The Apostates who mock God and His Christ in former Catholic, Protestant and Christian churches are led by the spirit of theistic pantheism - God blended with self and universe and mystical experience, in a word: "witchcraft."
Father Malachi Martin - witness to the Truth: Primacy: How the Institutional Roman Catholic Church Became a Creature of the New World Order
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin the practicing witch.
THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION
New Agers believe in the theory of evolution. Reincarnation is actually based on the idea of evolution... man 'evolves' through lifetime after lifetime in endless successive incarnations until they finally reach perfection. Eastern Mysticism teaches that the lower forms of life evolve into higher forms of life and that eventually all men will evolve back into godhood or the 'Source from which they came'.
The Jesuit, PierreTeilhard de Chardin, (sometimes referred to as the Father of the New Age Movement), eagerly investigated paleontology, which is the study of prehistoric animal fossils, which undoubtedly led to his later obsession with the theory of evolution. "Spiritualism teaches that man is the creature of progression; that it is his destiny from birth to progress or to evolve, even to eternity, toward the godhead". Ellen White, Great Controversy pg 554 In like manner, Teilhard believed that the more man became like his 'true self' (otherwise known as the Higher Self) -the more he evolved into 'what God is'.
The idea behind this theory is that man was already God and that it was essential that he go back to the Source from whence he came, to find his 'True Self.' He needed to evolve into the 'Ultra Human' or into the God-man to whom Teilhard was referring. Once man reaches this state, he is presumed to have achieved what is known as 'Cosmic Consciousness.' And so the 'Father' of the New Age Movement was deeply involved in the theory of evolution.
This New Age idea of spiritual evolution makes man his own savior- convincing him that he has the ability to evolve into a god-man. The Creationist believes that since God created the world and created us- He can therefore re-create us into His own image with a god-like character. The Evolutionist is proud however, and thinks he can progress spiritually on his own, without the assistance of God... for he thinks himself to be a god!
The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought. French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit. It is of the nature and reproduction that progeny should outnumber parents, and of Mendelian heredity that the inborn endowments of the parents should be variously recombined and reassorted among their offspring, so enlarging the population's candidature for evolutionary change. Teilhard puts the matter thus: it is one of his more lucid passages, and Mr Wall's translation, here as almost everywhere else, captures the spirit and sense of the original.
These are trivialities, revealing though they are, and perhaps I make too much of them. The evolutionary origins of consciousness are indeed distant and obscure, and perhaps so trite a thought does need this kind of dressing to make it palatable: 'refracted rearwards along the course of evolution, consciousness displays itself qualitatively as a spectrum of shifting hints whose lower terms are lost in the night' (the roman type is mine). What is much more serious is the fact that Teilhard habitually and systematically cheats with words. his work, he has assured us, is to be read, not as a metaphysical system, but 'purely and simply as a scientific treatise' executed with 'remorseless' or 'inescapable' logic; yet he uses in metaphor words like energy, tension, force, impetus and dimension as ifthey retained the weight and thrust of their specific scientific usages. Consciousness, for example, is a matter upon which Teilhard has been said to have illuminating views. For the most part consciousness is treated as a manifestation of energy, though this does not help us very much because the word 'energy' is itself debauched; but elsewhere we learn that consciousness is a dimension, or is something with mass, or is something corpuscular and particulate which can exist in various degrees of concentration, being sometimes infinitely diffuse. In his lay capacity, Teilhard, a naturalist, practised a comparatively humble and unexacting kind of science, but he must have known better than to play such tricks as these. On page 60 we read:
In spite of all the obstacles that Teilhard perhaps wisely puts in our way, it is possible to discern a train of thought in The Phenomenon of Man. It is founded upon the belief that the fundamental process or motion in the entire universe is evolution, and evolution is 'a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow ... a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow'. This being so, it follows that 'nothing could ever burst forth as final across the different thresholds successively traversed by evolution ... which has not already existed in an obscure and primordial way' (again my romans). Nothing is wholly new: there is always some primordium or rudiment or archetype of whatever exists or has existed. Love, for example --- 'that is to say, the affinity of being with being' --- is to be found in some form throughout the organic world, and even at a 'prodigiously rudimentary level', for if there were no such affinity between atoms when they unite into molecules it would be 'physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in "hominized" form'. But above all, consciousness is not new, for this would contradict the evolutionary axiom; on the contrary, we are 'logically forced to assume the existence in rudimentary form ... of some sort of psyche in every corpuscle', even in molecules; 'by the very fact of the individualization of our planet, a certain mass of elementary consciousness was originally imprisoned in the matter of earth'.
What form does this elementary consciousness take? Scientists have not been able to spot it, for they are shallow superficial fellows, unable to see into the inwardness of things --- 'up to now, has science ever trouble to look at the world other than from without?' Consciousness is an interiority of matter, an 'inner face that everywhere duplicates the "material" external face, which alone is commonly considered by science'. To grasp the nature of the within of things we must understand that energy is of two kinds: the 'tangential', which is energy as scientists use that word, and a radial energy (a term used interchangeably with spiritual or psychic energy), of which consciousness is treated sometimes as the equivalent, sometimes as the manifestation, and sometimes as the consequence (there is no knowing what Teilhard intends). Radial energy appears to be a measure of, or what conduces towards, complexity or degree of arrangement; thus 'spiritual energy, by its very nature, increases in "radial" value ... in step with the increasing chemical complexity of the elements of which it represents the inner lining'. It confers centricity, and 'the increase of the synthetic state of matter involves ... an increase of consciousness'.
We are now therefore in a position to understand what evolution is (is nothing but). Evolution is 'the continual growth of ... "psychic" or "radial" energy, in the course of duration, beneath and within the mechanical energy I called "tangential" '; evolution, then is 'am ascent towards consciousness'. It follows that evolution must have a 'precise orientation and a privileged axis' at the topmost pole of which lies Man, born 'a direct lineal descendant from the total effort of life.'
Let us fill in the intermediate stages. Teilhard, with a penetrating insight that Sir Julian Huxley singles out for special praise, discerns that consciousness in the everyday sense is somehow associated with the possession of nervous systems and brains ('we have every reason to think that in animals too a certain inwardness exists, approximately proportional to the development of their brains'). The direction of evolution must therefore be towards cerebralisation, that is, towards becoming brainier. 'Among the infinite modalities in which the complication of life is dispersed,' he tells us, 'the differentiation of nervous tissue stands out ... as a significant transformation. It provides a direction; and by its consequences it proves that evolution has a direction.' All else is equivocal and insignificant; in the process of becoming brainier we find 'the very essence of complexity, of essential metamorphosis'. And if we study the evolution of living things, organic evolution, we shall find that in every one of its lines, except only in those in which it does not occur, evolution is an evolution towards increasing complexity of the nervous system and cerebralisation. Plants don't count, to be sure (because 'in the vegetable kingdom we are unable to follow along a nervous system the evolution of a psychism obviously remaining diffuse'), and the contemplation of insects provokes a certain shuffling of the feet [p. 153]; but primates are 'a phylum of pure and direct cerebralization' and among them 'evolution went straight to work on the brain, neglecting everything else'. Here is Teilhard's description of noogenesis, the birth of higher consciousness among the primates, and of the noosphere in which that higher consciousness is deployed:
I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose. What Teilhard seems to be trying to say is that evolution is often (he says always) accompanied by an increase of orderliness or internal coherence or degree of integration. In what sense is the fertilized egg that develops into an adult human being 'higher' than, say, a bacterial cell? In the sense that it contains richer and more complicated genetical instructions for the execution of those processes that together constitute development. Thus Teilhard's radial, spiritual or psychic energy may be equated to 'information' or 'information content' in the sense that has been made reasonably precise by modern communication engineers. To equate it to consciousness, or to regard degree of consciousness as a measure of information content, is one of the silly little metaphysical conceits I mentioned in an earlier paragraph. Teilhard's belief, enthusiastically shared by Sir Julian Huxley, that evolution flouts or foils the second law of thermodynamics is based on a confusion of thought; and the idea that evolution has a main track or privileged axis is unsupported by scientific evidence.
