Moments in the Life of Teilhard de Chardin
This set of ten “nuclear episodes” from Teilhard’s life, meant for contemplation and conversation, are available now on YouTube.
Biography of Teilhard de Chardin
Written by John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker
Teilhard
de Chardin
There is a communion with God, and a communion with the earth, and a communion with God through the earth.
—Writings in Time of War, New York, 1968, p. 14
These lines that conclude Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s essay, “Cosmic Life,” provide an appropriate starting point for a consideration of his life. They are of special interest because Teilhard wrote them in 1916 during his initial duty as a stretcher-bearer in World War I. In many ways they are an early indication of his later work. Yet the communion experiences emphasized here take us back to his early childhood in the south of France and ahead to his years of travel and scientific research. Throughout Teilhard’s seventy-four years, then, his experience of the divine and his insight into the role of the human in the evolutionary process emerges as his dominant concerns. In briefly presenting the biography of Teilhard, three periods will be distinguished: the formative years, the years of travel, and the final years in New York.
the formative years
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born on May 1st, 1881 to Emmanuel and Berthe-Adele Teilhard de Chardin. While both of his parental lineages were distinguished, it is noteworthy that his mother was the great grandniece of Francois-Marie Arouet, more popularly known as Voltaire. He was the fourth of the couple’s eleven children and was born at the family estate of Sarcenat near the twin cities of Clermont-Ferrand in the ancient province of Auvergne. The long extinct volcanic peaks of Auvergne and the forested preserves of this southern province left an indelible mark on Teilhard. He remarks in his spiritual autobiography, “The Heart of Matter,” that:
Auvergne molded me. Auvergne served me both as a museum of natural history and as a wildlife preserve. Sarcenat in Auvergne gave me my first taste of the joys of discovery. To Auvergne I owe my most precious possessions: a collection of pebbles and rocks still to be found there, where I lived (Claude Cuénot, Teilhard de Chardin, 3).
A memory? My very first! I was five or six. My mother had snipped a few of my curls. I picked one up and held it close to the fire. The hair was burnt up in a fraction of s second. A terrible grief assailed me; I had learnt that I was perishable. . . . What used to grieve me when I was a child? This insecurity of things. And what used I to love? My genie of iron! With a plow hitch I believed myself, at seven years, rich with a treasure incorruptible, everlasting. And then it turned out that what I possessed was just a bit of iron that rusted. At this discovery I threw myself on the lawn and shed the bitterest tears of my existence! (Cuénot, 3).
A spark had to fall upon me, to make the fire blaze out. And, without a doubt, it was through my mother that it came to me, sprung from the stream of Christian mysticism, to light up and kindle my childish soul. It was through that spark that “My universe,” still but half-personalized, was to become amorised, and so achieve its full centration Cuénot, 4).
This early piety was well established, so that when he entered Notre Dame de Mongre near Villefranche-sur-Saone, thirty miles north of Lyons, at twelve years of age, his quiet, diligent nature was already well-formed. During his five years at this boarding school Teilhard exchanged his security in stones for a Christian piety largely influenced by Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. Near the time of his graduation he wrote his parents indicating that he wanted to become a Jesuit.
During his five years at this boarding school Teilhard exchanged his security in stones for a Christian piety largely influenced by Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. Near the time of his graduation he wrote his parents indicating that he wanted to become a Jesuit.
Teilhard’s training as a Jesuit provided him with the thoughtful stimulation to continue his devotion both to scientific investigation of the earth and to cultivation of a life of prayer. He entered the Jesuit novitiate at Aix-Provence in 1899. Here he further developed the ascetic piety that he had learned in his reading at Mongre. It was also at Aix-en-Provence that he began his friendship with Auguste Valensin who had already studied philosophy with Maurice Blondel. In 1901, due to an anti-clerical movement in the French Republic, the Jesuits and other religious orders were expelled from France. The Aix-en-Provence novitiate that had moved in 1900 to Paris was transferred in 1902 to the English island of Jersey. However, prior to the move on March 26, 1902, Pierre took his first vows in the Society of Jesus. At this time the security of Teilhard’s religious life, apart from the political situation in France, was painfully disturbed by the gradual sickness that incapacitated his younger sister, Marguerite-Marie, and by the sudden illness of his oldest brother, Alberic.
