Inasmuch as I myself appreciate the thought of Thomas Merton and his role in my own spiritual evolution, I was compelled to research further Merton's own thoughts on Teilhard, who seems to be "of two minds" about Teilhard de Chardin -- commenting positively on some aspects of Teilhard's thought but also critical as well. Richard W. Kropf explores Merton's thought on Teilhard in his paper, Crying with a Live Grief: The Mysticism of Thomas Merton and Teilhard Compared.
In Merton's review of De Lubac's The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin, Teilhard's Gamble (Commonweal 10/27/67), Merton reproaches Teilhard for what he perceives as his naive and overly grandiose faith in human evolution and technological progress:
Teilhard gambles on God’s need for man, since without man God’s creative plan cannot be fulfilled. Without man, God’s face cannot be fully manifest in his evolving creation. Man has an inescapable inner need to be the locus of the divine epiphany, because in him the universe has at last become conscious of itself. And "the universe by structural necessity cannot disappoint the consciousness it produces." [...][The Teilhardian man] is a " pilgrim of the future," and he refuses to be diverted from his pilgrimage even by the H-bomb which Teilhard found very inspiring: it was only a manifestation of the spirit and the " dawn of a Christic neo-energy."
Clearly, the Teilhardian wager is as much a gamble as Pascal’s. Perhaps it is more of a gamble. Pascal’s existential thinking confines itself to the area of individual freedom, and the individual can decide his own spiritual destiny! Teilhard has hocked everything and bet it on the whole human species. He has done so at a moment when the odds seem somewhat long against the kind of runaway win he anticipates. Teilhard does not seem to notice the wounds of mendacity and hatred which have been inexorably deepened in man by his practice of technological warfare, totalitarianism and genocide. Certainly we can sympathize with the admirable innocence of his hope. But is it as he believes, and as de Lubac concurs, a completely valid extrapolation of Bible eschatology? Is Teilhard so convinced that he be right, that he obstinately refuses to see any possibility of losing? At times, the Teilhardian synthesis seems to demand nothing short of blind faith in predetermined evolutionary success: the Noosphere is here, the super-consciousness is dawning and—this de Lubac neglected to add—the armies of Mao marching on Peking in 1951 were seen by Teilhard as the vanguard of a new humanity. Everything is already in the bag. You can’t lose: " It would be easier to halt the turning of the earth than it would be to prevent the totalization of mankind."
In "The Plague of Camus: A Commentary and Introduction", Merton indulges the question of whether the existentialist Albert Camus would not have turned away from Christianity had he read the works of Teilhard:
Camus would have heartily agreed with Teilhard’s love of man and with his aspiration toward human unity. But it is rather doubtful whether he would have been able to accept the evolutionary and historical scheme of Teilhardian soteriology. To be precise, it is likely that Camus would have had a certain amount of trouble with the systematic progress of the world toward " hominization" and " christification" by virtue of laws immanent in matter and in history.
The point cannot be adequately discussed here, but anyone who wants to investigate it further had better read Camus’ book on Revolt (L’Homme révolté), which he wrote after The Plague and which he thought out at the same time as The Plague. This study of revolt, which precipitated the break between Camus and the Marxists (especially with Sartre), is a severe critique of Hegelian and post-Hegelian doctrines which seek the salvation and progress of man in the "laws of history."
Camus was suspicious of the way in which totalitarians of both the left and the right consistently appealed to evolution to justify their hope of inevitable progress toward a new era of the superman. In particular, he protested vigorously against their tendency to sacrifice man as he is now, in the present, for man as he is supposed to be, according to the doctrine of race or party, at some indefinite time in the future. In Camus’ eyes, this too easily justified the sadism and opportunism of people who are always prepared to align themselves on the side of the executioners against the victims. In other words, a certain superficial type of eschatological hopefulness, based on evolution, made it easy to ignore the extermination camps, the pogroms, the genocide, the napalm, the H-bombs that so conveniently favored the survival of the fittest, got rid of those who no longer had a right to exist, and prepared the way for the epiphany of superman.