Teilhard is widely believed to have rejected the modern Mendelian-Darwinian theory of evolution or to have demonstrated its inadequacy. Certainly he imports a ghost, the entelechy or élan vital of an earlier terminology, into the Mendelian machine; but he seems to accept the idea that evolution is probationary and exploratory and mediated through a selective process, a 'groping', a 'billionfold trial and error; 'far be it from me', he declares, 'to deny its importance'. Unhappily Teilhard has no grasp of the real weakness of modern evolutionary theory, namely its lack of a complete theory of variation, of the origin of candidature for evolution. It is not enough to say that 'mutation' is ultimately the source of all genetical diversity, for that is merely to give the phenomenon a name: mutation is so defined. What we want, and what we are slowly beginning to get, is a comprehensive theory of the forms in which new genetical information comes into being. It may, as I have hinted elsewhere, turn out to be of the nature of nucleic acids and the chromosomal apparatus that they tend spontaneously to proffer genetical variants --- genetical solutions to the problem of remaining alive --- which are more complex and more elaborate than the immediate occasion calls for; but to construe this 'complexification' as a manifestation of consciousness is a wilful abuse of words.
Teilhard's metaphysical argument begins where the scientific argument leaves off, and the gist of it is extremely simple. Inasmuch as evolution is the fundamental motion of the entire universe, an ascent along a privileged and necessary pathway towards consciousness, so it follows that our present consciousness must 'culminate forwards in some sort of supreme consciousness'. In expounding this thesis, Teilhard becomes more and more confused and excited and finally almost hysterical. The Supreme Consciousness, which apparently assimilates to itself all our personal consciousnesses, is, or is embodied in, 'Omega' or the Omega-point; in Omega 'the movement of synthesis culminates'. Now Omega is 'already in existence and operative at the very core of the thinking mass', so if we have our wits about us we should at this moment be able to detect Omega as 'some excess of personal, extra-human energy', the more detailed contemplation of which will disclose the Great Presence. Although already in existence, Omega is added to progressively: 'All round us, one by one, like a continual exhalation, "souls" break away, carrying upwards their incommunicable load of consciousness', and so we end up with 'a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness'.
Teilhard devotes some little thought to the apparently insuperable problem of how to reconcile the persistence of individual consciousnesses with their assimilation to Omega. But the problem yields to the application of 'remorseless logic'. The individual particles of consciousness do not join up any old how, but only center to center, thanks to the mediation of Love; Omega, then, 'in its ultimate principle, can only be a distinct Center radiating at the core of a system of centers', and the final state of the world is one in which 'unity coincides with a paroxysm of harmonized complexity'. And so our hero escapes from his dire predicament: with one bound Jack was free.
Although elsewhere Teilhard has dared to write an equation so explicit as 'Evolution = Rise of Consciousness' he does not go so far as to write 'Omega = God'; but in the course of some obscure pious rant he does tell us that God, like Omega, is a 'Center of centers', and in one place he refers to 'God-Omega'.
How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind, for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. It is through their eyes that we must attempt to see the attractions of Teilhard, which I shall jot down in the order in which they come to mind.
Galatians 5:
20 Idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions, sects,
21 ... Of the which I foretell you, as I have foretold to you, that they who do such things shall not obtain the kingdom of God.
Father Malachi Martin - witness to the Truth: Primacy: How the Institutional Roman Catholic Church Became a Creature of the New World Order
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin the practicing witch.
THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION
New Agers believe in the theory of evolution. Reincarnation is actually based on the idea of evolution... man 'evolves' through lifetime after lifetime in endless successive incarnations until they finally reach perfection. Eastern Mysticism teaches that the lower forms of life evolve into higher forms of life and that eventually all men will evolve back into godhood or the 'Source from which they came'.
The Jesuit, PierreTeilhard de Chardin, (sometimes referred to as the Father of the New Age Movement), eagerly investigated paleontology, which is the study of prehistoric animal fossils, which undoubtedly led to his later obsession with the theory of evolution. "Spiritualism teaches that man is the creature of progression; that it is his destiny from birth to progress or to evolve, even to eternity, toward the godhead". Ellen White, Great Controversy pg 554 In like manner, Teilhard believed that the more man became like his 'true self' (otherwise known as the Higher Self) -the more he evolved into 'what God is'.
The idea behind this theory is that man was already God and that it was essential that he go back to the Source from whence he came, to find his 'True Self.' He needed to evolve into the 'Ultra Human' or into the God-man to whom Teilhard was referring. Once man reaches this state, he is presumed to have achieved what is known as 'Cosmic Consciousness.' And so the 'Father' of the New Age Movement was deeply involved in the theory of evolution.
This New Age idea of spiritual evolution makes man his own savior- convincing him that he has the ability to evolve into a god-man. The Creationist believes that since God created the world and created us- He can therefore re-create us into His own image with a god-like character. The Evolutionist is proud however, and thinks he can progress spiritually on his own, without the assistance of God... for he thinks himself to be a god!
http://www.religiouscounterfeits.org/EvolvingIntoGodhood.htm
The Phenomenon of Man
Sir Peter Medawar
Everything does not happen continuously at any one moment in the universe. Neither does everything happen everywhere in it.
There are no summits without abysses.
When the end of the world is mentioned, the idea that leaps into our minds is always one of catastrophe.
Life is born and propagates itself on the earth as a solitary pulsation.
In the last analysis the best guarantee that a thing should happen is that it appears to us as vitally necessaryThis little bouquet of aphorism, each one thought sufficiently important by its author to deserve a paragraph to itself, is taken from Père Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man. It is a book widely held to be of the utmost profundity and significance; it created something like a sensation upon its publication in France, and some reviewers hereabouts called it the Book of the Year --- one, the Book of the Century. Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. The Phenomenon of Man cannot be read without a feeling of suffocation, a gasping and flailing around for sense. There is an argument in it, to be sure --- a feeble argument, abominably expressed --- and this I shall expound in due course; but consider first the style, because it is the style that creates the illusion of content, and which is a cause as well as merely a symptom of Teilhard's alarming apocalyptic seizures.
The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought. French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit. It is of the nature and reproduction that progeny should outnumber parents, and of Mendelian heredity that the inborn endowments of the parents should be variously recombined and reassorted among their offspring, so enlarging the population's candidature for evolutionary change. Teilhard puts the matter thus: it is one of his more lucid passages, and Mr Wall's translation, here as almost everywhere else, captures the spirit and sense of the original.
Reproduction doubles the mother cell. Thus, by a mechanism which is the inverse of chemical disintegration, it multiplies without crumbling. At the same time, however, it transforms what was only intended to be prolonged. Closed in on itself, the living element reaches more or less quickly a state of immobility. It becomes stuck and coagulated in its evolution. Then by the act of reproduction it regains the faculty for inner re-adjustment and consequently takes on a new appearance and direction. The process is one of pluralization in form as well as in number. The elemental ripple of life that emerges from each individual unit does not spread outwards in a monotonous circle formed of individual units exactly like itself. It is diffracted and becomes iridescent, with an indefinite scale of variegated tonalities. The living unit is a center of irresistible multiplication, and ipso facto an equally irresistible focus of diversification.In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that reproduction is only 'intended' to make facsimiles, for parasexual processes of genetical exchange are to be found in the simplest living things. There seems to be some confusion between the versatility of a population and the adaptability of an individual. But errors of fact or judgement of this kind are to be found throughout, and are not my immediate concern; notice instead the use of adjectives of excess (misuse, rather, for genetic diversity is not indefinite nor multiplication irresistible). Teilhard is for ever shouting at us: things or affairs are, in alphabetical order, astounding, colossal, endless, enormous, fantastic, giddy, hyper-, immense, implacable, indefinite, inexhaustible, extricable, infinite, infinitesimal, innumerable, irresistible, measureless, mega-, monstrous, mysterious, prodigious, relentless, super-, ultra-, unbelievable, unbridled or unparalleled. When something is described as merely huge we feel let down. After this softening-up process we are ready to take delivery of the neologisms: biota, noosphere, hominsation, complexification. There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus. 'Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct tract marked on the heart of the element by the psychical converge of the universe upon itself.' 'Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself,' and evolution is 'nothing else than the continual growth of. ... 'psychic' or 'radial' energy'. Again, 'the Christogenesis of St Paul and St John is nothing else and nothing less than the extension ... of that noogenesis in which cosmogenesis ... culminates'. It would have been a great disappointment to me if Vibration did not did not somewhere make itself felt, for all scientistic mystics either vibrate in person or find themselves resonant with cosmic vibrations; but I am happy to say that on page 266 Teilhard will be found to do so.