Alberic’s death in September, 1902, came as Pierre and his fellow Jesuits were quietly leaving Paris for Jersey. The death of this formerly successful, buoyant brother, followed in 1904 by the death of Louise, his youngest sister, caused Teilhard momentarily to turn away from concern for things of this world. Indeed, he indicates that but for Paul Trossard, his former novice master who had encouraged him to follow science as a legitimate way to God, he would have discontinued those studies in favor of theology.
From Jersey Pierre was sent in 1905 to do his teaching internship at the Jesuit college of St. Francis in Cairo, Egypt. For the next three years Teilhard’s naturalist inclinations were developed through prolonged forays into the countryside near Cairo studying the existing flora and fauna and also the fossils of Egypt’s past. While Teilhard carried on his teaching assignments assiduously he also made time for extensive collecting of fossils and for correspondence with naturalists in Egypt and France. His collected Letters from Egypt reveal a person with keen observational powers. In 1907 Teilhard published his first article, “A Week in Fayoum.” He also learned in 1907 that, due to his finds of shark teeth in Fayoum and in the quarries around Cairo, a new species named Teilhardia and three new varieties of shark had been presented to the Geological Society of France by his French correspondent, Monseur Prieur. From Cairo Pierre returned to England to complete his theological studies at Ore Place in Hastings. During the years 1908 to 1912 Teilhard lived the rigorously disciplined life of a Jesuit scholastic. Yet the close relation he maintained with his family is evident in the depth of feeling expressed at the death in 1911 of his elder sister Françoise in China. This sister, who was the only other family member in religious life, had become a Little Sister of the Poor and worked among the impoverished of Shanghai. For Teilhard her death was particularly poignant because of the selfless dedication of her life.
His letters during this period at Hastings indicate that the demands of his theological studies left little time for geological explorations of the chalk cliffs of Hastings or the clay of nearby Weald. Yet his letters also reveal his enthusiasm for both of these types of study. In summary, three different but interrelated developments occurred during this period which significantly affected the future course of Teilhard’s life. These are his reading of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, the anti-Modernist attack by Pope Pius X, and his discovery of a fossil tooth in the region of Hastings.
In reading Henri Bergson’s newly published Creative Evolution, Teilhard encountered a thinker who dissolved the Aristotelian dualism of matter and spirit in favor of a movement through time. Teilhard also found the word evolution in Bergson. He connected the very sound of the word, as he says, “with the extraordinary density and intensity with which the English landscape then appeared to me – especially at sunset – when the Sussex woods seemed to be laden with all the fossil life that I was exploring, from one quarry to another, in the soil of the Weald” (Robert Speaight, The Life of Teilhard de Chardin, 45). From Bergson, then, Teilhard received the vision of on-going evolution. For Bergson, evolution was continually expanding, a “Tide of Life” undirected by an ultimate purpose. Teilhard would eventually disagree with Bergson with respect to the direction of the universe. Later he put forward his own interpretation of the evolutionary process based on the intervening years of field work.
In 1903 while Pierre was in Egypt, Pius X succeeded Leo XIII as Pope. The forward-looking momentum of Leo was abandoned by the conservative Italian Curia in favor of retrenchment and attacks on a spectrum of ideas labelled “modernism” in the encyclical Pascendi (1907) and the decrees of Lamentabili (1907). Among the many new works eventually placed on the Index of Forbidden Works was Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, although it was not yet suspect when Teilhard read it at Hastings. It is in this ecclesiastical milieu that Teilhard endeavored to articulate his emerging vision of the spiritual quality of the universe.
It was also during his years at Hastings that Teilhard and other Jesuits met Charles Dawson, an amateur paleontologist. Because of Pierre’s years of collecting in Cairo he had acquired a growing interest in fossils and prehistoric life, but he was not an accomplished paleontologist, nor did his studies allow him the time to develop the skills needed to accurately date or determine pre-historic fossils. In his very limited association with Dawson, Teilhard discovered the fossil tooth in one of the diggings that caused his name to become known to the scientific community. Moreover, Teilhard’s enthusiasm for the scientific study of prehistoric human life now crystallized as a possible direction after his ordination in August 1911.
