Rome’s contribution to palaeo-cosmology

Colonnades and style - Rome's got it all!

A few days in Rome is enough to allow the spirit to breathe. I used to visit much more regularly, but any opportunity must now be cherished. The long walks around the forum, daily visits to the Vatican and plentiful gelato all put you in mind – well, the long walks do anyway – of Cicero’s ponderous, peripathetic tendencies to ruminate and expel. It’s time for some expelling.
I took with me Teilhard de Chardin’s censured, posthumous and really rather heavy-going The Phenomenon of Man. OK, so I cheated and started reading earlier in the week. As the Pope is visiting London, someone has to take care of Rome so I’ve escaped and, sharing in the pain of a long line of guardians of orthodoxy, thought I’d read something that will provoke a righteous fury. It’s been all too long since I was filled with some.

Pere Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit imbued with the spirit of the 70’s. However, oddly enough he finished the book in the 1930’s and it wasn’t until over a decade later that the mimeographs, letters and other provocations printed and circulated were embellished with the magnum opus itself. It had a monitum slapped on it the moment its spread was made obvious to the Holy Office – early 1960’s, to be precise.

I read it with interest. Having waded through the Hymn to the Universe in my undergraduate years, I wasn’t unfamiliar with the good Father’s main interests and despite possessing the equivalent of a blood hound’s snout in matters of orthodoxy, never found his writings to be particularly problematic. Two fears emerge: firstly, perhaps the sands of time have shifted so as to make heresy common place. The second one is more distressing – perhaps I hadn’t understood what I’d read.

The argument is overwhelmingly expansive, if not complex. As a war hero, priest, theologian but mainly – perhaps a little oddly – as a palaeontologist, Teilhard de Chardin seems to want to re-apply Darwin rather than re-writing the evolutionary theory. He sees the whole history of the world as a convergence, an upwards movement from the very beginning of the world (which he calls the Alpha) all the way to the emergence of homo sapiens and beyond. Interestingly, his discussion doesn’t sharpen on the mechanism of natural selection, but rather on the reality that the process seems to uncover. Step by step, the order of complexity in the universe increases, beginning from the first moments where the only common level consists of energy, rising into the organisation of atoms and then into cellular complexes, with life as a highest principle. All the way through to man, the complexity of the outputs increases and as the self-reflecting genus man constitutes a new unity, that of the thinking mind which we all possess.

As an aside, it’s an interesting parallel between the metaphysical cogitations of Teilhard de Chardin and the ethical principles of unity of humanity (or common humanity). We talk of a common understanding, a common basis, a common humanity that defines our moral obligations and duties towards each other. The metaphysical idea that forming a unity through the capacity of reflective thought, as a step among others (energy, materiality, life) constitutes a strong bridge to the ethical.

The book continues on the convergence of the universe into a more highly-linked, cooperative, superior state of intellect that has echoes of the Aristotelian in it. Everything tends towards greater complexity, further consciousness, ever increasing sociological coherence. There is a wondrous feeling of ease and common-sense as you read his words, the sweet honey that traps the mind so easily – and for a moment the mind is captured by the image. The ultimate object (the Omega) is not a forceful point of conflation but a tendency we can gesture at, never seemingly able to reach.

Perhaps the most telling episode in the reception of Teilhard de Chardin’s works was a few years ago when Benedict XVI managed to make a positive reference to the more theological aspects of our man’s writings  – a most unexpected context to hear praise for the cosmological meditations of a once-censured author.

If you’ve ever read Umberto Eco’s Focault’s Pendulum, you’ll be familiar with Abulafia’s abilities to mix contexts and create a narrative that jumps with great facility between topics, persons, even centuries in an attempt to decipher the complexity of history. The French style of Teilhard de Chardin is evocative of this, with the constant use of neologisms and a generated feel of isolation. The author started writing the piece whilst in virtual exile in China, so perhaps this isn’t altogether surprising, but it remains a stylistic burden as well as a characteristic more familiar to a novel rather than a piece of non-fiction. The inability to communicate through adopted language can be either of the two: the authentic expression of genius, unwilling to be shackled by established language, or an attempt (conscious or unconscious) to generate complexity that in fact cannot bear out scrutiny.

I remain slightly agnostic where Teilhard de Chardin sits. Among the most important authors of science and metaphysics or with the novelists whose attempts to create a dystopian picture thrills and rouses the mind. Alas, no righteous fury, perhaps a bit annoyance at the all-encompassing yet unfocused treatment of certain areas. It wasn’t without reason that the Holy Office censured his writings, though never sent for publishing by the author. Not being a professional inquisitor or a biologist, I won’t mind bringing him up at a dinner where such minds might take the bait and inform me more. I’ll be sure to share.

Sant'Uffizio

~ by Max on September 19, 2010.