I am old enough to remember the furore caused among the Catholic young and not so young with whom I had communication in the time after my attendance at the Law School of the University of Sydney, and during my attendance at the Aquinas Academy, on the publication, after his death, of the works of Teilhard de Chardin, prohibited to be published by the Church during his lifetime. The furore as I recall came to a head in the middle 1960s as the Second Vatican Council was ending or shortly afterwards. Dr. Woodbury was amongst the loudest in his condemnation of the materialist/scientistic evolutionism to be found in the works.
Apart from the moral consequences of its teaching, the inanity, even insanity, of the “theological science” propounded, as well as the equivocations and general sophistry in its popular propagation, were so obvious to us at the time that we hardly gave it another thought. We did not pay that much attention to the sensationalist “press” that these works evoked.
Being more interested in the revival of genuine Catholic thought in the likes of Chesterton and the books being written by a multitude of other marvelous English converts, such as Father Ronald Knox and Arnold Lunn, a mountaineer who invented the slalom ski event in the Olympics, we treated the “phenomenon” of de Chardin SJ as just another of the passing fashions to which the Catholic world had always been subject, and focused on the works of the Church’s “Common Doctor”, with their resources to retain the sanity of mind needed in our times, as at all times.
Little did we realise that many in the Church, especially amongst de Chardin’s confreres, the Jesuits, were giving a lot of thought to his “revelations”, seeing it as a vehicle to bring the Church up to date, as it was supposed was the intent of the Vatican Council.
For a time, we did not appreciate that the ideas of de Chardin were but a break out of a deeper disease/malaise in modern Catholic thought that had already been identified and condemned as strongly as possible by the Magisterium, namely, that “mother of all heresies”, Modernism.
It is only in more recent times, as the depth of this intellectual and moral darkness has become more “visible”, that I have come to realise that, far from being a passing “phenomenon”, de Chardin’s “scientific evolutionism” has grown, like a cancer, to such monstrous proportions that it seems to be ineradicable. For it is evident now that the “forces” of the Evil One (Malignus), or the smoke of Satan as Pope Saint Paul VI put it, have indeed entered the very inner halls of the governing “Curia” (Latin for caring part) of the Church.
If I had been aware of the work of Frits Adlers, who was well aware of what was happening even in the 1970s, and was describing it in detail in the books only now being published widely, I would have been much the wiser myself about the dire state of affairs the faithful was caught up in, like in a spider’s web.
However, better late than never, and no doubt in God’s providence, we now have the malign situation exposed in the most thoroughgoing way. It is up to us to have the courage to face it, and condemn the error and evil it represents.
I will add if I might my own view of de Chardin’s work, whose connection with Modernism can be traced quite clearly in retrospect. Like many of his generation, including Maritain, he was well educated in modern science, and greatly impressed with its power. But being deeply spiritual because of his Christian upbringing, he was also troubled by the apparent conflict between what he held by Faith and what his modern science told him was pure reason.
He looked for a way out of this dilemma and through intellectual contact with Bergson’s philosophy, expressed especially in his book “Creative Evolution”, believed he had found it. He befriended Bergson’s closest associate Edouard Le Roy and discussed things over a long period.
It is significant that Maritain was initially drawn to Bergson’s solution of his own dilemma – it became the prevailing solution of the day to the perceived view that human knowledge in science was mechanistic – but later through contact with the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (by the graces of his wonderful wife Raissa) Maritain was able to see through Bergson’s “evolution” philosophical solution.
Importantly, the Church authorities of the time were alert to this mistaken approach, apparently perceiving the pantheistic implications of Bergson’s thought, and banned his books.
De Chardin, one speculates, felt that this was either a misunderstanding of Bergson’s philosophy or, like many others both inside and outside the Church, an arbitrary exercise of ecclesiastical authority against the scientific search for truth.
In fact, as we can now see, thanks in great measure to Frits Albers’ work, de Chardin’s adoption of scientific evolutionism, which evidently was influenced by the vitalism/intuitionism of Bergson, fell also into Modernism. Sadly for those deceived by it, de Chardin’s philosophy of science was just another philosophical error by which the heresy of Modernism, masquerading as Christian theology, was able to be perpetuated in modern Catholic thinking.
— Dr. Donald G. Boland, author of Rev. Fr. Austin M. Woodbury, SM, PhD, STD and the Aquinas Academy (1945 – 1975); also see his Compendium
Dr. Dennis Bonnette retired as a Full Professor of Philosophy in 2003 from Niagara University in Lewiston, New York. He taught philosophy there for thirty-six years and served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department from 1992 to 2002. He lives in Youngstown, New York, with his wife, Lois. They have seven adult children and twenty-five grandchildren. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 1970. Dr. Bonnette taught philosophy at the college level for 40 years and has taught free courses at the Aquinas School of Philosophy in Lewiston, New York. He is the author of two books, Aquinas’ Proofs for God’s Existence (The Hague: Martinus-Nijhoff, 1972) and Origin of the Human Species (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, third edition, 2014), and many scholarly articles.
Richard J. Bishirjian was Founding President and Professor of Government at Yorktown University from 2000-2016. He earned a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame.