Between 1912 and 1915, Teilhard continued his studies in paleontology. But because of his initiative in meeting Marcellin Boule at the Museum of Natural History and in taking courses at the Paris museum and at the Institute Catholique with Georges Boussac, Teilhard now began to develop that expertise in the geology of the Eocene Period that earned him a doctorate in 1922. In addition, Pierre also joined such accomplished paleontologists as the Abbe Henri Breuil, Father Hugo Obermaier, Jean Boussac and others in their excavations in the Aurignacian period caves of southern France, in the phosphorite fossil fields of Belgium, and in the fossil rich sands of the French Alps. While Teilhard was developing a promising scientific career he also renewed his acquaintance in Paris with his cousin Marguerite Teillard-Chambon. Through Marguerite, Teilhard entered into a social milieu in which he could exchange ideas and receive critical comment from several perspectives. In these surroundings Teilhard developed his thought until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
When the war came in August, Teilhard returned to Paris to help Boule store museum pieces, to assist Marguerite turn the girl’s school she headed into a hospital, and to prepare for his own eventual induction. August was a disastrous month for the French army; the German forces executed the Schlieffen Plan so successfully that by the end of the month they were about thirty miles from Paris. In September, the French rallied at the Marne and Parisians breathed easier. Because Teilhard’s induction was delayed, Teilhard’s Jesuit Superiors decided to send him back to Hastings for his tertianship, the year before final vows. Two months later word came that his younger brother Gonzague had been killed in battle near Soissons. Shortly after this Teilhard received orders to report for duty in a newly forming regiment from Auvergne. After visiting his parents and his invalid sister Guiguite at Sarcenat, he began his assignment as a stretcher bearer with the North African Zouaves in January 1915.
I don’t know what sort of monument the country will later put up on Froideterre hill to commemorate the great battle. There’s only one that would be appropriate: a great figure of Christ. Only the image of the crucified can sum up, express, and relieve all the horror and beauty, all the hope and deep mystery in such an avalanche of conflict and sorrows. As I looked at this scene of bitter toil, I felt completely overcome by the thought that I had the honour of standing at one of the two or three spots on which, at this very moment, the whole life of the universe surges and ebbs, places of pain, but it is there that a great future (this I believe more and more) is taking shape” (The Making of a Mind, 119-20).
I’m still in the same quiet billets. Our future continues to be pretty vague, both as to when and what it will be. What the future imposes on our present existence is not exactly a feeling of depression; it’s rather a sort of seriousness, of detachment, of a broadening, too, of outlook. This feeling, of course, borders on a sort of sadness (the sadness that accompanies every fundamental change); but it leads also to a sort of higher joy . . . I’d call it “Nostalgia for the Front.” The reasons, I believe, come down to this; the front cannot but attract us because it is, in one way, the extreme boundary between what one is already aware of, and what is still in process of formation. Not only does one see there things that you experience nowhere else, but one also sees emerge from within one an underlying stream of clarity, energy, and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere else in ordinary life – and the new form that the soul then takes on is that of the individual living the quasi-collective life of all men, fulfilling a function far higher than that of the individual, and becoming fully conscious of this new state. It goes without saying that at the front you no longer look on things in the same way as you do in the rear; if you did, the sights you see and the life you lead would be more than you could bear. This exaltation is accompanied by a certain pain. Nevertheless, it is indeed an exaltation. And that’s why one likes the front in spite of everything, and misses it” (The Making of a Mind, 205).
Teilhard’s powers of articulation are evident in these lines. Moreover, his efforts to express his growing vision of life during the occasional furloughs also brought him a foretaste of the later ecclesiastical reception of his work. For although Teilhard was given permission to take final vows in the Society of Jesus in May 1918, his writings from the battlefield puzzled his Jesuit Superiors especially his rethinking of such topics as evolution and original sin. Gradually Teilhard realized that the great need of the church was, as he says, “. . . to present dogma in a more real, more universal, way more ‘cosmogonic’ way” (The Making of a Mind, 267-68). These realizations often gave Teilhard the sense of “being reckoned with the orthodox and yet feeling for the heterodox” (The Making of a Mind, 277). He was convinced that if he had indeed seen something, as he felt he had, then that seeing would shine forth despite obstacles. As he says in a letter of 1919, “What makes me easier in my mind at this juncture, is that the rather hazardous schematic points in my teaching are in fact of only secondary importance to me. It’s not nearly so much ideas that I want to propagate as a spirit: and a spirit can animate all external presentations” (The Making of a Mind, 281).
