What was unique about Teilhard’s mysticism?

Today’s Post

     Last week we took a second look at examples of ‘evolutionary mysticism’, seeing how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ can lead to a deeper and wider grasp of both reality and our place in it as human persons.

This week we will look a little deeper how Teilhard’s insights into such reality bring a new and powerful facet to the traditional practice of mysticism.

Empiricism and Intuition

As we have addressed many times in this series, humans are capable of grasping realities in two different but overlapping modes.  In the ‘intuitive’ mode, popularly thought as taking place in the right hemisphere of the brain, reality isn’t addressed as it is objectively ‘in itself’, but more as it appears subjectively as an object of our consciousness.  As we saw a few weeks ago, when we fill in what’s missing from our attempt to ‘objectively’ make sense of reality, we are using ‘intuition’.  Intuition is usually contrasted with ‘empiricism’, which attempts to make sense of this reality using as little imagination as possible.

When a physicist weighs a rock, he seeks information about the rock that anyone else that wants to know will measure in the same way and get the same information.  This is the empirical mode of consciousness and underpins the success of science in developing what sense it makes of reality.

Empiricism and intuition are commonly thought of as opposites, even though when put into a time continuum, are simply different stages in any thought process.  When it comes to a concept as slippery as ‘mysticism’, the size of the gap between them seemingly becomes bigger.  Even though such great scientists as Newton and Einstein had their ‘mystical’ sides, most materialists would see the two sides as solidly blocked by the wall of objective evidence of whatever phenomenon they were addressing.

Teilhard clearly did not erect such a ‘wall’.  Addressing existence from Teilhard’s perspective opens us to seeing facets of an ever more deeply intertwined life in ever widening terms.  For eons, humans have understood this this, trying to articulate their intuitions into the narrow scope of human language and empirical observation, but limited by their evolutionary incompleteness.

As Tennessee Williams observed of one of our intuitional practices:

“The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.”

    But, the accumulation of empirical insight has increased over time.  As Norberg documents, as the empirical database has since blossomed the seeds of human maturity have begun to sprout more robustly over the past hundred fifty years.  This clearly demonstrates how a secular understanding of the ‘ground of being’ is emerging which offers not only increasing clarity and relevance to religious thought but an increasing focus on the human by Science.  Secular mysticism occurs when the inclusion of both approaches merge into a single, harmonized enterprise.

Through the lens of secular mysticism Science can be seen to dig deeper into an ever-expanding trove of objective observations towards the same deep core of existence that Religion has intuited for generations.  By the same token, Religion can be understood as refining its intuition of a ‘first cause’ which enriches all being by increased use of those insights provided by Science.

Teilhard was one of the first to recognize that these two oft-orthogonal enterprises are on parallel but convergent paths to an understanding of reality which enriches both the spiritual and material aspects of human existence.  His recognition reflects a true ‘widening of vision’, now become capable of effectively grasping both past and future as well as both material and spiritual, in a way that recognizes the presence of God in the world which underpins not only the part we play, but more importantly, the fullness which is possible to us as we play in it.  Teilhard once again uses the metaphor of the sphere to illustrate the potential relation between Science and Religion:

“Religion and Science obviously represent two different meridians on the sphere of our minds, and it would be wrong not to keep them separate (which is the concordist error).  But these two meridians must necessarily meet somewhere at a pole of common vision (which is the mean of coherence).  On a sphere it would be absurd (concordism) to confuse the meridians at the equator; but at the pole (coherence) they ought to rejoin each other by structural necessity.”

   Thus, Teilhard was unique in his insight that the intuition of Religion requires a ‘grounding’ in empiricism for it to achieve its full potential as a tool for enrichment of human life.  Blondel, in his insight recognized that the new view of reality provided by Science in the late eighteenth century opened the door to re-emergence of the ancient intuition of the intimacy of the underlying cause of reality.  Teilhard went one step further in articulating this ancient intuition into empirical terms.  In the new and expanded approach to mysticism that Teilhard pioneers, the many metaphors proposed by mystics for millennia take their rightful place in the human passage from an imagined construction of reality to increased recognition of them as steps of progress toward an increasingly integrated grasp of reality.

In doing so, both Blondel and Teilhard showed how by ‘grounding’ mysticism to a more complete and comprehensive empiricism can not only increase its relevancy to a society which is becoming more secular, but at the same time increase its potential to further the reach of Science into the realm of human life.

The Next Post

This week we looked at how Teilhard’s approach to ‘making sense of things’ extended the traditional religious concept of ‘mysticism’ by seeing its need for ‘grounding’ it in the recognition of the value of empirical thought to intuitional imagination.  In doing so, he introduced yet another insight into the evolutionary value of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

Next week we will take a look at how such an integrated insight can lead to a ‘mysticism’ less typified by isolated ecstatic vision to one more germane to daily life.