp. 222- 31). According to astrophysicist John Barrow and mathematical-physicist Frank Tipler (Barrow and Tipler 1988), based on the wide range of possibilities the incipient universe could have taken in contrast the exceedingly narrow range of conditions that have allowed life to evolve, the universe in some way appears to be "fine-tuned" to produce life, especially intelligent life such as ours.

While some dismiss this phenomenon as a mere tautology inasmuch as we might be seeing our universe in this way because we are here to see it, or propose other variations associated with what some call the WAP or the "weak anthropic principle", others take the same reasoning seriously enough to counter with the suggestion that there may even be other universes where this may not be the case. There are also those who take the evidence as indicative of a deliberate design implying a Designer -- which Barrow and Tipler characterize as the SAP or "strong anthropic principle". Still others would go so far as to suggest a "Participatory Anthropic Principle" (PAP) based on the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum indeterminacy, implying that it is we who have thought the universe into its present shape.

Barrow and Tipler pay serious attention in their book to Teilhard's pioneering thought (Ibid., pp.195-205). In fact, they even go so far as to argue, much as Teilhard had, that once intelligent life has appeared in the universe, it cannot cease to exist (Ibid., p.23). They call this assertion their "final anthropic principle" or FAP.

3.4.1 The Possibility of Extra-Terrestrial (Intelligent) Life

However, the question of whether life, especially intelligent life, exists elsewhere in the universe, is one where a curious discrepancy appears. As early as 1920 in his essay "Fall, Redemption and Geocentrism" (Teilhard 1971, pp. 38 & 44) Teilhard had taken notice of the probability of there being other galaxies in the universe, a likelihood which was confirmed by Hubble just a few years later, and he began to wonder what other possibilities of life they might harbor. Although in The Phenomenon Teilhard appears at first to have confined himself to describing the evolution of life on our planet and to have expressed the opinion in his 1945 lecture on "Life and The Planets" (Teilhard 1964, pp.97-123) that life-supporting planets might be exceedingly rare, still, he suggests that, even if this should be true, to discount the phenomenon on the basis of the comparative rarity of life in the universe may be a sign that we are looking through the wrong end of our telescope! (Ibid., p. 104).

Tipler, unlike Teilhard, has a major problem with the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. In fact, in the book he co-authored with John Barrow, Tipler claims, contrary to Teilhard's 1920 statement, that Teilhard really did not believe that intelligent life was possible in other parts of the universe and only changed his mind at the very end of his life (Barrow & Tipler 1988, pp.202-3). In addition, Tipler argues that there can be no such ETs (extra-terrestrial beings) because, if there were, we would have contacted them or been contacted by them by now (Ibid., pp. 576-601).

The thinking behind Tipler's position become more apparent in his later book, The Physics of Immortality, where he transfers Teilhard's imagery of the "noosphere" as "converging" from an anthropological or sociological context to a cosmic scenario demanding a "closed universe". Based on Tipler's mathematical calculations, the accuracy of which some critics have questioned, the existence of other intelligent, energy-using creatures would seriously jeopardize the whole outcome, which he sees as being a kind of infinitely subjective prolongation of human thought by computer þemulationþ and transported to other planets (Ibid., pp.20-44). All this would happen, according to Tipler, even within the admittedly finite time-line of a closed universe (Ibid., 128-38) and would reach its apotheosis only within final a cosmic collapse (Ibid., pp.140-2). Again, Tipler repeats his argument -- especially his exclusion of ETs -- in upper-case letters in a footnote (Ibid., p.351). Thus Tipler's reasoning in his later book appears to be directed towards proving the possibility of a FAP or Final (or unending) Anthropic Principle -- even while abandoning the AP terminology.

Yet we must ask: if there were no other occurrences of life elsewhere in the universe, at least in other galaxies, would it not be very difficult to argue that any anthropic principle is at work in the universe at all? Teilhard, to the contrary, had no doubt that life would emerge wherever else in the universe favorable conditions might exist (Teilhard 1971, pp.230-1).

3.4.2 The Closed versus the Open Universe Debate

Teilhard's views concerning the energy that propels the evolutionary process, no matter how tentative his formulations (e.g. "tangential" versus "radial"), are conceptualized within the framework of an entropic universe, yet one in which the diminishment of usable physical energy is counterbalanced, as it were, by the appearance of islands of psychic or spiritual energy -- namely, creatures like ourselves. This is why, in addition to the contemplation of the vast reaches of space, and the billions of galaxies, the idea that we would be alone in this universe increasingly became, in Teilhard's mind, untenable. For how can all this tremendous expenditure of cosmic energy be explained except as a necessary precondition and/or concomitant of the emergence of thought?