After his demobilization on March 10, 1919, Teilhard returned to Jersey for a recuperative period and preparatory studies for concluding his doctoral degree in geology at the Sorbonne, for the Jesuit provincial of Lyon had given his permission for Teilhard to continue his studies in natural science. During this period at Jersey, Teilhard wrote his profoundly prayerful piece on “The Spiritual Power of Matter.”
After returning to Paris, Teilhard continued his studies with Marcellin Boule in the phosphorite fossils of the Lower Eocene period in France. Extensive field trips took him to Belgium where he also began to address student clubs on the significance of evolution in relation to current French theology. By the fall of 1920, Teilhard had secured a post in geology at the Institute Catholique and was lecturing to student audiences who knew him as an active promoter of evolutionary thought.
The conservative reaction in the Catholic Church initiated by the Curia of Pius X had abated at his death in 1914. But the new Pope, Benedict XV, renewed the attack on evolution, on “new theology,” and on a broad spectrum of perceived errors considered threatening by the Vatican Curia. The climate in ecclesiastical circles towards the type of work that Teilhard was doing gradually convinced him that work in the field would not only help his career but would also quiet the controversy in which he and other French thinkers were involved. The opportunity for field work in China had been open to Teilhard as early as 1919 by an invitation from the Jesuit scientist Emile Licent who had undertaken paleontological work in the environs of Peking. On April 1, 1923, Teilhard set sail from Marseille bound for China. Little did he know that this “short trip” would initiate the many years of travel to follow.
the years of travel
Teilhard spent his first period in China in Tientsin, a coastal city some eighty miles from Peking where Emile Licent had built a museum and housed the fossils he had collected in China since his arrival in 1914. The two French Jesuits were a contrast in types. Licent, a northerner, was unconventional in dress, taciturn, and a very independent worker. He was primarily interested in collecting fossils rather than interpreting their significance. Teilhard, on the other hand, was more urbane; he enjoyed conversational society in which he could relate his geological knowledge to a wider scientific and interpretive sphere.
Almost immediately after his arrival Teilhard made himself familiar with Licent’s collection and, at the latter’s urging, gave a report to the Geological Society of China. In June 1923, Teilhard and Licent undertook an expedition into the Ordos desert west of Peking near the border with Inner Mongolia. This expedition, as well as successive ones with Emile Licent during the 1920s, gave Teilhard invaluable information on Paleolithic remains in China. Teilhard’s correspondence during this period provided him with penetrating observations on Mongolian peoples, landscapes, vegetation, and animals of the region.
Teilhard’s major interest during these years of travel was primarily in the natural terrain. Although he interacted with innumerable ethnic groups, he rarely entered into their cultures more than was necessary for expediting his business or satisfying a general interest. One of the ironies of his career is that the Confucian tradition and its concern for realization of the cosmic identity of heaven, earth and man remained outside Teilhard’s concerns. Similarly, tribal peoples and their earth-centered spirituality were regarded by Teilhard as simply an earlier stage in the evolutionary development of the Christian revelation. Teilhard returned to Paris in September 1924 and resumed teaching at the Institute Catholique. But the intellectual climate in European Catholicism had not changed significantly. Pius XI, the new Pope since 1922, had allowed free reign to the conservative factions. It was in this hostile climate that a copy of a paper that Teilhard had delivered in Belgium made its way to Rome. A month after he returned from China, Teilhard was ordered to appear before his provincial Superior to sign a statement repudiating his ideas on original sin. Teilhard’s old friend, Auguste Valensin, was teaching theology in Lyon, and Teilhard sought his counsel regarding the statement of repudiation. In a meeting of the three Jesuits, the Superior agreed to send to Rome a revised version of Teilhard’s earlier paper and his response to the statement of repudiation.
