Prometheus Purifying the Noosphere

(Jean Delville)

The cathartic exhilaration that now strikes us almost daily as sins long rumored are dragged out into the light has had a way of drowning out the less flashy scandals. Back in May the Internet received an article from John P. Slattery about the unspoken legacy of eugenics in the writings and speaking engagements of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ. Catholic writers have been somewhat preoccupied of late, but it is worth brushing the dust off of Slattery’s essay before it has become entirely buried. After noting the approbation given to the French Jesuit from multiple popes, Slattery treats the reader to a few select quotations, such as this one from 1929:

Do the yellows—[the Chinese]—have the same human value as the whites? [Fr.] Licent and many missionaries say that their present inferiority is due to their long history of Paganism. I’m afraid that this is only a ‘declaration of pastors.’ Instead, the cause seems to be the natural racial foundation…Christian love overcomes all inequalities, but it does not deny them.

This from 1937:

What fundamental attitude…should the advancing wing of humanity take to fixed or definitely unprogressive ethnical groups? The earth is a closed and limited surface. To what extent should it tolerate, racially or nationally, areas of lesser activity? More generally still, how should we judge the efforts we lavish in all kinds of hospitals on saving what is so often no more than one of life’s rejects?…To what extent should not the development of the strong…take precedence over the preservation of the weak?

From 1949:

From this there follows, as a first priority, a fundamental concern to ensure (by correct nutrition, by education, and by selection) an ever more advanced eugenics of the human zoological type on the surface of the earth. At the same time, however, and even more markedly, there must be an ever more intense effort directed towards discovery and vision, animated by the hope of our gradually, as one man, putting our hands on the deep-seated forces (physico-chemical, biological and psychic) which provide the impetus of evolution…. There is no future for man, I repeat, without the neo-sense of the species.

And also a biographical account of a debate between Teilhard and a French Catholic philosopher:

Once in a debate with Gabriel Marcel on the subject of ‘Science and Rationality,’ [Teilhard] shocked his opponent by refusing to permit even the appalling evidence of the experiments of the doctors of Dachau to modify his faith in the inevitability of human progress. ‘Man,’ [Teilhard] asserted, ‘to become full man, must have tried everything’ …He added that since the human species was still so young…the persistence of such evil was to be expected. ‘Prometheus!’ Marcel had cried… ‘No,’ replied Teilhard, ‘only man as God has made him.’

The eugenical frenzy of previous centuries seems almost quaint to us in the 21st century, although we have learnt how to accomplish quiet genocides in suburban neighborhoods that were once overrun with children and how also to “perfect” humanity with cyborgian grafts and the application of scalpels to regions unmentionable. Teilhard’s great theological errors are not composed of racism—however that be defined in this age of hypersensitivity—but of a rejection of Original Sin, a replacement of charity with evolutionary energies, and a non-recognition of individual personhood. (Dietrich von Hildebrand’s thorough condemnation is enough to convince any reasonable Catholic of the Frenchman’s grave errors.) It would be best if heresy were enough to strip a theologian of any respect and influence, but credible accusations of racism are in fact more likely to accomplish this end. His doctrines infect even the writings of the Pope Emeritus, whose more mystical excursions are simply incomprehensible without reference to Teilhard.

May we soon be rid of this and all such troublesome Jesuits.