Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

French paleontologist and theologian

• Born: May 1, 1881
• Birthplace: Sarcenat, France
• Died: April 10, 1955
• Place of death: New York, New York

Through his work as a geologist on the evolution of the earth and as a paleontologist on the evolution of life, Teilhard, a devout Jesuit priest, came to see human beings progressing toward a new consciousness and spiritual unity called the Omega Point, which he identified with Jesus Christ.

Early Life

From the perspective of his mature vision of the universe, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (pyehr tay-yahr deh shahr-dan) interpreted his own life in the light of his evolutionary doctrine. He saw as providential his birth in a Sarcenat chateau amid the foothills of the Monts Dore in central France. Teilhard was the fourth child in a family that would eventually number eleven children, and on his mother’s side he was distantly related to Voltaire and on his father’s side to Blaise Pascal. His mother was a deeply religious Roman Catholic who ignited a spiritual fire in young Teilhard. His father was a gentleman farmer with interests in natural history, and he introduced his children to the delights of rocks, minerals, wildflowers, and animals. Thus, from an early age, Teilhard was able to combine two spheres of life the material and the spiritual commonly considered incompatible.

In 1892, a month before his eleventh birthday, Teilhard became a boarder at the Jesuit school of Nôtre-Dame de Mongré at Villefranche-sur-Saône, near Lyons. He was a good student, especially in science and literature, and in his free time he continued his interest in geology by collecting minerals. He eventually concluded that he had a vocation to the Jesuit life. On March 20, 1899, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Aix-en-Provence, about twenty miles north of Marseilles, to begin a long period of spiritual and intellectual formation.

On March 25, 1901, Teilhard took his first vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and then began, at Laval, his studies in the Greek and Latin classics (the juniorate). These studies were interrupted when anticlerical legislation in France forced the Jesuits to transfer their juniorate to Jersey, one of the English Channel islands, in the summer of 1901. As a second-year junior in Jersey, Teilhard seriously considered abandoning the study of geology to devote himself completely to spiritual activities. One of his religious superiors wisely helped him put his spiritual evolution in perspective and guided him in a direction in which he could combine his love of matter, energy, and life (his cosmic sense) with his love of Christ and the supernatural (his Christic sense). From 1902 to 1905, he studied Scholastic philosophy at the Jesuit house on the Isle of Jersey, where he spent his free hours, geologist’s hammer in hand, in scientific surveys, resulting in a paper on the island’s mineralogy and geology.

In September, 1905, Teilhard was sent to teach chemistry and physics at the Jesuit College of the Holy Family in Cairo, Egypt. Although the science he taught was elementary, this experience of the chemical substances and physical forces of the universe helped him refine his still-crude understanding of the world. After three years as a teacher in Egypt, during which he published works on the Eocene period, he returned to England to complete his Jesuit training. He spent four years, from 1908 to 1912, studying theology at Hastings in southern England. While continuing his geological and paleontological research and writing, he also devoted time to the synthesis of his scientific and spiritual views.

During his theological studies at Hastings, Teilhard began to understand matter from the perspective of spirit, and this forced him to develop a new way of thinking and speaking about what he saw happening in the universe. He began to use the words of science (energy, force, radiation) to describe the previously unseen evolution of spirit that was taking shape in nature. This spiritual energy, already familiar to him in the evolution of his own consciousness, he now grasped as active in the universe, itself in the process of self-creation. Matter, as an evolutionary fact, had given birth to spirit; therefore, matter and spirit are not two separate substances but two aspects of a single evolving cosmos. Physical energy therefore contains something of the spiritual, since energy’s upward trend is an observable fact in the increasing complexity of evolving organisms. By the time he was ordained, on August 14, 1911, he had discovered a vision by which he could understand scientific phenomena spiritually and spiritual phenomena scientifically. It therefore became the core of his vocation as a priest to show that evolutionism does not entail a rejection of Christianity, because Christ represented the crucial point in the universe’s history at which matter and spirit met.

Life’s Work

Throughout the rest of his career, as priest and scientist, Teilhard devoted himself to the evolution of the universe (what he called cosmogenesis), whose ever-richening spirituality constantly became for him more real and resplendent. For him, salvation no longer meant abandoning the world but building it up. His scientific work therefore became something holy, to be undertaken not for its own sake but for the liberation of more spirit from matter.

