by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Teilhard’s Point Omega, Half a Century Later
“There’s almost some law of
mathematics or physics that we haven’t quite hit upon, where the mind
transcends all direction inward. The omega point …”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died fifty years ago this week – April 10, 1965; Easter Sunday – and with the anniversary of this pioneering Jesuit’s decease in mind Frank and Mary Frost organized a conference at Georgetown on Teilhard de Chardin: His Importance in the 21st Century.
Teilhard’s importance for 20th century writers is beyond dispute. His image of divine providence as a tight slowly upturning spiral has served many people as an image for the way evolution and divine providence might converge. His notion that “everything that rises must converge” gave Flannery O'Connor the title for one of her greatest stories; more than that, it gave her an understanding of the racial situation “in the South & indeed in all the World” more complex than she had had previously, making her, in a stroke, an integrationist in race matters and a progressive in matters of theology. Teilhard’s thought called forth the artisanal weave of meditation and quotation that is Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. In my own work, Teilhard’s idea of convergence suggested a religious rationale for the converging pilgrimages in The Life You Save May Be Your Own and the multiple-stranded narrative I used to represent them; and it suggested the name of this site, too.
As for Teilhard’s importance in the 21st century, well, who knows? The 21st century is only one-seventh gone. I think it is fair to say that both the life and the work are less well known than they once were. Possibly the Frosts’ documentary will change that. But perhaps in consequence of the effacing of Teilhard’s public image, the images that he made central to his thought are all the more powerful, for they are free to work unencumbered by biography.
Don DeLillo, for example, called a novel Point Omega, and without citing Teilhard directly he pointed in the Jesuit’s direction, drawing a dotted line between the mental thresholds and convergences that feature in his work and the mystical side of Teilhard’s thought. Out in a desert – anchorite-like – a man who spent his life as a philosopher of military force and reach speaks of his sense of things in Teilhardian terms:
“Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect on itself. Something about this feels almost mathematical to me. There’s almost some law of mathematics or physics that we haven’t quite hit upon, where the mind transcends all direction inward. The omega point,” he said. “Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it’s not a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea outside our experience.”
“What idea?”
“What idea. Paroxysm. Either a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion. We want it to happen.”
You think we want it to happen.”
“We want it to happen. Some paroxysm.”
He liked this word. We let it hang there.
Texts and video from the Georgetown conference will go up soon. The image, from The Millions, is Point Omega with book critic Sam Anderson’s marginalia; he calls the marked passage “right on the border of stoner existentialism.”
