Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit, was a distinguished scientist of human origins, a prolific religious writer and fervent Christian mystic. Published posthumously, he became internationally known for his controversial ideas which relate Christian beliefs to contemporary scientific thinking, especially the theory of evolution.
Born into an old aristocratic family and brought up in a traditional Catholic milieu marked by a vibrant faith and strong religious practice, Teilhard was endowed with deeply pantheistic and mystical leanings, evident since childhood. He entered the Jesuit order at 18 and was ordained in 1911. From 1905-8 he taught science in a Jesuit school in Cairo where he discovered his great attraction to nature, the desert, the East. This experience made him later write with great lyrical beauty about cosmic and mystical life, culminating in his spiritual classics Mass on the World (1923) and The Divine Milieu (1927).
Through reading Bergson’s Creative Evolution, Teilhard discovered the meaning of evolution for the Christian faith. Evolution made him see the world anew, immersed in an immense stream of unfolding creation where everything is animated by a ‘christic element’ and the heart of God is found at the heart of the world, so that we are surrounded by a ‘divine milieu’. His scientific studies in Paris were interrupted by the First World War where he served as stretcher bearer at the front. There he discovered a pluralistic ‘human milieu’ not met before; this led to speculations about the oneness of humanity and eventually to the idea of the ‘noosphere’ (sphere of mind) as a layer of thinking which connects people around the globe and hails a new stage in human evolution. Almost daily encounters with death gave him an extraordinary sense of urgency to write a series of deeply stirring essays, only published after his death as Writings in Time of War. Relatively little known, these contain the seeds of all his further writings.
After the war he obtained his doctorate in science and was appointed lecturer in geology at the Institut Catholique, Paris, where he could expound his ideas about evolution and the Christian faith. This soon led to difficulties with his church which continued throughout his life. In 1923 he was glad to join a fossil expedition in China, and the discovery of Asia was another decisive experience shaping him for the rest of his life.
China became a place of almost permanent exile where he spent the greatest part of his scientific career (1926-46), regularly interspersed with expeditions and travels in East and West. It was in China that he wrote most of his religious essays and also his best known, but most difficult, work The Phenomenon of Man (1938-40), now retrans-lated under the more accurate title The Human Phenomenon (1999).
After the Second World War Teilhard returned to Paris; further difficulties with his superiors made him accept a research post in the United States. Lonely and marked by suffering, he spent the last four years of his life mostly in New York where he died on Easter Sunday 1955. His large corpus of writings took over 20 years to be published.
Teilhard de Chardin’s method consists of a specially understood phenomenology, combining the outer and inner seeing of all phenomena, leading to a profound transformation of the world as seen, so that seeing more also implies being more. Such seeing involves all the knowledge that science has to offer, but this is combined with a unifying inner vision whereby the world is held together by Spirit. Teilhard’s vision brings together cosmic, human, and divine dimensions, all centred in Christ, and each involved in a process of becoming or genesis. Whereas cosmogenesis refers to the birth of the cosmos, anthropogenesis and noogenesis relate to the human dimension and the birth of thought. Christogenesis or the birth of God in Christ, an event of cosmic significance and proportion, can only be seen through the eyes of faith. For Teilhard, cosmic and human evolution are rising and moving onwards to an ever fuller disclosure of the Spirit culminating in ‘Christ-Omega’.
This rise is not automatic but involves human responsibility and co-creativity in shaping the future of humanity and the planet. Humans are fully responsible for their own further self-evolution, for a higher social and cultural development and a greater unification of the human community, but ultimately these goals are only achievable through the powers of love. Central to Teilhard’s thinking are the ideas of the ‘noosphere’ and the ‘divine milieu’. The first belongs to a more secular, the second to a deeply religious context. The noosphere is a thinking layer which arises out of the biosphere and is intimately connected with it. It is also an active sphere of love which provides a new context for human relationships by creating greater bonds of unity between individuals and groups. The noosphere provides Teilhard with a particularly creative perspective in approaching racial, cultural and religious pluralism within the new context of global complexity, and in relating it to the unitive powers of all-transforming love. He was convinced that humankind must study the powers of love as the most sacred spiritual energy resource in the same way that all other forces in the universe are studied.
Teilhard’s thought represents a unique blend of science, religion and mysticism. The essayistic, fragmentary nature of his work marks him more as a postmodern than a traditional thinker. His work contains challenging reflections on God and the world, science and religion, ecological responsibilities, interfaith encounter, the greater unification of humanity, the place of the feminine and of love in creating greater unity, the central importance of spirituality and mysticism. Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas have influenced several New Age thinkers just as he influenced earlier the Second Vatican Council, Christian-Marxist dialogue, debates about futurology and now about the significance of the worldwide web. Unfortunately his ideas are often taken out of context without acknowledging the profoundly Christian core of his vision.
