(bell rings)
- "After harnessing
the winds and the waves
"and the tides and the
gravitation, we shall harness
"for God the energies of love.
"And on that day, for the
second time in the history
"of the world, we will
have discovered fire."
When I read those words
in another translation,
as a Jesuit novice, I
was hooked on Teilhard.
And so it is my pleasure
to initiate our
conversation this afternoon
and welcome you to Georgetown.
I'm Kevin O'Brien.
I'm Vice President for
Mission and Ministry.
On behalf of President DeGioia,
I want to welcome our
community here at Georgetown
and our friends and neighbors
and visiting scholars to our conversation
on Teilhard, his importance
in the 21st century.
Teilhard, we know, died about 60 years ago
on Easter Sunday, 1955.
And as Frank Frost will share with us
and our panel will share with us today,
he died largely unrecognized
by the Society of Jesus
and society at large,
but that would soon change.
For five years later after his death,
his books would become published,
and then 10 years later
his fame would be worldwide
and transformative, both in
the church and in the sciences
and society at large, particularly
with the energy unleashed
within and outside the Church
during and after Vatican II.
And we know Teilhard worked
so much to reconcile religion
and science, evolution and faith,
and understanding of
Christ and Christology
with his understanding
of how the world operates
by God's natural laws.
And so his influence has continued
for over 60 years in different phases.
His fame diminished for
a while, then returned,
and now we are seeing a
resurgence, a reinterest,
in all things Teilhard.
There is some special connections
that Georgetown has to Teilhard.
Not only have we had some of
the most distinguished scholars
of Teilhard teach and
work here or visit here,
but as a Jesuit, we know
that when he was alive,
we can count on at least two occasions
when Teilhard stayed overnight
at the Jesuit community.
We are still waiting for his
per diem check to arrive.
(audience laughs)
His good friend, Lucile Swan,
lived just down the street here
during the last 20 years of her life.
The country's, and perhaps the
world's, largest collection
of Teilhard's papers and all
things Teilhard are found
at our Lauinger Library in the
Woodstock Theological Library
and in the Special Collections.
And Teilhard's great niece
came to Georgetown a couple
of years ago to do research
from these archives.
When I was a student here in the 1980s,
Father Tom King, known to
many of us in this room,
taught and preached Teilhard.
He was a preeminent scholar in the US
and famous for his presentation
of the Mass on the World.
On the 50th anniversary
of Teilhard's death,
Georgetown hosted a similar gathering.
And Tom was very much invested in that.
And as far as we know
today, as far as we know,
today's gathering on the
60th anniversary is the only
such gathering happening in the US,
though we understand
there are other gatherings
outside this country.
Soon we will be gifted with
a documentary shown on PBS,
which Frank Frost and Mary
Frost, his business colleague
and better half, are in the process
of producing a documentary
which will reintroduce,
or introduce for the first time, Teilhard
to a much larger audience.
And so we are delighted to
have you all here today,
which should be a very enlightening
and engaging conversation for all of us.
And so to introduce our panel,
I welcome Frank Frost here,
who is known to many of us here.
He is an award-winning,
independent television producer
and is the director of the
Teilhard de Chardin Project.
Along with Mary Frost,
this project will bring
to PBS a documentary
on the life of Teilhard
and the writings of Teilhard.
Frank and Mary's work is known to us
perhaps most significantly
in the fascinating
and revealing documentary
on Cardinal Bernardin,
which he produced and a
project particularly important
for us here at Georgetown,
a documentary on the life
of Pedro Arrupe, which he
collaborated with Tony Moore
on producing on behalf of Georgetown
and which is shared widely.
So we are delighted to have
Frank Frost's stewardship
of our panel today, and
I introduce Frank to you.
Thank you, Frank.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you, Kevin.
That's very generous.
I'm gonna stay seated here,
because I'm gonna ask the panel
to stay seated when they make
their short presentations,
so I feel I should put
myself in that same position.
Before we begin the discussion,
a few things need mentioning.
First of all, I want to
thank Georgetown University
for hosting this event and following up
on their event you did 10 years ago
on the 50th anniversary
of Teilhard's death.
President Jack DeGioia instantly said yes
to having this celebration
when we broached it,
the subject, last fall.
He was a great friend of Father Tom King
and is himself a Teilhard enthusiast.
All he had to do is persuade
the rest of the university
to go along with him, and he did.
To our knowledge, this is the only event
of its kind in the United States,
although there are other
60th anniversary happenings
all over the world.
And we want to give a special thanks
to Sam Wagner and his colleagues
in the Office of Catholic
and Jesuit Initiatives,
interreligious dialogue, in
the Office of the President,
which is Kevin O'Brien.
Without him, and without his colleagues,
we would not be sitting here.
And you mentioned the Lauinger
Library Special Collections.
We have up on the stage
here, for those of you
who can see it, there's
a bust of Teilhard.
Is that bronze?
Whatever that material is.
- Bronze.
- Yes, it's a bronze cast of Teilhard,
cast by Malvina Hoffman quite
a famous sculptor working
in the '40s and '50s.
I have a little
note here from Leon Hooper,
the director of the Woodstock Library,
of something that Malvina
Hoffman said about Teilhard
when he was posing for this.
She said, "His eyes would often smile
"and a cluster of tiny lines
engraved their hieroglyphs
"on either side of his face,
prolonging the downward slant
"of the corners of his upper lip
"and radiating a warm and loving nature."
And she said that when he was
sitting for the sculpting,
he saw how discouraged she became.
And she said, "He seemed
to restore my confidence
"and carry my thoughts upward
"by the force of his own will and faith."
Also, Leon has brought over
from the library, Father Leon, a video,
which is mostly shot by George Barbour,
a colleague of Teilhard,
and also, if I'm right, Father Leon,
I think this is kind of a risque video.
It's got 20 seconds of
Teilhard skinny dipping
in the Yellow River.
(audience laughs)
But anyway, there's some goods back there
of Teilhard from the library.
I think we missed the bells.
- [Woman] Yeah, they just stopped.
- They just stopped?
I was told to be aware of the fact that
at 3:15 the bells would
be ringing in Healy,
because this is the 150th anniversary
of the end of the Civil War,
and all over the country,
bells are ringing at 3:15,
or rang at 3:15, to celebrate that.
Georgetown had a special role to play
in the Civil War by becoming a hospital,
and the same is true
of Holy Trinity Parish.
And we're told that actually
the blue and gray colors
of Georgetown came from the Civil War,
in the reconciliation of North and South.
So if that's true, that's nice, isn't it?
(audience laughs)
Why am I skeptical of these things?
(audience laughs)
I know I'm running on, but
let me tell you about an email
that Mary and I received
this morning today
from Pierre and Jacqueline Francois.
Pierre and Jacqueline live
near Hyde Park, New York,
and not too far from the
grave of Teilhard de Chardin.
And for a number of years now,
they've made it their
personal responsibility
to pay a quarterly visit
to Teilhard's grave
to landscape it.
And with four faithful
friends and devotees,
they went yesterday morning
to landscape the spring
landscaping of Teilhard's grave
for his birthday, ah, death anniversary.
And they want us to know that
when they arrived to
plant a bed of pansies,
they found that someone had
left a bouquet of pink roses,
and the daffodils were pushing up
through the hard, cold earth.
They also found a rosary
there at the grave,
and any of you who've
been to that site know
that the top of his tombstone is loaded
with stones of tribute.
I also bring you greetings
from the Teilhard family
itself from France.
Marie Bayon de la Tour,
Teilhard's great niece
and Secretary General of
the Association of Nephews
of Father Teilhard de Chardin
wanted to be here with us,
but as it turns out, she's speaking today
at a 60th anniversary event in Paris.
Since we set out several
years ago, Mary and I,
to make a television
documentary about Teilhard
and found that evolving
into the Teilhard Project
with its accompanying
website, we've been touched
and overwhelmed by the
interest and support of people
from many faiths and many
countries around the world.
