Evolution and Creation (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
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With the spread of Darwin's theory of evolution in the second half of the nineteenth century, a gap opened up between its followers and those who advocated a biblical belief in creation. The French theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin endeavored throughout his life to bridge this gap.
Teilhard first studied natural sciences and philosophy and was only confronted with the idea of cosmic evolution while studying theology. He tried to integrate this knowledge into his Christian understanding of faith and dared to take the first steps towards a synthesis of faith and knowledge , creation and evolution. For Teilhard, the traditional dualism of spirit and matter was put into perspective . Teilhard felt his way from the conventional static to an evolving worldview .
How Teilhard's main ideas gradually developed can be seen in his earliest writings, which he wrote during his theological studies between 1905 and 1912. These writings, hardly taken into account by the previous Teilhard reception, are central to the understanding of his thinking. Thomas Becker made these works of Teilhard accessible in 1987 and placed them in context.
Starting position
Teilhard's starting point was - due to his scientific training - the matter as determined by classical physics in the context of a static worldview. Based on this conception of matter, Teilhard already started in 1905 in search of something “below” things, which he sensed in a certain “indeterminacy” of matter (see chapter Spirit and Matter) . After Teilhard discovered biological evolution for himself around 1908, a direct path led from this "below" of things via the "inner dimension" of plants and animals (1911) to human consciousness (1912).
The genesis of his new, evolutionary worldview was threatened from the beginning by church censorship. Because his new point of view meant a total reshaping of the philosophy and theology based on the conventional static worldview into a completely new way of thinking oriented towards the cosmic process of evolution. This rethinking is comparable to the Copernican turn , i.e. the transition from the geocentric to the heliocentric worldview at the beginning of modern times.
It is also remarkable how Teilhard's concept of nature changed during his theology studies. He had to deal with idealistic thinkers who disregarded the matter . For the time being, however, he avoided defining matter positively, instead describing it as a "mysterious and disturbing thing". In fact, however, he always attached great importance to matter. According to him it belongs inextricably to earthly reality from the beginning to the end and cannot be canceled by anything. He emphasized its permanence and constancy and rejected any justified devaluation of the matter as fundamentally unchristian.
Thought leader
Teilhard was, as he wrote in a letter, particularly influenced by his compatriot Blaise Pascal , but also by Plato , Leibniz and Isaac Newton . But he also took up thought elements of contemporary great minds and inserted them creatively into his own comprehensive thought structure that was in the making. One can speak of a “development of his developmental thinking”. In addition to John Henry Newman , the French philosophers Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson as well as his brother, fellow student and friend Pierre Rousselot should be mentioned here.
Henri Bergson and the "élan vital"
The influence of Henri Bergson on Teilhard's thinking is also undisputed . Bergson was a French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner in literature. His best-known term is " élan vital ", which he introduced in his "Philosophy of the Living" ( Die Schöpferische Entwicklung , French 1907, German 1921) in precise knowledge of the life sciences of his time.
In 1909, Bergson fell out of favor with representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in connection with the dispute over modernism . In 1914 Bergson's first major work was placed on the index of forbidden books . Teilhard himself named Bergson in his autobiographical book Das Herz der Materie from 1950 as the one who (around 1908) had opened his eyes to evolution. In contrast to Bergson, who described the course of evolution as divergent, Teilhard postulated a "creative union".
Nature and Faith with Pierre Rousselot
Pierre Rousselot wrote the article Idéalisme et Thomisme in 1908 . According to this, all material things are on the one hand dependent on the existence of human consciousness, on the other hand the material world represents a high value in and of itself for being human. Teilhard became aware of the theological relevance of evolution through his friend Rousselot in the years 1908/1909, but turned away from the idealistic metaphysics of Rousselot and reversed it: It is not the projection of the human spirit onto the world that gives it its actual meaning, but rather this is inherent in the world and thus also in all matter.
Rousselot's article from 1908 was not allowed to appear because of its close proximity to Bergson, among other things, that is, its publication was prohibited by the Roman Catholic censors “because of modernist, idealistic and evolutionist tendencies”. With the rejection of Rousselot's thoughts by the superiors of the order, Teilhard felt early on the resistance to the new evolutionary worldview.
With all of the aforementioned thought leaders, one encounters the phenomenon that Teilhard integrated elements of their views into his thinking, but in the process reversed the "thinking direction" of his role models: All three of the aforementioned philosophers - Blondel, Bergson and Rousselot - determined the meaning of the world from the point of view of humans . Teilhard, on the other hand, gradually tried to integrate the development of the pre-human cosmos into his new world interpretation. In this way he succeeded in including matter in the genesis of spirit.
Theological development steps
The Truth Behind the Apparitions (1905)
In his first published work Von der Arbitrage in der Physik (1905), the 24-year-old Teilhard developed the concept of “below things” (later: the “inside of things”). In this science-critical work, he first cites statements by physicists and philosophers of science on the fundamental relativity of physical and scientific statements. In view of the diversity of natural phenomena, Teilhard is looking for a truth that lies behind all these phenomena. Teilhard believes he will be able to approach this later in his main work Der Mensch im Kosmos (French 1947, German 1959) through a transcendent mode of knowledge and a “scientific view”.
