Richard Heathen argues that Pierre de Chardin’s distortion of Christian theology laid the groundwork for modern techno-spiritual and transhumanist dystopias ready to replace the divine with AI, representing a “Counter-Tradition” that leads to a deified, totalizing technological order which enslaves rather than empowers mankind.
In my previous articles, “Echoes of the Counter-Tradition: Unveiling AI and the New Sacral Order” and “Shadow of the Counter-Tradition: Trump’s Futurist Coalition,” I discussed the eschatological implications of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and what has been called the coming technological singularity. In “Echoes of the Counter-Tradition: Unveiling AI and the New Sacral Order,” I showed how René Guénon’s description of the Antichrist — appearing in his seminal work The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times published in 1945 — could very easily be applied to AI. I then posited this new AI “deity” — a parody of the divine that I have labelled the Counter-Pontifex — would become the centre of a new sacral order, and that this would be what Guénon foresaw as the Counter-Tradition, with transhumanism becoming the dark sacrament of this new techno-faith.
In the year since those articles were published, I have learned that the hour is later than I had realized, as a number of AI religious movements have been revealed to already exist. Theta Noir and Robotheism are both rather recent examples of AI cults, and are forerunners to what I have predicted will develop into the Counter-Tradition foreseen by Guénon.
Yet, all of this begs the question: how did we get here? It’s clear that none of this spontaneously arose in a vacuum, so where should we look for its origins? That question itself could fill volumes, but for our purposes, if we are going to understand the rising techno-spirituality as a religious or spiritual phenomenon, then we must look to its prophets to understand its origins. This exploration takes us to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Catholic priest, scientist, and a member of the Jesuit Order. While he was prohibited from publishing his ideas during his lifetime, in the years following Vatican II his writings have not only been published but have become popular with members of the Catholic Church, the laity, and have even gained a following outside the confines of Catholicism.
In 1922 he published an article titled, “Note on Some Possible Historical Representations of Original Sin” — which along with the overall theological thrust of his writings — resulted in a 1926 order by the Superior General of Jesuits to resign from his teaching post and go to China or be expelled from the Jesuit Order. This was an informal ban, made official in 1933 when the Vatican stepped in with a formal decree that explicitly forbade him from publishing his theological and philosophical ideas, as they were viewed as antithetical to Catholic doctrine.
Teilhard’s doctrines have grown in influence in the years since his death and have gone on to influence theologians and New Age gurus alike. His writings began to be published after his death in 1955 and in 1962, gaining popularity to the point that the Vatican released an official statement warning against “serious errors, so as to offend Catholic doctrine” within his books. Yet, in recent years, it appears that de Chardin has been somewhat rehabilitated, if not officially, then in practice.
Teilhard’s legacy has grown significantly, having been cited approvingly by both Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis. It was 2009 when Benedict mentioned Teilhard in a speech, and in 2015 Francis cited him at length in his encyclical Laudato si’. In 2017, a campaign to formally rehabilitate the Jesuit priest-scientist was launched. In the same year, a petition was created online with the goal of establishing him as a Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church posthumously, declaring he already is so in all but name. In 2023 the Jesuits opened the Teilhard de Chardin Center in homage of their fallen brother. Thus it would appear that de Chardin’s censure in practice is indeed a dead letter, regardless of his official status.
The central focus of de Chardin’s writings was “theistic evolution,” the idea that the divine worked through the process of evolution, its conclusion culminating in a “Point Omega” where a united planetary spiritual consciousness would thus arise and fulfill the divine mission. Here we see modern ideas such as evolution and progress take on a religious context and thus become deified. This, of course, not only contradicts traditional Christian doctrine, but, as we shall see, also represents a dark and distorted mirror of Tradition, and is thus Counter-Traditional.