The website, quite unexpectedly
to us, emerged a community
of people of interfaith
and interreligious,
and it's created our own little noosphere,
and that involves a lot of the people
in this room, as a matter of fact.
And actually reminds me, I'm glad to see
that people are wearing name tags.
Normally at events like this,
Georgetown doesn't provide name tags,
but we felt that this
gathering was much more
of a community than just an event
and that the name tags will
be particularly helpful
when we get to the reception.
We have people visiting
here from distant places,
from California, Canada, North Carolina,
Wisconsin, other places,
but there are a couple
of people that I want to mention by name.
Cara Wood is here from California,
because she has a special stake
in Teilhard and Georgetown
through her great-aunt, Lucile Swan.
Lucile Swan, of course, is
Teilhard's great friend.
Cara is doing some biographical writing
of her own and is taking advantage
of Georgetown's library while she's here.
Cara, could you just stand and say hello.
(audience applauds)
Niels de Terra, did you arrive?
I thought I saw you come in.
Niels de Terra is the son
of Teilhard's geological
colleague, Helmut de Terra,
and Helmut was also
married to Rhoda de Terra,
who deserves to be mentioned at this time,
because it was in her New York apartment
that Teilhard had a heart
attack and died in 1955.
Welcome, Niels.
(audience applauds)
I have to say that Niels has
published a graphic novel
on Teilhard called something like,
what's the title of your
book, your graphic novel?
(Niels mumbles)
Okay.
If you go to Amazon and
Google Niels de Terra,
you will find a graphic
novel about Teilhard.
So there's many other people in this room
that I'd like to recognize,
but this would go on forever.
But we at least have to
recognize two members
of the board of directors who are present,
Dolores Leckey and Dennis Lucey.
(audience applauds)
And there are also people here
who represent some institutional members
who are collaborators of the project.
And we have a substantial
council of scholar advisors,
starting with these four
who are on this panel,
and there are others in this room
who are also part of that council.
Maybe you'd like to stand.
No (laughs)?
(audience laughs)
If you are not already a stakeholder
in the Teilhard Project,
go to our website,
teilhardproject.com and
sign up for our newsletter.
Okay, one more piece of housekeeping,
and then I'll get to what you came for.
When we leave here at 5 o'clock,
we're presenting Mass on the World
in the chapel in another
part of this building.
And I wanted to make sure
it's not a misunderstanding.
Don't plan to think you're going to Mass,
if you're going to this Mass on the World.
It's not a Catholic liturgy.
It's dramatic readings of excerpts
from Teilhard's mystical
essay, Mass on the World.
And it's a multimedia presentation,
so please come, but don't
expect to be going to Mass.
And at 6 o'clock, you're aware of the fact
that there's a reception.
The reception was originally planned
for the Dahlgren Quadrangle,
it is now been moved,
because of the weather, to Riggs Library,
the super elegant library in Healy Hall.
If you follow the crowd,
you'll find where it is.
(audience laughs)
A lot of people here know where it is.
Okay, so you came to hear the panel.
I'm going to introduce them all together,
and then we'll give a talk,
let them give their talks.
First of all, Jim Salmon, for those of you
who got an early invitation to this event,
Father James Salmon was
listed on the panel,
but he had to withdraw
because of health problems,
which are not life-threatening
but are serious enough
to keep him in a wheelchair in Baltimore.
So starting on my far right here,
John Haught is a distinguished
research professor
of Georgetown University, where
he is formerly a professor
in the Department of Theology
and its chair for five years.
His area of specialization
is systematic theology
with a particular interest
in issues pertaining
to science, cosmology,
evolution, ecology and religion.
He received his doctorate
from Catholic University.
John is a prolific writer,
having written 20 books
on theology, evolution, Darwin,
science and religion, the new atheism
and Teilhard de Chardin,
among other things,
and some of his books have been translated
into as many as six languages.
He has a new book coming out this year,
which is getting great advanced notices
called Resting on the
Future: Catholic Theology
for an Unfinished Universe.
Do you have a publication date yet?
- [John H.] August.
- August.
Look for that on Amazon.
He lectures internationally
on many issues related
to science and religion.
In 2002, he was the winner
of the Owen Garrigan Award
in Science and Religion,
in 2004, the Sophia Award
for Theological Excellence,
and in 2008, a Friend of Darwin Award
from the National Center
for Science Education.
That probably made you
some enemies as well.
(audience laughs)
He testified, this is the
one I like the best though.
He testified for the plaintiffs
in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
intelligent design trial,
Kitzmiller versus Dover
Board of Education.
Kathleen Duffy is a
sister of Saint Joseph,
is a professor of physics
at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia,
where she directs the
interdisciplinary honors program
and the Institute for
Science and Religion.
She is editor of Teilhard Studies
and serves on the advisory board
of the American Teilhard Association
and also Cosmos and Creation.
Her present research deals
with the way Teilhard de
Chardin's religious writings
connect with modern science.
She's published several
book chapter and articles
on these topics and edited a volume
of essays entitled
Rediscovering Teilhard's Fire.
And she wrote a book of her own,
Teilhard's Mysticism: Seeing
the Inner Face of Evolution.
John Grim, president of the
American Teilhard Association,
do you have brochures here?
- [John G.] They're in the back.
Please speak with me later
if you'd like to know more about it.
- Please look into the
American Teilhard Association
if you're interested.
He's co-director with Mary Evelyn Tucker,
who's also his wife,
on the Forum of Religion
and Ecology at Yale.
He's a senior lecturer
in School of Forestry
and Environmental Studies
at the Yale Divinity
School, Yale University,
where he's also a research scholar.
You're a specialist, if I'm not mistaken,
in Native American culture and religion?
- [John G.] That's right.
- Does that include indigenous
religions around the world?
- [John G.] The term
indigenous is often used
to talk about native people.
- Okay, and also in
comparative world religions.
He's got a PhD from Fordham University.
He's the executive producer,
along with Mary Evelyn Tucker,
of the award-winning and
extremely well-received,
hour-long documentary,
Journey of the Universe.
- [John G.] It's on Netflix.
(audience laughs)
You can find it very easily.
- His books, which are all
co-authored Mary Evelyn Tucker,
include Ecology and
Religion, a 10-volume series
on religions of the world
and ecology, among others.
All of these people
have written more books
than we can possibly talk about up here.
Go to Amazon, Google them,
you'll find them and be pleased.
And they have several
books in the pipeline,
including a biography of Thomas Berry.
Ilia Delio is a Franciscan
sister of Washington, DC
and director of the Haub
Catholic studies program,
here at Georgetown University,
where she's also a visiting professor.
Prior to being in charge
of Catholic studies,
she was a senior research fellow
at Woodstock Theological
Center in the area
of science and religion, focusing
on transhumanism, evolution
and emerging Christianity.
She holds a doctorate in pharmacology
from Rutgers Graduate School
of Biomedical Sciences
and a doctorate in historical
theology from Fordham.
Like all of our panelists,
she's a prolific writer,
author of 16 books and many articles.
A couple of the most recent books
are the Unbearable Wholeness
of Being: God, Evolution
and the Power of Love, and
From Teilhard to Omega,
which has won several awards.
Shall we actually get going?
Not quite yet.
I want to start with a prayer.
The reason I want to start with a prayer
in particular is because
the prayer's taken
from People's Companion to the Breviary,
published by the
Carmelites of Indianapolis.
It's taken from the liturgy
of Teilhard de Chardin for April 10th.
And isn't it ironic that
here in a Catholic milieu,
we have no feast of Teilhard de Chardin,
but if you want to walk
up or go up the street
to the National Cathedral
tomorrow morning,
you can participate in the liturgy
of Teilhard de Chardin
who is in their liturgy.
We give you thanks, Creator
God, for your servant Teilhard
and for all those who help us
to see you in your universe.
May Creation be continually
transformed that all may share
in the life, death and
resurrection of God becoming human,
our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.
- [Audience] Amen.