And, if so, then, how can one explain the emergence of thought on only one planet among million or even billions of others? On the other hand, if the universe turns out to be quite otherwise, to be eternal (as Einstein once thought) or perhaps self-renewing, then everything would appear in quite a different light.

There might still be an interplay between the "tangential" and the "radial" (or the physical and psychic) aspects of energy. But what would be different is that nothing would be played out "for keeps". Like a mathematical equation, everything could be repeated or inverted, or like a moving picture, run in reverse. Within such a scenario, life might appear here and there, then just as randomly disappear, while the whole universe, just like "Old Man River . . .just keeps rollin along".

Such a universe is imaginable, and, in fact, is quite comforting to many because it appears, at least superficially, to have no need for an origin, and hence no need for a God.

Putting aside the question of God, a universe that is eternal, or at least eternally repeating itself, also has no real need for evolution, nor even any particular interest in preserving the results. It is, as Albert Camus (Camus, 1955) lamented, an "absurd" universe, one in which there is "no higher destiny" but one which is "inevitable and dispicable" (Ibid., p.91). For Teilhard, on the other hand, this universe, heartless as it may see at times, has a purpose, a goal, an "end" -- which is the Pleroma, in which the One (God) and the Many (the fullness of evolved reality) are united in "a quantitative repletion and qualitative consummation of all things" (Teilhard 1960, p.100).

If there was to be any real danger to Teilhard's vision of the evolutionary process, it would have been the alternative anti-entropic views later proposed by Fred Hoyle and his colleagues, in one form or another ranging from steady-state (no Big Bang) to reciprocating (many Big Bangs) universes. Nor, despite the growing evidence to the contrary, had Hoyle renounced his view on this, at least as of 1990 (see Hoyle's "Assessment of the evidence against the steady-state theory" in Bertotti et al, 1990). But even if evidence could still be found for a "closed universe" in which energy-matter is continually or periodically recreated, this would not invalidate the eventual or inevitable triumph of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as according to Berkeley astronomer and cosmologist Joseph Silk, at best such a closed universe could only repeat the Big Bang scenario a few times before total entropy would win out (Silk 1985, pp.388-93).

In addition, despite intensive efforts over the past decade or so to discover hitherto unknown forms of "dark matter", ranging from large numbers of "brown dwarf" and "red dwarf" stars to the ubiquitous neutrinos -- and, most recently, dark galaxies -- all the most recent data suggests that at most, the total mass of the universe is no more than about one-fifth of that which would be required to halt its expansion, and thus tip the balance back in favor of a closed universe. Not only that, but the most recent observations of Type Ia supernovas conducted by several teams of astronomers engaged in what is called the "Supernova Cosmology Project", backed up as well by a team of radio astronomers from Princeton studying other cosmic phenomena, puzzled the world with reports early in 1998 that the expansion rate of the universe might even be accelerating rather than slowing down, contrary to all previous assumptions -- both of the "open" as well as the "closed" models of the universe. These results have been recently further confirmed (Glanz 1998, pp.2156-7). Thus currently there seems to have been an almost complete abandonment of any hopes for an eternal or self-perpetuating universe. Instead, according to the consensus of practically every cosmologist in the business, we have an inflationary Big Bang universe that is ultimately "open" or entropic, suggesting that not only was Einstein wrong about postulating a "cosmological constant" to keep the universe from collapsing upon itself (the biggest mistake of his career, he admitted) but may have been wrong again in rejecting it -- except for the wrong reason, because this time some cosmologists are invoking such a "cosmological constant" to try to explain how or why the expansion of the universe may even be speeding up!

Whether or not this last cosmological wrinkle, which in effect would represent an acceleration on the entropic process, turns out to be true, however, does not change the basic validity of Teilhard's initial premise. For if the material universe is ultimately entropic, then the only thing that stands between belief in the ultimate meaning of the universe and complete nihilism is the anti-entropic occurrence of human phenomenon (i.e. reflective thought or awareness) or, as Teilhard put it, "...a noogenesis arising upstream against the flow of entropy" (Teilhard 1959, p.290). If so, the only significant remaining cosmological question is: how many times or places has this phenomenon happened or is still yet to occur?

3.4.3 The Number of Inhabitable Planets

The emergence or the maintenance of life depends on the right planetary conditions. But the scientific guesses as to how often such conditions might occur elsewhere in other "solar systems"in the universe have varied widely down through the years. In a note later added to The Phenomenon (Teilhard 1959, p.67) -- apparently after his 1945 lecture on "Life and the Planets" -- Teilhard remarked on how astronomers seemed as of late to be returning to the old hypothesis of Pierre Laplace (1749-1827) that every star has its nebula out of which planets are gradually formed. Yet, until recently, even the most liberal estimates confined the possible existence of planetary systems to those stars which were not part of binary or multiple star systems, which in turn was believed to represent the situation of only about one-third or at most half of all stars. But now, even the idea that binary, trinary, or more stellar groupings may harbor planets is not being ruled out.