After completing his theological studies in 1912, Teilhard went to Paris to study under Marcellin Boule, a professor at the Institute of Human Paleontology in the Natural History Museum. Boule was one of the leading experts on Neanderthal man, but Teilhard’s work was mainly in the paleontology of Tertiary mammals in Europe. His scientific studies were interrupted by his tertianship (the final year of his Jesuit formation, a period of intense prayer, meditation, and ascetical training), and then by World War I. Although he could have chosen to be a chaplain, he joined the Eighth Regiment of the Moroccan Tirailleurs as a stretcher-bearer. Teilhard, whose bravery under fire and whose generosity of spirit throughout his military service were honored by medals both during and after the war, did not allow his experiences of the war’s horrors to destroy the vision of human history he was constructing. Indeed, he found that his patriotic service on behalf of a great ideal had invigorated his life. Even in the trenches he believed that he was participating in the grand work of sanctifying humanity. In his personal writings during this time, his constant theme was spiritual evolution: When everything of value in the material world has passed into the human soul, he believed that souls will pass into a new level. In 1917, he began describing this level as the mystic milieu.

After his demobilization, Teilhard returned to his scientific studies. He completed his academic requirements at the Sorbonne and then began work on a thesis about the mammals of the lower Eocene in France. In 1922, he successfully defended his thesis and was awarded his doctorate in paleontology. During the early 1920’s, he served as an assistant professor of geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris, but his position there became untenable when he taught that evolution required a revision in the Church’s doctrine of Original Sin. The discoveries of geologists, paleontologists, and paleoanthropologists had convinced Teilhard that no evidence existed for Adam, Eve, or Eden, and consequently the Fall was an event that could not be verified. Before Charles Darwin, Christians could believe that one man’s sin (Adam’s) had ruined everything and that another man’s suffering (Christ’s) had saved everything. After Darwin, Teilhard believed that Christians must realize that Original Sin is not a malady specific to the earth but an inevitable consequence of the limitations of evolving matter and spirit. Because of Teilhard’s heterodox views on Original Sin, his Jesuit superiors asked him to leave the institute and take a research post in Tianjin, China, with Father Émile Licent, a Jesuit pioneer in paleontology. For the next twenty-three years, from 1923 to 1946, Teilhard’s career would center on China. He would return to France periodically, but he led what he called a vagabond existence that would continue for the rest of his life.

During his first decade as a peripatetic priest, Teilhard worked mainly in the north of China. He participated in a French paleontological mission to the Ordos and Gobi deserts directed by Father Licent. On a visit to central Mongolia in the summer of 1923, the two priests found the first evidence for paleolithic man in China. After these research expeditions, Teilhard returned to Paris, hoping to continue teaching at the Catholic Institute while making occasional field trips to China, but his superiors continued to be bothered by his evolutionary views of Original Sin, and he was told to restrict himself to his scientific work (his position at the Catholic Institute was terminated at the end of 1926).

Returning to China in the spring of 1926, Teilhard obeyed the orders of his superiors not to disseminate publicly his theological speculations, and for the rest of his life, he confined himself to publishing his scientific work while privately developing his evolutionary vision (which he shared with friends and fellow Jesuits). During the late 1920’s, he began using the term “noosphere” to describe Earth’s sphere of thinking substances. The world of matter (the geosphere) had been the source of life (the biosphere), but now the human species was taking conscious control of evolution, and science, technology, and socialization were changing the earth more rapidly than natural selection ever had.

Teilhard’s ideas about humankind’s role in the universe found spiritual resonance in his manuscript of Le Milieu divin (1957; The Divine Milieu , 1960), which he wrote in 1926 and 1927 (but which was not published until after his death). In this book, which many scholars see as a spiritual portrait of Teilhard himself, he tried to set down as simply as possible the religious life that he had been living. Through his scientific work, he had become convinced that humans are at the spiritual center of the cosmos, and he wanted to show how Christianity was at the center of human history and should be the center of every person’s spiritual life.

During this period of intense spiritual probing, Teilhard shifted the base of his operations from Tianjin to Zhuokoudian, about thirty miles southwest of Beijing. There, Davidson Black, a Canadian who was a professor of anatomy at the Beijing Medical College, was engaged in an organized search for prehistoric humans. In the decade from 1927 to 1937, many fossils of animals and humans were found in the calcareous deposits of Zhuokoudian. The human fossils were first called Sinanthropus pekinensis, then Pithecanthropus pekinensis, and now Homo erectus. Teilhard helped to date the fossils, to show that Beijing man was a toolmaker, and to publicize the importance of the finds. Although he gained wide recognition for his account of the discovery, his principal paleontological work continued to be on nonhuman fossils for example, on fossil carnivores.

During the late 1920’s and through the 1930’s, Teilhard went on several expeditions into northern and central China, made periodic trips to Europe and America, and continued to refine his synthesis of evolution and Christianity. He built up a network of friends and disciples in Paris and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In China, he had collaborators of many nationalities, and this contributed to his strongly cosmopolitan and internationalist views. His participation in various research trips to Africa, America, and especially China deepened his understanding of evolution.

