Was Flannery O’Connor a Fan of Teilhard de Chardin? Setting the Record Straight
Flannery O’Connor has never lacked devotees, but there’s no question public awareness will skyrocket thanks to the new film about her life, Wildcat. I haven’t seen it and, unless the planets align just so, probably won’t, since movies almost invariably disappoint me, especially when they are based either on books or on real people’s lives. For what it’s worth (and I’m not sure quite how much that is), the New York Times panned it.
But the fleeting disc of spotlight thrown upon O’Connor by the film seems a good occasion to revisit an issue that first popped up at this Substack when I published my series on Teilhard de Chardin. Namely, was Flannery a die-hard fan of Teilhard de Chardin? If you look around, you can find people who assert this as an indisputable fact. The pair of literary critics most enamored of this idea are Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (Fordham, 2020), and Steven R. Watkins, author of Flannery O’Connor and Teilhard de Chardin: A Journey Together Towards Hope and Understanding About Life (Peter Lang, 2009). Both say O’Connor endorses Teilhard’s conception of “convergence.”
Ralph Wood, a prestigious O’Connor authority and a Catholic-loving Baptist, refuted that notion already long, long ago, first in a 1979 article (about which more anon), and in his 2005 book from Eerdmans, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. In other words, well before either Watkins or O’Donnell published their books. (As a scholar, I can tell you that few things are more frustrating than having laid an error to rest six feet under, only to find it popping up again like an irrepressible cork, floating along its merry way. And the worst is when later writers are too lazy to bother to look at your work, which might have helped them to avoid embarrassing themselves in the court of history and scholarship. Everyone makes mistakes and no one can read everything out there, but major errors that have already been refuted within one’s discipline should be avoided.)
What is the basis for the myth that Flannery was (and her works are) Teilhardian? Quite simply this: she started off as an enthusiast of the French paleontologist, intoxicated as were so many others with his heady potion of prose-poetry-science-mysticism. But she lost her enthusiasm as the liquor wore off. That’s the thesis of Ralph Wood’s 1976 article “The Heterodoxy of Flannery O’Connor’s Book Reviews,” in The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 5 (Autumn 1976): 3–29. I’m going to quote liberally from it, as the content is so interesting, and the article’s not well known:
We are left, then, with what I regard as the most serious conundrum in the interpretation of Flannery O’Connor’s life and work—her avowed enthusiasm for the theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Most of her commentators assume naively that there is a natural connection between her fiction and his theology. But for me there is an awful abyss dividing them. Indeed, Teilhard seems to advocate precisely the kind of amalgamated and eviscerated religion that she finds so objectionable in Toynbee, Huxley, and the gurus of Zen.
Yet there is no gainsaying O’Connor’s admiration of his thought. When Leo Zuber asked her what kinds of books she wanted to review, she specified—in addition to works on the Bible—any items by or about Teilhard. Her unbounded esteem for his work was revealed to the general public in 1961, when The American Scholar asked several artists and intellectuals to name the single most important book published in the last three decades. Flannery nominated Père Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man: “His is a scientific expression of what the poet attempts to do: penetrate matter until spirit is revealed in it. Teilhard’s vision sweeps forward without detaching itself at any point from the earth.”
Teilhard’s theology is the consummate twentieth-century expression of the Catholic humanism which O’Connor salutes in Guardini and Voegelin, among others, but which her own work serves severely to qualify if not actually to repudiate. But the conflict seems not to have been immediately obvious to her. Indeed, she scores Nicholas Corte’s book on Teilhard for linking him with Origen rather than St. Thomas. It is obvious to her that Teilhard’s daring attempt to reconcile Darwinian science and Christian revelation demands comparison with the great Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason in the thirteenth century.
Yet the question remains why Flannery did not object to the obvious pantheistic tendencies of Teilhard’s thought. For all his disavowals to the contrary, he persistently refuses to offer any qualitative distinctions between God and the cosmic process. He can thus say, without blinking, that “Christianity is nothing more than a ‘phylum of love’ within nature” [Divine Milieu, 15]. Consequently, he will not take the reality of sin and evil seriously. Instead, his answer to the problem of suffering partakes more of Spinoza’s naturalism than of Flannery’s dark affirmations of the devil’s existence.