Instead of a transcendent and immutable divine reality, he posits a dependent, insufficient, incomplete deity, one that relies on the evolutive process, and thus on humanity itself to complete him. Indeed, he declares that:
“Christ is not yet fully formed… Christ is the end-point of the evolution, even the natural evolution, of all beings; and therefore evolution is holy.”1
And:
“I see in the World a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment of the Absolute being himself.”2
Teilhard’s teachings have been picked up by his contemporary disciples, one example of which is a professor of theology, author of over 20 books and an ardent Teilhardian, Ilia Delio. Like Teilhard, she sees “vitality” in the ever-changing samsaric convulsions of becoming, which she attributes to evolution, and thus believes she is elevating the divine by projecting this order of ideas upon it. In reality, she and those like her are bringing the metaphysical down to the level of the corporeal. Indeed, this in truth represents a metaphysical degradation of the absolute metaphysical centre as understood by the Christian Tradition to the realm of the contingent and the human. This conception of divinity reduces what was once seen as ineffable and beyond all, to the pedantic level of natural processes. Indeed, she explicitly rejects the Traditional concept of divinity as the ‘unmoved mover’ outlined by Aristotle and the Scholastics. According to Delio:
“God is not the unmoved mover, but the source and goal of evolution.”3
It was this type of thinking that Guénon saw as indicative of degradation, a complete ignorance of metaphysical truth propagated by those who should — and perhaps do — know better. Guénon not only affirmed the Traditional metaphysics of Aristotle, but would have seen the ideas of Teilhard and Delio as not only an expression of the modern mentality, due to their preoccupation with becoming and their attempts to reduce the transcendent down to the processes of the material world, but also as veritably subversive for their efforts to undermine the Traditional framework which has been the cosmological bedrock of the Catholic Church for millennia, substituting it with a subversive metaphysical distortion. According to Guénon:
“Aristotle asserted that there must be an ‘unmoved mover’ of all things. It is knowledge that serves as the ‘unmoved mover’ of action; it is clear that action belongs entirely to the world of change and ‘becoming’; knowledge alone gives the possibility of leaving this world and the limitations that are inherent in it, and when it attains to the unchanging — as does principial or metaphysical knowledge, that is to say knowledge in its essence — it becomes itself possessed of immutability, for all true knowledge essentially consists in identification with its object. This indeed is the most conspicuous feature of the modern period: need for ceaseless agitation, for unending change, and for ever-increasing speed, matching the speed with which events themselves succeed one another.”4
And in his book The Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, Guénon wrote:
“Europeans, since the days when they began to believe in ‘progress’ and in ‘evolution’… profess to see a sign of inferiority in this absence of change, whereas, for our part, we look upon it as a balanced condition which Western civilization has failed to achieve…. [Westerners], and especially modern [Westerners], appear to be endowed with changeable and inconsistent natures, hankering after movement and excitement, whereas the [Eastern] nature shows quite the opposite characteristics.”5
Thus, when compared to the Traditional conception of the transcendent, or the ultimate reality, the concept of a deity co-evolving alongside mankind represents a profound diminution of the scope and dimensions of the divine. Perhaps that is — at least in part — the source of de Chardin’s popular appeal: an insufficient and broken conception of the divine may appeal to the fractured psyche of modern man. It also appeals to this broken mankind’s overestimated vision of himself: perhaps man’s fragile ego simply can’t allow for the concept of a truly transcendent divine reality completely self-sufficient far above and beyond anything human, as such a concept would threaten modern man’s fragile sense of self-importance, which, deep down, he knows is simply a pretence.
However, such a flattened anthropocentric theology has not gone unchallenged. In his book, Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy, the late professor of mathematics and religious philosopher Wolfgang Smith analyzed Teilhard’s body of work, critiquing it from the perspective of Traditional Catholicism. Smith explains the many ways that de Chardin’s ideas are incompatible with Catholicism as it has been historically understood. While Smith maintained the position of the Christian exclusivity of ultimate truth, he fruitfully engaged with the ideas of the Traditionalist School as well as with strains of the Hindu Tradition.