- A couple of years ago, Mary and I went
to pitch our television
documentary to PBS.
They'd never heard of Teilhard de Chardin.
They thought he had an interesting story,
but they had an important question.
Is there an audience for this?
From what we told them, isn't he outdated?
Is there any relevance?
Does he continue to have any relevance?
And that's what we're here to talk about
with these four extremely
knowledgeable people.
They were all very
gracious when I asked them
to each take just a little
tiny corner of Teilhard
to introduce this with
the discussion here.
And so, they're gonna
try to do the impossible.
They're gonna try to
limit their presentations
to five minutes each.
You'll be sympathetic if,
I may not be sympathetic,
but they'll be sympathetic,
you'll be sympathetic
if they're forced to go over.
And Jack, you accepted the
baseline responsibility
of talking about Teilhard's God.
- Thank you, Frank.
I'm especially grateful
to you and the university
for organizing this
conference and to all of you,
whether for your expertise
or interest in Teilhard.
I personally think
nothing is more important
than keeping alive the memory
of this man and of his thought.
Well, I've been asked
to say a few words about
what he meant by God.
He asked in one of his essays one time,
"Who at last will give
us a God for evolution?"
Well, it turned out
that nobody came closer
to doing so than Teilhard himself.
He wants to remind us that
over the past 200 years,
science has shown that without a doubt,
the universe we live in is
still coming into being.
Geology, biology, and now
more recently, cosmology
have demonstrated undeniably that we live
in an unfinished universe.
And he says that Christian
people and theologians have
to develop as a habit of
thought this awareness
that we live in a universe
that's still becoming new,
that's still coming into being every day.
And what that means,
especially for the idea of God,
is that we need to think
of God no longer so much
as the efficient cause or
the governor of the universe
as its goal, God as the goal of evolution.
This is pretty well-known to
most followers of Teilhard,
but what might not be so
well-known is the arduous process
that he went through as a person
to arrive at that understanding of God.
I think we have to begin by recalling that
for Teilhard a lifelong
preoccupation was his sensitivity.
We might say his hypersensitivity
to the fact of his own perishing.
He talks about how when he
was still a very young child,
he wept when he saw locks of
his hair going up in flames
and how he followed this up
by trying to tie his life
as closely as possible to
what is indestructible,
so he sought out rocks and pieces of iron,
and we might conjecture that
even his choice of a career
in geology, which deals
with hard, fixed objects,
has something to do with this longing
to tie his perishable life
to something that lasts.
So his life turns out, I
think, to be best understood,
in many ways, also his
thought is best understood,
as an ongoing search for
what he called consistence,
by which he meant something
solid, foundational,
something indestructible, that
he could connect his life to
and that would somehow
address his anxieties
about perishing and also
that would set the universe,
this ongoing, unfinished,
perishable universe,
on a firm foundation as well.
Whatever could provide this consistence,
that would be his God.
And this explains why this is puzzling
to a lot of us perhaps,
that even as a young man,
as a young priest, as a young scientist,
he freely admits his attraction
to metaphysical materialism,
to the philosophy that
matter is all there is.
After all, what could be more consistent,
what can be more
indestructible and durable
than this realm of lifeless
and mindless matter,
out of which life and mind showed up
for a day or two in cosmic time,
and then as scientists tell
us, will eventually sink back
into this sphere of mindlessness,
this eternal matter?
He felt almost a mystical
attraction to this,
and he understood, and
if he were here today,
he would still understand why so many
scientifically educated people
are attracted to materialism.
He thinks there's almost a mystical allure
of this body of material,
lifeless and mindless, stuff
to a certain kind of personality,
particularly his own,
which was a rather
melancholic personality,
which he freely admits likes
to live more in the past,
in a way, than in the future,
which is quite ironic.
And it's also ironic that
it was science itself
that eventually proved to him
that materialism does not work
as far as providing a refuge
from perishability is concerned.
What science does, especially today,
is look back, it digs
back, into the cosmic past
as far as it can go.
But what if finds there is
not something something solid
or coherent or intelligible.
It finds incoherence, scattered,
fragmentary bits of matter.
In other words, this is a
universe which if you take it back
to its past, dissolves
into fluff, into sand.
So to make a long story short,
and I only have five minutes.
Have I used most of it up already?
- [Frank] You've used just five minutes,
but I'll give you two more.
- Okay (laughs), I'll give
you two more (laughs).
To find the consistence
of what he had to do is
after he arrived at this
fragmentary, incoherent past,
and he wants us to do
this, too, turn around
and look toward the future.
If you follow the path
of evolution as it moves
from billions of years ago toward now
and then into the
future, what you will see
is these fragments
coming together into more
and more elaborate, tight,
coherent states of being.
And so intelligibility can
be found therefore only
by looking toward what
happens in the future.
Right now, we live in
an unfinished universe,
which is for the most part
still unintelligible to us,
and that includes the idea of God.
But if we're gonna get a
glimpse of God in any way,
we have to look toward where
the universe is converging,
toward more unity and
compactness and complexity
and consciousness in the future.
So ultimately, the consistence
that he's looking for is the result
of the pull of the future,
and God is the ultimate
future on the cosmos,
and if this pull were relaxed
or slackened only for a moment,
the whole mass would fall
back into multiplicity.
So look for God as the
God of evolution's future.
(audience applauds)
- I did you a favor.
You really compacted
everything into five minutes.
The reason we chose this style
of going short appetizers
before the main discussion is
because there's so many
different facets of Teilhard.
What John just did could
be an hour's lecture,
and it's been an hour's
lecture in the past.
Now we go to another appetizer.
It's another aspect of Teilhard is that,
for a popular understanding of Teilhard,
if you go to social media and internet,
you'll discover it's all about love.
So why not talk about that?
- (laughs) Thank you, thank you, Frank.
It's a great joy and privilege to be here
with all of you today
celebrating Teilhard.
And as Jack did, I would
like to thank the organizers,
especially Frank for putting
all of this together,
and Mary too, I guess I should say,
'cause the two of them
really did a wonderful job.
Well, in five minutes, I am going
to tell you everything
Teilhard and I know about love.
(audience laughs)
So hang on (laughs).
According to Teilhard,
love is the most universal,
formidable and mysterious
of cosmic energies,
the fundamental impulse of life,
the bloodstream of evolution.
Its aim is the great work
of union, of communion, of oneness.
Those who fall in love
embark on an adventure.
They develop a relationship
that, like evolution,
will survive only by embracing the life
of perpetual discovery and by finding ways
to surmount the obstacles
to greater growth.
At an early age, Teilhard
fell in love with rock
and with the beauty of Earth's landscape,
as Jack has just told
us, but later in life,
he came to know the power
of interpersonal love.
And I think this is where
he was able to also,
besides an understanding about evolution,
it was another way in which he began
to understand the power of spirit.
But with his understanding of evolution,
he was able to integrate
these experiences,
the beauty and the love he had for Earth,
the love he had for other persons,
and his understanding of this
marvelous process of evolution
into an expansive cosmic vision of love.
For Teilhard, love's roots are cosmic.
It's presence spans the
entire epic of evolution.
In the early universe,
love was overshadowed by its predecessors,
the forces that were fusing
hydrogen into helium,
creating atoms from nuclei and electrons
and gathering the gas and dust scattered
throughout the early universe
into galaxies and stars.
With the coming of life,
the energy of love surfaced gradually
as a more spiritual form of attraction,
always urging the cosmos
toward a single goal,
the Omega Point, the future,
which he later recognized
as the Cosmic Christ.
A thrust toward unity is coded
into the very fabric of the cosmos,
encouraging what Teilhard
calls creative union,
a term that implies a uniting
love that differentiates,
meaning that whenever two
really, actually become one,
each becomes richer, and
the pair is capable of more.
This principle holds true
for all sorts of unions,
though Teilhard was
anxious that we apply it
to the noosphere, that
collective thinking layer
surrounding Earth's biosphere
that, like any living body,
needs a heart and a soul.