While Teilhard certainly believed that evolution was teleologically oriented, he never assumed that life on planet earth could be its sole intelligent product. In fact, after again admitting in 1950 that there exists "the increasing probability .... of other thinking planets" (Teilhard 1978, p. 56), by 1953 he had come to the "inevitable conclusion" that it is "practically certain" that "millions" of other galaxies exist in the universe in which there are "thousands of millions of solar systems...in which life has equal chances of being born and becoming homininized" (Teilhard 1971, pp. 230-31). Given the current estimate of the number of galaxies in the observable universe now being around 125 billion, the possibility of life elsewhere far outstrips earlier Teilhard's estimates.

Thus, even if Teilhard did not think contact with such life likely, he took the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life for granted and was all the more convinced of his general noogenic or orthogenic theory because of this likelihood. In other words, Teilhard's "orthogenesis" amounts to an "anthropic principle" in which anthropos (i.e. "humanity") itself may be but an infinitesimally small but typical specimen in a universe teeming with life.

3.5 A Leap to Ultimate Meaning

Whether "open" or "closed", the end of our present universe still represents the end of all the evolution which has taken place up until now. Nor does the number of inhabited planets really change the basic equation -- since none of them is destined to survive forever. Thus evolution appears to culminate in virtual nothingness. In a 1945 lecture Teilhard quoted the melancholy views of the astronomer James Jeans as follows:

What does life amount to? We have tumbled, as though through error, into a universe which by all the evidence was not intended for us. We cling to a fragment of a grain of sand until such a time as the chill of death shall return us to primal matter. We strut for a tiny moment on a tiny stage, well knowing that all our aspirations are doomed to ultimate failure and that everything we have achieved will perish with our race, leaving the Universe as though we never had existed.... The Universe is indifferent and hostile to every kind of life (Teilhard 1964, p.104).

Of course, this is precisely the kind of interpretation of the universe that Teilhard protested, even though Jeans seems to be assuming that the universe as a whole, despite the eventual death of our life-supporting sun, would survive. How much more today, as we contemplate the death of the universe altogether, would Teilhard have been left no choice but to all the more strongly hold to his theory predicated on the complete transformation or spiritualization of matter. Otherwise, there would be no other way out for the human race. The zest for life would be inevitably undermined by a certain "cosmic angst" (Teilhard 1969b, p.184) or by "the morbid symptoms" of Sartrian existentialism (Teilhard 1964, p. 296).

Nevertheless, even if Teilhard looked rather disparagingly on the pessimism of the existentialists, was he not posing an existential question of his own? It would appear that our only real hope, according to Teilhard, lies in evolution eventually reaching an "Omega-point" at its terminus, but which because entropy still has the last word within that same process, must somehow permanently escape it. But is it not equally clear that in having reached this point in his reasoning, we will have passed from what may be seen as Teilhard's more or less "scientific" phenomenology and the extrapolations drawn from it into a realm of speculation that can only be seen as involving a kind of "leap of faith"?

4. ULTIMATE MEANING WITHIN A PLEROMIC CONTEXT

Teilhard's "leap of faith" is not, at least to begin with, a specifically religious one. It is, first of all, a faith in the inevitability of evolution, indeed even in the "infallibility" of the universe (Teilhard 1971, pp.96-137). But on what grounds? However ubiquitous life may now be, does not entropy win in the end?

Thus we come the other two big objections facing Teilhard's thought: his optimism in the face of evil (which is really a kind of moral entropy) and his reliance on a specifically Christian solution to the problem of ultimate meaning.

4.1 The Problem of Evil and the Optimism of Teilhard de Chardin

If, in the face of the paleontological as well as cosmological evidence, the doctrine of Original Sin troubled Teilhard -- the problem of evil in general continues to trouble many of his critics. Even secular friends like Huxley considered Teilhard's treatment somewhat "inadequate or at least unorthodox" (Teilhard 1959, p.21). Some later critics were even more upset at his apparently casual treatment of the nuclear threat and his praise for the potentials of atomic energy (Teilhard 1964, pp.140-48). But, in general, it is this overall optimism, which often seems to have bordered on the naïve, that bothers many people. What is to be said?