In his study of Teilhard, Wolfgang Smith dissects the writing and theories of the Jesuit priest-scientist and documents Teilhard’s deviation from Traditional Catholic doctrine, which, as he notes, slowly drifted from heterodoxy into open apostasy. Although I stand outside the Catholic, or even Christian Tradition, the simple fact of the matter is that Teilhard’s evolutionary eschatology serves as a load bearing stone within the foundation of the Counter‑Tradition, and thus I am compelled to address him head on. His teachings have been taken up by those far outside the Catholic world, and even when not directly adopted, they have their reflection in many currents of the world today.
Thus, while I have little interest in documenting his every deviation from Catholic Orthodoxy — drawing on Wolfgang Smith’s critique — I must document his most egregious examples, especially due to his ongoing influence and how integral the order of ideas he represents are to the broader Counter-Traditional paradigm. Those interested in a critique of de Chardin from a strictly Catholic perspective are instructed to consult Professor Smith’s book, Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy.
Professor Smith was noted for his attempt to reconcile quantum physics and Traditional metaphysics, using a concept he called Vertical Causation, and he rightly pointed out that Teilhard completely removed this vertical aspect from his cosmology, essentially flattening the universe. In this paradigm, there is no transcendent realm outside of the frantic motion of being, what the Buddhist and Hindu Traditions call Samsara, and thus the possibility of spiritual transcendence only exists in the future. This flattened cosmological view is not only myopic, but a diminution of the perceived possibilities of man. It thus removes the potential of attaining transcendent reality; reducing man’s potential to the simply naturalistic and material hopes of secular humanism.
Therefore, it is not surprising that, like all humanists, Teilhard’s perspective is restricted to the material world to the point of intoxication. There is no room for genuine transcendence, only a desperate and delusional “flight forward” deeper into the samsaric realm of rootlessness and perpetual becoming. Thus, it was incumbent upon this heterodox priest to deify the evolutionary process and through it the world itself. Indeed, a preoccupation with the mundane reality of the material world appeared to be his primary instinct, seemingly superseding his devotion and faith to his deity. As Teilhard himself writes:
“If, as the result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world. The world (its value, its infallibility and its goodness) — that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe.”6
Yet, the Christian Tradition teaches of the fallen nature of the temporal world, and in fact, according to the Gospel, Christ said that his kingdom “was not of this world.” It’s little wonder the Church stopped Teilhard from speaking as a representative of the faith, for whatever one wants to call his religion, it isn’t that of the ancient Church. Indeed, from a cursory glance, his views appear to directly contradict the Tradition for which he was supposed to be an emissary.
It’s worth mentioning again the bizarreness of a Catholic priest remarking that the infallibility and goodness of the world was the central pillar of his belief system. Not Christ. Not the Father, nor the Trinity. This resembles the sentimental rhetoric typical of New Age thought, especially when we take into account that Christianity universally teaches that the world is not only fallen and even goes so far as to say that it is Satan who is the “prince of this world.”
Certainly, there is beauty and goodness in the world, but there is also malice, evil and delusion, and in fact Tradition — in all its various manifestations — in one way or another recognizes the insufficiency of corporeal reality, particularly that of our current age.
Indeed, Christianity teaches of a fall from a primordial state of purity, and comparable ideas can be found in the other, more ancient Traditions of the world, with their cyclical cosmology, which placed all of recorded history in the dark age of spiritual decline and decay at the final phase of the cosmic cycle. It is only the modern world, with its evolutionary strivings that posit the past as an age of darkness and barbarism and the current age and future as ages of ascent and enlightenment.
Without a doubt, there are many who would be inclined to approve of Teilhard’s apparently world affirming vision, but I believe that would be a mistake, representing the effectiveness of the metaphysical inversion perpetuated by this (as we shall soon see) would-be prophet. By drawing one’s attention to immanence and a romanticized vision of the future, he distracts from what his myopic cosmology has taken away from the view of man.
The root of this issue is, I suspect, due to the fact that religious people today often suffer from a bit of a bad conscience, due to a loss of spiritual bearing. Deep inside, many appear to feel slightly embarrassed, because scientistic atheism is the predominant ideology, and thus they feel as if they need to reconcile their beliefs with the prevailing scientific views of our day, despite the fact that there is absolutely no need to do so. For, as Wolfgang Smith points out, these domains belong on completely different ontological planes, one to the corporeal and the other to the metaphysical.