“If [says Teilhard] we regard the march of the world from this standpoint (i.e., not that of its progress but that of its risks and the effort it requires) we soon see, under the veil of security and harmony which—viewed from on high—envelop the rise of man, a particular type of cosmos in which evil appears necessarily and as abundantly as you like in the course of evolution—not by accident (which would not much matter) but through the very structure of the system.” [Phen. of Man, 310–11]
It is extremely revealing to follow the development of Miss O’Connor’s attitude toward Teilhard. For while she begins as an advocate of his scientific mysticism, she gradually withdraws her endorsement of it. Her 1960 review of The Phenomenon of Man thus offers no qualifiers whatsoever. She is not surprised that a secularist like Julian Huxley should, in his introduction to the book, regard Teilhard’s synthesis of Christianity and evolution as a mere “gallant attempt.” For her, however, it is wholly successful.
Notwithstanding that Hazel Motes ends his life wearing barbed wire around his chest and walking with gravel and broken glass in his shoes, Flannery vigorously affirms Teilhard’s Dionysian embrace of the world. She assents uncritically to his view that the aim of the spiritual life is not to escape from the natural order, but to spiritualize and sanctify the materiality we have been given by “working together” with God. This despite the fact that nowhere in her fiction is there any such genial partnership between God and his human helpers.
O’Connor’s most startling declaration in this review is that “Teilhard’s work constitutes a recovery of St. Paul’s thought.” She apparently has in mind the Pauline eschatology, wherein the natural order is seen not as an already-finished process, but as a creation which “groaneth and travaileth together” until it shall eventually “be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21-22). As Flannery notes, Teilhard also sees creation as a movement still in full gestation and humanity as complete “neither in its individual developments nor, above all, in the collective terminus toward which it is directed.”
It is astonishing, however, that O’Connor could have equated the eschatology of St. Paul with Teilhard’s concept of the Omega Point. The latter is a mystical culmination beyond time wherein the increasing development of human consciousness engendered by the natural process shall issue in the final concord of all things. Teilhard likens this “superior pantheism” to the Pauline declaration that “God shall be all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28) [Phen. of Man, 294]. But there is an enormous and irreconcilable difference here that both Teilhard and O’Connor miss. Whereas for Teilhard the Omega Point represents the gradual evolutionary ascent of all things into a final cosmic convergence, for St. Paul it is an apocalypse in which God intervenes to defeat the evil powers that hold the world in thrall.
Here, Wood’s footnote number 20 is too precious to omit:
Miss O’Connor depicts a thoroughly biblical apocalypse at the end of “Revelation.” There Mrs. Ruby Turpin has a vision of an eschaton which is anything but a unification of consciousness. The entire scale of human values is overturned, and the last enter first. Shambling freaks, leaping lunatics, racial outcasts, and all the other species of human wretchedness ascend to Heaven ahead of the prim and respectable Turpins, whose very virtues have to be purged before they can approach the Kingdom.
Resuming the main analysis:
Gradually Miss O’Connor began to discern this ineluctable conflict, for her enthusiasm for Teilhard is somewhat tempered in her review of The Divine Milieu a year later. It is the spirit rather than the substance of Teilhard’s work that she now praises. What she admires is his intensity of passion for spreading the Gospel, a rare Christian fervor which matches the secularist determination to envision the cosmos as void of divinity. And thus she concludes with a ringing endorsement: “It is doubtful if any Christian of this century can be fully aware of his religion until he has reseen it in the cosmic light which Teilhard has thrown on it.”
Even so, Flannery concedes that The Phenomenon of Man may appear heretical when read apart from The Divine Milieu, and that the theological affirmations made in the latter will seem insubstantial without the scientific argument offered by its companion-piece. Her reservations about Chardin’s work seem to have increased by the time when, later in 1961, she came to review Olivier Rabut’s study of Teilhard. Hence we find her commending Rabut for understanding Teilhard’s greatness without accepting his hypotheses as either proven or even likely. She seems also to assent to Rabut’s critique of Teilhard: “[Rabut] believes that Teilhard yields to a temptation to overemphasize the element of panpsychism in nature and that he does not distinguish adequately between the supernatural action of Christ and the purely natural ascent of evolution.”
No longer is there any mention of Teilhard as the new Aquinas and rediscoverer of the biblical doctrines of creation and eschatology. Indeed, O’Connor affirms nothing more than that we owe to Teilhard the discovery that “vocation of spirit is visible, concrete, and of absorbing interest.” She means, apparently, that belief in God is neither an abstract nor private matter, but a commitment which must infuse every aspect of one’s art, politics, science, and merest menial job. That Teilhard lived out such a commitment there is no doubt.