While awaiting Rome’s reply to his revisions, Teilhard continued his classes at the Institute. Students who recalled the classes remembered the dynamic quality with which the young professor delivered his penetrating analysis of homo faber. According to Teilhard, the human as tool-maker and user of fire represents a significant moment in the development of human consciousness or hominization of the species. It is in this period that Teilhard began to use the term “biosphere,” or earth-layer of living things, coined by Eduard Suess, in his geological schema. Teilhard then expanded the concept to include the earth-layer of thinking beings which he called the “noosphere” from the Greek word nous meaning “mind.” While his lectures were filled to capacity, his influence had so disturbed a bloc of conservative French bishops that they reported him to Vatican officials who in turn put pressure on the Jesuits to silence him.
The Jesuit Superior General of this period was Vladimir Ledochowski, a former Austrian military officer who sided openly with the conservative faction in the Vatican. Thus in 1925 Teilhard was again ordered to sign a statement repudiating his controversial theories and to remove himself from France after the semester’s courses Finished.
Teilhard’s associates at the museum, Marcellin Boule and Abbe Breuil, recommended that he leave the Jesuits and become a diocesan priest. His friend, Auguste Valensin, and others recommended signing the statement and interpreting that act as a gesture of fidelity to the Jesuit Order rather than one of intellectual assent to the Curia’s demands. Valensin argued that the correctness of Teilhard’s spirit was ultimately Heaven’s business. In July 1925, after a week’s retreat and reflection on the Ignatian Exercises, Teilhard signed the document. It was the same week as the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee which contested the validity of evolution.
Teilhard’s associates at the museum, Marcellin Boule and Abbe Breuil, recommended that he leave the Jesuits and become a diocesan priest. His friend, Auguste Valensin, and others recommended signing the statement and interpreting that act as a gesture of fidelity to the Jesuit Order rather than one of intellectual assent to the Curia’s demands. Valensin argued that the correctness of Teilhard’s spirit was ultimately Heaven’s business. In July 1925, after a week’s retreat and reflection on the Ignatian Exercises, Teilhard signed the document. It was the same week as the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee which contested the validity of evolution.
In the spring of the following year, Teilhard boarded a steamship bound for the Far East. The second period in Tientsin with Licent is marked by a number of significant developments. First, the visits of the Crown Prince and Princess of Sweden and later that of Alfred Lacroix from the Paris Museum of Natural History gave Teilhard new status in Peking and marked his gradual movement from Tientsin into the more sophisticated scientific circles of Peking. Here, American, Swedish, and British teams had begun work at a rich site called Chou-kou-tien. Teilhard joined their work contributing his knowledge of Chinese geological formations and tool-making activities among prehistoric humans in China. With Licent, Teilhard also undertook a significant expedition north of Peking to Dalai Nor. Finally, in an effort to state his views in a manner acceptable to his superiors, Teilhard wrote The Divine Milieu. This mystical treatise was dedicated to those who love the world; it articulated his vision of the human as “matter at its most incendiary stage.”
Meanwhile, Teilhard had been in correspondence with his superiors who finally allowed him to return to France in August 1927. But even before Teilhard reached Marseille, a new attack was made on his thought due to a series of his lectures that were published in a Paris journal. While Teilhard edited and rewrote The Divine Milieu in Paris, he was impatient for a direct confrontation with his critics. Finally, in June 1928 the assistant to the Jesuit Superior General arrived in Paris to tell Teilhard that all his theological work must end and that he was to confine himself to scientific work. In this oppressive atmosphere, Teilhard was forced to return to China in November 1928.
For the next eleven years, Teilhard continued this self-imposed exile in China, returning to France for only five brief visits. These visits were to see his family and friends who distributed copies of his articles and to give occasional talks to those student clubs in Belgium and Paris who continued to provide a forum for his ideas. These years were also very rich in geological expeditions for Teilhard. In 1929, Teilhard traveled in Somaliland and Ethiopia before returning to China. He played a major role in the find and interpretation of “Peking Man” at Chou-kou-tien in 1929-1930. In 1930 he joined Ray Chapman Andrew’s Central Mongolian Expedition at the invitation of the American Museum of Natural History.