Creation and Development (1909)
Teilhard's first theological publication, The Miracles of Lourdes (1909), continues the 1905 study on the arbitrariness of physics . It spans an arc between the church's position on the factuality of miraculous healings and the view of natural science. Teilhard cautiously brings evolution into play for the first time.
Teilhard discusses the psychosomatic genesis of illnesses, as well as the healing of illnesses through auto- or external suggestion. Since there is no scientific explanation for some of the healings in Lourdes, the Church interprets these healings as miracles , that is, as an act of God. According to Teilhard, however, these miracles do not have the character of a secret generally closed to knowledge. These are phenomena that cannot be explained by current science and which the Church takes on in an interpreting manner. In his opinion, the miraculous healings of Lourdes are related to a spiritual principle of matter still unknown to science. God created matter in such a way that with the appropriate combination of its basic elements, new properties such as life or spirit appear. The term “spirit” (French: “esprit”), which was later important for Teilhard, is not yet found in this text. But in 1909 he begins, as he explains in The Heart of Matter from 1950, to question the dualism of spirit and matter that he has acquired.
Man as a special case of evolution (1911)
In a preliminary study for the lexicon article Man from the perspective of the teaching of the church from 1912 Teilhard gives a systematic and commented list of the four contemporary positions on the subject of evolution. He sees classical Darwinism with its focus on the struggle for existence and on natural selection and the associated survival of the most adapted individuals overcome. According to Teilhard, this concept cannot explain the appearance of new features and more complex forms. Teilhard raises the opposite charge against neo-Darwinism . This offers an explanation for the spontaneously occurring mutations through the inclusion of Mendelian heredity . According to Teilhard, however, it takes insufficient account of the influence of the environment. Teilhard also states that the neo-Lamarckist approach and the inheritance of acquired properties postulated by Lamarck are very difficult or even impossible to prove.
Teilhard himself favors a fourth theory, "vitalistic transformism", and thus follows a trend that was set around 1910 by philosophers and theologians such as Bergson who were intent on balancing out. Teilhard believes that the vitalistic concept (life force as an independent principle) more than makes up for the limitations and incompleteness of the other three classical theories.
With the concept of the "internal impetus", the "poussée internal", Teilhard clearly differs from Henri Bergson and his "élan vital". The roots of the “poussée internal” can already be traced in Teilhard's Lourdes article, as this term describes the work of God in the world.
Teilhard treats humans as an evolutionary special case. Because of the appearance of intelligence in humans, according to Teilhard, a "divine act" or a "creator of the soul" must be recognized. The creation of a soul for Adam , the first man, has the highest obligation for faith . Teilhard allows the biological origin of humans as a way of thinking that must be taken up if clear scientific evidence for this origin from the animal kingdom has been produced.
The so-called monogenism thesis (all people are descended from a single couple) qualifies Teilhard as an assertion that is close to belief. Teilhard declares all other statements of the biblical revelation, in particular the statement about the age of the person, as dogmatically not binding. Faith as a basic Christian dimension does not have to be afraid of scientific discoveries in principle; the core of belief can never be destroyed by science.
The human soul as creatio ex nihilo (1912)
Towards the end of his theology studies, Teilhard wrote part of the lexicon article Man from the point of view of the doctrine of the Church and spiritualistic philosophy .
A decree of the Roman Biblical Commission of June 30, 1909 ( De charactere historico trium priorum capitum Geneseos ) leaves only the "literal and historical sense" of the Genesis reports , particularly with regard to the special creation of man and the formation of the first woman from the first man to, as "the special intervention of the Creator at the origin of man" with regard to body and soul. Teilhard is familiar with this decision by the Biblical Commission. He wrote the above-mentioned article about people in a climate of sharp distinction between church teaching and against it polemic natural scientists such as e. B. the German biologist Ernst Haeckel . Thomas Becker writes :
"Teilhard's struggle with evolution is like walking a tightrope between knowledge and belief, in which one wrong word could result in exclusion from the order or at least rejection by the censors."
It is the first and at the same time the last text of Teilhard in which he appears as a representative of official Catholic dogmatics. In his part he works out the compatibility of Christian faith with contemporary statements of philosophy and the natural sciences with regard to human nature. According to this, man consists of a body and a soul, and his individual ego has remained the same throughout all experience since the first moment of his existence. Teilhard states the radical incompatibility of this dogma with materialism , determinism and a materialistic evolutionism : a pure descent of humans from non-human living beings is not a possibility for a Christian to think. The human being represents a category of its own, and at least the human soul owes its existence to a source independent of all visible becoming. Teilhard rejects evolutionism, which denies humans any reference to transcendence . He defends the statement of faith that the soul of the first man was created directly by God, i.e. a creatio ex nihilo .
He developed his “Inner Impulse” from 1911 into a “creative impulse”, which he interpreted as God's work in the world. In doing so, he takes up the concept of a creatio continua from his Lourdes article. Teilhard wants to convince the natural scientists that God's work in the world in the sense of creative impulses does not contradict the scientific understanding of reality, because it does not destroy the way of thinking of natural science and never asks why. It concerns only nature itself, in which God works through the "inside" (fr. Le dedans). This is where the term “inside” appears for the first time in Teilhard's system of thought.