4.1.1 God Plays Creatively with Chance

For Teilhard, the key to understanding evil, or at least what we consider to be "evil" on the level of natural occurrences, was to be found in the evolutionary play of large numbers, and in the lack or arrangement (or what we might today call "chaos") which nevertheless is involved or utilized in what he alternatively called, depending on the element being emphasized, "orthogenesis", "noogenesis", "cosmogenesis", or, quite simply, the process of advance (Teilhard 1959, pp. 311-13). Unlike Einstein, who is said to have refused, upon hearing of Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle", to believe that God plays dice with the universe (Morgan 1996, pp.16-21), Teilhard might well be said to have believed that God plays creatively with chance. But the price thus paid is not inconsiderable. Indeed, in his 1945 lecture "Life and the Planets" Teilhard allowed that even if planets are rare -- especially ones on which life might evolve -- then all the more does not this suggest that "in every order of Nature, and at every level, nothing succeeds except at the cost of prodigious waste and fantastic hazards?" (Teilhard 1964, p.110).

But if the above is true, then would it not stand to reason that human intelligence is a result of evolutionary process, one in which the chance has played a major role. If so, then it follows that because of human freedom, in which reflective knowledge plays an essential part (Marcel 1964), all the chance happenings, including all disasters and the so-called "acts of God" are necessary. You simply can't have one without the other (Kropf, 1984; Polkinghorne, 1996). This is not to say that moral evil or sin is merely a chance happening, but it is to say that the ability to sin is at least partly a product of chance.

4.1.2 Entropy, Evil, and Providence

Teilhard's critics characterized his approach to evil "statistical" and particularly objected to his use of a phrase borrowed from the writer Leon Bloy to the effect that "everything that happens is adorable". In a universe that is ultimately entropic in nature, can this really be true? Despite the distinctions Teilhard made in his 1948 appendix to The Phenomenon between the various types of evil and why they are necessary and his extensive treatment of the subject in The Divine Milieu and elsewhere, many remain unconvinced.

Nevertheless, I think it must be said at this point that Teilhard's irrepressible optimism undoubtedly had another cause, and that was not just his belief in God, but his belief also in the "infallibility" of evolution itself -- a conviction that was particularly singled out by his ecclesiastical critics. In an informal 1947 debate in Paris with the Dominican Friar, D. Dubarle, Teilhard was reminded that a comet could at any moment wipe out the whole human race. But Teilhard refused to admit the possibility, responding that, as a believer, our life must be one of faith (Cuenot 1958, p. 258; Speaight 1967, p. 271). This suggests that he was convinced that ultimately evolution is providentially destined to arrive at a final consummation (an Omega-point), something which is guaranteed, simply because it already exists (Teilhard 1971, p.99).

Yet, we must still ask Teilhard why, in view of the fact that there are a plurality of "humanities" in the universe, our version of humanity should ours be so special as to rule out the possibility of its failure to achieve, at least in any collective sense, the Omega Point? Or is the Omega Point simply the spiritual distillation of all reflective beings from around the whole universe? And if that were so, what is the relationship of such a process to the historical drama of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as redeemer of the human race? So it is here, from this vastly expanded cosmological setting, that we must venture into Teilhard's theological outlook and -- we might add -- our head-on collision with his Cosmic Christ.

4.2 Teilhard's Christocentrism

Perhaps the most important writing for understanding Teilhard's christology is to be found in some of his earliest essays, especially those collected in the volume titled Hymn of the Universe, where the connection between Christ and the World is seen as quite literal and organic. The key linking concept, as his 1916 essay "Christ in the World of Matter" (Teilhard 1965b, pp.42-58), makes clear, is the Body of Christ -- a radiating presence beginning with the physical body of Jesus, extended through the sacramental body of the Eucharist, and the "mystical" body of the Church, even to the whole universe. The second of these essays, Teilhard's 1919 "Spiritual Power of Matter", written on the Isle of Jersey, goes even further, depicting the universe or "universal matter" revealing "the dimensions of God" or even matter itself being described as "the hand of God", or the "flesh of Christ" in a way that is almost pantheistic -- or certainly "panentheistic" in Whiteheadian terms (the additional "en" denoting God's presence in but not identical with all things). Again, in his later 1923 meditation "Mass on the World" (Teilhard 1965b, pp 19-37), written while on an expedition in the Ordos Desert of Western China, it is the transformative power of the divine energy that makes possible "the innumerable prolongations of your incarnate Being in the world of matter" -- "your body in this its fullest extension" (Teilhard 1965b, p. 37).

Given Teilhard's problems with the traditional doctrine of "original sin" (Teilhard 1971, pp.36-55), and the question about the future of humanity in a universe whose own future is in doubt it is not surprising that his "high christology" moved beyond an emphasis on the death of Jesus as an act of "atonement" for humanity's sins towards a christology stressing the ancient patristic theme that "God became man that man might become God". For Teilhard, if this high christology of divine "descent" was to retain any relevance in this ever-expanding universe, then it could only be by and through an "ever-greater Christ".

