Titus Burckhardt, "Contra Teilhard de Chardin" (1969)
The average modern man "believes" above all in science - the science that has produced modern surgery and modern industry - and this is almost his basic "religion." If he considers himself a Christian at the same time, the two "beliefs" stand in opposition to each other in his soul, and engender a latent crisis that calls for a solution. This solution is what Teilhard de Chardin seems to bring. He "ties the two loose ends together"; but he does so, not by making, as he should, a distinction between different planes of reality - that of empirical knowledge which is exact in its way but necessarily fragmentary and provisional, and that of faith which is bound up with timeless certainties - but by mixing them inextricably together: he endows empirical science with an absolute certainty that it does not and cannot have, and he projects the idea of indefinite progress into God Himself.
posted by Phila @ 4:27 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I'm clueless about who this Titus Burckhardt is, but I have read a bit of Teilhard, and what strikes me aout his work has been his open-hearted wonder at the world as it appears before him. He seems to recognize science as a means to describe, measure and predict the phenomena of everyday life.
This Burckhardt sounds far more concerned about pinning things down, stripping the wonder from the world. Perhaps some of us who have a love for the earth (and sense that this experience of love is motivated by a larger transcendent mystery) can live untroubled by the enormity of that mystery, but Burckhardt here seems the one who is determined to pin down and make certain every detail of the known material world.
Good luck to Burckhardt, that's what I say. Good luck pinning life down like an insect in a collection, all its vital life removed and the marvel of its simply being is vanished, while its body is solid material still before your eyes. No wonder or transcendence there.
Speechless,
You may not like Burckhardt regardless, but his quarrel with Teilhard is rather different than you might think from this quote. And his views, on the whole, are not entirely dissimilar from what you're saying here. He certainly couldn't be classed as a materialist.
He objects to the idea of an evolutionary spirituality partially because he rejects the idea that God can be apprehended biologically, or through scientific inquiry; partially because of the Aristotelian view that what is part of a stream of being - or becoming, really - can't stand outside it and assess it; and largely because it seems to imply that spiritual truths change over time, and that ancient thinkers were somehow less developed than modern ones.
I have no particular opinion; I just thought it was an interesting sentiment, for better or worse.
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