Miss O’Connor’s final evaluation of Teilhard’s work was published in 1963, soon after the Vatican issued a Monitum warning readers to be wary of his theology. Her review of Letters from a Traveller assents, without qualification, to the papal caveat. Once again she hails Teilhard’s absolute loyalty to the Church despite the suffering and exile it cost him.1 Yet she confesses that his attempt to reconcile evolution and revelation is a failure, albeit “the failure of a great and saintly man.” And so it is that finally her sympathy lies with the orthodox distinction between nature and grace rather than with Teilhard’s near collapse of them: “these letters are further evidence that his life of faith and work can be emulated even though his books remain incomplete and dangerous.”
Wood addresses O’Connor’s use of a characteristically Teilhardian phrase, often taken by more superficial critics as evidence of her adherence to Teilhard’s worldview:
These reviews confirm, then, what I have long suspected but what the critics have rarely admitted: that Flannery O’Connor’s fiction constitutes a critique rather than a vindication of Teilhard’s naturalistic faith. Even in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” whose title is taken directly from Teilhard, there is a virtual refutation of his notion that the natural order forms “a movement of convergence in which races, people and nations consolidate one another and complete one another by mutual fecundation” [Phen. of Man, 242]. The convergences which occur in O’Connor’s story, on the contrary, are violent, tragic, and only potentially redemptive.
The mother’s aristocratic and racial pretensions are demolished in her confrontation with the Negro woman wearing an identical hat. Julian’s arrogant, intellectual self-sufficiency clashes with his mother’s genuine solicitude to result, indirectly at least, in her death. And only in the harrowing vision of what he has done to her spiritually does the son enter that “world of guilt and sorrow” whose Omega Point is not the unification of mankind but the atonement for sin wrought upon the Cross.
For all the putative influence of Teilhard’s theology on O’Connor’s fiction, this story with a Teilhardian title looks very much like a parody of the cosmic optimism which rings out in the paleontologist’s famous watchword: “Remain true to yourselves, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge!” So it is with all her stories and novels. Their convergences point not toward the renovation of the earth under the new universal religion of mystical science but to the recurring crux of sin and evil whose only remedy lies in a Grace which radically transforms the world’s misery from beyond itself.
Ralph Wood, I tip my hat to you: this interpretation makes sense of all the data.
So, Flannery initially liked certain things about Teilhard—one suspects it was especially his “spirit,” the dashing impression he gave of great positivity and vitality in bringing the Christian faith right into the heart of the world and of modernity—but eventually took a critical distance as the heterodoxy and, let’s face it, Hegelian implausibility of his system came into view. And that’s why, as Mark Helprin eloquently argues in his book Digital Barbarism (Harper, 2009), she chose to deploy his language with a dark irony:
That something is very wrong with the [Teilhardian] notion of convergence in even its most elevated formulation is supported by its most eloquent critique. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a simple and profound short story by Flannery O’Connor, a mother and son travel on a city bus in the newly integrated South. The mother clings to the old ways and is clearly wrong in doing so, but, in practice, she is kind and good. The son is the apostle of progress and justice, but in practice he is smug and cruel. He represents pride in achievement, faith in emerging perfection, reason, justice, the linear concept of history. She—humility, tradition, conservation, circularity, continuity, mercy, and forgiveness.
It is no coincidence that in the interplay between the two in the context of their individual struggles he finds that his actions have assured “his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.” And it isn’t a coincidence that the title of the story, which Flannery O’Connor wrote to address the great French philosopher, is from Teilhard, for it is a velvet demolition of his belief that mankind can evolve to perfection.
If salvation is a function of perfectibility, what does this imply about the lame, the weak, the befuddled, and the oppressed? Are they by implication less beloved of God? In one spare short story, mortally ill Flannery O’Connor, with the Southern and the Celtic knowledge of hubris and defeat running naturally in her blood, checkmated Teilhard’s great erudition, multiple volumes, and splendid dreams. This she did with the same kind of totally unexpected, breathtaking power of the Maid of Orleans, or Anne Frank. She, who would never know temporal glory, or be rewarded in this world, who died without husband or children, who suffered and had no sway, she knew the simple truth that salvation is ultimately a matter of grace. That is, when all is said and done, man is simply unable to construct the higher parts of his destiny, and must know this to survive even the simpler challenges that he is expected to meet.