In 1938, while he was in Beijing, Teilhard began writing Le Phénomène humain (1955; The Phenomenon of Man , 1959), in which he tried to show how evolutionary data pointed to a Christian interpretation of the world. His approach was phenomenological; that is, he tried to bring out the meaning of phenomena by describing them as precisely as possible. By analyzing the problem of humankind in terms of evolution, he hoped to bridge the gap between Christians and non-Christians, for he believed that Jesus Christ, as God Incarnate, revealed himself not only in the New Testament but also in human evolution. In his book, Teilhard argued that consciousness evolves, and he located the origins of consciousness in preliving as well as living matter. Thresholds, such as the origin of life and of consciousness, are important examples of emergence, where something entirely new enters the universe. Traditional science, according to Teilhard, has not well served these threshold phenomena, and modern science has almost completely ignored what he calls “the within” of the world. This spiritual energy can be studied just as scientists study “the without,” matter’s external face, in terms of space and time. As the capstone of his evolutionary synthesis, Teilhard believed that, through an increase in knowledge and love, human consciousness can evolve to a new level. Noogenesis, the evolution of mind, is a stage on the way to Christogenesis, the evolution of the universe toward the Omega Point, Teilhard’s term for the cosmic Christ.

Teilhard was composing this optimistic vision of the world against a background of world events that would have made pessimism a more natural response. The Japanese occupation of China interfered with his work at Cho-k’ou-tien and his attempt to establish a laboratory for advanced studies in human paleontology in Peking. When World War II began, he was trapped in China, a situation that continued for the war’s duration. He abhorred both German Nazism and Japanese fascism, both of which he interpreted as crudely and unjustifiably transferring the laws of natural selection (the survival of the fittest) from the biological to the human level, whereas, in his vision, humankind was clearly passing to a new level of existence in which a future of love and cooperation was being built. Nevertheless, beneath the human and national tragedies of this war, he believed that something spiritual was evolving. This vision of human evolution found expression in The Phenomenon of Man, which he completed in 1940 and sent to Rome in 1941 for approval by his superiors. Since his approach was phenomenological, he hoped that his book would pass the censors, but in 1944 he learned that it had been rejected.

After the war’s end, Teilhard was able to return to Europe in 1946. He went to Paris, where, during the late 1940’s, he was frustrated in his desire to teach at the Collège de France. A visit to Rome to seek permission to publish various works on his evolutionary synthesis was unsuccessful. In 1947, he was appointed director of research in the National Scientific Research Center, which subsidized his scientific work, but he was eager to communicate his evolutionary vision, for he found the existentialism that was spreading throughout France, with its pessimistic ideas of humankind and matter, dangerously anachronistic in a universe that was evolving toward Christ. On June 1, 1947, he suffered a heart attack and, though he recovered, his health remained precarious for the remainder of his life. These physical sufferings were followed by psychological ones, for in September his religious superiors forbade him again to write on philosophical or theological issues, thus squelching any hope that The Phenomenon of Man or any of his works on anthropogenesis would be published.

Refusing to be discouraged and undertaking no action that could be seen as disobedient, Teilhard nevertheless did everything he could to circulate his ideas privately. He was enthusiastic about the new United Nations, and he worked for some of its organizations that were concerned about the future of the human race. Through contacts made in these labors, for example, with Julian Huxley, he continued to develop his cosmogenetic vision. These efforts were further stimulated by his return to field work in the 1950’s. With the financial support of the Viking Fund (soon to become the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research), Teilhard made expeditions to various excavation sites in South Africa, where important prehuman fossils, especially the australopithecines, had been discovered.

During the last period of Teilhard’s life, from 1951 to 1955, his center of operations became New York City, where, as a fellow of the Wenner Gren Foundation, he concentrated on anthropogenesis (the evolution of the human species). In the summer of 1954, he made his last trip to France, and, though the visit aroused warm feelings for his native country, he was back in New York by September. He was denied permission by a superior to travel to a meeting at the Sorbonne in April, 1955, but he accepted this without bitterness, resolving to continue fighting to increase love in the world. Teilhard died on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955.

Significance

Teilhard did more than any other thinker to help people understand evolution in the context of Christianity. Although he wrote nearly two hundred articles and technical papers in geology and paleontology, mainly on the early Cenozoic period in Europe and the late Cenozoic period in China, his name is most likely to be remembered for his radical view that evolution has a spiritual orientation. For him, the earth, which he so lovingly studied, was profoundly linked to Jesus Christ, since every created thing will find its fulfillment in him. In Teilhard’s view, evolution is a purposeful process in which matter and energy progressively evolve in the direction of increasing complexity, consciousness, and spirituality. He so tightly identified Christ and the universe that many critics have interpreted his vision as a Christian pantheism. Although Teilhard often spoke of the universe as God’s cosmic body, he also carefully distinguished pantheistic evolution, which destroys personalities in its union with matter, from Christian evolution, which culminates in a union with God that preserves personalities.

