Frankly reactionary

Wolfgang Smith is a conservative Catholic writer with Traditionalist leanings, i.e. Traditionalist as in Guénon, Coomaraswamy and Schuon. His project is to refurbish Catholic teachings with insights gleaned from the Traditionalist or perennialist school.

In this book, "Teilhardism and the New Religion", Smith takes on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a dissident Catholic who attempted to create a grand synthesis between Christianity and Darwinian evolution. The result was a kind of optimistic, socialistic pantheism in which Darwinian evolution was combined with teleology and the idea that God is "The Omega Point" of cosmic development.

Smith considers Teilhard's ideas to be heretical, and even implies that they might be Satanic. His book is a detailed criticism of Teilhard from a conservative Catholic and Traditionalist perspective. It's a heavy read, but could perhaps interest advanced students of theology.

Since Smith rejects Darwinian evolution in favour of a kind of "old earth creationism", he naturally collides with Teilhard already on this, very fundamental, point. To Smith, the world as we know it is fallen from a higher metaphysical plane. Strictly speaking, there is therefore no evolution and definitely no "progress". Smith regards Teilhard as a panpsychist, and criticizes him from a dualist standpoint. He also attacks the notion that God somehow needed to create the universe, or that humans can affect God. Often, the author regards Teilhard as nebulous and illogical. If the so-called Omega Point is God or Christ, how can God or Christ exist from the beginning, as well? Smith also regards Teilhard as a crypto-socialist who favoured a strong, universal state.

I'm not a Traditionalist, and I consider Wolfgang Smith's entire perspective to be frankly reactionary. The writer vehemently rejects feminism, gay liberation and egalitarianism, instead extolling the virtues of traditional social hierarchies. At least by implication, he opposes modern technology, as well. I think his real problem with Teilhard is precisely the modernist, progressivist political perspective of the maverick Jesuit father. By contrast, the Traditionalist cosmos is hierarchic, stable and static. Translated to political terms, this means Throne-and-Altar conservatism, with any change (read: reform or revolution) seen as a degeneration. Teilhard's teleological, optimistic evolutionism implies the exact opposite - small wonder Smith dislikes him.

In a concluding chapter based on Eric Voegelin (whose works I unfortunately haven't read) and the idea of the "immanentization of the eschaton", the author argues that the progressive movements of modernity are really forms of Gnosticism, a Gnosticism turned 180 degrees from a vertical rejection of the material world in favour of "Heaven" to a horizontal rejection of the present material world in favour of a future millenarian Utopia (often conceived in scientific-technological terms). While the idea sounds somewhat far-fetched, I agree that there is *some* truth in it. Hegel's scheme of a unconscious world soul coming to know itself in a history created by itself, does sound like a temporalized, immanentized form of Gnosticism (or perhaps Hermetism). Marx, of course, based his curious teleological materialism on Hegel. Interestingly, Smith also rejects millenarianism, despite its clear Biblical antecedents. Ironically, a strict follower of Biblical millennialism might argue that *Smith* is the Gnostic, since he rejects a millennium on Earth ushered in by Jesus in favour of a nebulous salvation in the purely spiritual realm of Traditionalism.

"Teilhardism and the New Religion" is, as already indicated, a heavy read - unless you spend most of your spare time actually studying heavy metaphysical treatises, or even the works of Teilhard de Chardin (with warts, neologisms and all). However, it deserves a high grade on its own turf, so to speak. Therefore I give it four stars.

But yes, in the event of a revolution, I'm afraid I would have to extradite Smith to Bhutan or some other micro-state where the ancien régime still survives...