Worldview (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

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The worldview of the French Jesuit and natural scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) is based on his unified teaching and theory structure, with which he wanted to finally classify the knowledge of natural science of his time in a belief-based worldview. Teilhard's ideological thinking, which was shaped by orthogenetic and vitalistic ideas, was overtaken by the development of natural science during his lifetime.

Teilhard's concept of development

For Teilhard, development is a central dimension of the whole living cosmos. In his view everything appears and also exists within the world as a function of a whole. "That is the most general, deepest and most indisputable sense of the idea of ​​evolution."

Two forms of development

In Teilhard, events in time are expressed in two developmental terms : One relates to the development in large periods of human history, as described in one of the main works, Man in the Cosmos . The other comes into play in the second major work, The Divine Milieu, and relates to the individual development of faith and soul.

Collective development

During his theology studies Teilhard seized the opportunity to confront Catholic teaching with the time dimension, to fathom the belief in creation and to contrast it with his scientific knowledge (see evolution and creation ).

Evolution answers the context of the living: "Everything living comes from the living" (Omne vivum e vivo). Teilhard accepts neither spontaneous generation nor a wonderful intervention of God for every species, but every living being comes from a germ that in turn comes from a parent organism. In addition to this “law of birth” comes the “law of divergence”: the more the descending beings move away from the origin through variation and mutation, the more dissimilar they become to their ancestors. In this general sense, for Teilhard, evolution is neither a hypothesis nor an empirical fact; it is an "ineradicable dimension of the living cosmos". The question of the “how”, ie the family tree, remains hypothetical and open, as does the question of the cause.

Central to Teilhard's concept of evolution is the transition from a lower to a higher centered complexity and thus to the rise of consciousness. After a long period of passive evolution, man begins to continue the active development of the human. For Teilhard this means that evolution in man pursues a work of a personal kind through love. In a spiritual vision of evolution Teilhard sees in man the continuation of the work of creation up to fulfillment through Christ:

"Evolution makes Christ possible by discovering a summit in the world - likewise Christ makes evolution possible by giving the world a meaning."

Individual soul development

Teilhard's contribution to the inner development of faith and soul can be found above all in the text The Divine Milieu . Teilhard refers to the Christian doctrine of the faith, where corresponding references can already be found in the Acts of the Apostles.

According to Teilhard, creatio continua is continued in and through people. It always manifests itself in transformation processes, both individually and as a whole. Henri de Lubac writes about this: “In the text The Christian (from 1955) the presence of Christ in the universe is defined as a 'transforming presence'. [...] By so affirming the 'transformation' that nature undergoes during its transition to the supernatural order, Teilhard makes the transcendence of this supernatural order clear in a particularly expressive way. "

The temporal scope of Teilhard's worldview

Teilhard's view of the world can be divided into five sections according to Elliott :

  1. the distant past: exploring the processes that brought the universe to life;
  2. the immediate past: knowing the direction of these movements;
  3. the present: the interpretation of the current transformation of processes through approaches based on previous ones;
  4. the immediate future: the discovery of the future direction;
  5. the distant future: the interpretation of the final stage of the universe.

For Teilhard, the five sections in the history of the universe all refer to a single movement, but they do not follow one another like episodes of equal rank, but rather like the acts in a drama. They are not parts that are cut out of the course of time, but phases of an organic development. Each not only represents a particular aspect of the earth's history, but requires a particular movement of thought to understand it, which corresponds to the respective historical section.

Teilhard's worldview

For forty years, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has presented his worldview in ever new variations in books, essays and lectures. The main features remained the same all the time. In a lecture on March 3, 1941 in the French Embassy in Beijing, where he was interned during the Second World War, Teilhard derived his vision of the future from his knowledge of past earth periods on the subject of the future of man in the eyes of a paleontologist . He wrote: "This contribution is the fruit of thirty years of sincere contact with scientific and religious circles in Europe, America and the Far East."

Contemporary classification

Orthogenetic ideas of evolution, as represented by Teilhard, were widespread valid natural science in the first half of the 20th century. These were often, as with Teilhard based on visions, fused with a kind of "cosmic teleology ". The belief that one could combine science and religion into one ideological unity through this show was widespread. At the turn of the 20th century, a dispute between vitalism and mechanism was fought out in biology . Under the impression that various problems in developmental biology could not be satisfactorily explained by the mechanistic approach, neovitalism emerged, on whose side Teilhard can be classified. With the aim of repelling materialistic ideologies and promoting idealistic or Christian positions and their mixed forms, many other theologians and philosophers in addition to Teilhard represented neo-vitalistic and orthogenetic ideas, e.g. B. the German scientist and natural philosopher Bernhard Bavink .

