de Chardin, Teilhard

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881⁠–1955) was a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist who read evolution as the means by which God completes creation. He held that matter grows more complex over time, that consciousness grows with it, and that the process tends toward a final communion of persons in Christ, which he called the Omega Point. Histories of transhumanism, including the Mormon Transhumanist Association's own, count him among the movement's Christian precursors. The MTA draws on his conviction that human ingenuity, science and technology included, has a part in divine purpose.

Life and Scientific Work

Teilhard was born on 1 May 1881 at Orcines, in the Auvergne. His father taught him to collect rocks and fossils, and his mother shaped his devotional life. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1899 and was ordained a priest in 1911. In the First World War, he served as a stretcher-bearer. He received the Médaille militaire and, later, the Legion of Honour, and he wrote his earliest theological essays at the front.

After the war, he completed a doctorate in geology at the Sorbonne and began teaching at the Institut Catholique in Paris. A private note reinterpreting original sin in light of evolution reached his superiors. In 1925 he was required to sign a set of doctrinal propositions, removed from teaching, and sent to China, where he spent most of the next two decades as a working scientist. He served as a geologist on the excavations at Zhoukoudian that recovered the fossils known as Peking Man, and with Henri Breuil he reported evidence of stone tools and the use of fire at the site.

His Jesuit superiors refused to let him publish his religious writings during his lifetime. He died in New York on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955. The Phenomenon of Man appeared that year and The Divine Milieu in 1957, and both found a wide readership.

Core Concepts

Complexity and Consciousness

Teilhard's system rests on one observed tendency. Across cosmic history, matter arranges itself into more complex structures: atoms into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into organisms with nervous systems. He argued that interiority, a "within" of things, increases in step with this outward complexity. Consciousness is therefore present in rudimentary form throughout matter and becomes reflective in human beings. He called this correlation the law of complexity-consciousness and treated evolution as having a direction because of it.

The Noosphere

With humanity, evolution crosses a threshold. Reflective minds, linked by language, migration and communication, form a new planetary layer that Teilhard named the noosphere, the sphere of thought above the biosphere. He began using the term in the early 1920s, and Édouard Le Roy and Vladimir Vernadsky developed it alongside him. Who coined it first remains disputed. In Teilhard's account, the noosphere is still forming, and its growth depends on human cooperation, research, and the technical systems that bring minds into contact.

The Omega Point

Teilhard projected the convergence of the noosphere forward to a final center, the Omega Point. He described Omega as personal, loving, and already active, drawing evolution toward itself. As a Christian, he identified it with the risen Christ, the cosmic Christ of Colossians 1:17, in whom all things consist.

Union Differentiates

Teilhard insisted that convergence completes persons and does not dissolve them. His formula was that union differentiates: the more closely beings are joined in love, the more fully each becomes itself. He accepted the word pantheism only in a qualified sense, for a state reached "by the differentiating and communicating action of love (God all in everyone)." For a Restoration reading, this rules out the absorption of individuals into an undifferentiated divine whole.

Transhumanizing and the Ultrahuman

The verb transhumanize has an old pedigree. Dante coined trasumanar to describe passing beyond the human in the ascent to paradise (Paradiso I.70). In a 1949 essay later collected in The Future of Man, Teilhard wrote of each person's chance to "trans-humanize" himself by developing his potentialities to the fullest. More often he spoke of the "ultra-human," a further stage of evolution that humanity reaches collectively through the noosphere. Scholars dispute how closely either term corresponds to modern transhumanism, which usually emphasizes enhancing the capacities of individuals.

Teilhard in the Transhumanist Lineage

Teilhard's closest link to secular transhumanism runs through the biologist Julian Huxley. Huxley was his friend and wrote the introduction to the 1959 English edition of The Phenomenon of Man. In the 1950s he popularized the word transhumanism⁠—the idea that humanity could take conscious responsibility for its own evolution. While the two men disagreed about God, they agreed that in the human species, evolution had become a process capable of directing itself.

Later writers recast the Omega Point in technological terms. The physicist Frank Tipler used the name for a cosmological scenario in which computation near the end of the universe emulates every person who has ever lived. Ray Kurzweil's account of a technological singularity is often read as a secular descendant of the same vision. Since the 1990s, commentators have also described the internet as a partial realization of the noosphere. That reading comes after the fact. Teilhard foresaw planetary communication networks and computing machines, but he located the unity he hoped for in love among persons and treated technology as its instrument.