These are trivialities, revealing though they are, and perhaps I make too much of them. The evolutionary origins of consciousness are indeed distant and obscure, and perhaps so trite a thought does need this kind of dressing to make it palatable: 'refracted rearwards along the course of evolution, consciousness displays itself qualitatively as a spectrum of shifting hints whose lower terms are lost in the night' (the roman type is mine). What is much more serious is the fact that Teilhard habitually and systematically cheats with words. his work, he has assured us, is to be read, not as a metaphysical system, but 'purely and simply as a scientific treatise' executed with 'remorseless' or 'inescapable' logic; yet he uses in metaphor words like energy, tension, force, impetus and dimension as ifthey retained the weight and thrust of their specific scientific usages. Consciousness, for example, is a matter upon which Teilhard has been said to have illuminating views. For the most part consciousness is treated as a manifestation of energy, though this does not help us very much because the word 'energy' is itself debauched; but elsewhere we learn that consciousness is a dimension, or is something with mass, or is something corpuscular and particulate which can exist in various degrees of concentration, being sometimes infinitely diffuse. In his lay capacity, Teilhard, a naturalist, practised a comparatively humble and unexacting kind of science, but he must have known better than to play such tricks as these. On page 60 we read:
The simplest form of protoplasm is already a substance of unheard-of complexity. This complexity increases in geometrical progression as pass from the protozoon higher and higher up the scale of the metazoa. And so it is for the whole of the remainder everywhere and always.Later we are told that the 'nascent cellular world shows itself to be already infinitely complex'. This seems to leave little room for improvement. In any event complexity (a subject on which Teilhard has a great deal to say) is not measurable in those scalar quantities to which the concept of geometrical progression applies.
In spite of all the obstacles that Teilhard perhaps wisely puts in our way, it is possible to discern a train of thought in The Phenomenon of Man. It is founded upon the belief that the fundamental process or motion in the entire universe is evolution, and evolution is 'a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow ... a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow'. This being so, it follows that 'nothing could ever burst forth as final across the different thresholds successively traversed by evolution ... which has not already existed in an obscure and primordial way' (again my romans). Nothing is wholly new: there is always some primordium or rudiment or archetype of whatever exists or has existed. Love, for example --- 'that is to say, the affinity of being with being' --- is to be found in some form throughout the organic world, and even at a 'prodigiously rudimentary level', for if there were no such affinity between atoms when they unite into molecules it would be 'physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in "hominized" form'. But above all, consciousness is not new, for this would contradict the evolutionary axiom; on the contrary, we are 'logically forced to assume the existence in rudimentary form ... of some sort of psyche in every corpuscle', even in molecules; 'by the very fact of the individualization of our planet, a certain mass of elementary consciousness was originally imprisoned in the matter of earth'.
What form does this elementary consciousness take? Scientists have not been able to spot it, for they are shallow superficial fellows, unable to see into the inwardness of things --- 'up to now, has science ever trouble to look at the world other than from without?' Consciousness is an interiority of matter, an 'inner face that everywhere duplicates the "material" external face, which alone is commonly considered by science'. To grasp the nature of the within of things we must understand that energy is of two kinds: the 'tangential', which is energy as scientists use that word, and a radial energy (a term used interchangeably with spiritual or psychic energy), of which consciousness is treated sometimes as the equivalent, sometimes as the manifestation, and sometimes as the consequence (there is no knowing what Teilhard intends). Radial energy appears to be a measure of, or what conduces towards, complexity or degree of arrangement; thus 'spiritual energy, by its very nature, increases in "radial" value ... in step with the increasing chemical complexity of the elements of which it represents the inner lining'. It confers centricity, and 'the increase of the synthetic state of matter involves ... an increase of consciousness'.
We are now therefore in a position to understand what evolution is (is nothing but). Evolution is 'the continual growth of ... "psychic" or "radial" energy, in the course of duration, beneath and within the mechanical energy I called "tangential" '; evolution, then is 'am ascent towards consciousness'. It follows that evolution must have a 'precise orientation and a privileged axis' at the topmost pole of which lies Man, born 'a direct lineal descendant from the total effort of life.'
Let us fill in the intermediate stages. Teilhard, with a penetrating insight that Sir Julian Huxley singles out for special praise, discerns that consciousness in the everyday sense is somehow associated with the possession of nervous systems and brains ('we have every reason to think that in animals too a certain inwardness exists, approximately proportional to the development of their brains'). The direction of evolution must therefore be towards cerebralisation, that is, towards becoming brainier. 'Among the infinite modalities in which the complication of life is dispersed,' he tells us, 'the differentiation of nervous tissue stands out ... as a significant transformation. It provides a direction; and by its consequences it proves that evolution has a direction.' All else is equivocal and insignificant; in the process of becoming brainier we find 'the very essence of complexity, of essential metamorphosis'. And if we study the evolution of living things, organic evolution, we shall find that in every one of its lines, except only in those in which it does not occur, evolution is an evolution towards increasing complexity of the nervous system and cerebralisation. Plants don't count, to be sure (because 'in the vegetable kingdom we are unable to follow along a nervous system the evolution of a psychism obviously remaining diffuse'), and the contemplation of insects provokes a certain shuffling of the feet [p. 153]; but primates are 'a phylum of pure and direct cerebralization' and among them 'evolution went straight to work on the brain, neglecting everything else'. Here is Teilhard's description of noogenesis, the birth of higher consciousness among the primates, and of the noosphere in which that higher consciousness is deployed:
By the end of the Tertiary era, the psychical temperature in the cellular world had been rising for more than 500 million years ... When the anthropoid, so to speak, had been brought 'mentally' to boiling-point some further calories were added ... No more was needed for the whole inner equilibrium to be upset ... By a tiny 'tangential' increase, the 'radial' was turned back on itself and so to speak took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had change. But in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations ...The analogy, it should be explained, is with the vaporization of water when it is brought to boiling-point, and the image of hot vapor remains when all else is forgotten.
I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose. What Teilhard seems to be trying to say is that evolution is often (he says always) accompanied by an increase of orderliness or internal coherence or degree of integration. In what sense is the fertilized egg that develops into an adult human being 'higher' than, say, a bacterial cell? In the sense that it contains richer and more complicated genetical instructions for the execution of those processes that together constitute development. Thus Teilhard's radial, spiritual or psychic energy may be equated to 'information' or 'information content' in the sense that has been made reasonably precise by modern communication engineers. To equate it to consciousness, or to regard degree of consciousness as a measure of information content, is one of the silly little metaphysical conceits I mentioned in an earlier paragraph. Teilhard's belief, enthusiastically shared by Sir Julian Huxley, that evolution flouts or foils the second law of thermodynamics is based on a confusion of thought; and the idea that evolution has a main track or privileged axis is unsupported by scientific evidence.
Teilhard is widely believed to have rejected the modern Mendelian-Darwinian theory of evolution or to have demonstrated its inadequacy. Certainly he imports a ghost, the entelechy or élan vital of an earlier terminology, into the Mendelian machine; but he seems to accept the idea that evolution is probationary and exploratory and mediated through a selective process, a 'groping', a 'billionfold trial and error; 'far be it from me', he declares, 'to deny its importance'. Unhappily Teilhard has no grasp of the real weakness of modern evolutionary theory, namely its lack of a complete theory of variation, of the origin of candidature for evolution. It is not enough to say that 'mutation' is ultimately the source of all genetical diversity, for that is merely to give the phenomenon a name: mutation is so defined. What we want, and what we are slowly beginning to get, is a comprehensive theory of the forms in which new genetical information comes into being. It may, as I have hinted elsewhere, turn out to be of the nature of nucleic acids and the chromosomal apparatus that they tend spontaneously to proffer genetical variants --- genetical solutions to the problem of remaining alive --- which are more complex and more elaborate than the immediate occasion calls for; but to construe this 'complexification' as a manifestation of consciousness is a wilful abuse of words.