Teilhard then defends himself against the evolutionary biological view of natural scientists, who see nothing in humans other than physical-chemical processes . Teilhard rejects this reduction of humans to physics and chemistry in a very modern way with the reference to the systemic properties of life.
Mind and matter
Indeterminacy as God's ability to work
Teilhard believes that he has found the dimension that Teilhard was looking for "below things" in his very first work from 1905 in a certain indeterminacy as the organizing reality of matter. In 1909 he saw the working of God in the indeterminate elements of matter. And in 1912 he realized what the opposite of the determinism and the automatism of matter is: spontaneity . The fact that Teilhard already grants certain degrees of freedom to the lowest material structures contradicts all of the prevailing ideas at the time.
In the following years Teilhard defended this “free” element within matter against all theological resistance, which only sees the automatism of matter. On the human level, this indeterminism is freedom . Under the umbrella term of spontaneity, Teilhard makes the connection between “inside” and “consciousness” possible within his evolutionary worldview. In 1940 he will write in the book Man in the Cosmos :
“One inside, one awareness and therefore spontaneity: these three expressions mean the same thing. It is not up to us to set an absolute beginning for them empirically; as little as for any other line of development in the universe. "
No mind without matter?
As early as 1912 it became clear how much Teilhard saw life as a further development of matter. He also assumes that there is a “zone of transition” in humans between matter and spirit: When the soul enlivens the body, then it unites so closely with this body that it is no longer without the material elements which it connects can be understood. The two elements can in a certain way be converted into one another and can no longer be compared in the way that a dualism claims.
Teilhard thus takes an important step towards his later conception of "spirit matter". The matter becoming spirit is in principle possible if there is a transition from one dimension to the other.
In this context Teilhard also questions whether the mind can even think without matter. Here he already points out the difficulties that arise from the dualistic view: Spirit and matter would have to be distinguished, but not in the sense of a “fundamental dualism”. (See also: Hylemorphism .)
On the other hand, Teilhard holds that the human soul was created by God and differs from matter through its spirituality, substantiality and immortality . So he accepts a certain dualism between spirit and matter.
As a further step, Teilhard will later in The Divine Realm emphasize the joint development of spirit and matter in the course of cosmic evolution:
“No matter how independent our soul may be, it is the heiress of an existence that was wonderfully worked on before it through the cooperation of all earthly forces. At a certain stage of development the soul encounters life and unites with it. "
It is noticeable that in 1912 Teilhard did not adopt the theological conception of an anima separata or a “pure spirit” separated from the body after death, although he kept thinking about life after death . Rather, he emphasizes the survival of the concrete earthly matter, which will be withdrawn from destruction after a transformation.
Teilhard's integrative worldview is still fought today by fundamentalist , creationist and anti-Darwinist circles.
See also
literature
- Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. (= Freiburg Theological Studies. Volume 134). Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau / Basel / Vienna 1987, ISBN 3-451-20982-9 .
- Henri Bergson: Creative Evolution . Felix Meiner, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-7873-2688-4 .
- Hans Kessler: Evolution and Creation in a New View. Arguments for clarification . Butzon et al. Bercker, Kevelaer 2009, ISBN 978-3-7666-1287-8 .
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Man in the cosmos . Beck, Munich 1959. (New edition: 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-60274-0 ) ( Le Phénomène Humain. 1955).
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The Divine Realm. A blueprint of the inner life . Walter, Olten 1962, ( Le Milieu Divin. 1957).
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The divine milieu. New translation. ppb edition Patmos Düsseldorf / Benziger Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-545-70014-3 ).
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The heart of matter. The core of an ingenious worldview . Walter, Olten 1990, ISBN 3-530-87379-9 with appendix from Lobgesang des Alls. ( Le Cœur de la Matière. 1976).
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The heart of matter and the Christian in evolution. New translation. Patmos, Ostfildern 2014, ISBN 978-3-8436-0529-8 .
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Early Writings . Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1968 ( Écrits du temps de la guerre. 1965).
Individual evidence
- ↑ This article is an excerpt from Thomas Becker: Spirit and Matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins .
- ↑ Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. Cape. 9.3.1.
- ^ Correspondence between Blondel and Teilhard. P. 32.
- ^ According to Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. Cape. 2-4.
- ^ According to Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. Cape. 5.
- ↑ According to Thomas Becker: Geist und Materie in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins , chap. 6th
- ^ According to Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. Cape. 8th.
- ↑ Published as the 8th fascicle of the second volume of the Dictionnaire apologétique at the end of 1912.
- ^ According to Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. Cape. 7.2.
- ^ According to Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. Cape. 9.2.
- ^ According to Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. Cape. 9.
- ^ According to Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. Cape. 9.3.3.
- ↑ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Man in the cosmos. P. 46.
- ↑ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The Divine Realm. P. 40.
- ^ According to Thomas Becker: Spirit and matter in the first writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins. Cape. 9.3.2.
- ↑ See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , Part Criticism.