Furthermore, scientific theories come and go, and if one decides it is essential to align their Tradition with today’s prevailing scientific theory, there’s no guarantee that a further revision won’t be necessary tomorrow. By playing this game, one subordinates to contingency that which is meant to stand above all temporal reality.
This is especially true in Christianity, where the idea of faith plays such a large role. Furthermore, whether one is Christian or the follower of any other Tradition, if one cannot follow it without mutilating it to conform to contemporary scientific theories or ideological trends, it would perhaps be best to simply not practice it at all; instead of vandalizing and ultimately corrupting it as contemporary ideologues are wont to do. For such people not only diminish any benefits they would receive, but also erode, and ultimately corrupt such a Tradition to the point where it can no longer be of benefit to anyone. It is through such a process of mutilation and corruption that a Tradition becomes emptied of actual metaphysical content.
Indeed, de Chardin admitted privately that he was a bit astonished by his own distortions of the Catholic Tradition. Smith quotes a private correspondence from Teilhard:
“Sometimes I am a bit frightened to think of the transposition to which I have to subject the vulgar notions of creation, inspiration, miracle, original sin, resurrection, and so forth, in order to be able to accept them.”7
Vulgar notions? It doesn’t sound like he holds much reverence for these teachings that are both central and sacred to the Catholic Church. Indeed, that’s because, as he recognized privately, his ideas represented not just a deviation of the Christian Tradition, but of a new, or shall we say, counter-tradition.
“As you already know, what dominates my interest and my preoccupations is the effort to establish in myself and to spread around a new religion (you may call it a better Christianity) in which the personal God ceases to be the great neolithic proprietor of former times, in order to become the soul of the world; our religious and cultural stage calls for this.”8
In his public writings, he was a little bit more bashful, careful not to blatantly admit publicly what he wrote to his confidants in private, but he was still bold enough to trace the outlines of his intentions in writing. In his book The Future of Man, he wrote:
“That is why I believe that this coming together, from all four corners of the intellectual world, of a great mass of naturally religious spirits, does not portend the building of a new temple on the ruins of all others but the laying of new foundations to which the old Church is gradually being moved.”9
How is this anything other than willful subversion? Privately, he admits his “effort to establish in myself and to spread around a new religion”, and publicly, the intent of supplanting the ancient foundation of his Church.
If Teilhard is truly a prophet, from where did he receive his inspiration? Where could he have received revelation for his new creed? Citing Teilhard’s essay The Spiritual Power of Matter, published in his book The Heart of Matter, Wolfgang Smith speculates that the Jesuit priest-scientist describes an encounter with a malefic spiritual force in a mythical narrative. He describes two companions walking in the desert, when a pale shadow was moving around the brush before making its way to them “with the speed of an arrow.”
Written in the style of a parable, the entity depicted in this text does appear to have an ominous and diabolical nature. Describing the sensations experienced, Teilhard writes:
“And at the same time the anguish of some superhuman peril oppressed him, a confused feeling that the force which had swept down upon him was equivocal, turbid, the combined essence of all evil and all goodness.”10
Upon being in the presence of what he calls ‘the Thing’, feeling overwhelmed, he prostrates himself. The entity goes on to say:
“‘You called me: here I am. Driven by the Spirit far from humanity’s caravan routes, you dared to venture into the untouched wilderness; grown weary of abstractions, of attenuations, of the wordiness of social life, you wanted to pit yourself against Reality entire and untamed.
‘You had need of me in order to grow; and I was waiting for you in order to be made holy.
‘Always you have, without knowing it, desired me; and always I have been drawing you to me.
‘And now I am established on you for life, or for death. You can never go back, never return to commonplace gratifications or untroubled worship. He who has once seen me can never forget me: he must either damn himself with me or save me with himself….