Teilhard's metaphysical argument begins where the scientific argument leaves off, and the gist of it is extremely simple. Inasmuch as evolution is the fundamental motion of the entire universe, an ascent along a privileged and necessary pathway towards consciousness, so it follows that our present consciousness must 'culminate forwards in some sort of supreme consciousness'. In expounding this thesis, Teilhard becomes more and more confused and excited and finally almost hysterical. The Supreme Consciousness, which apparently assimilates to itself all our personal consciousnesses, is, or is embodied in, 'Omega' or the Omega-point; in Omega 'the movement of synthesis culminates'. Now Omega is 'already in existence and operative at the very core of the thinking mass', so if we have our wits about us we should at this moment be able to detect Omega as 'some excess of personal, extra-human energy', the more detailed contemplation of which will disclose the Great Presence. Although already in existence, Omega is added to progressively: 'All round us, one by one, like a continual exhalation, "souls" break away, carrying upwards their incommunicable load of consciousness', and so we end up with 'a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness'.
Teilhard devotes some little thought to the apparently insuperable problem of how to reconcile the persistence of individual consciousnesses with their assimilation to Omega. But the problem yields to the application of 'remorseless logic'. The individual particles of consciousness do not join up any old how, but only center to center, thanks to the mediation of Love; Omega, then, 'in its ultimate principle, can only be a distinct Center radiating at the core of a system of centers', and the final state of the world is one in which 'unity coincides with a paroxysm of harmonized complexity'. And so our hero escapes from his dire predicament: with one bound Jack was free.
Although elsewhere Teilhard has dared to write an equation so explicit as 'Evolution = Rise of Consciousness' he does not go so far as to write 'Omega = God'; but in the course of some obscure pious rant he does tell us that God, like Omega, is a 'Center of centers', and in one place he refers to 'God-Omega'.
How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind, for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. It is through their eyes that we must attempt to see the attractions of Teilhard, which I shall jot down in the order in which they come to mind.
- The Phenomenon of Man is anti-scientific in temper (scientists are shown up as shallow folk skating about on the surface of things), and, as if that were not recommendation enough, it was written by a scientist, a fact which seems to give it particular authority and weight. Laymen firmly believe that scientists are one species of person. They are not to know that different branches of science require very different aptitudes and degrees of skill for their prosecution. Teilhard practised an intellectually unexacting kind of science in which he achieved a moderate proficiency. He has no grasp of what makes a logical argument or of what makes for proof. He does not even preserve the common decencies of scientific writing, though his book is professedly a scientific treatise.
- It is written in an all but totally unintelligible style, and this is construed as prima-facie evidence of profundity. (At present this applies only to works of French authorship; in later Victorian and Edwardian times the same deference was thought due to Germans, with equally little reason.) It is because Teilhard has such wonderful deep thoughts that he's so difficult to follow --- really it's beyond my poor brain but doesn't that just show how profound and important it must be?
- It declares that Man is in a sorry state, the victim of a 'fundamental anguish of being', a 'malady of space-time', a sickness of 'cosmic gravity'. The Predicament of Man is all the rage now that people have sufficient leisure and are sufficiently well fed to contemplate it, and many a tidy literary reputation has been built upon exploiting it; anybody nowadays who dared to suggest that the plight of man might not be wholly desperate would get a sharp rap over the knuckles in any literary weekly. Teilhard not only diagnoses in everyone the fashionable disease but propounds a remedy for it --- yet a remedy so obscure and so remote from the possibility of application that it is not likely to deprive any practitioner of a living.
- The Phenomenon of Man was introduced to the English-speaking world by Sir Julian Huxley, who, like myself, finds Teilhard somewhat difficult to follow ('If I understood him aright'; 'here his thought is not fully clear to me'; etc.). Unlike myself, Sir Julian finds Teilhard in possession of a 'rigorous sense of values', one who 'always endeavored to think concretely'; he was speculative, to be sure, but his speculation was 'always disciplined by logic'. But then it does not seem to me that Huxley expounds Teilhard's argument; his Introduction does little more than to call attention to parallels between Teilhard's thinking and his own. Chief among these is the cosmic significance attached to a suitably generalized conception of evolution --- a conception so diluted or attenuated in the course of being generalized as to cover all events or phenomena that are not immobile in time. In particular, Huxley applauds the, in my opinion, mistaken belief that the so-called 'psychosocial evolution' of mankind and the genetical evolution of living organisms generally are two episodes of a continuous integral process (though separated by a 'critical point', whatever that may mean). Yet for all this Huxley finds it impossible to follow Teilhard 'all the way in his gallant attempt to reconcile the supernatural elements in Christianity with the facts and implications of evolution'. But, bless my soul, this reconciliation is just what Teilhard's book is about!
Peter Medawar
Sir Peter B. Medawar, OM, FRS (1915--1987). British immunologist of Arab extraction (which, as he said in Memoir of a Thinking Radish, makes him sound like a kind of gum). Won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1960 for work on tissue transplantation which eventually helped make organ transplants possible. In addition, he wrote extensively, and extremely well, on science and philosophy.
``Biology and Man's Estimation of Himself''
``On `The Effecting of All Things Possible' ''
``Does Ethology Throw Any Light on Human Behavior?''
``The Future of Man,'' the last of six lectures of the same title. This one is on ``exosomatic'' (i.e., mental) evolution and heredity.
Review of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man
``Technology and Evolution''
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Medawar/
___________________________________________________________________________________
Pantheist Mysticism
Pantheist Mysticism vs. Created Reality
Ellen Myers
The orthodox Christian believes in the God of the Bible Who is apart from and above all things visible and invisible as their Creator out of nothing, and their sovereign Lord and Sustainer. The atheist believes that there is no God, claiming that empirically verifiable matter in motion is all there is. Such empirical reductionism is becoming eclipsed today, however, by what Thomas Molnar has called
Molnar shows that when Gnosticism was defeated by the spreading Christian faith in the fifth century A.D., it was not totally extirpated but went underground, to survive and eventually resurface, especially during the Renaissance. One of its branches was "the Jewish Cabala which claimed to go back to the Jews' captivity in Babylon where they had supposedly studied the Brahmanic texts of india, and, later, the Persian spirituality."5 Another major strand of gnostic-pantheist mysticism Rosicrucianism goes back to Egypt, to the Persian magi, the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, and to Arabia. Gnostic-pantheist mysticism in the forms of esoteric freemasonry, astrology and alchemy also flourished during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Astrology and alchemy are "as old as the earliest mining and metallurgical activities of men . These esoteric teachings are intimately related."6 These teachings are in vogue again in our own days, sometimes violently. R.C. Zaehner, an Oxford historian of Oriental religions, has shown the link between ancient Brahmanic thought, the practice of Zen, and the beliefs of the Charles Manson Family, the Satanist cult which shocked America with the Tate-La Bianca murders in August 1 959~7 Revived astrology meets us today in every major daily newspaper.
Since alchemy, an important part of the pantheist mystic revival in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, is supposedly extinct today, the following points need to be made. Gary North has written:
Lurking behind the transformation of matter into spirit is the transformation of man into God. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier wrote:
The approval of mankind's "evolutionary leap" into one single world-wide collective of necessity includes a push for openness towards communist views. Thus Stephen Jay Gould is quoted by Ferguson in connection with the new punctualist" evolution model:
It should not surprise us that the goal of pantheist mystics is a collectivistic "one world." Such a world would merely incarnate the pantheistic oneness they see underneath all things. What some of them may sincerely not perceive (Teilhard stressed his belief in "democracy"), or may willingly deceive themselves and each other into overlooking, is that all societies built by pantheist mystics in the past, or envisioned in fundamentally pantheist-mystical utopian fiction, have been variations of the Soviet inferno of the "Gulag Archipelago,"19 and must be such of necessity! For a collective society is administered by an oligarchy or a dictator, and for it to behave "as one Man" means the strict enforcement of total bondage to the administrators. A society cannot be truly pluralistic and monolithic at one and the same time. If mankind's next "evolutionary leap" makes mankind "in a sense, a single individual" then woe to men and women who will not fit the collective mold! They must be conformed to it by any and all means (for indeed that end, world-wide oneness in fusion with the god of the world justifies all means!) - or they must be discarded in the name of their own and the collective's welfare, the definition of "love." (And since they merely dissolve into chemicals when they are discarded - which chemicals still belong to the one world what harm is done, anyway? In the pantheist mystics' world, you can do no real wrong.) How fittingly Orwell named his "change agency for the transformation of society" "the Ministry of Love ("Miniluv")" in 1984!