The following year he made a trip across America which inspired him to write The Spirit of the Earth. From May 1931 to February 1932 he traveled into Central Asia with the famous Yellow Expedition sponsored by the Citroen automobile company. In 1934, with George Barbour he traveled up the Yangtze River and into the mountainous regions of Szechuan. A year later he joined the Yale-Cambridge expedition under Helmut de Terra in India and afterwards von Koenigswald’s expedition in Java. In 1937 he was awarded the Gregor Mendel medal at a Philadelphia Conference for his scientific accomplishments. That same year he went with the Harvard-Carnegie Expedition to Burma and then to Java with Helmut de Terra. As a result of this extensive field work Teilhard became recognized as one of the foremost geologists of the earth’s terrain. This notoriety, in addition to his original theories on human evolution, made him a valuable presence for the French government in intellectual circles east and west. His professional accomplishments are even more noteworthy when one recalls the profound tragedies that he experienced in the years between 1932 and 1936 when his father, mother, younger brother, Victor, and his beloved sister, Guiguite, all died during his absence.
The final years of exile in China, 1939 to 1946, roughly correspond to the years of World War II and the disintegration of central control in Chinese Republican politics. During this period, Teilhard and a fellow Jesuit and friend, Pierre Leroy, set up the Institute of Geobiology in Peking to protect the collection of Emile Licent and to provide a laboratory for their on-going classification and interpretation of fossils. The most significant accomplishment of this period, however, was the completion of The Phenomenon of Man in May of 1940. An important contribution of this work is the creative manner in which it situates the emergence of the human as the unifying theme of the evolutionary process. The Phenomenon of Man in its presentation of the fourfold sequence of the evolutionary process (the galactic evolution, earth evolution, life evolution and consciousness evolution) establishes what might almost be considered a new literary genre.
With the war’s end Teilhard received permission to return to France where he engaged in a variety of activities. He published numerous articles in the Jesuit journal, Etudes. He reworked The Phenomenon of Man and sent a copy of it to Rome requesting permission for publication, a permission never granted in his lifetime. He was also asked to stand as a candidate for the prehistory chair at the Sorbonne’s College de France soon to be vacated by his long-time friend, the Abbe Henri Breuil. By May of 1947 Teilhard had exhausted himself in the attempt to restate his position and to deal with the expectations of his sympathetic readers. His exhaustion caused a heart attack on June 1st, 1947. For Teilhard this illness meant a postponement in joining a University of California expedition to Africa sponsored by the Viking Fund of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York. Teilhard had looked forward to the trip as an interlude before the confrontation with Rome over The Phenomenon of Man and the teaching position at the Sorbonne. While recovering from this illness, Teilhard was honored by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for his scientific and intellectual achievements and was promoted to the rank of officer in the Legion of Honor.
In October 1948, Teilhard traveled to the United States. At this time he was invited to give a series of lectures at Columbia University. Permission was refused by the local Jesuit Superior. Suddenly, in July 1948, Teilhard received an invitation to come to Rome to discuss the controversies surrounding his thought. Gradually Teilhard realized that the future of his work depended on this encounter and he prepared himself as he said, “to stroke the tiger’s whiskers.”
Rome in 1948 was a city just beginning its recovery from the war’s devastation. The Vatican Curia was also beginning its reorganization, for Pius XII who had assumed the Pontificate in March 1939 had been in relative isolation during the war years. In the late 1940s he developed his plans for the holy year of 1950. As a former Vatican diplomat, Pius XII continued the Curia’s conservative stance with a more sophisticated and more intellectual effort.
When Teilhard came to Rome he stayed at the Jesuit residence in Vatican City. After several meetings with the Jesuit general, Fr. Janssens, Teilhard realized that he would never be allowed to publish his work during his lifetime; furthermore, that he would not be granted permission to accept the position at the College de France. Those who spoke with Teilhard when he returned to Paris could sense the frustration that enveloped him as he groped to understand the forces against which he was so powerless. During the next two years Teilhard traveled extensively in England, Africa and the United States trying to determine an appropriate place to live now that China was no longer open. In December of 1951 he accepted a research position with the Wenner-Gren foundation in New York.