At this point, it must be admitted that one of the most serious criticisms of Teilhard bears precisely on this point: an optimism which tends to look at existential evil and suffering through the small end of the telescope. It is unfortunately true that Teilhard, like many other Christians, regarded the dead and wounded of Hiroshima with a certain equanimity as inevitable by-products of scientific and evolutionary progress. He was much more impressed with the magnificent scientific achievement of the atomic physicists than he was with the consequences of dropping the bomb. It must be added immediately that the physicists themselves did not all see things exactly as he did. The concern of a Niels Bohr and his dogged struggle to prevent the atomic arms race put Bohr with Rieux and Tarrou in the category of "Sisyphean" heroes that are entirely congenial to Camus. After the Bikini test, Teilhard exclaimed that the new bombs "show a humanity which is at peace both internally and externally." And he added beatifically, "they announce the coming of the spirit on earth." (L'Avenir de l'homme) [...]
No matter how much we may respect the integrity and the nobility of this dedicated Jesuit, we have to admit here that at least in one respect he resembles his confrere Paneloux. True, they are at opposite extremes of optimism and pessimism; but they do concur in attaching more importance to an abstract idea, a mystique, a system, than to man in his existential and fallible reality here and now. This is precisely what Camus considers to be the great temptation. Lured by an ideology or a mystique, one goes over to the side of the executioners, while arguing that in so doing one is promoting the cause of life.
There is no question whatever that Teilhard believes in the "new man", the homo progressivus, the new evolutionary leap that is now being taken (he thinks) beyond homo sapiens. Science certainly gives us a basis for hope in this development, and perhaps Camus needed to have more hope in the future of man than he actually seems to have had. Perhaps Camus was too inclined to doubt and hesitate. Perhaps his "modesty" tended too much to desperation. Perhaps there was much he could have learned from Teilhard. But it is not likely that he would purely and simply have agreed with Teilhard’s statement in Peking, in 1945, that the victorious armies of Mao Tse-tung represented "the humanity of tomorrow" and "the generating forces and the elements of planetization," while the bourgeois European world represented nothing but the garbage (le déchet) of history. No doubt there may be good reason to think that a "new humanity" will arise out of the emerging Third World. Let us hope that it will. But Camus would not be so naïve as to identify this "new humanity" with a particular brand of Marxism, or to pin his hopes on a party which announced its own glorious future as a dogma of faith.
Source: The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New Directions Publishing, 1985), 214-217. Tip of the hat due to the blog Real Physics for reposting Merton's insightful essay in full).
Regarding Teilhard's romanticized view of nuclear testing, see: A Symbolic Meditation on Hiroshima at 75: Divine-Human Transfiguration and Transhuman Disfiguration, by Christian Roy (The Symbolic World 08/06/20);
What truly troubled [Bernard] Charbonneau however was the willingness of many supposedly high-minded humanitarians to celebrate — as immanent spiritual epiphany and ultimate eschatological fulfillment — globalized modern technology’s Activation of Energy. This was the title of a book about the spiritual life inherent in atomic particles by the worst culprit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). This Jesuit evolutionary thinker posthumously became fashionable well beyond an initial coterie of progressive Catholics. He remains a kind of patron saint of transhumanism as its pre-war initiator. But at the height of his fame, Charbonneau’s first published book was devoted to debunking Teilhard de Chardin, Prophet of a Totalitarian Era (1963).
The inherent inhumanity of Teilhard’s technophile theodicy was evident in “A Few Reflections on the Spiritual Impact of the Atomic Bomb” (1946) for the journal of French Jesuits, that failed to even directly mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki or their human toll. They focussed instead on the Trinity and Bikini research and testing facilities as harbingers of world peace, through global unanimity in the concerted effort to consolidate mastery of the energy at the heart of matter, portraying this as the divine fulfillment of man’s destiny and the goal of evolution.
Teilhard’s text is replete with inverted symbolic echoes of the Transfiguration, and especially of its defining role in the hesychastic practice of the prayer of the heart...
- Teilhard's reflections on the Bikini Atoll tests are reproduced in full here: Quelques réflexions sur le retentissement spirituel de la bombe atomique" ["Teilhard de Chardin, Some reflections on the spiritual impact of the atomic bomb, 1946"], in Etudes, 79th Year, Vol. 250, July-August 1946.
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