This inherent pantheist-mystic drift toward totalitarianism may explain the curious blindness often found in the writings of pantheist mystics towards communist reality, and even occasionally towards fascism or Nazism. It is part of their all-pervading and fatuous optimism about the future "one world", which in turn is rooted in their denial of original sin. Again, if the reality in which we live and move is "all one" if "God" is us and we are God then the concept of good and evil as absolute opposites must be false. At most, "good" and "evil" are bound up with the pantheist world's evolutionary process This process is fondly seen in a continuous upward or forward direction in which, in horrible perversion of Romans 8:28, "all things work together for good."
Thus Teilhard could believe that the end of evolution was man joining with other men to make a kind of simple organism with a single Personal God. When that goal was reached, he proclaimed, "Everything that is hard, crusty, or rebellious. . . all that is false and reprehensible. . . all that is physically or morally evil will disappear . . . Matter will be absorbed into Spirit."20 Teilhard could also "once again" suggest in 1948 "the adoption of a truly human faith" combining the "rational force of Marxism" with the "human warmth of Christianity."21 The French Communist Roger Garaudy could quote Teilhard at some length in defending Communist-Roman Catholic dialogue, and he concluded his argument with a statement by Teilhard: "The synthesis of the (Christian! God of the Above and the (Marxist! God of the Ahead: this is the only God whom we shall in the future be able to adore in spirit and in truth."22 Teilhard also asserted in The Future of Man that "the modern totalitarian regimes, whatever their initial defects, are neither heresies nor biological regressions: they are in line with the essential trend of 'cosmic' movement."23 In Science and Christ he wrote: "Fascism represents possibly a blueprint, rather successfully done, of the world of tomorrow."24 Teilhard also anticipated the transformation of mankind into one single unit by the tool of eugenics, a notorious Nazi "change agent" to transform Germany into a pure Aryan society. In a 1946 debate on the subject of "Science and Rationality" he shocked the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel by
It must be pointed out again that these Teilhardian views are not an aberration but rather a corollary of a consistent pantheist mystical world view. Within that view, however, divergence is possible and exists about the final state, goal or consummation of the entire process. Will the end state be personal or impersonal? Here Teilhard opted for progressive personalization. For instance, he objected to a famous Indian guru's "raw pantheism" because "(t)here could be no real love of neighbor without individuation a thing impossible in the pantheist perspective."27 The defense of Teilhard by his adherents against the accusation of heresy, for instance by Henri de Lubac, is based upon such Teilhardian "personalism."
Teilhard based his reconciliation of man's union with God and man's individuation at first sight incompatible within the pantheist mystic scheme upon his view that "union differentiates." However, union cannot differentiate if understood as fusion of the uniting entities; and it must inevitably be understood fundamentally and ultimately as fusion in a pantheist-mystical world view seeing the whole world as "all-one" already to begin with. Teilhard apparently never resolved this internal contradiction of his thought, but kept defending both distinct personality of individuals, and what he once called "totalization of the individual in the collective man."28 Like Sorokin, Teilhard thought of love as "cosmic energy."29 Viewed from the Biblical perspective, if Satan, the god of this world, and a person, is behind the gnostic-pantheistmystical scheme, as indeed he is according to the Scriptures Ephesians 6:12; I Corinthians 10:20; II Corinthians 4:4), then this internal contradiction between personalism and impersonalism within pantheist mysticism will be resolved in favor of personalism for those more truly attuned to their god.
Teilhard attempted to present his system as a Christian one, although he himself was aware of the difficulties of doing so. He wrote Leontine Zanta that he was trying to establish and diffuse
What is the practical outworking of the pantheist-mystic "conspiracy" right now? Ferguson's listing of certain "psychotechnologies" gives usa cue: (a) the "consciousness-raising" strategies of various social movements calling attention to "old assumptions": (b) self-help and mutual-help networks cooperating with "higher forces" by looking inward: and (c) seminars "which attempt to break the cultural trance and open the individual to new choices." Common to all three is the questioning of "traditional morality" (the "old assumptions" of our supposed "cultural trance"). Now "traditional" morality, though doubtless adulterated by sin, is the offspring of Biblical morality,35 which is rooted in the holiness, wisdom, and sovereign authority the character of the God of Creation. Now as ever since their god "raised the consciousness" of Adam in Eden, pantheist mystics will not submit to the God of the Bible and His created reality.
They are making tremendous headway today. For example, the "values clarification" techniques now being used in many American public schools37 are evidently part of their intended "transformation of society," in which teachers admittedly function as "change agents." The key premise of "values clarification" is that there is no absolute right or wrong (based upon emergent evolutionism in this monist universe), and that therefore each man, woman and child may and should determine his or her own relative value system or "alternative lifestyle" in which the Charles Manson Family is as good as the Bible-based "traditional" family. The gnostic-pantheist mystic will accept you with tolerant condescension it you refrain from murder, theft, fornication etc. because that is "your own thing." "But the temperature drops," C.S. Lewis wryly remarks, "as soon as you mention a God who has purposes and performs particular actions, who does one thing and not another, a concrete, choosing, commanding, prohibiting God with a determinate character."38 The most furious attack upon Christians today is that we "impose our morality upon others" especially on the subject of abortion, "gay rights," and even (still mutedly) incest.
The gnostic-pantheist mystic has ever resented that God created man male and female and charged him with procreation of his kind and with stewardship over the rest of material creation (Genesis 1:27-28). This resentment is directed against the created, fixed identity of man (men and women) and the creative decree of God circumscribing mankind's duties under Him. It is expressed either by extreme ascetic abstinence from sex and material things the "touch not, taste not, handle not" warned against in Colossians 2:2Off. or else by unbridled indulgence or perversion. This asceticism-libertinism dichotomy has been a notorious aspect of gnostic-pantheist mysticism throughout its history.39 The reasons should be obvious: one, the denial of original and all sin; and second, that once one says, "all is god/spirit" one may (ascetically) shun matter as "illusion" one may plunge into matter as divine one may even gorge upon matter in order to lose one's taste for it and so fuse with "pure spirit" it does not matter which. Ultimately nothing does mailer in the gnostic-pantheist mystic scheme, for despite all the glow of optimism about the next "evolutionary leap" and the upward and forward cosmic movement to some "Omega Point" where all that is is pure spirit no real transcendence to a really "higher state" is possible. If you are already god, and if all that is is already god - and if there is nothing else then haven't you reached your "goal" already? Alternately, is not talk about some future or goal meaningless? This is the ultimate void faced by the pantheist mystic. He has three options: (1) eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die; (2) hasten your absorption into Nirvana where you are freed from individual consciousness (Gautama Buddha's answer); (3) don't think about it all too much. There is, of course, another alternative: call upon the God of Creation and receive your life's meaning in Him, absolutely.
We must guard against viewing pantheist mysticism as some "new" development of our own day; it is merely the same old "religion" of the worshippers of the god of this world. C.S. Lewis gave us gripping fictional portraits of gnostic-pantheist mystic personalities in his Professor Weston, the "un-Man" of Perelandra, and in Straik, Wither and Frost of That Hideous Strength. Less striking but equally true is this great Christian apologist's sketch of the system itself which will sum up and conclude our discussion:
REFERENCES
1 Thomas Molnar, "The Gnostic Tradition and Renaissance Occultism," The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Vol.1, No.2 (Winter, 1974), 112.
