I feel that it’s time for another book review.
It’s been a while since the last one; plus, I’d like to continue on with my anti-evolutionism kick, which I’ve been pursuing with singular focus recently—even if it is, or perhaps especially because it is, so contrary to everything that the “new barbarians” in our degenerate and decrepit modern world believe.
Some months ago I read the distinguished scientist Wolfgang Smith’s Theistic Evolution,1 a fascinating book that examines and dissects the heretical “religio-evolutionism” of the famed Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Père Teilhard de Chardin. Now Wolfgang Smith is in possession of a quite profound intellect, with a distinctly Traditionalist bent, even if his mental powers operate on a decidedly loftier plane than my own; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is a Frenchman of equally impressive intellectual capacities, evincing the singularly Gallic penchant for poetry and inimitable creativity that so distinguishes that race.
And I will admit, during my former years as a committed evolutionist, I was enraptured by his ideas, and besottedly in love with the sheer grandeur and magnificence of his mystical evolutionism. I eagerly devoured Le phénomène humain (The Phenomenon of Man),2 his magnum opus, and marveled with reckless intellectual abandon at its spectacular vistas of evolution—from the primordial soup, as the evolutionists like to call it, all the way through the aeon-spanning phylogeny of life, the hominization of evolution in the appearance of man, and the subsequent growth of civilization, the birth of the “noösphere,” the organization of scientific and intellectual research, the ordering of human society, and the glorious emergence (in some remote and unguessable futurity) of the “Omega Point,” the culmination of cosmic evolution, a kind of composite intelligence that will subsume mankind into God at the Eschaton…the end of time.
This was heady stuff, and I loved it. I read others of his works as well, including The Future of Man and The Divine Milieu.
Of course, it wasn’t until my discovery of the thinking of the Traditionalists that I realized just how false was that brilliant Jesuit’s teaching.
And that is where Smith’s Theistic Evolution comes into the picture. It is a bravura critique of the ideas and thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, and it spares nothing and stints not at all in attacking the great—if by many unacknowledged—evil that lurks behind these seemingly benign evolutionist concepts.
I can hardly do the book justice in this spare essay; but I can try my best to illuminate some of its most important points. For one, Smith is clear about the spiritual poverty of de Chardin, which has induced him to adopt evolutionism as his true religion, and explains with great clarity whither such impoverishment leads, observing that in de Chardin’s vision:
“…[b]asically what remains of the spiritual life is communal action, the kind that promotes ‘socialization,’ to use one of Teilhard’s peculiar terms; after all, what counts, from an evolutionist point of view, is not the individual, but the species…It should come as no surprise, moreover, that Teilhard is well disposed towards the disciples of Karl Marx, and in fact considers them fellow travelers, whether they know it as yet or not. In short, one finds in the Teilhardian opus a preview, as it were, of tendencies and aberrations affecting the spiritual life of the laity as well as of religious orders which have manifested following Vatican II, or are still in process of manifesting.”3
In the opening chapters, Smith presents us with a well-reasoned argument against the claims of the evolutionist fallacy, which is all the more impressive in that ultimately it eschews the pointless and often farcical attempts to counter the Darwinists on their own ground—attacking them instead from the only position that matters or is possible: that is to say, from the metaphysical perspective.4
René Guénon would undoubtedly approve.
In concluding his arguments, Smith offers what we must consider an indisputable axiom in our times: “What confronts us in the Darwinism of our day is thus no longer science, properly so called, but proves to be, ultimately, a kind of religion: a counter-religion, to be exact.”5
Furthermore:
“It is literally true that Teilhard has deified Evolution. And from the start the concept of evolution had been—not just a scientific hypothesis, nor even a scientifically established fact—but an idea charged with a kind of religious significance. Teilhard de Chardin was presumably the first person in history to be totally possessed by the concept, the first to be fully intoxicated with the new wine.…Not until Teilhard appeared upon the stage, at any rate, did Evolution find its full-blown prophet. It was he that brought out—with a fury one can say—the religious pretension which presumably had been latent in the movement from the start. At Teilhard’s hands the Darwinist theory became transformed into a full-fledged religion: was actually turned into a cult.”6
This is precisely correct, for Darwinism or evolutionism or transformism—or whatever one wishes to call it—is nothing less than a subversive and infinitely destructive leading-edge of the Counter-Tradition.