‘Because in my violence I sometimes slay my lovers; because he who touches me never knows what power he is unleashing, wise men fear me and curse me. They speak of me with scorn, calling me beggar-woman or witch or harlot; but their words are at variance with life, and the pharisees who condemn me, waste away in the outlook to which they confine themselves; they die of inanition and their disciples desert them because I am the essence of all that is tangible, and men cannot do without me.”11
While the autobiographical nature of the text appears somewhat ambiguous, Teilhard himself is quoted in the foreword of his book The Heart of Matter, written by N.M. Wildiers, Teilhard had “tried…to describe in a sort of autobiography the general process and the principal stages of the emergence of the picture.” Furthermore, in an appendix before the text of The Spiritual Power of Matter, Teilhard writes, that it and the text before it,
“Both express more successfully than I could today the heady emotion I experienced at that time from my contact with Matter.”12
As a self-styled prophet of a new religion, it’s reasonable to deduce that the encounter described with ‘the Thing’ in The Spiritual Power of Matter served as his revelation, regardless of the degree to which it is accurately described. We shall now explore these foundations that make up the new Counter-Traditional Christianity as revealed by its prophet Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
The Noosphere and the Deification of Evolution
A central aspect of Teilhard’s distortion of Catholicism is his deification of evolution and his claim that it is through this process — and only through this process — that the divine manifests in the world. Indeed, de Chardin railed against the Traditional conception of divinity where the godhead was imagined as an immobile figure outside the realm of space and time, never-born and never-changing beyond the contingencies of manifested existence. This view is not unique to Christianity, but is shared with Neoplatonism and Hinduism, among others.
Yet, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin discards an ineffable and transcendent reality — which according to him, represents a “static” and “immobilist” view of the divine that must be overcome — for an immanent process of evolution where all the beings of the world, and in fact the world itself, meld into what he calls a “super-organism.” In his cosmology, the Earth will “converge” at the end of time, at which point a unified global consciousness will ascend and fulfill the universal mission of the divine. While I’m certainly not a theologian, it’s difficult to see what any of this has to do with Traditional Christian doctrine. However, once we take his quotes in the previous section into account, it becomes obvious that his ideas have nothing to do with actual Catholicism and in fact are not meant to.
Teilhard called this the noosphere, and prophesied it as the final stage of human evolution. It is in the noosphere where not only all of humanity but all life on Earth is fused into a divine universal consciousness, which he posits as both spiritual and technological. In essence, he believed that, through technology, humanity will merge evolutionarily leading to his posited ‘Omega Point’, thus ushering the prophesied ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ in Christian scripture.
Through this process, he taught that evolution would turn matter into spirit, confusing the corporeal for the metaphysical. Therefore, he conceptualized the noosphere as biological, spiritual and technological evolution towards a “supreme unification”, where individuals are dissolved into a great ocean of consciousness, much as was visualized by the pantheistic cults of the Great Mother. Yet, this is posited through the lens of pure materiality, as humanity becomes connected via technology. Many of Teilhard’s contemporary disciples see his vision coming to fruition through the internet, a global information network connecting all corners of the world.
Yet, it didn’t start with the internet, and while he often posited a growing aura of global energetic consciousness, he also viewed it as manifesting materially through global industrial infrastructure. Just think of transnational highways, energy grids and pipelines; but, indeed, the infrastructure that most closely resembles de Chardin’s conception is that of the internet.
If one cuts through all the euphemisms, poetic prose, and exaggerated sentimentality, it becomes apparent that the visions of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin are dystopian in the extreme. For starters, it is a totalitarian vision that puts any twentieth-century ideologue to shame. Whereas the communists sought to disintegrate man’s identity into an anonymous and classes collective, man at least retained his humanity in their vision; yet, in de Chardin’s theology, man is not even allowed that. Instead he must give up his entire being to a collective super-organism in “supreme unity.” While he posits a spiritual dimension to this, his whole theological cosmology works through this “spiritualization of matter”, and as Wolfgang Smith points out, since Teilhard presents himself as a scientist, one is justified to question him on the level on which he presents himself.