The internet gives a sense
of the power available
when this interconnected global sphere
of human consciousness
shares thoughts and ideas.
However, to this day, the
noosphere lacks a common passion
and a sense of solidarity as
we know, as we watch the news
at night and watch all of
the terror and the wars
that are pervading our Earth.
It is not yet learned how to
release the formidable energy
that lies dormant beneath
the turbulent power of love.
Love alone can provide the
affinity and integration
among the peoples of
the world that is needed
to overcome the animosities
that drive us apart.
If we do not learn to love,
Teilhard says we will perish.
The situation is critical.
And the only way forward he says is
in the direction of a common passion.
For Teilhard, it's not
enough that we survive.
Instead, he envisions a day
when humanity will reach a
higher form of life together,
a day when we will become
more deeply conscious,
more fully alive and truly creative.
For the world to truly
flourish, our love must extend
around the globe to all
persons of whatever persuasion.
It must extend to our
Earth, to our ancestors
who have brought us to this moment
and to our children of the future.
True love demands plunging
headlong into life.
But how can we dare to
stretch out our arms
to embrace the whole world
so that we can together
call down the fire?
In order to find inspiration
for this venture,
Teilhard points to the great religions
as a deep source of spiritual wisdom.
Only a dynamic spirituality,
oriented toward the future,
can keep us animated,
strengthened and filled
with zest for life, capable
of sustaining interest
in this worthwhile but difficult task.
Because he found that he
could not love a collective,
Teilhard realized that love
energy must be personal.
Thus, he imaged the urge
toward union embedded
in the cosmos as a divine
presence, not unlike Sophia,
the wisdom figure of the Scriptures.
Although, he imaged Sophia as love.
This eternal feminine presence
became for him the face
and the heart of a god that he could love,
a god large enough to embrace the world,
one who could expect from him
in return self-transcendence
and self-sacrificing love.
As the bond that holds
together the foundations
of the universe, the one who
bestirred the original mass
of matter and energy, Sophia
now plays over the surface
of the divine fire, continuing
to allure us into a future,
to gather us together and to
lead us to the Cosmic Christ,
in whom we will realize
that we are already one.
During the discussion following
these short presentations,
we will address our
present global situation
more specifically and consider
whether Teilhard's vision
is at all practical, or even possible.
Whether or not we agree with him,
Teilhard remains totally optimistic.
He knows that the day will come when,
after harnessing the ether, the winds,
the tides and gravitation, we will harness
for God the energies of love.
And on that day, for the
second time in the history
of the world, humanity
will have discovered fire.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- John Grim has accepted
the responsibility
for connecting the dots
between Teilhard's thinking
and the robust ecological movement
that he himself is part of.
- Thanks, Frank, thank you very much
for putting this together.
Mary, your work and emails are so helpful,
appreciate it very much, and
to Georgetown University,
for sponsoring this event.
As we were speaking earlier,
it's so rare when we come together,
the Teilhard family,
the Teilhard community.
It's very special.
I want to invite all of you May 16th,
do I have the date right, Jack?
May 16th is the annual meeting
of the American Teilhard Association
at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
And this year, we're also focused
on the 60th anniversary Teilhard's death.
And Jack will deliver that address,
particularly, the invitation
was particularly given
to Jack because of his
expertise in this area.
I work with Kathy Duffy
in the American Teilhard Association.
So it's an active organization.
Small, but we manage to get some work done
and to raise the question
of Teilhard's relevance.
I wanted to remember
some people, first off.
Thomas King has been
mentioned, Jim Salmon,
Malvina Hoffman, Thomas
Berry, Ewert Cousins,
all of these people associated
with Teilhard's thought
and helped to bring it
forward and to develop it.
So Teilhard's relevance
interestingly is not just dependent
upon Teilhard himself.
I think that's what we're
feeling in relation to you also.
His thought is brought
forward by all of us,
and we're beginning to
explore it in new ways.
For example, if you take
theology, science and ecology,
which is where I'm headed in my remarks,
Teilhard was much criticized in all three.
I've been critical of Teilhard
from the ecological standpoint,
so I'll go in that direction.
Theologically, consider Jack's remark
about this sense of God,
in a traditional Christian community,
Roman Catholic community,
his idea of connecting God
with evolution at a time when
the Church was not capable
of accepting evolution, at that time,
very problematic for him.
So you can see where he's really
moving at the knife's edge,
1881 to 1955, his birth and death dates,
it's a time of great ferment of thought
and certainly theological thought,
is he ran headlong into a
great deal of opposition.
He didn't have a community
that he could speak with
about his thought and
really help develop it.
So he had a science community, didn't he?
And he was a recognized scientist.
In fact, his science work was
published during his life.
The speculative, philosophical
and metaphysical,
theological thought was not.
It wasn't published until after his death,
and there are reasons for that,
but I only have five minutes.
(audience laughs)
In the science community,
though, you would expect
that science received Teilhard then
and his speculative thought warmly.
Not at all.
Teilhard was committed to materialism,
but his materialism was shot through
and through with spirit.
Matter and spirit for
Teilhard were two dimensions
of the same thing.
So Jack's comment earlier
about spirit drawing matter forward,
if that spirit did not
draw matter forward,
it would collapse.
That was the role of matter,
was guided by gravity,
and spirit, the Christic, is
what drew towards the future.
So this is where Jack's
work has been so helpful
for all of us in
understanding the Christic,
the sense of future, and Jack,
when he talks about promise,
ties it into the biblical
world, really beautifully done.
But theology the controversy,
science the controversy,
Teilhard has a theological vision.
He has a sense of a drive
within this material process,
totally unacceptable in
the science community.
So he had a good working relationships
with the geologists that he worked with,
but his deep, depth dimension
thought did not move
into the science
community in the same way.
How about ecology?
Think of his dates again, 1881 to 1955.
What are the driving philosophical,
what's his worldview?
There's this French philosophical
emphasis on progress.
The world is constantly becoming better,
and evolution supports that.
And Teilhard is totally in that camp.
Evolution is bringing us ever fuller
towards human consciousness,
our emergence in the evolutionary process.
So Teilhard will use the term hominization
to talk about the evolutionary process,
which has come through the
emergence of the universe
into the galaxies, our galaxy, the Earth,
solar system, Earth, into
the spirit of the Earth
and forming the human.
So we are like a culminating drive
in the evolutionary process.
Is that French philosophical?
Is that Western philosophical thinking?
Humanities, Teilhard is a humanist.
Where are all the creatures
in Teilhard's thought?
Where's the Earth community?
Now some people will make an argument
that Teilhard was an ecologist.
Well, obviously he's not.
He's a trained geologist.
Ecology is a specific science.
Now the relationship of
organisms in an ecosystem
or a biosphere wasn't his specialty.
Did he have a sense of the
creatures of the world,
of the world itself?
Definitely, it's a
profound aesthetic vision.
He has a profound appreciative vision,
because this is the world
which has given rise
to evolutionary processes,
which have led to the human.
But Teilhard has a sense of
once the spirit has moved
through a stage or an element,
it's no longer in that sphere.
So my studies with
American Indian peoples,
indigenous peoples, Teilhard
would say early humans,
indigenous peoples, the spirit
of the Earth was in them,
and then it moved into
the civilizational realms.
So native people, in a sense, fell back.
He equivocates on this, but the same
with the Earth community at large.
Now seals to giraffes to insects,
for Teilhard, they were
instrumental in the formation
of the human, but he
failed to see the role
that they played in our bodies,
the formation of our bodies, in our minds.
We come out of the Cenozoic period.
Our brilliance of our minds comes out
of this brilliant world.
So the point I'm trying to make is
if you diminish this world,
you diminish the whole human capacity
of creative thought as it goes forward.
So is Teilhard relevant in this regard?
Definitely.
Definitely, and his relevance
is we extend his thought.
We think through him.
Instead of pedestaling Teilhard,
such a beautiful bronze,
and Teilhard would not want
to be pedestaled that way.