4.2.1 Problems with the Theologians

Other developments on the theological scene were to further complicate things. As far back as 1929, while complaining to a friend about the effects that the "Modernists" were having on our understanding of Christ, Teilhard wrote the following:

Christ must be endowed with certain physical properties -- þtheandricþ as theology puts it -- radically different from those of a simple prophet -- who is a vehicle of truth without being in the least a centre which organizes the universe. Christ must always be far greater than our greatest conceptions of the world, but for two or three centuries we have allowed him to appear hardly equal to them, or even smaller. That is why Christianity is so anaemic at the present moment (Speaight 1967, p.162)

But when Teilhard returned from his long exile in China during the years preceding and including World War II, the situation had grown, in his estimation, even worse. He was shocked and dismayed to find that Catholic biblical scholarship (with which he had been largely out of touch) was rapidly abandoning its traditionally high christological emphasis to take much more seriously the resumed search for "the historical Jesus" with its correlative shift to a "low christology", one detailing the ascent of the human Christ to his post-Resurrection status as "Son of God'. So while Teilhard found himself impelled to promote his ever-greater Christ, he complained about how some biblical exegetes seemed intent on diminishing him! (Kropf, 1980, p.150).

4.2.2 A "Third Nature" of Christ?

Undaunted by all of this, perhaps even spurred on by a determination to counteract it, Teilhard began to conjecture, toward the end of his life, about a "third nature" of Christ. The notion first appears in a Journal (XV [iii] p.97) note dated Feb. 7, 1948, but seems to remain otherwise relatively hidden until expressed in a note added to the 1953 essay "A Sequel to the Problem of Human Origins: The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds" (Teilhard 1971, pp.229-36). In it Teilhard rejects what he calls the two "easy solutions" -- either to deny that the original sin would have affected other planets, or else to claim that the saving knowledge of Christ could somehow be spread beyond this world. He does not seem to have entertained the possibility of more than one Christ. Instead, we are told, in still another note (apparently added by the editor, Ibid., p.235) that the "J.M. Hypothesis" Teilhard spoke of in the first note is one that holds that the Incarnation of Christ is spread over the whole universe both of space and time in such a way that Christ needs to have been born, died and risen only once to effect the outcome of the whole process, quite independently, it would, from any knowledge of what is going on. Certainly, this opinion would be consistent with Teilhard's earlier characterization of the Incarnation as a kind of "inoculation" of the universe with the "Universal Christ" (Teilhard 1968a, p.61). But was it his last word beyond all doubt? In another Journal note, dated Sept. 28, 1953, Teilhard admitted that he had still not decided as to whether or not the Jesus of history is not more or less a "virtual projection" of a "trans-Christ" or a sort of "unleashing" [déclencher] of Christ (Journal XX [viii], p.23). Nevertheless, despite these doubts, we find in his very last essay,"Le Christique" (March 1955), his insistence that the universe must have a "christic centre" and thus (again) that Christ should be seen as having a "third aspect or function"... even "third nature (neither human nor divine but cosmic)" in order to accomplish this task (Teilhard 1978, p.93).

Thus, at least to Teilhard's mind, one must understand and accept his explicitly Christian claims in order to appreciate his vision of ultimate reality and meaning. This does not mean that he felt that only Christians could be "saved", but is rather a question of the objective order of things, a somewhat ex opere operato view of the divine economy, rather than an appeal to any necessity of subjective knowledge or personal acceptance. Nevertheless, there seems to be an inborn tension even within this view. Otherwise, why did he propose a "third nature" for Christ? Do we not have to find a more universal or universally satisfying solution?

4.3 A Pleromic Solution?

In a long note written on Sept 20. 1954, Teilhard outlined a proposed essay on "Ecumenism & Convergence", occasioned by reports of the deliberations of the World Council of Churches meeting being held about that time in Evanston, Illinois. In it, Teilhard criticized attempts to remedy the divisions of Christianity either by a return to the classic definitions of the past (typical of Catholic and Orthodox appeals) or by some new effort to find a "common denominator" (the approach of liberal Protestantism). Instead, he stated that the divided churches need a totally new approach based on the future needs of humanity -- what he called "The Pleromic Solution" providing not only a meeting point for the various branches of Christianity but a "threshold of convergence" where both the Christian and "pan- religious" elements of the world could meet (Journal XX, [viii] pp. 70-71). Thus, while Teilhard emphasized the christic nature of this solution, he seemed to have set his sights on a kind of ecumenism that goes far beyond just the unity of Christians or Christianity. In any case, his "solution" reaches far beyond any simple identification with Jesus of history. It calls for "Revelation of the Pleroma" -- one that appears to involve a "Revolution Christique!" (Ibid., p.71).

