Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 Teilhard, friend of the writer and explorer Henry de Monfreid, loved the earth and the created world. He was forever amazed by the life produced by the cosmos and by matter. Explorer and archaeologist, this friend of Father Henri Breuil (the historian who publicised the discovery of the caves at Lascaux), Teilhard discovered the Peking Man in China. This was, along with Java Man, the oldest ancestor of Homo sapiens then known.

As well as a scientist, Teilhard was a philosopher. He befriended Édouard Le Roy, the successor to Henri Bergson’s chair in the Collège de France. Teilhard was undoubtedly influenced by Bergson’s religious thought – in Teilhard’s correspondence with Le Roy, we see not only the depth of their friendship but also his concern and respect for Roman Catholicism, even though the Catholic Church has seldom paid heed to his ideas.

Even if Teilhard was a scientist of note, he was first and foremost a Catholic Christian who became a Jesuit in 1898. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1911, he submitted his PhD thesis in 1920 on: “Mammals of the Early Eocene Epoch in France and their fossil deposits”! But make no mistake, Teilhard was a true mystic – for proof of this, read his Hymn of the Universe – and like all great mystics, he led an active life. He saw the universe as though from on high and had a panoramic vision of the evolving world. For Teilhard, matter spiritualises itself – he took this insight from his geological studies. His Christ is the cosmic “Christ who directs evolution”. What is of Christ is found in the universe, in the mental and spiritual dimension which leads to the noösphere, the sphere of the human spirit, and thence to the Omega Point which is the end and the goal of evolution. This coming-together is driven by the Spirit, in Christ.

After Hymn of the Universe, we need to read the entirety of Teilhard’s oeuvre to let ourselves absorb his vision and vocabulary. Teilhard is special because he embodies the encounter of the Christian and the scientist united in a spiritual vision. He is no dogmatician; rather, he leads us in his vision of life and of the universe – an altogether extraordinary voyage. Nor is Teilhard an “institution man”: in spite of his faithfulness to Catholicism, he was never recognised as he ought to have been by his own Church. All in all, a strange destiny for the little boy born in Orcines in the Auvergne on 1 May 1881, who died in New York on 10 April 1955.

Teilhard has bequeathed us a corpus of works obviously linked to Process Theology. More surprisingly, he is the most frequently cited author in the New Age classic The Aquarian Conspiracy! Without question, the life of adventure and science lived by Teilhard is worth the effort of study; but even more significant is his vision of evolution and of the cosmic presence of Christ in the universe.

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