The necromancy continues in the latest column. If you're pressed for time, Thomas Merton’s critique of Henri De Lubac’s overly rosy summation of Teilhard, whose baffling naïveté included seeing the H-bomb as “dawn of Christic neo-energy,” and Mao’s armies as a vanguard of a new humanity, is a convenient summation:
De Lubac has many reservations about Teilhard's religious teaching style and its perspectives. But he accepts the Teilhardian wager as a legitimate extrapolation of Chrsitian revelation in a modern context. Teilhard, in his estimation, has made an inspired guess and has built upon it a mystique of hope, which many well be of vital importance in our time. But Du Lubac also admits that the enthusiasm of Teilhardians — and their overanxiety to be supermodern — has blinded them to two facts. Teilhard is not really as revolutionary as he himself thought, and one of the defects of Teilhardism is precisely its tendency to black-and-white schematization, a naïve polarization of "yesterday" and "tomorrow." The only harsh word De Lubac has for Teilhard is that he was too complacent about his own originality that he neglected to learn from predecessors he would have agreed with, had he but known them: "His knowledge of Christian though throughout the centuries was never more than elementary" (191).
Indeed. But he (Teilhard) knows better now, and still has a lot to offer anyone trying to make sense of geology and paleontology.