4.3.1 The Active Sense of the Pleroma

We have already seen Teilhard's basic description of the Pleroma (see the conclusion of Section 2.5 above). But it is important that we note a gradual intensification of a certain active rather than passive meaning already hinted at when he used the phrase "a sort of triumph and generalization of being" (Teilhard 1960, p. 100). Although the later pauline captivity epistles used the term "pleroma" to designate the completion of God's plans for the universe and the fullness of God's presence in the universe (that is, the universe completed by God), the term gradually became, for Teilhard, ultimately nothing less than the fullness or completion of God. This may not always appear to be so clear in many of his essays, where despite the prevalence of the term "Pleroma" and its cognates like "pleromization", Teilhard was always careful to apply them either to creation or to Christ, whom he saw as both the instrument and beneficiary of this fulfillment.

On several other occasions Teilhard pushed the meaning much further towards an active or fulfilling role. A more direct, even if somewhat qualified, statement appeared in Teilhard's 1937 essay on "Human Energy" where he speaks of the Christian who "[w]hether he lives or dies, by his life and by his death, he in some way completes his God" (Teilhard 1969a, p. 155, emphasis mine). But the ontological import of his thought on the matter -- answering the implied question in the phrase "in some way" of the previous statement -- only comes through in his highly autobiographical 1950 essay, "The Heart of the Matter". There he writes of the World not "as an object of Creation", where "classical metaphysics had accustomed us to seeing a sort of extrinsic production, issuing from, out of an overflowing kindness..." Instead he sees it as

a mysterious product of completion and achievement for Absolute Being itself, no longer Being participated through extra-position and divergence, but Being participated through pleromization and convergence. It is an effect, not so much of causality, but creative union (Teilhard 1978, p.54; Teilhard's emphasis).

In other words, the Pleroma is not so much that which is fulfilled but that which fulfills!

While there is evidence that in a later draft of this essay Teilhard softened the force of the words "completion and achievement" (de completion et d'achèvement) by substituting a simple "satisfaction" (de satisfaction) in their place (Tresmontant 1959, p.93), this may have been done more out of considerations of prudence than from a change of conviction. Nor was that alteration to stand. For as late as January 1952, Teilhard remarked in a letter to François Richaud:

In that which touches God and the World, contemporary intellectual systems (e.g. Scholastic, Vedic ...) are always caught in a dilemma: either to divinize or to minimize [annihilate] the World. And yet the truth may very well be in the notion of the "Pleroma" of St. Paul: Creation in some way "completing" God. There is, in other words, some kind of absolute perfection in the Synthesis of the One "a se" and of the Multiple. Pleromization in addition to [en outre] Trinitization (Correspondence "R" #118, Archives of the Fondation Teilhard de Chardin; Translation mine; Kropf 1980, p.191).

4.3.2 Pleromic Meaning

In the spring of 1953, Teilhard returned to this problem of the "completion" of God. This time his slightly different language speaks most directly to our concern for Ultimate Meaning. This particular essay, entitled "The Contingence of the Universe and Man's Zest for Survival", is subtitled with a question: "How Can One Rethink the Christian Notion of Creation to Conform with the Laws of Energetics?" Here he tied the problem of the complementary nature of the Pleroma for the last time with what he considered the root problem -- the inadequacy of the scholastic categories of thought to cope with an evolutionary view of reality or, even worse, their failure to provide a motive or meaning for human activity.

Strictly deduced from a particular metaphysics of potency and act, this thesis of creation's complete gratuitousness was acceptable in the Thomistic framework of a static universe in which all the creature had to do was to accept his existence and effect his own salvation. By contrast, it becomes dangerous and virulent (because disheartening) as soon as, in a system of cosmogenesis, the participated being we all are begins to wonder whether the radically contingent condition to which the theologians reduce it really justifies the pain and labour required for evolution. For, unless only individual happiness is to be sought at the term of existence (a form of happiness we have definitively rejected, how could man fail to be robbed of his zest for action by this alleged revelation of his radical uselessness? (Teilhard 1971, pp. 115, 224-25).

Such extrinscism, in Teilhard's mind, had to be counteracted by a new concept of God's transcendence, one that is associated not with a splendid isolation of God from his universe but in a convergence of that God with that same universe. It would call for an uncompromising change of perspective, one that in this same essay he entitled: "A Corrective to Contingence: The Notion of the Pleroma". In this final section Teilhard went on to say:

Let us, in fact, forget about "Ens a se" and "Ens ab alio" and go back to the most authentic and most concrete expressions of Christian revelation and mysticism. At the heart of what we can learn or drink in from those, what do we find but the affirmation and the expression of a strictly bilateral and complementary relationship between the world and God? ....