2 Pat Means, The Mystical Maze, Campus Crusade for Christ, 1976, 25.
3 Ellen Myers, "Sorokin's `Integralism' vs. the Biblical Creation Position," Creation Social Science & Humanities Quarterly, Vol.11, No.1 (Fall 1979), 14-15,
4 Molnar, bc. cit. Also cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, Boston, Second Enlarged Edition ph. 1963, passim.
5 Ibid,, 113.
6 Idem.
7 Idem. Also cf. the detailed description of the bizarre beliefs of the Manson Family in Ed Sanders, The Family, Avon, New York, First Avon Printing, May, 1972. Chapter Eight, "Helter Skelter," and Chapter Nine, "The Solar Lodge of the O.T.O.", are especially revealing.
8 Gary North, "The Morning of the Magicians" by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, a Book Review, The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Vol.1, No.2 (Winter, 1974), 184. This writer read the book by Pauwels and Bergier in its entirety at the time of its publication 11973), and agrees with North that it "has now given to Gnosticism an audience wider than GnostICS would ever have believed possible" (loc Cit., 187).
9 Pierre Teuhard de Chardin, Letter's to Leontine Zanta, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York and Evanston, 1969, 114.
10 Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, quoted by North in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, bc. Cit.. 184-185.
11 Myers, Op Cit., 25.
12 Idem.
13 Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 9110 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90069,87.
14 Ibid. 86-87.
15 Ibid. 159.
16 Ibid, 162.
17 Ibid, 160.
18 Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas, Tejihard, Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, New York, 1977, 121-132.
19 cf. IgorShafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1980. The importance of this thoroughly researched study cannot be overemphasized.
20 Lukas and Lukas, op. cit., 50.
21 Ibid, 249.
22 Leo S. Schumacher, The Truth About Teithard, Twin Circle Publishing Co., 86 Riverside Dr., New York, NY 10024,1968,33. This is a well researched and annotated study by a Catholic priest. Since the original publisher has gone out of business, individual copies of this study may be obtained from Mary Immaculate Queen of the Universe Center, P.O. Box 1207, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 68814 (price quoted in 1981 was $1.00 per copy ppd.)
23 Ibid, 34.
24, Idem.
25 Lukas and Lukas, Op. Cit., 237-238. This biography of Teuhard is written from an admiring perspective, and hence all the more valuable as a source for Teilhard Critics.
26 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Trojan Horse in the City ofGod, Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, IL 60609, Revised Edition March 8,1967, 232. Dr. von Hildebrand personally met and talked with Teilhard in 1951 upon the recommendation of Teilhard's friends and supporters, Father Henri de Lubac and Msgr. Bruno de Solages (bc. Cit., 227). Dr. von Hildebrand, himself a noted Catholic philosopher, was bitterly disappointed in Teuhard, especially by his exclamation regarding St. Augustine: "Don't mention that unfortunate man; he spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural." (loc. cit., 227). The entire appendix (pp. 227-253) of Trojan Horse in the City of God, entitled "Teilhard de Chardin: A False Prophet" is a scholarly philosophical treatise on the incompatibility of Teilhard with orthodox Catholicism.
27 Ibid., 251.
28 cf. Ibid, 231ff.
29 Ibid., 234.
30 Teillhard, op. cit., 114.
31 Lukas and Lukas, op. &t, 342.
32 Ibid, 312-313.
33 Ferguson, op. c,t. 420. Teithard was named as the most influential upon the thought of some 185 "Aquarian conspirators" polled by Ferguson in preparation of The Aquarian Conspiracy. This writer was asked for materials exposing the heresies of Teilhard when
she visited Europe in 1980, because of the popularity of his thought among European Catholics.
34 Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, Encyclical Letter concerning some false Opinions which Threaten to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine. Given at Rome, at St. Peter's, August 12, 1950. Order from Daughters of St. Paul, 50 St. Paul's Ave., Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA 02130. Estimated 1981 price S .50 per copy ppd.
35 Ibid, 15.
36 This is true not only for "Western traditional morality" but universally. Cf. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1947, Fourth Printing 1968, Appendix, "Illustration of the Tao."
37 For more information on "values clarification" and related programs, contact Pro-Family Forum, P.O. Box 14701, Fort Worth, Texas 76117.
38 C.S. Lewis, Miracles, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1947, Eleventh
Printing 1971,83.
39 Cf. the excellent, scholarly discussion of "Gnostic Morality" by HansJonas, The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press. Boston, Second Enlarged Edition, pb. 1963,270-281. For an allegorical treatment, see C.S. Lewis, The Pdgrim's Regress, Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 1958, reprinted January 1979, Book Eight, Chapter One, "Two Kinds of Monist," 138-141.
40 C.S. Lewis, Miracles, 85.
Ellen Myers
- the spontaneous bent of the archaic mind which predominated in most parts of the world and which threatens to prevail once more in our time the temptation. to identify God and self, to recognize in the soul a divine substance, indeed the seat of divinity.1
- ... the ancient, powerful, and perennial stream of philosophical thought represented by Taoism, the Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita. shared by all branches of Buddhism, including the Zen Buddhist thinkers. . by Heraclitus and Plato. . . reiterated by. . thinkers of the Neo-Platonic, the Hermetic, the Orphic, and other currents of thought.3
Molnar shows that when Gnosticism was defeated by the spreading Christian faith in the fifth century A.D., it was not totally extirpated but went underground, to survive and eventually resurface, especially during the Renaissance. One of its branches was "the Jewish Cabala which claimed to go back to the Jews' captivity in Babylon where they had supposedly studied the Brahmanic texts of india, and, later, the Persian spirituality."5 Another major strand of gnostic-pantheist mysticism Rosicrucianism goes back to Egypt, to the Persian magi, the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, and to Arabia. Gnostic-pantheist mysticism in the forms of esoteric freemasonry, astrology and alchemy also flourished during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Astrology and alchemy are "as old as the earliest mining and metallurgical activities of men . These esoteric teachings are intimately related."6 These teachings are in vogue again in our own days, sometimes violently. R.C. Zaehner, an Oxford historian of Oriental religions, has shown the link between ancient Brahmanic thought, the practice of Zen, and the beliefs of the Charles Manson Family, the Satanist cult which shocked America with the Tate-La Bianca murders in August 1 959~7 Revived astrology meets us today in every major daily newspaper.