He would want people to use his thought
and work with his thought,
go forward with his thoughts.
So how do we go forward with his thought?
Let's consider this,
and I'm getting close.
(audience laughs)
- [Frank] We can consider
this, as we (laughs)--
- Teilhard has one of the
issues that brought him
into question and trouble in
his early work was his turn
from Genesis, his turn
from Creation in the past.
So again, the comments that have made,
those lovely comments about
love pulling us forward,
the creative process for
Teilhard is not back then.
It's right now, cosmogenesis.
This world is involved in
creative, evolutionary activity.
And for Teilhard then
to extend his thought,
to begin to realize
the ecological thought,
that we are totally interrelated,
and that this community of life
that we depend upon, we now begin
to realize we have shut
it down extensively.
As we revisit that thought,
we begin to realize the
creative possibilities
that Teilhard lays out in cosmogenesis,
that this world around us
an interdependent world,
and we recover again a
depth dimension of ourselves
in relationship to the Earth community.
So Teilhard doesn't have an
ecological component exactly,
but by extension, he gives rise
to an even more profound
ecological insight.
- Well, not bad for 10 minutes (laughs).
(audience applauds)
That will deserve much more discussion
as we discuss it as a group.
And finally, Sister Ilia
Delio, Teilhard's vision was
that evolution has not finished,
and the human species
is not finished, right?
- Right, so again, I want
to thank Frank and Mary
for organizing this great event today.
And I want to pick up, John,
on where you left off on ecology,
because I think that's
a great starting point
for talking about Teilhard and technology,
because sometimes I think
we can think of ecology
as just sort of a warm,
happy, interconnected,
lovely human family, Earth human family.
But we are moving, and I think
that's what Teilhard tried
to bring into our central focus,
that we are, as Jack points out initially,
in an evolutionary cosmos.
And so he really devoted his life.
He was, again, a trained
scientist, a paleontologist,
but deeply Ignatian, so he tried
to bring together evolution
and Christianity, not just
the sacred and the secular
but really God at the heart
of this evolutionary cosmos.
One thing about Teilhard is that he saw
that evolution is the
rise of consciousness,
not just matter coming into formation,
but consciousness itself is
rising and complexifying.
So he saw the human person
as the arrow of evolution.
We're not just byproducts of evolution.
We are evolution, now
become conscious of itself.
But as he looked around
at Earth community,
he realized that we seem to
be, and we feel this today,
sometimes up against the wall, you know.
We hear of these endless
conflicts, endless wars.
It seems that we're in different impasses.
Are we up against the
big evolutionary wall?
And Teilhard said well,
we have maxed out the
expanding phase of evolution,
and now we are at a critical phase.
We either must converge and
unify, or we will annihilate.
And so he saw the next phase of evolution
as this converging phase
or unification phase.
And in his words, he says,
"The success of humanity's
evolution will not be determined
"by survival of the fittest
"but by our capacity
to converge and unify."
So when he discovered the
computer, he was like,
I think of a kid in a candy shop.
He was like, "Wow, this
is the greatest thing
"I have seen in a long time."
Since the French mountains, I guess.
And he was just enamored by
the power of modern technology.
He was enamored by the
cyclotron, the power of energy.
But he saw with the
computer that we could,
in a sense, enter into a
new level of consciousness.
And therefore, in a sense,
we have already now emerged
into this new level with the internet.
But in Teilhard's time,
we're talking the early '50s,
he saw that the internet,
the computer, would usher
in the next level of evolution,
or what he called the noosphere,
the level of shared mind
or shared consciousness.
For Teilhard then, this
continues evolution.
In other words, evolution
now, from the Big Bang onward,
is not only in biological evolution,
but now we are in, you might
say, noological evolution.
In other words, we are to
harness, he said, our energies
through a shared consciousness
for the next stage
of humanity and for the
Earth itself, you might say,
what he called the Ultra-Human.
He did foresee, and I find
Teilhard very prophetic
in his insights on computer technology.
For one thing, he thought
that computers would complete our brains
by instantaneous retrieval of information.
Well, I don't know about you,
but it certainly completes
my brain, most of the time.
(audience laughs)
Second, he thought
that the computer would improve our brains
by faster speeds, processing
information more rapidly.
He was a prophetic figure.
There's not doubt about it.
And he was a mystic, I
think, of some sorts.
He could see more deeply
than what most people
would see in that time.
But he also saw that technology
was not just about speed
and making things easier for us.
Technology, he thought was
about harnessing the spiritual energies.
So what he saw is that
through the internet,
we would be in a sense more collaborative,
a new level of consciousness,
but this new level
of consciousness is not
about more information.
It's about a deepening of mind and heart.
And in that sense, I think Teilhard saw
that science is not the end.
We're not about just improving ourselves,
so we would be smarter and
live longer and live happier,
but he said science in
the end must, in a sense,
aid the deepening of spirituality.
So he did, at one point,
he places spirituality,
in a sense, in the forefront of science.
In other words, science
is not its own limit.
And therefore technology
is then within the context
of evolution, it plays
the role of convergence.
Technology is to converge
us, not just occupy us.
Technology is to form a collective mind,
not just a multiplicity of minds.
And through technology, he
saw the next stage of humanity
as what he called Ultra-Humanism.
So in a sense, we are on
that next stage of evolution
towards Ultra-Humanity, but
I'm not sure we have reflected
as much as Teilhard did on
where technology can lead us
in this next stage of Ultra-Humanism.
He thought that a shared consciousness,
the level of noogenesis,
could usher in a new type
of inter-thinking human
with new possibilities
for evolving life on the planet.
So in terms of ecology,
it wasn't, I think,
he would see technology, in a sense,
advancing the ecological interconnectivity
so that technology placed in the context
of evolution is that through technology,
we move to more being, more consciousness,
a deepening of love, a
deepening of heart and mind.
And in that new collective consciousness,
he thought that we, in a sense,
could rise to a new level
of heart, a new soul,
perhaps even the world soul,
you might say, retrieved
through the computer.
So Teilhard is, and was,
and I think he's still alive
in this room in some
ways, a very insightful
and one-step-ahead-of-the-game
type of thinker.
He also saw that with
technology and the noosphere,
with his deepening of love,
the deepening of mind,
he saw then the emergence of Christ.
In other words, the technology can link us
and link world religions,
help us converge,
to harness the spiritual energies
that Kathy mentioned at the end.
For the forward movement,
not of just humankind
but of the whole Earth community,
what he called planetization,
moving towards this globalized
mind, a globalized heart,
for the rise of the Christ
or the cosmic person.
I think that's it.
(audience applauds)
- In the combination of
four brief presentations,
we've got a phenomenal collection
of insights into Teilhard.
I'm still trying to figure out
if everything you've all
said is relevant, though.
- Same.
(Frank laughs)
- Since we're working on this documentary,
we now filter everything we read
through what would Teilhard think.
And we read about climate change
and the conflict about that.
We read about artificial
intelligence and nanotechnology
and medical advances and Ray
Kurzweil and the singularity
and DNA modification, atheism and science,
Creationism theme parks,
the meaning of sinner redemption.
We didn't have time to
get somebody on the panel
to talk about Teilhard and feminism,
but there's something to
be said there as well.
The basic question then is
can we connect dotted lines
to things that we're reading
about in today's paper
with what Teilhard had to say?
I think you did some of that, definitely,
in what you were just saying, Ilia.
As a stimulant to talking about that,
let me just read you this.
Ross Douthat recently wrote
in The New York Times,
"One of the anxieties haunting
the 21st century is a fear
"that technological change
will soon make human lives
"seem essentially superfluous.
"Soon, if not tomorrow,
the rich may be able
"to re-engineer bodies and minds,
"making human equality
seem like a quaint conceit.
"Work is disappearing for
the erstwhile middle-class.
"The rich are increasingly
self-segregating
"and marrying among themselves,
"and virtual realities are replacing
"older forms of intimacy."
