Chardin and Jung's Influence on Today's Society

By Most Rev. John J. Lehman, S.S.B.

Cosmology is the study of the world, the cosmos.  When talking
about the present and trying to understand it, the past sometimes
enlightens the present.  An ancient Jewish cosmology can help show
us where we are looking at the state of the world.  God said, "Let
there be light," and God created the sun to rule over the day and
the moon to rule over the night.  The sun would come from around
back of heaven, rule the day, and go back behind the firmament.
The moon did the same for the night.  The earth was like a round
saucer sitting on four pillars.  Such was the world view, just from
appearances, that the ancient Hebrews devised.

When the earth began to shake or quake, it was these pillars of the
earth that were shaken.  The stars were hung from the filament of
heaven, stars, as it were, stuck onto the vaulted sky.  When the
flood gates of heaven were opened, the water behind the firmament
was let in as rain.  This was not too bad a cosmology.  Man, today,
looks at the heavens and it's like living under a bubble canopy.
This is the way ancient Israelites saw things and developed their
personal cosmology.

In the center of the earth was a large hole leading ever downward.
This was called SHEOL, the pit.  At death, everyone went into this
pit, all mankind, whether they were good or bad.  Except for having
the earth flat like a saucer, the Israelites had a rather good but,
for moderns, an inadequate cosmology.  It fit them perfectly,
however, and this cosmology held for ages and ages.  Man is still
influenced by it today.

I talked to a nuclear scientist at the time Air Force sent me to
Catholic University to get a master's degree.  While I was there, I
sat down in a crowded lunch room and met this very interesting
atomic scientist from Los Alamos.  I said, "What are you doing out
here in the East?"  He answered, "My wife has cancer.  I am out
East to get her through the cancer clinic.  I have a job here
investigating cosmic rays.  I spend half my day in a cave with
various photographic plates getting impressions of cosmic rays."

I said, "Did you get in on the atom bomb blast?"  He replied,

"Yes, I was there when the scientists first exploded it."

"Well", I said, "what did the scientist think about the whole
thing?"

He answered, "When that thing went off, some fell on their knees
and asked God's forgiveness for creating this monster, some cursed,
and the rest were praying like crazy!"

"Why?" I asked.

He replied, "Well, we had two theories--either this was going to
start a chain reaction and the whole world was going up in smoke,
or the explosion was going to punch a hole in the sky way up there
and the atmosphere was then going to leak out."  He continued, "I
was standing right in the middle of the desert surrounded by
mountains when the bomb went off.  The first shock wave came and
knocked me flat on my duff.  This desert was like a great plain
bowl and there were mountains surrounding the whole area.  So, when
I got knocked down flat, I picked myself up and brushed myself off.
I no sooner finished than I was knocked down on my duff again.  I
thought for certain the world was beginning to go up in a big chain
reaction, but, after the sixth time, I finally found out it was
shock waves coming off these mountains, hurtling back to me at the
bottom of the bowl, that were knocking me down.  Then, when the
world did not explode, I knew everything was going to be all right.
The next thing I worried about was that bomb is for sure going to
punch a hole in the sky and let out all the oxygen in our earth's
atmosphere."

Before the atomic and rocket age, a remnant of the same old Jewish
God-centered cosmology hung on.  About he time of the French
Revolution, the deists said that God took the earthy globe, like a
rubber ball, and hurled it off into space.  Like a child who got
tired of playing with his ball and turned his back, God no longer
took a personal interest in the world.

Next to come along were the authorities who said, "Well, there is
not only no personal God, but there isn't any God."  So, they took
God out of cosmology and exclaimed, "God is dead!"  After the First
World War, a scientist began to write from his studies in
anthropology.  He devised a new cosmology with God as the center of
it in Christ Jesus.  That scientist was Dr. Teilhard de Chardin.

He was an anthropologist and a Jesuit priest who died in 1955. This
age needed a Teilhard de Chardin because at that time there were a
lot difficulties in the Catholic Church.  So great were the
difficulties that none of the Teilhard de Chardin's publications
came out until after his death.  Ecclesiastical authorities were a
little frightened of them.  He was changing the whole traditional
cosmology that catholics and scholastic philosophers used.  When de
Chardin talks about cosmosphere, he says in the positioning of
atoms in the world, when they start to arrange themselves,
positively there is still no psyche or soul in the world as yet.
But when in a process that he called ramification, these atoms
begin to complexify in their arrangement, a soul is born to the
world.  As soon as the process of complexification comes to be,
matter then takes on a psyche.  The psyche begins to radiate
energy.  He calls this radial energy.