In the initial enthusiasm generated by the publication of many of Teilhard’s works in the years after his death, some commentators compared the significance of his synthesis of evolutionism and Christianity with Saint Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotelianism and Christianity. Now that most of Teilhard’s writings and letters are in print, it is easier to see him as part of the intellectual development composed of such thinkers as Henri Bergson. These evolutionary philosophers were dissatisfied with the positivism and scientism of the twentieth century and attempted to provide an understanding of humankind’s total experience, of the material as well as the spiritual, of the past and the future, of variety and unity. In this sense, Teilhard has much to teach both scientists and theologians. For scientists, his mystical temperament and loving grasp of positive values have given the world an interpretation of the universe that encourages love, progress, and unity. For theologians, his evolutionary view has necessitated a transposition of Christian revelation into a new key, where religion can profit from scientific insights.

Despite criticisms of his work, many of them justified, Teilhard did offer an alternative to the materialist vision of humankind as an accidental phenomenon, a random collection of molecules on an unimportant planet. In his view, humankind represented the culmination of the complex evolution of matter and life. It is doubtful that in the future Teilhard’s evolutionary synthesis of Christianity and evolution will be completely accepted by Christians or by scientists, but as a product of a luminous mind and a loving heart, his conception of the universe as a unity in which all things work together for a final consummation in Christ has already found numerous followers, because this vision, which allows people to remain true to themselves while building union with God, reveals the deeply spiritual values in the innermost heart of humankind and the universe.

Bibliography

Browning, Geraldine O., Joseph L. Alioto, and Seymour M. Farber, eds. Teilhard de Chardin: In Quest of the Perfection of Man. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973. This book is the result of an international symposium held in San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts in May of 1971. An international group of scholars analyzed the life and work of Teilhard from several perspectives religious, scientific, psychological, and educational. This volume also contains a biographical sketch of Teilhard and a brief analysis of his philosophical beliefs.

Cuénot, Claude. Teilhard de Chardin: A Biographical Study. Edited by René Hague. Translated by Vincent Colimore. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1965. Cuénot, who was a close friend of Teilhard, has carefully documented his many travels. The evolution of Teilhard’s ideas, in Cuénot’s view, becomes clearer when seen against the background of his life as a Jesuit and a scientist. Contains an annotated bibliography.

Grenet, Paul. Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Theories. Translated by R. A. Rudorff. New York: Paul S. Eriksson, 1966. Contains sections on Teilhard’s life, personality, and scientific career, as well as on his philosophical and theological thought. A final section of selected writings from Teilhard is followed by a brief bibliography and an index. Scholars already familiar with Teilhard’s ideas will find little new here, but Grenet’s book is a good primer for novices.

Grummett, David. Teilhard de Chardin: Theology, Humanity, and Cosmos. Dudley, Mass.: Peeters, 2005. Describes the theological origins and religious nature of Teilhard’s ideas to reclaim him as a French Catholic theologian with intellectual roots in the twentieth century.

Lubac, Henri de. Teilhard de Chardin: The Man and His Meaning. Translated by René Hague. London: Hawthorn Books, 1965. One of the most enlightening studies of Teilhard’s ideas. Lubac is a fellow Jesuit whose analysis is based on personal knowledge of Teilhard as well as on his mastery of the published and unpublished material by and about him. He presents both a spiritual portrait, in which he elucidates the interior life that animated Teilhard’s work, and a modern apologetic, in which he shows how Teilhard tried to reinterpret Christianity for twentieth century readers. Contains a bibliography, footnotes, and an index.

Maynard, Thierry, ed. “Teilhard and the Future of Humanity.” New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Essays examining the relevance of Teilhard’s ideas to contemporary times, discussing, among other subjects, his ideas of God and the person, spiritual resources, and coevolution.

Mooney, Christopher F. Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Mooney’s basic theme is that what unifies the many facets of Teilhard’s thought is the relationship between the evolving cosmos and the mystery of Christ. Mooney, also a Jesuit, is able to explicate with sensitivity and understanding the theological implications of Teilhard’s ideas. Contains an extensive bibliography and a detailed index.

Speaight, Robert. The Life of Teilhard de Chardin. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Speaight, a British Catholic writer, presents a straightforward chronological account of Teilhard’s life. He intended his work not to compete with Cuénot’s definitive biography, but to make Teilhard’s thought accessible and comprehensible to a wide readership. Contains a glossary, bibliography, and index.