How would Teilhard react
to that, to what he wrote?
Jack.
- Well, I think, just
to unify what Kathy said
with what Ilia said,
there is the possibility
that all this could get out
of whack and go haywire.
But whenever the universe has become more,
at every stage in the past,
this has only happened
because of the intercommunion of entities,
whether these be atoms
or molecules or whatever,
but for that intercommunion to take place,
there had to be a center
that organized these elements
into something new.
So if we want to extend
that to the prospect
of the Earth becoming
more, as Ilia said, today,
we would have to ask whether
there is some sort of center
that can bring all of this
together, and since the elements
that are being brought
together are persons,
this center has to be at
least personal itself,
because we cannot be fully attracted
to something that's less than personal.
It has to be concrete.
It has to be available in our history.
And it has to be something
that can lift up the mass.
So we have to ask the question,
and this is a question
for religion and theology
and for theology and science,
is there anything that
could do something parallel
at the present stage of cosmic evolution
to what, say, the nucleus of the atom did
to pre-atomic elements or the
nucleus of the eukaryotic cell
to organize the entities
into something new?
At each stage, there's a convergence of,
then there's an emergence,
but in order for that leap
to take place, something
of the transcendent has
to enter into our history.
So this is the question that
I would ask Ilia and Kathy.
Is there anything available to
us that would unify the mass?
Teilhard also talked about
how we need a great hope held
in common for this new
stage to come about.
And I'm with your columnist
from The New York Times.
It's very difficult for me
to see anything like
that happening right now.
But I think the task
of all of us is to look
for whether there is.
- I was just thinking that
in the early universe,
it was a force that really
was, forces became available
as the universe cooled down.
Gravity wasn't able to bring
the gas and dust together
until it was cool enough.
And fusion could happen only
at a certain temperatures
and pressures, then that force.
Now what is the force
today, and we would say,
you would say the force of
the Omega Point or the future,
but I'm not really sure
with that, what it is.
But it is a good question.
- I do think that there's
a lot of heightened fear
with some of the new technologies today,
because in some ways,
they're operating out
of an old cosmology, sort
of a Newtonian framework.
And I think when you operate
out of a Newtonian framework,
it's going to be this
or that, rich or poor.
One's gonna win, one's going to lose.
Teilhard thinks in evolutionary framework,
a cosmic framework.
He thinks of a deep interconnectedness.
He also sees that matter is porous.
It's open to spirit.
So I don't think he would look
at the emerging technologies
today fearfully.
He would, in a sense, ask
how are these harnessing
the energies of love.
How are these, you might say, unifying us?
And I do think today we're
developing technology so quickly,
in a sense, you could say
the unreflected cyber life
may not be worth living,
that if we're developing them
so quickly without reflecting,
where are we going with them?
What are we creating them for?
I think Teilhard was one who
was always very reflective
about even scientific achievements
or about what he would,
in a sense, discover with
the new technologies.
The technologies in themselves
can be for good or for ill.
We're creating them.
So what we do find, and I
think what Teilhard noticed,
we have the capacity
to transcend ourselves.
We are creatures in evolution.
We are, in a sense,
the arrow of evolution.
So the very things we are creating,
we are transcending ourselves
by our own creativities.
The question is toward
what and for what purpose.
- And just one small thought,
I do think that today,
you know, in the past,
we might have though what
great leader can be the center,
but I think today what we
need is a collective body
of, you know, a movement
that will move us on,
that will be attractive.
And I don't know what that is yet,
but I think some of these movements
about heightened consciousness, you know,
there's a lot of that going on.
They're reaching out to do that.
- The term that Teilhard
used was co-reflection,
that we're not just now self-reflecting.
I don't go in my own little
room and reflect by myself
what's gonna happen to
me if I become a cyborg
or a robot or something,
but we reflect together.
What he's saying is now with the emergence
of technology, we have a greater capacity
to join minds, to think together,
to, in a sense, deepen
together what we want,
and I do think we are
living between cosmologies.
So we're not really in
Teilhard's world yet.
- I agree.
- Have we...
- Go ahead.
- Have we outgrown...
Teilhard was criticized
even in his lifetime,
not his lifetime, but he
was criticized shortly
after he died, when his books came out,
about not being sufficiently scientific.
And a criticism in the '80s and '90s was
that his thought didn't really
take into account science.
And science has progressed so
rapidly and become so extreme.
Has science totally outrun Teilhard?
I mean, has he become
irrelevant in that sense?
- Well, I think you have to
distinguish between the hundreds
of papers that Teilhard wrote
in a purely scientific vein,
about which there is no controversy.
In fact, the papers made
him one of the top two
or three geologists of
the Asian continent.
So this man knew what science was.
What he's doing in The Phenomenon and most
of the popular essays that
have made him controversial
is working pretty much
alone to try to synthesize
what he's learned about
through scientific discovery,
more than with scientific method,
what scientific discoveries tell us
about the nature of ultimate reality.
And when he writes these papers,
he's seen as controversial.
Partly, it's his own fault,
because when he wrote
The Phenomenon of Man,
wrote The Human Phenomenon, in
the early pages of that work,
he said, "What I'm
presenting here is nothing
"that goes beyond what
science can confirm."
But he was using science
there in a very broad sense.
What he was really looking for was
to be actually more radically empirical
than conventional science is.
Conventional science leaves out so much
that's really there,
especially our own subjectivity
and some of the other
things that are qualitative
and value laden that are
going on in the world.
That science, by
definition, quite rightly,
has abstracted from values,
meaning, subjectivity,
purpose, God, and talked only
about physical causation.
Teilhard knew this, because
when he wrote his papers,
he didn't bring God, value
and so forth into it.
But when he wrote The Phenomenon,
he was doing something different.
But it's not against
the spirit of science.
It was to actually expand
the empirical orientation
of science to take into account things
that science unfortunately leaves out,
like consciousness, for
example, which today,
in a materialist worldview,
doesn't even exist,
and yet it's the most palpable experience
that any of us has.
So if you try to construct a worldview
that leaves out something so vital
and important as mind to subjectivity,
then that's unempirical,
that's irrelevant.
What we need is a radically
empirical approach to the world
that includes within what
he calls hyperphysics,
the experience of consciousness
and also the experiences
of faith, religions.
You asked about his relevance.
When you're asking about his
relevance, you're asking about
whether his paying attention to faith
and religion is relevant.
Well, for him, in this wider worldview,
religion and faith are the
way in which the universe,
now that it has become
conscious of itself,
continues that search for the center,
which has been going on from the start.
And that's why this religious
search is vitally relevant
to being radically
empirical in understanding
what kind of universe we live in.
- I find it very attractive
the way he uses science
poetically, actually.
I mean, I think, for me, that's always
what attracted me to his writing.
As a, well, even before I was a scientist,
I think that almost
attracted me to science.
So I think that's one
thing that's really good.
But the other thing is I've
noticed, thinking about,
I'm interested in chaos
theory, complexity theory,
some of these new theories
that are coming out in science,
and his writings point in that direction.
He was looking at the universe
in such a different way
from his fellow scientists
that I think he could see
what was happening, and now
the theories are coming out,
and you can see that he was,
at least, alluding to them.
And I find that very exciting
and like to make those connections.
- Just following up,
one thing about Teilhard is
he kept detailed journals
of his scientific data.
I mean, the records are
that he was very precise
in his measurements and
very detailed about keeping,
you know, accumulating the data.
So he really was a bonafide
scientist in this way.
But it wasn't about data collection alone.
I think one thing that Father Tom King
in his book, Teilhard's
Mysticism of Knowing,
thinking was really essential.
So it's not just data collection.
It's how do you think about
these observations, this data?
How do you make sense of it?
How does it unify?
How does it deepen our insight?
And I think he brings that,
maybe it was the Jesuit training in him,
that many years of scholastic
studies probably instilled
in him a rigor of thinking and reflecting.