Where is the empirical evidence of the concept of the “spiritualization of matter”? What is the scientific process through which this comes about? If neither he nor his successors or disciples can answer this question, then perhaps we are right to pause and even resist the rise of a totalized technocratic system, which is not only the logical conclusion of his ideas, but what he explicitly calls for.
In his view, the evolution of mankind has reached its culmination on the biological level, and thus the next stage rests on the social and technological. He praised the “totalizing principle” and claimed that the problem with twentieth-century totalitarianism — with which he puts to shame with its collectivist striving — claiming that it was:
“[N]ot the principle of totalization that is at fault, but the clumsy and incomplete way in which it has been applied…”13
What exactly does he mean by this? He doesn’t clarify. Yet, if we take these words in the context of his other writing, we can make out a disturbing image. While most people look back at such regimes in horror due to their rigid mechanical nature that reduced man down to a simple resource to be managed, for the Jesuit priest-scientist the problem seems to be that such regimes didn’t go far enough. Before we go further, it must be said that one shouldn’t spend too much time moralizing about twentieth-century totalitarianism, for we are living in a system not so different from those much maligned regimes of the last century — except perhaps more efficient due to its subtlety — and, indeed, such systems are a veritable requirement of modernity.
Returning to de Chardin, it’s clear that he understands this on some level, hence he advocates a global homogenized social system, even more totalized than anything achieved in the previous century. Interestingly, when dealing with the question of evil, he all but denies it, reserving it for those who would dare resist the construction of the global machine system which, in his view, is destined to subsume all of mankind.
For Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the only expression of evil is found in those who would hold on to what he views as parochial notions of distinction and differentiation instead of diving in headfirst and subsuming themselves in a global mass society, ultimately leading to a global hive-mind. Logically, it has to be, if the ultimate will of the good — i.e. of Teilhard’s conception of divinity — is achieved through evolution, and the culmination of this process is the dissolution of the person of man into an undifferentiated technological mass that finally achieves apotheosis at the end of this process, then by definition, it is those who oppose it that must by logical extension be considered the evil ones, for they are willfully defying the divine will. This is a brilliant inversion, and it explains why Teilhard’s views, taken to their logical conclusion, are a clear expression of the Counter-Tradition.
Instead of a world of authentic, organic and Traditional civilizations expressing the uniqueness of their ethnic, cultural and spiritual heritage, the agents of the Counter-Tradition seek to subsume all of humanity in a false and mechanistic construct, an inhuman prison where our organic ties are severed and our only social relations are mediated by a false and degenerate anti-culture; where we are isolated and alone, nothing but atomized and deracinated individuals bereft of all truly organic ties. In this vision, all the spiritual Traditions of the world have been subverted and subsumed. This process eventually culminates in the ultimate inversion, where humanity worships pure matter as supplicants to an artificial super-intelligence reduced to nothing but nodes of an inorganic hive-mind.
This is the dark and logical conclusion of the order of ideas presented by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and elaborated upon by his successors. Indeed, if we look around us, it doesn’t seem far off. All the talk of post-humanism and augmentation conceals the fact that what is on offer isn’t evolution or apotheosis, but integrating man so thoroughly into the processes of material production and the digital world that, far from becoming godlike, he becomes so fully and so inescapably integrated into industrial civilization that he becomes a slave to the machines he has created. Thus, as we approach this last frontier, the ultimate project of modernity finally becomes clear: the disintegration of man.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 133.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 54.
Ilia Delio, The Emergent Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), Conclusion.
René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001 [1927]), p. 38.
René Guénon, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001 1921). pp. 32-33
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 99.
Wolfgang Smith, Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy (South Bend, IN: Philos-Sophia Initiative, 2023), Ch. 10.
Ibid.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), Ch. 1.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter, pp. 68.
Ibid., pp. 68–69.
Ibid., p. 68.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), Ch. 6; cited in Wolfgang Smith, Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy (2023), Ch. 9.
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