Since alchemy, an important part of the pantheist mystic revival in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, is supposedly extinct today, the following points need to be made. Gary North has written:
- The mental image of the alchemist in the minds of most people, if any, is that of . . . the precursor of the modern chemist. Take one alchemist, remove his lust for gold, add the principles of secular Enlightenment philosophy, plus a dash of Cartesian methodology, and shake gently for two centuries; out pops modern chemistry. Not so. It was not the Enlightenment which produced modern science, but the Reformation (North bases this statement upon Robert K. Merton's doctoral dissertation, Social Theory and Social Structure, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957, chapter 18) . . alchemy was established on the principle of secret knowledge. It was the science of Gnosticism. Its technique was based on the idea that in the endless mixing of the same chemicals chemical opposites they would somehow transcend themselves after a hundred or a thousand repetitions.8
Lurking behind the transformation of matter into spirit is the transformation of man into God. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier wrote:
- The real aim of the alchemist's activities. . is the transformation of the alchemist himself, his accession to a higher state of consciousness. The material results are only a pledge of the final result, which is spiritual. Everything is oriented towards the transmutation of man himself, towards his deification, his fusion with the divine energy, the fixed center from which all material energies emanate.10
- …the ancient techniques of Yogas, Buddhism, Zen-Buddhism, Sufism the techniques invented by the founders of great religious and monastic orders Oriental and Occidental . . . the techniques of the eminent secular educators, such as Comenius, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Froebel and others.11
- Sensory isolation and overload: biofeedback; chanting; Psychodrama; the "consciousness-raising" strategies of various social movements calling attention to old assumptions; self-help and mutual-help networks cooperating with "higher forces" (sic) by looking inward; hypnosis and self-hypnosis; meditation including Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, chaotic, Transcendental, Kabbalist, kundalini, raja yoga, tantric yoga, etc.; various shamanic and magical techniques; seminars "which attempt to break the cultural trance and open the individual to new choices"; dream journals; Arica, Theosophy, and Gurdjieffian systems "which synthesize many different mystical traditions and teach techniques for altering awareness;
Contemporary psychotherapies; body disciplines and therapies, such as hatha yoga, Reichian, the Bates system for vision improvement, aikido, karate, running, dance; sensitivity groups, encounter groups; solitary activities "which foster self-discovery and a sense of timelessness."14
- …it opens us up to the possibility of rapid evolution in our own time, when the equilibrium of the species is punctuated by stress., . Pioneering becomes an increasingly psychospiritual venture since our physical frontiers are all but exhausted, short of space exploration. Given what we are learning about the nature of profound change, transformation of the human species seems less and less improbable.15
The approval of mankind's "evolutionary leap" into one single world-wide collective of necessity includes a push for openness towards communist views. Thus Stephen Jay Gould is quoted by Ferguson in connection with the new punctualist" evolution model:
- …we should consider alternative philosophies of change to enlarge our realm of constraining prejudices. In the Soviet Union, for example, scientists are trained with a very different philosophy of change They speak of the "transformation of quantity into quality." This may sound like mumbo jumbo, but it suggests that change occurs in large leaps following a slow accumulation of stresses that a system resists until it reaches the breaking point. Heat water and it eventually reaches a boiling point. Oppress the workers more and more and they suddenly break their chains.17
It should not surprise us that the goal of pantheist mystics is a collectivistic "one world." Such a world would merely incarnate the pantheistic oneness they see underneath all things. What some of them may sincerely not perceive (Teilhard stressed his belief in "democracy"), or may willingly deceive themselves and each other into overlooking, is that all societies built by pantheist mystics in the past, or envisioned in fundamentally pantheist-mystical utopian fiction, have been variations of the Soviet inferno of the "Gulag Archipelago,"19 and must be such of necessity! For a collective society is administered by an oligarchy or a dictator, and for it to behave "as one Man" means the strict enforcement of total bondage to the administrators. A society cannot be truly pluralistic and monolithic at one and the same time. If mankind's next "evolutionary leap" makes mankind "in a sense, a single individual" then woe to men and women who will not fit the collective mold! They must be conformed to it by any and all means (for indeed that end, world-wide oneness in fusion with the god of the world justifies all means!) - or they must be discarded in the name of their own and the collective's welfare, the definition of "love." (And since they merely dissolve into chemicals when they are discarded - which chemicals still belong to the one world what harm is done, anyway? In the pantheist mystics' world, you can do no real wrong.) How fittingly Orwell named his "change agency for the transformation of society" "the Ministry of Love ("Miniluv")" in 1984!
This inherent pantheist-mystic drift toward totalitarianism may explain the curious blindness often found in the writings of pantheist mystics towards communist reality, and even occasionally towards fascism or Nazism. It is part of their all-pervading and fatuous optimism about the future "one world", which in turn is rooted in their denial of original sin. Again, if the reality in which we live and move is "all one" if "God" is us and we are God then the concept of good and evil as absolute opposites must be false. At most, "good" and "evil" are bound up with the pantheist world's evolutionary process This process is fondly seen in a continuous upward or forward direction in which, in horrible perversion of Romans 8:28, "all things work together for good."
Thus Teilhard could believe that the end of evolution was man joining with other men to make a kind of simple organism with a single Personal God. When that goal was reached, he proclaimed, "Everything that is hard, crusty, or rebellious. . . all that is false and reprehensible. . . all that is physically or morally evil will disappear . . . Matter will be absorbed into Spirit."20 Teilhard could also "once again" suggest in 1948 "the adoption of a truly human faith" combining the "rational force of Marxism" with the "human warmth of Christianity."21 The French Communist Roger Garaudy could quote Teilhard at some length in defending Communist-Roman Catholic dialogue, and he concluded his argument with a statement by Teilhard: "The synthesis of the (Christian! God of the Above and the (Marxist! God of the Ahead: this is the only God whom we shall in the future be able to adore in spirit and in truth."22 Teilhard also asserted in The Future of Man that "the modern totalitarian regimes, whatever their initial defects, are neither heresies nor biological regressions: they are in line with the essential trend of 'cosmic' movement."23 In Science and Christ he wrote: "Fascism represents possibly a blueprint, rather successfully done, of the world of tomorrow."24 Teilhard also anticipated the transformation of mankind into one single unit by the tool of eugenics, a notorious Nazi "change agent" to transform Germany into a pure Aryan society. In a 1946 debate on the subject of "Science and Rationality" he shocked the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel by
- . . refusing to permit even the appalling evidence of the experiments of the doctors at Oachau to modify his faith in the inevitability of human progress. "Man," he asserted, "to become fully man, must have tried everything ..." . . . since, unlike the lower animals, man no longer acted purely out of instinct, he would presumably abandon every new experiment the moment he saw it did not lead him to greater personalization..... Prometheus !" Marcel had cried, articulating the astonishment of most of the audience. "No," Teilhard replied, "only man as God has made him."25
It must be pointed out again that these Teilhardian views are not an aberration but rather a corollary of a consistent pantheist mystical world view. Within that view, however, divergence is possible and exists about the final state, goal or consummation of the entire process. Will the end state be personal or impersonal? Here Teilhard opted for progressive personalization. For instance, he objected to a famous Indian guru's "raw pantheism" because "(t)here could be no real love of neighbor without individuation a thing impossible in the pantheist perspective."27 The defense of Teilhard by his adherents against the accusation of heresy, for instance by Henri de Lubac, is based upon such Teilhardian "personalism."
Teilhard based his reconciliation of man's union with God and man's individuation at first sight incompatible within the pantheist mystic scheme upon his view that "union differentiates." However, union cannot differentiate if understood as fusion of the uniting entities; and it must inevitably be understood fundamentally and ultimately as fusion in a pantheist-mystical world view seeing the whole world as "all-one" already to begin with. Teilhard apparently never resolved this internal contradiction of his thought, but kept defending both distinct personality of individuals, and what he once called "totalization of the individual in the collective man."28 Like Sorokin, Teilhard thought of love as "cosmic energy."29 Viewed from the Biblical perspective, if Satan, the god of this world, and a person, is behind the gnostic-pantheistmystical scheme, as indeed he is according to the Scriptures Ephesians 6:12; I Corinthians 10:20; II Corinthians 4:4), then this internal contradiction between personalism and impersonalism within pantheist mysticism will be resolved in favor of personalism for those more truly attuned to their god.
Teilhard attempted to present his system as a Christian one, although he himself was aware of the difficulties of doing so. He wrote Leontine Zanta that he was trying to establish and diffuse
- …a new religion (let's call it an improved Christianity, if you like) whose personal God is no longer the great 'neolithic' landowner of times gone by, but the Soul of the world as demanded by the cultural and religious stage we have now reached.30
- Only when the Church accepted evolution's part in the Divine Plan, he reasoned, and saw the Cross as the symbol of this agonizing process, could she restore true value to the sign.. Only the concept of a Christ who was crucified not simply "to carry the sins of a guilty world" but "to carry the weight of an evolving world" could convert the "sign of contradiction" into the seal of strength.32
- . . in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure . . .35
What is the practical outworking of the pantheist-mystic "conspiracy" right now? Ferguson's listing of certain "psychotechnologies" gives usa cue: (a) the "consciousness-raising" strategies of various social movements calling attention to "old assumptions": (b) self-help and mutual-help networks cooperating with "higher forces" by looking inward: and (c) seminars "which attempt to break the cultural trance and open the individual to new choices." Common to all three is the questioning of "traditional morality" (the "old assumptions" of our supposed "cultural trance"). Now "traditional" morality, though doubtless adulterated by sin, is the offspring of Biblical morality,35 which is rooted in the holiness, wisdom, and sovereign authority the character of the God of Creation. Now as ever since their god "raised the consciousness" of Adam in Eden, pantheist mystics will not submit to the God of the Bible and His created reality.