But he does have that unique combination
of a deep spirituality
with a precise observation
of the things of nature.
And I think one thing that Teilhard speaks
to me about is the importance
of an interior life,
of spirituality, even as we
scientifically engage the world.
Jack has mentioned about the materialism,
that matter is its own explanation.
And what Teilhard sees
is that there's a depth
to being itself, a depth
to everything that exists,
even though he was a very
detailed-oriented paleontologist.
So he's a very unique blend, I think,
of scientist, priest and prophet.
- His relevance then
becomes very interesting,
in terms of that interiority.
At Yale, two of the issues
that students are very active about,
in fact, I believe today
there's a sit-in going on
at the President's Office at Yale,
(audience laughs)
over divestment and so the effort
to convince a establishment,
which has a significant endowment,
to pull it out of fossil fuels.
And the other is food, especially
factory farming of food,
the treatment of animals as
if they were simply machines
that could be manipulated,
slaughtered and raised up
in what some might call an inhumane way.
They're not allowed to live
a fullness of their life.
So what does that have
to do with Teilhard?
If you consider the
interiority of all reality,
and Teilhard will explore this issue,
in terms of these axes of openings.
How does the world speak to us?
It speaks to us in the infinitely large
and the infinitely small.
We don't even know how to think
about quantum thought yet and all this.
But he says it also speaks to us
in the infinitely complex,
complexity-consciousness.
And so we've developed some
really interesting remarks here
about that consciousness in the human.
And Teilhard sees that consciousness
in the human as extending
into the universe.
So Teilhard, you mean to say that stones,
that the matter in the
galaxies has consciousness?
And for Teilhard, definitely, yes.
It's not human consciousness.
It's its own organizational patterning,
its own consciousness,
but it's an interiority,
which is crucial.
And I think students now are
understanding the interiority
of animals, the interiority of life.
We diminish that, we diminish ourselves.
We have problems with ourselves,
because we have problems
with the Earth, the
way we treat the Earth.
So this interiority, the
relevance of Teilhard's thought,
it speaks to these students.
- So consciousness seems to be the element
that Teilhard introduced,
which in some sense,
science is now catching up with.
- Yeah, maybe (laughs).
- Maybe.
- Maybe (laughs).
Yeah, within neuroscience,
I mean, there's a lot of
neuroscience research.
But some scientists are gonna
say that's all there is,
is the matter, you know,
and so that's what I
meant by maybe (laughs).
- Before I go on to another question,
I just want to make sure
I'm not misunderstanding.
Did I hear from the three of
you in the discussion earlier
that we seem to be on the
cusp of a new emergence?
- Hopefully (laughs).
- It's a cosmogenesis.
- Is that right?
- In evolution, in cosmology,
emergence takes many, many
millions of years sometimes.
(audience laughs)
What Teilhard asks in one of his essays
in The Future of Man is
consider what the Earth,
which is metonymy for
nature, for the universe,
will be like, psychically speaking,
a million years from now.
And that's not very long
in evolutionary times.
So it's very difficult for
us to say whether we're
on the cusp of it and
how long that's gonna be.
- I just want you all to--
- Looking around
at television, though.
- Know what happens
when you wake (laughs),
(panel laughs)
you wake up tomorrow and we're a new--
- There's also room for setbacks
and regressive movements in this.
The universe is a drama,
and drama, unlike a machine,
allows for lots of
different dead ends and--
- Drama.
- And only occasional, and
seldom does, occasionally
and seldom does it make these leaps.
- And newness comes out
of, what do you call it,
you know, some kind of crisis, I think.
If we're in equilibrium, which
is what we usually all want
to be in, nothing happens.
So you really do need
something dramatic to happen
in order to create, and
I think of some examples
like a volcano is terrible, right?
The poor people at the
bottom of the volcano,
their homes get destroyed.
Maybe they haven't had time to
get away, and it's a tragedy.
But what happens 20 years
later is you have fertile soil.
And I also think about the
difficulties we're having now
with the Middle East and
understanding that culture.
For one thing, with technology,
the television is making us aware
of these countries the way
we've never been aware before.
And I think whenever you
bring differences together,
for instance, I always think in protons.
But the protons don't want
to get together either.
And it's only when they get (laughs),
get beyond a certain barrier
that the other force,
the strong force is able
to bring them together,
and they become something new.
So I think we need to
work these things out,
and it's gonna take a long time.
But it's not a sign, I don't think,
that things are getting worse,
which most people are saying.
It's a sign that we're
moving into a new era,
and we have new problems,
and we need to deal with them
in a way, and it shouldn't
be a surprise to us
that we have these difficulties, I think.
- So are you talking
about proton protests?
(panel laughs)
- I just lost my train of thought there.
That was very good.
- I just wanted
to pick up, though, and say
that what you're saying, Kathy,
is that, that's right, Teilhard would say
that while it looks to
us on the outer level
that it's all in chaos,
it's all falling apart,
and you hear people talking about this.
Is the end of the world coming?
It just seems like endless destruction.
And again, it looks
like the big brick wall.
There's nowhere to go.
And Teilhard is saying no, not pessimism,
look on the other side.
We're being summoned to something more.
And you know, it's always do you look
at the glass half full
or half empty, right?
It's always a matter of seeing,
and seeing was important
to Teilhard, right.
He said, "There's nothing
profane here below
"for those who know how to see."
Out of what center do we see this world
and the things of this world?
He did see there's a pattern going on.
If you look over cosmic evolution,
the very broad pattern of convergence,
which I think Jack and Kathy mentioned,
you know, convergence, complexity
and the rise of consciousness.
So he's saying that there's
something more going on
in evolution than meets the physical eye.
And the person who is
in touch with the more,
you might say, is the one
who can help lead then us
into the next level of evolution.
He sees this whole thing
as the rise of the Christ,
you know, Christification
of Christogenesis
or cosmic personalization,
to use his language.
- You've all touched on
this but not explicitly,
Teilhard's notion that
defines human, our condition,
is self-reflective consciousness,
which is what gives us freedom.
It gives us the capacity to love, right,
and it also gives us the
capacity to screw up evolution
or to enhance evolution.
People talk about co-creating evolution.
Do you want to talk about that?
- Co-creating, me?
- If you look at human history,
in terms of thousands of years,
it's not hard to become very discouraged
about whether we're making
progress, and for him,
progress doesn't mean
anything crude or economic.
It means the intensification
of complexity-consciousness.
And that requires some center around
which everything can occur.
But if you look at the question
of are we getting anywhere
in terms of cosmic evolution,
then this virtue is
not always talked about
when we think of Teilhard, patience.
He made a lot of how patience
is absolutely necessary
if you're gonna have a wide
and long view of things.
And seeds can lie dormant in the soil
through a long, long winter, and it seems,
from their point of view,
nothing is gonna happen,
but then all of a sudden, if
you know cosmic evolution,
these crises, as Kathy
was talking about, occur.
And then things which had
been purely divergent,
begin to converge, and
convergence can turn
into tighter associations and integration.
And out of that, we've
seen it time and time again
in cosmic history, something
emergent can come about.
This is why knowing
evolution is a very good way
of learning patience,
and if not despairing.
In the intellectual world
today, which is dominated
by scientific naturalism and materialism
and cosmic pessimism, it seems
that the most realistic attitude,
most relevant attitude
people can take is one
of discouragement and perhaps even despair
and work out on our own personal
lives some sort of meaning.
But evolution should give us a much wider
and more hopeful vision of possibilities.
- It's interesting also when
we try to see evolution,
it becomes unavailable to us,
because we are encased in it.
I think another example is climate change.
You hear this constant
pitter patter of well,
is this storm caused by climate change?
And we can't see it.
It's a hyperobject, to cite
the work of Timothy Morton,
who's a philosopher who
tries to think through some
of these issues, an object
which encompasses so completely
that we're not able to
put our minds around it.
And yet, at some point,
we have insight into these capacities.
We have capacities for insight
into these hyperobjects.