With the establishment of molecular biology and genetic engineering from the early 1950s, through which the processes of reproduction , procreation, and heredity in the realm of the living were discovered and researched, modern evolutionary biology achieved what Teilhard had not thought possible, and most of them did contemporary philosophers and theologians did not want or could not realize: The orthogenetic principle was replaced by a Darwinian principle. Thus Teilhard's theories and explanations of evolution were outdated.

reception

The biologist Heinz Penzlin considers Teilhard's teleological- evolutionary worldview to be unrealistic:

"This extremely bold, but from a biological point of view untenable draft, which is presented by Teilhard in missionary form, consists of a colorful mixture of the truth, half-truth and speculative, without this being made clear."

In 1966, the philosopher and theologian Karl Schmitz-Moormann , who translated and edited several of Teilhard's books, classified Teilhard's world design as follows in the intellectual history of (western) mankind:

“Teilhard reveals perspectives that allow completely new aspects of the universe to come into focus and consequently also do not occur in the previous world systems - be they scholastic, idealistic or Marxist. [...] The new, which Teilhard makes visible and which goes beyond the boundaries of our previous world, requires a far-reaching reorientation, not only in terms of the material, but also in terms of the spiritual. "

Francis G. Elliott , biochemist and theologian, Jesuit confrere of Teilhard:

“It is impossible to compare Teilhard's worldview with an older system. Teilhard's whole thinking is based on one fundamental axiom : the universe is evolution. [...] Teilhard is unique in his claim to completeness when looking at man and his universe. The human being is explored here in the totality of his cosmos, in the dimensions of time and space in their historical and world-significant unity. [...] His work can claim the title “Universal History” more than any other. [...] You can also call it a novel philosophy, because it poses and answers the famous three questions: Where do we come from? - What are we? - Where are we going?"

See also

Web links

literature

  • Ludwig Ebersberger: Man and his future - natural and human sciences are approaching Teilhard de Chardin's understanding of the world . Walter, Olten 1990, ISBN 3-530-18444-6 .
  • Henri de Lubac: Teilhard de Chardin's religious world . Herder, Freiburg 1969.
  • Karl Schmitz-Moormann: The world view Teilhard de Chardins . West German publishing house, Cologne / Opladen 1966.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Early Writings . Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1968.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The divine milieu . Benziger, Düsseldorf / Zurich 2000.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The future of man . Walter, Olten 1963.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: My faith . Walter, Olten 1972.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The heart of matter. The core of an ingenious worldview . Walter, Olten 1990, with an appendix from the Praise of Space. ISBN 3-530-87379-9 .
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The heart of matter and the Christian in evolution. (New translation). Patmos, Ostfildern 2014, ISBN 978-3-8436-0529-8 .
  • Helmut de Terra (Ed.): Perspektiven Teilhard de Chardins . Eight contributions to his worldview and evolutionary theory. Beck, Munich 1966.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Adolf Haas: Teilhard de Chardin-Lexikon vol. 1, p. 290ff.
  2. ↑ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: My faith. P. 153.
  3. ↑ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The divine milieu. P. 21.
  4. ^ Henri de Lubac: Teilhard de Chardins religious world. P. 180; see. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The heart of matter. P. 60ff.
  5. ^ A b F. G. Elliott: Pierre Teilhard de Chardins Welt-Anschauung. In: Helmut de Terra (ed.): Perspektiven Teilhard de Chardins. P. 66f.
  6. ↑ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The future of man. Chapter 4, Part I.
  7. ↑ Eberhard Dennert (ed.): Nature, the miracle of God. Berlin 1939.
  8. ↑ Bernhard Bavink : The natural science on the way to religion. Life and soul, God and free will in the light of today's natural science. Moritz Diesterweg publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1933.
  9. ↑ Heinz Penzlin : The phenomenon of life: basic questions of theoretical biology. Springer Spectrum, 2014. ISBN 978-3-642-37460-9 . P. 29.
  10. ^ Karl Schmitz-Moormann: Das Weltbild Teilhard de Chardins. P. 9.