In truth, it is not the sense of contingence of the created but the sense of the mutual completion of the world and God which gives life to Christianity. And, that being so, if it is just this soul of "complementarity" which Aristotelian ontology fails to get hold of, then we must do what the physicists do when mathematics is found wanting -- change our geometry (Teilhard 1971, pp. 226-7).

But where exactly is this "complementarity" to be consummated? It is on this final point that Teilhard's flirtation with the idea of a third nature of Christ must be put in perspective. So between the abridged quotations immediately above, Teilhard interjects with the remark:

If we reread St. John and St. Paul...what a sense we find of the absolute value of a cosmic drama in which God would indeed appear to have been ontologically involved even before his incarnation and, in consequence, what emphasis on the pleroma and pleromization! (Ibid., p.226).

It was this same vision of Teilhard's, one of humanity as a co-creator with God in the construction of the universe, that many people have felt to be at the very heart of Teilhard's thought. If so, then this also largely explains the popularity of the composite of quotations from a number of Teilhard's essays that appeared in the slim volume known as "Building the Earth" (Construire la terre) published by the Teilhard Foundation in Paris as the first of their "Cahiers" -- for here can be found this complementary aspect of the Pleroma expressed as "the realization of God at the heart of the Noosphere" and (even without using the word "pleroma") going so far as to speak of a "Theosphere" resulting from this cooperation of humanity and God (Teilhard 1965c, p.99).

4.3.3 The Pleromizing Christ

In tandem with his renewed emphasis on the Pleroma, Teilhard continued also to stress christocentrism. In a September 1954 letter to his secretary in Paris, Teilhard discussed his intentions for his final essay on "Le Christique" and "the coming together of the pleromizing-Christ of Revelation and the convergent Evolutive of Science"(Teilhard 1978, pp. 80-1). Thus, for Teilhard, ultimately Christ and the Pleroma are one. You just can't reach one without the other! How can we explain this?

There are several suggestions in Teilhard's 1948 Journal that may give us some direction. One of these speaks of "two bodies": one, which is "cosmic (coextensive with Time-Space)", and the other as "organic" [or so the note seems to indicate] to be measured in terms of the "complexity of the respective centres" (Journal XIV p.139, dated July 30, 1948). There is no indication of what "body" Teilhard is speaking about, but ten days earlier, another note refers to a "cosmic coextension of domination" ascribed to "Christ after Resurrection" as contrasted with a "cosmic coextension of interaction" that in some way applies "to each of us" (Ibid., p.137). This notion of "co-extension", the idea that everything in the universe to some extent interacts with everything else -- not unlike Whitehead's concept of the "continuum" -- is a key idea in Teilhard's thought (Teilhard 1968a, p.13 n; 1971, p. 127). Then in a note written just a few days later we can find some rather cryptic (and apparently inconclusive) lines regarding two þspeciesþ of concentration: one preceding the explosion of Lemaître's "primal atom" (what we now call the "Big Bang") and the other being a "post-explosive" concentration of arrangement or "centration" (Journal XV (iii) p. 141).

Are these three notes all connected? Maybe not except by their relative proximity, but they each display a similar pattern of thought, a sequential phasing which leads one to distinguish a "before" and "after" on the pleromic horizon -- a cosmic BC and AD so to speak. So while in some vague sense the universe can be seen as a kind of þBody of Godþ, for Teilhard the universe in its final, fully evolved or "pleromic" state can only be a universe that has become centered in God through Christ and transformed or "resurrected" with him. In other words, while everything is encompassed by the Pleroma, the Pleroma can only, at least to Teilhard's mind, be understood within a process of becoming that is dominated by the "Ever-greater Christ".

Or, again, in the very last of his journal notes, written three days before he died, under the caption "What I believe", he wrote: "first, in a 'Centered Cosmos', and second, that "Christ is the centre of the Cosmos (noogenesis = Christogenesis)" -- to which he added: "neo-Christianity" which both "saves noogenesis" and "is saved by it" (Teilhard 1978, p. 104).

5. CONCLUSION: SOME URAMic QUESTIONS

Given all this, and especially considering his insistent christocentrism in the face of our present cosmological horizons, we must ask just how well might Teilhard's vision serve today as an answer to humanity's search for "Ultimate Reality and Meaning"?

