Theologians apart
M. JARRETT-KERR, CR
Correspondence : Teilhard de Chardin and Maurice. Blondel edited by H. de Lubac (Herder and Herder/Burns Oates 40s) Letters from Paris Teilhard de Chardin (Herder and Herder/Burns Oates 30s) Teilhard de Chardin. a Biography Robert Speaight (Collins 45s) I doubt whether Bonhoeffer and Teilhard even knew of each other's existence. What would either have thought of the other's ideas? There is a curious, and fortuitous, similarity between Bonhoeffer's encounters with Barth and Teil- hard's with Blondel. In each case the older, sedater scholar admired the brilliant promise in the younger man, but found the new direc- tions he was taking were puzzling, perhaps dis- quieting. There is a good deal about Barth's view of Bonhoeffer—and vice versa—in Dr Gregor Smith's Symposium. It gives us Barth's own comments—appreciative, avuncular, but quizzical—on the controversial young theo- logian.
It also gives the very valuable lectures on Bonhoeffer given in America by Eberhard Bethge, who has the best right to speak on him; an early, strangely flat piece by William ('God-Is-Dead') Hamilton; an elusive and in- conclusive essay by Bultmann; and other cir- cuitous celebrations. The puzzle remains. Bon- hoeffer accused Barth of a 'positivism of revelation' (a Germanic way of saying 'dog- matic orthodoxy'); but Bonhoeffer had a positivism of his own, more like Comte's. And the puzzle is this: by what criteria can we judge when a metaphor from individual biological growth (youth, maturity, age) may rightly be applied to an historical era? Does phylogeny really parallel ontogeny? And if it does, are we prepared to accept the full cycle—are we ready, in signalling the arrival of majority, to prepare for the beginnings of senility? If not, our metaphor merely helps us to cheat.
The same puzzle faced Teilhard; but he was on safer grounds in using evolutionary meta- phors. Instead of comparing an era with an individual life-span (the greater reduced to the lesser), he interpreted periods of human history in relation to the whole process of evolution (the lesser adjusted to the greater). He did not say, with Bonhoeffer, 'Twentieth century man has come of age'; he said, The arrival of scien- tific research marks a quasi-biological mutation in man.'
This leaves the future open—though we know bow optimistic Teilhard was about it. Perhaps the only weakness of Robert Speaight's fine and readable Biography of Teilhard is that Bonhoeffer (and the whole range of discussion about 'secular Christianity') is missing. But Blondel is there. Blondel appre- ciates Teilhard's concern that faith should not lead to a decrying of man's powers, know- ledge and responsibility; but he was anxious to remind the young Jesuit of the other great Christian tradition, viz., that all ages of man are `equidistant from eternity.' (That, of course, is another metaphor, a geometrical rather than a biological one.) This Correspondence, carried on through the intermediary of Pere Valensin, is now available' in English, though readers should be warned that for f2 all they will get is thirty-two pages of Teilhard and Blondel, to nearly 140 pages of introduction, notes and appendices by Pere de Lubac. (Indeed, it is sad to see how hap- hazardly the Teilhard industry is conducted: the Letters from Paris (1912-14) are almost wholly trivial, as were many of the earlier Letters from Egypt. One day someone will have to gather the scattered fragments for a volume of complete letters.
In the long run, Teilhard's ideas, rather than Bonhoeffer's, will (I believe) prove the more fruitful for the future—it is Bonhoeffer's spilt blood that will be his seed.
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