They are making tremendous headway today. For example, the "values clarification" techniques now being used in many American public schools37 are evidently part of their intended "transformation of society," in which teachers admittedly function as "change agents." The key premise of "values clarification" is that there is no absolute right or wrong (based upon emergent evolutionism in this monist universe), and that therefore each man, woman and child may and should determine his or her own relative value system or "alternative lifestyle" in which the Charles Manson Family is as good as the Bible-based "traditional" family. The gnostic-pantheist mystic will accept you with tolerant condescension it you refrain from murder, theft, fornication etc. because that is "your own thing." "But the temperature drops," C.S. Lewis wryly remarks, "as soon as you mention a God who has purposes and performs particular actions, who does one thing and not another, a concrete, choosing, commanding, prohibiting God with a determinate character."38 The most furious attack upon Christians today is that we "impose our morality upon others" especially on the subject of abortion, "gay rights," and even (still mutedly) incest.
The gnostic-pantheist mystic has ever resented that God created man male and female and charged him with procreation of his kind and with stewardship over the rest of material creation (Genesis 1:27-28). This resentment is directed against the created, fixed identity of man (men and women) and the creative decree of God circumscribing mankind's duties under Him. It is expressed either by extreme ascetic abstinence from sex and material things the "touch not, taste not, handle not" warned against in Colossians 2:2Off. or else by unbridled indulgence or perversion. This asceticism-libertinism dichotomy has been a notorious aspect of gnostic-pantheist mysticism throughout its history.39 The reasons should be obvious: one, the denial of original and all sin; and second, that once one says, "all is god/spirit" one may (ascetically) shun matter as "illusion" one may plunge into matter as divine one may even gorge upon matter in order to lose one's taste for it and so fuse with "pure spirit" it does not matter which. Ultimately nothing does mailer in the gnostic-pantheist mystic scheme, for despite all the glow of optimism about the next "evolutionary leap" and the upward and forward cosmic movement to some "Omega Point" where all that is is pure spirit no real transcendence to a really "higher state" is possible. If you are already god, and if all that is is already god - and if there is nothing else then haven't you reached your "goal" already? Alternately, is not talk about some future or goal meaningless? This is the ultimate void faced by the pantheist mystic. He has three options: (1) eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die; (2) hasten your absorption into Nirvana where you are freed from individual consciousness (Gautama Buddha's answer); (3) don't think about it all too much. There is, of course, another alternative: call upon the God of Creation and receive your life's meaning in Him, absolutely.
We must guard against viewing pantheist mysticism as some "new" development of our own day; it is merely the same old "religion" of the worshippers of the god of this world. C.S. Lewis gave us gripping fictional portraits of gnostic-pantheist mystic personalities in his Professor Weston, the "un-Man" of Perelandra, and in Straik, Wither and Frost of That Hideous Strength. Less striking but equally true is this great Christian apologist's sketch of the system itself which will sum up and conclude our discussion:
- So far from being the final religious refinement, Pantheism is in fact the permanent natural bent of the human mind . . It is the attitude into which the human mind automatically falls when left to itself. , . . If "religion" means simply what man says about God, and not what God does about man, then Pantheism almost is religion. And "religion" in that sense has, in the long run, only one really formidable opponent namely Christianity. . . . It is nearly as strong today as it was in ancient India or in ancient Rome. Theosophy and the worship of the life-force are both forms of it: even the German worship of a racial spirit (Lewis wrote shortly after World War II) is only Pantheism truncated or whittled down to suit barbarians. yet, by a strange irony, each new relapse into this immemorial "religion" is hailed as the last word in novelty and emancipation.40
REFERENCES
1 Thomas Molnar, "The Gnostic Tradition and Renaissance Occultism," The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Vol.1, No.2 (Winter, 1974), 112.
2 Pat Means, The Mystical Maze, Campus Crusade for Christ, 1976, 25.
3 Ellen Myers, "Sorokin's `Integralism' vs. the Biblical Creation Position," Creation Social Science & Humanities Quarterly, Vol.11, No.1 (Fall 1979), 14-15,
4 Molnar, bc. cit. Also cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, Boston, Second Enlarged Edition ph. 1963, passim.
5 Ibid,, 113.
6 Idem.
7 Idem. Also cf. the detailed description of the bizarre beliefs of the Manson Family in Ed Sanders, The Family, Avon, New York, First Avon Printing, May, 1972. Chapter Eight, "Helter Skelter," and Chapter Nine, "The Solar Lodge of the O.T.O.", are especially revealing.
8 Gary North, "The Morning of the Magicians" by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, a Book Review, The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Vol.1, No.2 (Winter, 1974), 184. This writer read the book by Pauwels and Bergier in its entirety at the time of its publication 11973), and agrees with North that it "has now given to Gnosticism an audience wider than GnostICS would ever have believed possible" (loc Cit., 187).
9 Pierre Teuhard de Chardin, Letter's to Leontine Zanta, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York and Evanston, 1969, 114.
10 Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, quoted by North in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, bc. Cit.. 184-185.
11 Myers, Op Cit., 25.
12 Idem.
13 Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 9110 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90069,87.
14 Ibid. 86-87.
15 Ibid. 159.
16 Ibid, 162.
17 Ibid, 160.
18 Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas, Tejihard, Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, New York, 1977, 121-132.
19 cf. IgorShafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1980. The importance of this thoroughly researched study cannot be overemphasized.
20 Lukas and Lukas, op. cit., 50.
21 Ibid, 249.
22 Leo S. Schumacher, The Truth About Teithard, Twin Circle Publishing Co., 86 Riverside Dr., New York, NY 10024,1968,33. This is a well researched and annotated study by a Catholic priest. Since the original publisher has gone out of business, individual copies of this study may be obtained from Mary Immaculate Queen of the Universe Center, P.O. Box 1207, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 68814 (price quoted in 1981 was $1.00 per copy ppd.)
23 Ibid, 34.
24, Idem.
25 Lukas and Lukas, Op. Cit., 237-238. This biography of Teuhard is written from an admiring perspective, and hence all the more valuable as a source for Teilhard Critics.
26 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Trojan Horse in the City ofGod, Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, IL 60609, Revised Edition March 8,1967, 232. Dr. von Hildebrand personally met and talked with Teilhard in 1951 upon the recommendation of Teilhard's friends and supporters, Father Henri de Lubac and Msgr. Bruno de Solages (bc. Cit., 227). Dr. von Hildebrand, himself a noted Catholic philosopher, was bitterly disappointed in Teuhard, especially by his exclamation regarding St. Augustine: "Don't mention that unfortunate man; he spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural." (loc. cit., 227). The entire appendix (pp. 227-253) of Trojan Horse in the City of God, entitled "Teilhard de Chardin: A False Prophet" is a scholarly philosophical treatise on the incompatibility of Teilhard with orthodox Catholicism.
27 Ibid., 251.
28 cf. Ibid, 231ff.
29 Ibid., 234.
30 Teillhard, op. cit., 114.
31 Lukas and Lukas, op. &t, 342.
32 Ibid, 312-313.
33 Ferguson, op. c,t. 420. Teithard was named as the most influential upon the thought of some 185 "Aquarian conspirators" polled by Ferguson in preparation of The Aquarian Conspiracy. This writer was asked for materials exposing the heresies of Teilhard when
she visited Europe in 1980, because of the popularity of his thought among European Catholics.
34 Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, Encyclical Letter concerning some false Opinions which Threaten to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine. Given at Rome, at St. Peter's, August 12, 1950. Order from Daughters of St. Paul, 50 St. Paul's Ave., Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA 02130. Estimated 1981 price S .50 per copy ppd.
35 Ibid, 15.
36 This is true not only for "Western traditional morality" but universally. Cf. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1947, Fourth Printing 1968, Appendix, "Illustration of the Tao."
37 For more information on "values clarification" and related programs, contact Pro-Family Forum, P.O. Box 14701, Fort Worth, Texas 76117.
38 C.S. Lewis, Miracles, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1947, Eleventh
Printing 1971,83.
39 Cf. the excellent, scholarly discussion of "Gnostic Morality" by HansJonas, The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press. Boston, Second Enlarged Edition, pb. 1963,270-281. For an allegorical treatment, see C.S. Lewis, The Pdgrim's Regress, Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 1958, reprinted January 1979, Book Eight, Chapter One, "Two Kinds of Monist," 138-141.
40 C.S. Lewis, Miracles, 85.