Lincoln Cannon's history of religious transhumanism places Teilhard beside Nikolai Fyodorov among modern Christian thinkers who treated technological progress as a religious calling before the word transhumanism existed. The MTA partnered with the Teilhard Project in 2013. In a 2012 presentation, Roger Hansen grouped Teilhard with John A. Widtsoe and Alfred North Whitehead as "spiritual exemplars" for religious transhumanists.

Resonances with Restoration Theology

The comparisons below are Mormon Transhumanist readings. Latter-day Saint scholarship outside the MTA has engaged Teilhard only occasionally.

Spirit and Matter

Teilhard held that every particle of matter has an interior side, a rudimentary consciousness, throughout. Joseph Smith taught that "all spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure" (D&C 131:7). The two claims start from opposite ends. Teilhard finds mind in matter, and Joseph Smith finds matter in spirit. Both deny a sharp division between the physical and the spiritual, and both give material and technical work religious significance.

Communal Destiny

The noosphere is a collective body of mind. Restoration scripture describes a collective destiny in Zion, the people "of one heart and one mind" whom the Lord took up with Enoch (Moses 7:18⁠–21), a transformation Latter-day Saints call translation. The same scripture extends that destiny to the earth itself, which is to be sanctified and receive celestial glory (D&C 88:17⁠–20). Teilhard and the Restoration both describe salvation as the perfection of a community and its environment as well as of individuals. The third point of the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation states the same scope: it seeks the exaltation of "individuals and their anatomies, as well as communities and their environments."

Many in One

The principle that union differentiates corresponds to the sixth point of the Affirmation, which describes discipleship as offering friendship "that all may be many in one." Latter-day Saint theology places the same weight on relationship. Exaltation is sealed and familial, and the persons who share it remain distinct.

Building the Earth

Teilhard urged Christians to treat research and labor as participation in creation. The fourth point of the Affirmation holds that "scientific knowledge and technological power are among the means ordained of God" to realize prophetic visions of transfiguration, resurrection, and the renewal of the world. Restoration theology teaches that the intelligence gained in this life "will rise with us in the resurrection" (D&C 130:18⁠–19). Teilhard, the Affirmation, and scripture all treat human learning as preparation for divine work.

Significance for Mormon Transhumanism

Teilhard is a precursor of transhumanism, but for Mormon Transhumanists he is better described as a collateral relative than as an ancestor. The MTA's ideas descend chiefly from the Restoration: Joseph Smith's teachings on eternal matter, embodied deity, and human exaltation. Teilhard came to similar hopes by a separate path. What the two share is an older Christian habit of joining faith to the learning of its age. The early Church Fathers explained theosis using the philosophical language of their world. The thirteenth-century Scholastics, most notably Thomas Aquinas, brought Christianity together with the newly recovered works of Aristotle. Teilhard did the same with evolutionary science, and Mormon Transhumanists attempt it with emerging technology. Shared ancestry makes the resemblances real, and separate descent explains where they part.

Restoration theology departs from Teilhard at three points. The first concerns matter. Teilhard came close to Joseph Smith here. Late in life he called matter the matrix of spirit and spirit the higher state of matter (“The Heart of Matter,” 1950). But he kept the Catholic teaching that God transcends the material universe and brings it into being. Joseph Smith taught that the elements are eternal (D&C 93:33), that creation is the organization of existing matter, and that God himself has a body of flesh and bones (D&C 130:22). For Teilhard, matter is the medium through which God works.

The second concerns the body. Teilhard affirmed the resurrection of Christ, but his picture of the world’s end looks past the material world. At the Omega Point, he wrote, the noosphere would leave its planetary base behind and join God outside the framework of the visible universe. Restoration scripture places the end within matter. The faithful dead regard the separation of spirit and body as bondage (D&C 138:50). Spirit and element must be “inseparably connected” to receive a fulness of joy (D&C 93:33⁠–34). And the earth itself is to be sanctified and inhabited by celestial beings (D&C 88:17⁠–20; 130:9).

The third concerns God. Teilhard’s Omega is personal and already active, but it is unique: a single center toward which all creation converges and in which persons are united while remaining creatures. Restoration theology describes God as an exalted person who was once as we are and invites his children to become what he is. The faithful become joint-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17) and are called gods (D&C 76:58). Convergence, on this view, produces a community of exalted persons rather than a single point.

Teilhard allowed that humanity could refuse the work of convergence, but he trusted that the work would finally succeed. Mormon Transhumanists take that risk more seriously. The future Teilhard foresaw is possible, not assured, and reaching it depends on compassionate creators using their agency wisely to bring about the world they hope for.