For a counter-religion is what de Chardin and the evolutionists provide us with:
“What Teilhard would like to say, but can’t, is that there is Evolution and nothing else. His position is somewhat reminiscent of Heraclitus (and of certain Buddhist philosophers): there are no ‘things,’ no substances or natures in the universe, but only movement, only change, only a perpetual genesis or becoming. All that exists is flux. Strictly speaking, there is no cosmos even, but only a cosmogenesis. And that is Evolution.”7
And in order to achieve their metaphysical sleight-of-hand, the evolutionists transpose the “Great Chain of Being”—which we spoke of in an earlier essay—from the vertical to the horizontal dimension; in other words, that which was formerly “above” is now transposed into the “ahead,” into the future:
“…having abolished—or better said, denied—metaphysical verticality, [de Chardin] proceeds to find an analog, an Ersatz, within the remaining plane. This substitution constitutes in fact the salient feature of his theory: briefly stated, he has in effect replaced the axis mundi by the ‘arrow of time,’ which he identifies with the thrust of an imagined evolutive trajectory. To form a mental picture of this transposition, think of the integral cosmos as a three-dimensional space, in which our space-time is represented by a horizontal plane, endowed with an axis representing time. The decisive step reduces then to a projection of that three-dimensional space onto the plane which transforms the ‘above’ into the ‘ahead.’ This is the undeclared transformation, I say, that defines Teilhard’s theory in its essence: every facet of his doctrine follows from that single step. It is this hidden ‘rotation of axes’ that permits Teilhard to falsify just about every traditional concept of theology.”8
The problem, of course, is one that has plagued every evolutionist in every period of history—every believer in “flux” and “becoming” as the central principle of the cosmos: “what Teilhard has manifestly failed to recognize…is the fact that there can be no movement without a corresponding stasis, no evolution, if you will, without something that does not evolve.”9 This is a metaphysical point that has been ably demonstrated by, among others, René Guénon in his studies of the symbolism of the wheel and the swastika.
It might seem that this is mere academic and intellectual piffle, of no real consequence. “So what if the man wishes to adore evolutionism? Let him have his way; and do you have your own, and never the twain shall meet.” But only a fool would believe that; these are ideas that rock the world, for a very good reason, and it is a truism that error compounds with interest over time, until someday it evolves into a world-shaking evil.
Such is the case here.
What is the end of Teilhardism; whither does the notion of evolutionism lead? Smith has something to say about this as well. For one thing, the intellectual horizons of our civilization have become almost irretrievably narrowed and blinkered:
“Over a period of several centuries, and by successive stages, our civilization has come to embrace an exclusively horizontal and reductionist Weltanschauung. That outlook has now become the norm, the official standard in the educated world. But although the rise of an arid rationalism and a concomitant diminution of the symbolist spirit beginning in the fourteenth century may have been the primary causes that initiated this development as we have claimed, one needs also to realize that the process feeds upon itself. No sooner had the new science come to birth than it began to react upon the intellectual climate of the so-called civilized world. Before long science—or better said, scientism—became in fact the dominant intellectual voice in Western civilization. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that science cum scientism—science with a capital S—has been the leading purveyor of ‘informed belief’ and the driving force of cultural change since the Enlightenment. Not only, thus, has Science exacerbated the secularizing and desacralizing tendencies to which it owes its birth, but it has become itself the prime agent of that modernizing trend.”10
“Follow the Science!”—that is the increasingly shrill watchword of our day. “Progress,” “the arc of history”…the “right side of history.” These are the shibboleths of the progressives, of the left, of the anti- and counter-traditionalists. One dare not be classed among the anti-evolutionists, the anti-vaxxers, the anti-science types, the conspiracy theorists and wrong-thinkers and heterodox.
“Meanwhile our humanist and scientistic gurus continue to proclaim the gospel of Progress. The idea of future progress has moreover been joined to a systematic devaluation of our pre-modern past, which is to say that the contemporary apostles of progress busy themselves not only with the building up of a new order, but equally with the destruction of whatever still remains of the old. The ideal of progress has thus turned subversive: revolutionary in fact.