At least since the Enlightenment, man has modeled himself and his society upon the machine. Slowly shorn of his knowledge of and feel for nature and human nature, he has been brought over to the principles (and, often, the mere effects) of speed, efficiency, economy, and emotional detachment: doing the most with least; just-in-time inventory; lack of feeling; absence of commitment; neutrality of conscience; all the techniques common to a business, an organization, a mechanical contrivance, or a modernist novel. But neither nature nor man are machines, and, treated as machines, they sicken.
Convergence is not a fact on the horizon but a contrivance of human vanity. It will not come from a hand-held toy, an electronic network no matter how powerful, or a machine that sits on a desk. It will not come by virtue of universal or near-universal agreement or by virtue of the new. Wait as long as you wish, it will not come.
In his article “The Problem with Teilhard” (Nova et Vetera English edition, vol. 16, no. 2 [2018]: 377–85), Douglas Farrow makes a compelling case that Teilhard’s problem is not so much pantheism as it is a gnostic escapism:
Teilhard’s vision of salvation is undeniably escapist. His hope is not, as some pretend, in the renewal of all things, but in the forsaking of all things. It is not hope in the restoration of a proper relationship between God and the world and between the soul and the body, but in the eventual repudiation of the body and of the world, of all that is material, through union with God. That is his idea of rectification, indeed of deification, and it is—not to put too fine a point on it—a decidedly heretical idea…
Teilhard’s Cosmic Christ, who underwrites noogenesis, has in fact nothing to do with the risen and ascended Lord Jesus Christ to whom Paul bears witness. He is not Lord at all, really, but rather the product of the cosmic process. There is a sense in which he does not yet even fully exist. If evolution is noogenesis, noogenesis is Christogenesis. “Christ is the end-point of the evolution, even the natural evolution, of all beings; and therefore evolution is holy.” “Quite specifically,” says Teilhard, “it is Christ whom we make or whom we undergo in all things.”
So who was Jesus? In him, this future Cosmic Christ appeared proactively, or perhaps we should say retroactively, as a particular man. He did so in order to infuse into human nature a grace essential to evolution’s “hominization” phase. By his sacrifice on the Cross, Jesus provided the impetus to self-transcendence, without which unification—incorporation into one infinite Person—is ultimately impossible. In his resurrection, he anticipated our liberation from “the temporal zones of our visible world” into the oneness of the Pleroma. Having thus demonstrated a law common to all life, he began to draw the whole world after him as the enormous body of his ascension. The Cross now represents “the deepest aspirations of our age,” and “towards the peaks, shrouded in mists from our human eyes, whither the Cross beckons us, we rise by a path which is the way of universal progress.”
For Teilhard, the incarnation was a decisive but temporary affair, then. The Christ “appeared for a moment in our midst” that we might see and touch him “before vanishing once again, more luminous and ineffable than ever, into the depths of the future.” His withdrawal—both a going up and a going ahead, an ascension and an advance—means a going beyond the humanity he once shared with us. He has become “an immense and living force” to be encountered already, and worshipped, in all creatures. His presence is “silently accruing in things” until, in the Parousia, as if at a kind of flashpoint, it will suddenly break forth in all its splendor. For, as the twin vectors of our rectified faith “veer and draw together” they point us to the consummated Christ, the divine soul of a divinized creation….
Having presented further evidence of Teilhard’s monism, Farrow presses the question:
If Christ and cosmos can be run together, and Christ and Church, what can separate Church and world? The whole is greater than the parts, and Christ is that whole. “Always from the very first it was the world, greater than all the elements which make up the world, that I was in love with; and never before was there anyone before whom I could in honesty bow down.”
Regarding the attempt to “rehabilitate” Teilhard, Farrow’s conclusion is unequivocal:
On the basis of his Christology alone, it is impossible to speak, with the Pontifical Council, merely of reservations or room for constructive criticism. We are talking about heresy, full stop…. Pius XII was not exaggerating. The Holy Office was not being overly scrupulous when, under John XXIII, it issued its warning. Karl Barth, for that matter, did not go too far when he described the thought of Teilhard de Chardin as a giant gnostic snake. With all due respect to the Pontifical Council for Culture, it is high time the Church’s heel struck that snake a sharp blow on its head. The monitum, if it is to be lifted, should be lifted only for that purpose—to replace it with a condemnation of the material heresy with which Teilhard’s work is replete.