The biosphere comes to be when this complexification is able to
support life.  This happens in a very long evolutionary process.
After eons of time, finally there arrives on the scene the
primates, and through the primates evolving, evolution finally gets
to man, and here an interesting phenomenon happens.  Nerve ganglia
become very complex and refined.  A new process sets in. It is no
longer an evolution like a plant flowering outward, but like a
plant blossoming, flowering, or turning in on itself.  A huge
process has begun, and this process de Chardin called involution.
The flowering ganglia involutes on itself.  As soon as it does
this, it intensifies a ramification process, and this complexifies
intently and quickly.  Eventually, all the nerve ganglia piled one
on the other in primates are intensely ramified.  At the very top,
one highly developed, ramified ganglia involutes upon itself and a
brain develops or evolves.  The noosphere is born.  Man comes upon
the scene.  Finally, passing through a threshold of thought, man
becomes a totalized human being.  Where is God in this unique
process?  One can put him in at the very beginning, getting the
stuff together that finally evolves into a man, a creature with a
humanoid psyche or soul.  A new sphere is born and Dr. Teilhard
calls this the noosphere.  The nice thing about de Chardin is that
he puts the soul back into the cosmos, into that sphere of the
earth, into the life sphere of the biosphere, and, finally, he
gives to man a soul or psyche in the noosphere.  The earth and
everything on it, or in it, takes a soul or a psyche.  To
recapitulate, when the evolutionary process reaches its apex, it is
able to support thought.  A man is born and a new type of
reflective psyche comes into being, so here the earth takes on a
new type of soul.  Then we have a noosphere. As man continues to
populate the earth, an entire envelope of thought circles the
globe, and the earth is ringed round by a soul or a psyche, a
complete noosphere.  The beauty of de Chardin's cosmology is that
when Jesus of Nazareth came in the flesh at his birth, and when
through his passion, death and resurrection he took on a glorified,
spiritualized, radiant body, he was able to infuse all psyches with
his own glorified psyche.  His resurrected, glorified,
spiritualized body is now present to material being at the highest
point of psychic development, its acme of perfection.

And so, Jesus brings another special; presence of God through His
own glorified body into the world.  Present in the world, Jesus,
the Christ, sanctifies this world by anointing it with His
presence. De Chardin, as St. Paul, says that God will be all in all
through Jesus when this evolutionary process reaches completion,
when man and all nature become totally infused with God and allow
God to totally infuse the whole world with His presence and the
spirit of the living God.  Before the coming of Jesus Christ, this
kind of presence could not be supported in the world because Jesus
had not yet been born with a body as you and I have.  He infuses
the world with the energy of His own radiating presence.

In the past, man could not measure radial energy.  Until this age
of ours, there was no way to do it.  Without Geiger counters and
sophisticated electronic equipment, man had no way of knowing
scientifically that things give off radial energy.  Now it can be
measured.  Have you ever watched some of these T.V. programs where
they wire up plants?  Science can measure the psychic energy that
radiates from a plant.  Just think, one can take electronic
equipment and make a symphony of plants giving off their radial
energy.  An experimenter can send a man into a room full of plants
to snap off one of the buds of a selected plant, and when he goes
out of the room and comes back again, the plant that he has just
injured gives out one startling burst of fear-filled energy.  This
energy can be measured accurately.  Scientist have also
experimented with leaves.  When one cuts or breaks off a particle
of the leaf, this part will try to reproduce itself by giving off
psychic energy, filling in that part that was taken.  They can also
measure the attempt of the plant to do this.

Such is our sophistication.  Now from all of this, man can deduce a
psychoid world, a world in which thought can be supported. Dr. Carl
Gustav Jung, following Freud, was one of the first to investigate
scientifically the psychoid world.

The psychoid world that Jung investigated was like an iceberg, with
only a tip of the top sticking through the sea's surface.  This tip
he called consciousness.  The rest of the unseen iceberg Jung
called the unconsciousness.  The psychoid world in man is divisible
into consciousness and unconsciousness.  Unconsciousness can be
further delineated into the personal unconscious and the collective
unconscious.  Further, just as a man has a genetic heritage that
makes him the physical kind of being he is, so, too, he has a
psychic heritage.  This heritage comes to him not through genes,
but as archetypal images that are part of his inheritance.  A
primary archetypal image that man has in his unconscious is the
mandala.  It is a complete circle.  The mandala is man's image for
psychic wholeness.  The interesting thing is that when this circle,
the mandala, is divided into four, there is an archetypal image of
the deity.  So, Jung would say, "Called or not, God is present."
The reason he said this is that in all people he investigated, from
the American Indian to the people of Borneo, all have the same
symbol for psychic wholeness.  The image of psychic wholeness
divided into four becomes the archetypal image for God, and this is
why he said, "Called or not, God is present."  Jung does not
believe only that God is present.  He says that he can
scientifically demonstrate the presence of God.

In these two men, Dr. Teilhard de Chardin and Dr. Carl Gustav Jung,
we have a modern scientific philosophy to complete a true and
accurate picture of the modern world, a modern cosmology if you
will.

De Chardin, the anthropologist, begins with the external cosmos and
finds his way into the biosphere and then into the psychoid world
he calls noosphere.  The description is in words for this is the
language of consciousness.

Jung, the psychologist, starts with the psychoid world.  The
description is in symbols or images, for this is the language of
the unconscious world of man.  He arrives at consciousness and
through it he attains, in words, a picture of the world outside of
man.

There is only one thing more to point out in these two men. When
one or more psyches or souls giving off radial energy meet, Dr. de
Chardin calls this energy tangential.  We moderns like to call this
a happening.

The meetings of two or more psychoid worlds, a happening in Dr.
Jung's psychology, he called synchronicity.

The anthropologist, deriving his knowledge outside himself, and the
psychologist gathering his knowledge inside himself, meet each
other in the psychoid world.  A new scientific cosmology is thus
born from this nexus.