Kazimierz Kłósak reading and assessment of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s position on the issue of the creation of man and his nature

Abstract

The article is an attempt to answer the question: how did Kazimierz Kłósak read and interpret Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s views on the origins of Man and his nature? It shows that although the Kraków philosopher extensively popularized the work of the French naturalist in Poland, he sometimes argued with him and interpreted him in a specific way. The key issue was an attempt to understand the act of God creating the human soul in the context of evolution. Teilhard’s answer was that the human soul developed through evolution because spirit existed in primeval matter; the appropriate composition of matter generated spirituals phenomena. Although Kłósak tries to defend Teilhard from the accusation of materializm, he ultimately fails to save him for orthodoxy. According to the classical theorem defined by St. Thomas Aquinas and supported by Kłósak, the human soul was created from its own nothingness and the nothingness of the subject (ex nihilo sui et subiecti). In Teilhard’s solution, the human soul was created from the animals soul, and therefore it was created from its own nothingness, but not from the nothingness of the subject. Teilhard’s solution is therefore not a „creation” in the stricte sense of the word. Based on the main thread, the article addresses import ant methodological issues regarding the study of the problem of human origins and the creation of the human soul.