On the one hand, in terms of his interpretation of the evolutionary phenomena and, even more, because of his attribution of an ultimate goal or purpose in the face of the entropic fate of the universe, Teilhard's account has won high praise and respect, even from those who are otherwise agnostic, or even to some degree openly atheistic. Such respect has been accorded him under the Communist regimes in China and the former Soviet Union. Even the name under which Teilhard was and still is known in China, Te (or De) Ri-Jin or "Virtue Progressing Daily", captures something of both his personal and ideological appeal. This respect speaks well for the truth of what Teilhard himself frequently said in so many ways: that to capture the allegiance of the human race, the faith which Christianity must offer the world has to be first of all human. It cannot be a faith that is abstracted from or at variance with the highest or most progressive currents of evolution in this world (see especially "What the World is Looking for from the Church of God at this Moment" in Teilhard 1971, pp. 212-20).

But on the other hand, is the faith that Teilhard proposed really any longer identifiably "Christian"? Maritain, one of the most highly respected Catholic philosophers of our age, thought that, despite Teilhard's frequent invocation of the figure of Christ, his thought was not Christian. Certainly, if Teilhard's radical revision, or even repudiation, of classical ontology (especially in his understanding of the "Pleroma") is any indication, Teilhard was ready to "reverse the Christian perspective", or drastically revise the "geometry" of the usual Christian understanding of the relationship between the Creator and creation, to the point where we might speak of both (as did Whitehead) in terms of a "before" and "after" state, not just of the universe, but of God.

The only thing that Teilhard did not do, in my estimation, despite his penchant for neologisms, was to radically revise his theological vocabulary enough to meet the needs of the new "geometry" (especially as it is revealed by cosmology). Hence he struggled with ideas such as a "third nature" of Christ. One cannot but get the impression that, in his efforts to keep his vision essentially Christian, if Teilhard (to paraphrase his celebrated kinsman, Voltaire) could not find a Christ able to fit his needs, then he was obliged to invent one -- far beyond what even the "highest" orthodox christology seems able to do.

It is not that I would fault Teilhard's basic Christian instinct: we need a God-goal with which we can identify within the process and not altogether beyond or outside of it -- otherwise all our human travails and joys, not to mention the appalling evils, appear meaningless and trivial -- at best, unworthy of a loving God. But in the light of a universe in which there well may be "thousands of millions" of "thinking planets" one may well wonder if the great Cosmic Attractor to which Teilhard's vision beckons us must not reach far beyond anything Christian theology has yet conceived, one which -- to borrow, perhaps too literally, from Teilhard's one cryptic hint of a "trans-Christ" -- far-transcends his ties to both the "Historical Jesus" or even the "Christ of Faith" that we have so-far known.

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Silk, J. 1980 (1989). The Big Bang. Revised and Updated Edition, New York: W.H. Freeman.

Teilhard de Chardin, P. 1959. Phenomenon of Man. London: Collins.

- 1960. The Divine Milieu. Trans. Bernard Wall. London: Collins.

- 1962. Letters from a Traveller. Trans. Bernard Wall. London: Collins.

- 1964. The Future of Man. Trans. N. Denny. London: Collins.

- 1965a. The Appearance of Man. Trans. J.M. Cohen. London: Collins.

- 1965b. The Hymn of the Universe. Trans. S. Bartholomew. New York: Harper & Row.

- 1965c. Building the Earth. Wilkes-Barre Pa: Dimension Books.

- 1966a. The Vision of the Past. Trans. J.M. Cohen. London: Collins.

- 1966b. Man's Place in Nature. Trans. R. Hague. London: Collins.

- 1968a. Science and Christ. Trans. R. Hague. London: Collins.

- 1968b. Writings in Time of War. Trans. R. Hague. London: Collins.

- 1968c. Letters to Two Friends. Trans. H. Weaver. New York: New American Library.

- 1969a. Human Energy. Trans. J.M. Cohen. London: Collins.

- 1969b. The Activation of Energy. Trans. J.M. Cohen. London: Collins.

- 1971. Christianity & Evolution. Trans. R. Hague. London: Collins.

- 1975. Toward the Future. Trans. R. Hague. London: Collins.

- 1978. The Heart of the Matter. Trans. R. Hague. London: Collins.

- 1945-55. Journal(s) XIII-XXI (i-ix). Unpublished. Archives of the Paris Province, Society of Jesus.

- 1920-55. Correspondence. Archives of the Fondation Teilhard de Chardin. Paris

Tipler, F. J. 1994. The Physics of Immortality. New York: Doubleday.

Tresmontant, C. 1959. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: His Thought. Baltimore: Helicon, 1959.

Van der Steen, W.J. 1997. An Essay on "Life": Limitations of science in the search for ultimate meaning. Ultimate Reality and Meaning 20: 265-81.

Whitehead, A.N. 1960 (1929). Process and Reality. New York: Harper & Row Torchbooks.

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