I think one that I see on the
horizon, in relationship, say,
to the despair we feel
with regard to evolution
and the despair we feel with
regard to climate change,
the inability of the
nation-state to really move ahead
on these issues and to
foreground a cap-and-trade policy
that would really be on the ground
and bring to bear mechanics
that are already available,
that taxation process already
laid out with corporations.
Why can't we move in this regard?
The depression or the
pessimism that emerges,
I think Teilhard provides us a way
of seeing again those entry points.
Why is it that this pope
will release an encyclical
this summer and will
address climate change
and environmental issues?
What is it that he's seeing?
Will there be a Teilhardian
component to this encyclical?
I'm very interested to see that,
because I take it also
as a signal or a sign
of this larger issue is suddenly
emerging in front of us,
new ways of thinking about it.
- I should be turning to
the audience for questions,
but I have a specific question
that I really would like
to get your reaction to.
Teilhard was criticized in
his time for not dealing
with the question of evil.
Why does God do bad things to good people?
Is that what it is?
But FRONTLINE recently did a documentary
on the way doctors deal
with their patients.
And it emphasized the kind of
failure in medical services,
because doctors have come to
think of death as a failure.
If somebody dies, they
fail, and it leads to,
along with other technological reasons,
to extreme efforts to keep people alive.
How did Teilhard feel about death?
Jack.
- Well, at one point,
he says that God finds
both suffering and death odious.
So the question then is why
would God make a universe
in which evil and
suffering can come about?
Teilhard doesn't have any final
answers to these questions,
but he does say this.
From now on, this goes back to
what I said at the beginning,
we have to make a habit
of mind of remembering
that we live in a universe
that's still coming into being.
The universe is unfinished.
And logically speaking, any process
which has not yet
reached its ideal end is,
prior to that end,
liable to have an element
of darkness to it, and
within that darkness
of an unfinished universe,
evil can have a foothold.
All the big questions that bother us,
why we suffer, why we die, and why we have
to walk by faith rather than
sight, all these are functions
of the fact that we live in a universe
that's still unfinished.
In terms of that then, if that's
the case, then maybe it is
that we cannot really
find the full, divine,
theologically acceptable
solution to this problem of evil
until the process itself has
reached its full actualization.
So it's sort of built in, in a way,
but the thing about it
is there is still hope
that evil is not the final word.
- Maybe just to follow up on that,
many people have criticized Teilhard
that he minimalized evil or reduced it
to something that seemed inconsequential,
but I think we forget he lived through,
he was a stretcher bearer in World War I.
He lived through profound suffering.
He lost a number of his own
family members to death.
So he was a man fully aware
of death and suffering.
And so the charge that he
was naively optimistic,
I think is a very unfair one.
He did see, as Jack was saying,
in an unfinished universe,
in other words, suffering
is, you might say,
a stimulus to move on.
In other words, it's a
stimulus for new creativity.
Even death itself, death
is not an opposite to life
or something, you know, contrast to life.
It's, in a sense, a
dimension of life itself
so that suffering and death
are, you might say, stimuli
to move forward, to move
into more complex unions
to a new level of
consciousness, to let go.
Death is the letting go of isolated being,
to enter into more complex
union, in some ways.
So death is part of life,
and I think Teilhard, again,
in that kind of, he's a broad
thinker and a broad visionary.
He's looking at death and suffering
within this larger context of
evolution and Christogenesis,
without reducing it,
without minimalizing it.
He's saying it is part of
life, but life is, in a sense,
what we are being drawn into up ahead.
- I'm prompted by your very
fine insights, Ilia, to think
that the disgust and anger
that would manifest itself
as a problematic sign in the world.
I have had graduate
students who have applied
for grants to study Teilhard,
and they have been refused
by the granting agency.
And the response that was given
to them was Teilhard de Chardin is the one
that Steven Jay Gould
effectively dismissed
by connecting him to the Pildown Hoax.
Now that whole issue, and
it's a very interesting one,
too complex to go into at depth here,
but there's been ample evidence now
to explain how a particular clerk
at the British Museum
perpetrated those hoaxes
against the director of the
British National Museum.
But Teilhard was associated
by the major geologist
of the late 20th century,
Steven Jay Gould,
and that stain carries on.
I feel anger.
I feel disgust when the
students are up against that.
And when I read Teilhard, it passes.
It evaporates, that feeling
of disgust and anger,
because his work is significant.
His work endures, and his
work is that abiding capacity,
abiding in reverence, and it's not simply
that transcendent, although
we have acknowledged the,
say, the Omega Point,
that which pulls us on.
It's not just that.
It's not just the material.
He says, "If I would lose my
faith in Christ, in Jesus,
"if I would lose my faith in God,
"I would not lose my faith in the world."
And Henri de Lubac makes
such a beautiful interpretation of that.
He was talking to his
materialist scientist friends.
He intentionally made a
statement which is so jarring,
in terms of his sensibilities,
but he could stand by it,
because it's not just materiality for him.
It's a very complex,
conscious world where matter
and spirit are pulling us
forward in this interiority
that lifts us out of disgust and anger.
- John, just following up on that,
I think that just speaks to me
of Teilhard's deep incarnational spirit.
His trust in the world is the trust
that this world is not a planet
that's isolated apart from God,
that Omega is deeply at the heart of it.
Love is deeply at the heart of it.
So that Christianity is not
just normative of religion
but normative of evolution itself,
so that you can trust the world.
You trust life.
He speaks about resting on the future,
as Jack was talking about before.
And we don't trust the
world, I think, enough.
We don't trust the stuff of the world.
- I was just gonna say,
and that probably doesn't just follow,
but don't you think one of
our problems is individualism,
that we think of ourselves
as units, like of particles?
Really, we're much more
connected than that.
And so even with death, it's
not about just my death.
And even, we were talking about Teilhard
and what he's left here as a legacy.
I mean, he didn't die in a certain sense.
He's here with us, and so I don't know how
to explore that too much more,
but I think that's a piece
of the problem of the Western
world is the individualism.
- I've let this wonderful
discussion flow to the point
that I've essentially
eliminated the opportunity
for the audience to ask questions.
But we're about to go into
the Saint William Chapel
for the Mass on the World.
And Kathy, you wrote a book on mysticism.
Do you have any insights as to
what the spirit was underlying,
the Mass on the World,
Teilhard's writing of that essay?
Sorry to spring that question on you.
- I think he wanted to
make a cosmic, you know...
When you think of the
Mass, so here I come.
Again, it's individualism.
Here I come.
I'm giving my, you know, I'm doing this,
and I'm taking the host.
And well, maybe we're all
connected here in this church,
but he's trying to connect
us to the whole cosmos
in the Mass on the World.
I mean, all the way from the beginning,
he looks at the sun rising,
and he's surrounded by the
desert, and he just, you know,
he's using the whole Earth as his alter
and the whole cosmos.
So he's trying, I think, to
change this very narrow view
of spirituality into one
that really makes sense.
And he's offering himself
in a very strong way,
committing himself to make a difference
in the world actually, once
you get to the Communion.
- Am I right in remembering
he had no bread and wine?
- Mm-hmm.
- So the world...
- The altar.
- Yeah, the world was the altar,
and the bread and wine,
where the bread is all
that the universe has
made during this day,
and then wine is all the
sorrow that's in the world.
So all this is offered and transformed.
And then we give ourselves over
to be part of that transformation.
It's a beautiful movement.
- He talks about incarnation
not just being incarnation
in the human flesh, but this
goes well with your position,
but the incarnation--
(phone chimes)
Oops.
- It's Teilhard calling.
(panel laughs)
- I tried to turn that off.
- We told you he was here.
- That's a warning for
me to take my pills.
(audience laughs)
I had back surgery a little bit ago.
No, but the incarnation extends
not just to Christ coming
into the world, but Christ
extends to the whole world.
- Right, during Christmas.
- Thank you very much for coming
and a round of applause for our panel.
(audience applauds)