“We will not speculate as to what might be the ultimate source of that boundless fascination—this veritable mania, one is tempted to say—which has apparently taken hold of the activists, the dedicated leaders in this worldwide movement. Suffice it to say that the rank and file is still somewhat passive and lukewarm, and thus needs constantly to be prodded by progressivist propaganda of one sort or another. It appears that there are two main ‘arguments’ which in the eyes of the public at large lend credence to the dogma of progress: the first are the miracles of technology; and the second is the Darwinist theory of evolution, perceived as a scientific truth.”11
How can one refute such a passage, in face of the past several years—if not decades? Even the original purveyors of “progress”—the Enlightenment philosophers, scientists, and revolutionaries of past centuries, including the so-called “Founding Fathers” of the United States—have been cast down and sacrificed to this insatiable madness for destroying, erasing, and delegitimizing the past; they too have suffered the damnatio memoriae, the ultimate “WMD” of a generation dismissive of the past and obsessed with an unrealizable future.
It is truly the most terrible weapon the new barbarians wield—the power to erase one from history, to make it as though one never was.
We censor, bowdlerize, or outright destroy books, and in the place of the heroic intellects and spirits of the past we raise up monuments to pimps, criminals, whores, and vandals. Truly, we deserve our fate.
Furthermore, Wolfgang Smith pours much-deserved scorn on the notion that we are “progressing” at all as a civilization:
“It cannot be said, moreover, in any absolute sense, that the ‘social organism’ is becoming complexified. In the scientific and technological spheres, of course, an ongoing and progressive complexification is very much in evidence; but in other domains of culture the very opposite is taking place. In conformity with our egalitarian leanings, for example, the ancient forms of hierarchic order are in process of being dismantled, and it appears that the notion of a ‘classless society’ has established itself just about everywhere as the ultimate desideratum. In recent decades, moreover, even the division of the sexes—which in fact mirrors the primordial duality itself—has become a prime target of egalitarian zeal, and the charming prospect of ‘unisex’ is now before us. Despite an increasing vocational specialization, therefore, associated with the technological advance, it is plain to see that human society has become levelled-out and homogenized in other respects. And here again one may conclude that this transition is inevitable: as our Weltanschauung flattens, so does our culture. More precisely, civilization flattens by losing its verticality, its true hierarchic order and qualitative differentiations; and needless to say, that loss is in no wise compensated by a technology-based complexification, which truly does pertain to the quantitative domain. The world flattens, and as it flattens, it expands. This is essentially the point Huston Smith has made: when being loses its ‘upper stories,’ human culture has nowhere to go but ‘forwards.’ Under such auspices, science and technological conquest remain basically as the only viable frontier.”12
These lines were written, of course, long before our civilization quite descended into the abyss of madness that we are experiencing nowadays; but the handwriting, as they say, was already on the wall. In this passage, Smith foreshadows the cult of transgenderism, the stifling and stultifying conformity of modern Western civilization (America especially), and the loss of meaning in a culture that has been sucked into the welter of what Guénon would call “the reign of quantity” as if into the singularity of a black hole, whence there is no escape.
I encourage the reader to read that passage again, and reflect deeply upon its meaning and its application to our current predicament.
Our civilization—in Smith’s interpretation, and evinced by such things as our adherence to evolutionism—has rebelled against God, against Tradition, against the spirit, and now we are paying the price for it:
“In modern times…the picture has changed: what impedes us today is not simply a falling short on the part of individuals, but an inbuilt godlessness, a Promethean spirit of disobedience officially instituted and inscribed, as it were, upon our tablets of law. A kind of collective neo-humanist hubris insulates us en masse from the spiritual world. It is not a question of having outgrown the past, as one likes to believe, but of spiritual incomprehension and concomitant rebellion. In the emerging Brave New World the breaking of sacred vessels has come to be regarded as a meritorious act and a mark of enlightenment.”13
[…]
“From an evolutionist angle of vision there is only one viable path before us, and that is to aggregate through collectivization. To act, to produce, and even to think collectively—that is the ‘growing compulsion’ from which there is supposedly no escape.
“Teilhard realizes, of course, that to most of us the prospect of compulsory collectivization is distinctly unpalatable. As yet it is mainly the activists—the professional collectivizers one could say—who seem to be fully sold on the prospect of a joyous serfdom to the emerging super-state. The rest remain disquieted and apprehensive in varying degrees. And for good reason: if facts mean anything, there is little ground for euphoria. Even Teilhard admits that ‘the modern world, with its prodigious growth of complexity, weighs incomparably more heavily upon the shoulders of our generation than did the ancient world upon the shoulders of our forebears.’ And so far as ‘recent totalitarian experiments’ are concerned, he admits that the results have been less than encouraging.