Then, like a skilled radiologist who can peer through to the underlying bone structure and identify its peculiar defects, Farrow masterfully enucleates the entire Teilhardian system in the form of ten errors (“each of which,” he says, “implies several others”):
1. Creation, as the gnostics taught, entails a fall.
2. Diversity means disunity, and disunity is the only evil.
3. The redemption of creation involves overcoming matter with spirit and escaping, rather than renewing, the material world.
4. The risen Christ is not the man Jesus, but a spiritualizing force immanent in all creation.
5. Christ has three natures, not two: divine, human, and (synthesizing those two) universal.
6. The Church is building Christ by bringing his ubiquity to ritual expression.
7. Transubstantiation means the spiritualizing of matter.
8. The Church or city of God is one axis of Humanity as it fulfills its task of spiritualizing the world; the other is the city of man, with which the Church must fully (not partly or provisionally) identify and cooperate in a common enterprise.
9. The Cross represents the deepest aspirations of our age.
10. God is not, from and to all eternity, the Holy Trinity in transcendent splendor, who creates freely and grants being and goodness to all things that he makes, but rather, as Hegel taught, the Spirit-generating Process of diversification and unification.
Farrow thus distills the wild gnosticism of Teilhard into a few dense pages indicative of how far his vision stands from—indeed, how utterly alien it is to—Christian dogmatic orthodoxy.
Can anyone familiar with the fiction and non-fiction of Flannery O’Connor find this gnosticism in her work — this flight from the world in the name of transfiguring it, this separation of the historical Jesus from the cosmic Christ, this necessary evolutionary progress of cosmic divinization and the identification over time of Church and world?
As Wood and Helprin show so well, the distance between the substance of O’Connor’s worldview and the substance of Teilhard’s is nearly infinite, however much she appreciated this or that incidental aspect of his life and work, his spirited confrontation with huge questions. She, too, in her own peculiar Southern Gothic way, confronted huge questions with a bold spirit—but it was the spirit of the old Gospel in new literary forms. She was not a gnostic but a Catholic; for her, there was no flight from the world, but rather, a fighting with this world to see, or to bring out, the face of Christ in it, in people, in the suffering, in the anarchy where redemption stakes its claims. So far from evolution, there is devolution to the point of violence or surrender; the double meaning of “world,” God’s good creation and the wilful estrangement of creatures, is never overcome—can never be—until God freely and surprisingly intervenes.
As became apparent only later, after more of Teilhard’s papers and books were published, he assented to being silenced only in the external forum, and continued actively to promote his ideas and to prepare their dissemination after his death, when he surmised that the restrictions would no longer operate.—PAK
This is a fine and important article by Peter K. It deserves a wide audience. My background in science has enabled me to see through the pseudo science and gnostic spirituality of Teilhard. The latter’s brew of Chistology and mystical scientistism is still appealing to those for whom the Cross and Resurrection are merely events to get through to some sort of apotheosis in which judgment has no role. I remember being fascinated by Teilhard for a brief period in my intellectual life. But becoming a Catholic and a priest ended that fascination in my act of offering the Mass, the center of understanding of matter and spirit.
O'Connor's wonderful short story, "Parker's Back," is a clear repudiation of gnosticism. Grace enters into the life of Parker, this simple, puzzled fella, a weak, vessel of clay, and it does so by his obedience to the call of Beauty that is one with the Cross. It's significant that Parker rejects the modern, popular images of Christ, simpering and trendy. He is drawn to the iconic, an aesthetic far from the naturalism of modern proclivities. Parker's choice of "the Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes" is the opposite of any bland, presumptive optimism of mechanical ascent to apotheosis. The sorrow and shock of the titular character is the discovery that his moralizing, nagging wife, Sarah Ruth, devoutly follows a religion utterly opposed to the Incarnate Lord, and the ravishing apocalypse of the Holy. I recommend Marion Montgomery as another scholar worth investigating for insight into O'Connor's metaphysical and theological allegiances. My own view is that her attraction to Teilhard was partly a reaction against Irish Catholic Jansenism. Superficially, his thought promised to open up a narrow imaginary to sacramental depths that entail the cosmos. Any more acute acquaintance could only show initial enthusiasm to be ultimately misplaced. As Hans Urs von Balthasar has opined, the Spirit even now kenotically works to redeem the Fallen Creation. O'Connor rightly saw it as part of the mission of the poet in service of the Church to reveal the full scope of the eschatological Wedding Feast. It is far more than anything Tielhard could imagine, which is why apophatic reserve is necessary complement to the moment of artistic vision.