“But he argues that we must not give up that easily: ‘In so far as these first attempts may seem to be tending dangerously towards the sub-human state of the anthill or the termitary, it is not the principle of totalization that is at fault, but the clumsy and incomplete way in which it has been applied.’”14
Of course, that sounds an awful lot like that old joke in right-wing circles about “real Communism never having been tried.” And what are we to say about “professional collectivizers?” That is a very apposite description of the so-called Davoisie, the WEF and Davos crowd, the “globalists” and climate activists and world controllers—in short, the new barbarians who would control not merely our physical lives, but our internal universe as well.
As far as the matter of the “anthill or the termitary” is concerned…well, I believe I have already discussed the ideas of Roderick Seidenberg, and his notion of “Posthistoric Man.” Whether the “principle of totalization” has been applied clumsily or not, it most certainly is at fault, for it is the contention of Seidenberg and others that the manifestation of a humankind that has more in common with the eusocial insects than with his quondam ancestral estate is unquestionably the ultimate endpoint of totalization—the human termitary is the miserable apotheosis of the “reign of quantity,” of modernity and all its multiplying evils, and it is the unbearable future for which we are being prepared…whether foolish idealists like de Chardin would admit it to themselves or not.
Finally, I will close this review with Smith’s most salient observation on the ultimate end and purpose not only of Teilhardism and evolutionism, but of scientism and of the entire modern project—despite the sneering disdain of the witting and unwitting Counter-Traditionalists:
“We are given to understand, in the apocalyptic discourses of Christ as well as in the Book of Revelation, that there is to be a vast counter-movement to Christianity, which will gain enormous power as mankind passes into the final phase of its earthly existence. What confronts us here is not simply an ‘axis OX’ set at right angles to ‘the Christian axis OY,’ but a hostile Force of supra-human proportions and a final battle to the death. It appears moreover that this counter-movement will be realized in the form of a collective human organism replete with its own Antichristic ‘center of attraction’: it will in all respects be a caricature, a kind of satanic imitation or inverted image of the true Mystical Body of Christ. And this super-organism will grow and wax great by deceiving vast multitudes with its clever lies and marvelous feats. And in the end it will hoist religious colors and proclaim itself Divine.
“It is hardly surprising that Teilhard has little to say on that subject and seems to avoid it like the plague.”15
And there you have it.
The disorders of our age can be accounted for in the realm of metaphysical thought; and the meaning of evolutionism, scientism, and the madness of modernity can be gleaned ultimately within the theory of cosmic cycles and the closing of old ages and the begetting of new ones. For more on these matters, I urge you to read René Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times; it is truly the most indispensable guidebook to our confused and troubling era.
In any case, that is enough on this subject for now. In the next issues of this newsletter, I will relate a strange story I once heard from a former member of the College of Seth—and perhaps you will find it as fascinating and baffling and entertaining as I did…
Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy (Tacoma WA: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2012).
The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper, 1959).
Theistic Evolution, pg. 12.
Cf., for instance, the following bravura exposition of metaphysical thought on the matter:
“Let the theistic evolutionist realize, once and for all, that God does not create in time. The creature comes first: being has precedence over time. In the memorable words of St. Augustine: ‘Let them see that without the creature there cannot be time, and leave off talking nonsense!’ So far from ‘evolving’ over millions of years, creatures actually precede time itself. That precedence cannot, of course, be temporal: it is not a duration that can be measured by clocks. The point, rather, is that the creature, in its being as such, is not subject to time: for strange as it may seem, time itself derives ultimately from the creature. To quote St. Augustine once more: ‘God, therefore, in His unchangeable eternity, created simultaneously all things whence times were to flow.’ Let me say it once more: the creature as such comes first, it precedes time” (Ibid., pg. 21).
Ibid., pg. 20.
Ibid., pg. 234
Ibid., pg. 82.
Ibid., pg. 46.
Ibid., pg. 84.
Ibid., pg. 172.
Ibid., pg. 177.
Ibid., pg. 187.
Ibid., pg. 195.
Ibid., pg. 199.
Ibid., pp. 214-15.
I only recently discovered the work of Wolfgang Smith - it was the subject of my essay two weeks ago. But I am not surprised you had already read him! Your erudition is impressive, sir.