The final years in new york
Teilhard’s decision to move to New York was approved by his Jesuit Superiors, and this resolved his uncertainty with regard to a place of residence. In his final years, he lived with the Jesuit fathers at St. Ignatius Church on Park Avenue and walked both to his office at the Wenner-Gren Foundation and to the apartment of his self-appointed secretary and friend, Rhoda de Terra. Teilhard’s correspondence with Father Pierre Leroy during these final years, recently published in English as Letters from My Friend, are remarkable in their lack of bitterness and for their single-minded scientific focus.
In 1954, Teilhard visited France for the last time. He and his friend, Leroy, drove south together to the caves at Lascaux. Prior to visiting Lascaux, they stopped at Sarcenat, together with Mrs. de Terra who had joined them. Wordlessly they walked through the rooms until they came to his mother’s room and her chair. Only then did Teilhard speak, saying half to himself, “This is the room where I was born.” Hoping to spend his final years in his native country, Teilhard applied once more to his superiors for permission to return to France permanently. He was politely refused and encouraged to return to America.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955 at six o’clock in the evening. His funeral on Easter Monday was attended by a few friends. Father Leroy and the ministering priest from St. Ignatius accompanied his body some sixty miles upstate from New York City where he was buried at St. Andrews-on-Hudson, then the Jesuit novitiate.
Teilhard’s life with its simple, quiet ending unfolds like the tree of life, slowly, seemingly half opened at points yet bearing within it an enduring dignity. As he wrote of the tree of life:
Before attempting to probe the secret of its life, let us take a good look at it. For from a merely external contemplation of [the tree of life], there is a lesson and a force to be drawn from it: the sense of its testimony (The Phenomenon of Man, 137).
Getting to Know Teilhard: The Formative Years
Then it was that my newly born attraction to the world of “Rocks” began to produce the beginning of what was to be a permanent broadening of the foundations of my interior life . . . . The truth is that even at the peak of my spiritual trajectory I was never to feel at home unless immersed in an Ocean of Matter . . . .
The Heart of Matter[1]
Teilhard learned to love the earth from his father, Emmanuel Teilhard de Chardin. Pierre’s father had a deep love of the earth. He was a highly respected amateur naturalist and an avid fossil seeker. Emmanuel explored the Auvergne, the ancient region of extinct volcanoes in central France. That is where he had lived from childhood.
In Clermont-Ferrand, the capital city of Auvergne, he was a very important man. He had graduated as an archivist-historian from the famous university École des Chartes in Paris and in Clermont-Ferrand held the combined offices of historian, archivist, paleontologist, and permanent secretary of the local chapter of the Academy of Science, Literature, and the Arts. From an early age, while investigating the fossil-rich Auvergne hillsides, Emmanuel had carefully gathered and catalogued many mineral, botanical, and zoological specimens. Over the years he had amassed a very enviable collection of stones, insects, and plants. An extensive array of those items was proudly displayed in a special room in his home.
As young Pierre, his son, grew old enough, he often accompanied his father in these explorations. Pierre also spent many quiet hours with his father in his collection room. There, he learned to catalogue the rocks they had brought home from volcanic sites. Fossils were labeled each according to its kind and the spot where it had been found. Pierre’s father taught him the proper scientific names of their finds.
Already at age six or seven, Pierre could easily distinguish specimens of magma. He could identify igneous rocks that were intrusive (that cooled slowly under the earth’s surface) and those that were extrusive (that erupted onto the surface and cooled quickly to become small crystals).
I was just like any other child. I was interested especially in mineralogy and biological observation. I used to love to follow the course of the clouds, and I knew the stars by their names . . . . To my father I owe a certain balance, on which all the rest is built, along with a taste for the exact sciences.
Spirit of Fire[2]
Reflection
- Can you trace the beginnings of your life or career back to your childhood?
- Name a few people who helped shape your beliefs about what is important in life?
- In what positive ways did your father influence the person you have become?
At an age when other children, I imagine, experience their first “feeling” for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious; by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.
The Heart of Matter[3]
Teilhard learned to love God from his mother. In 1875, Emmanuel Teilhard de Chardin married Berthe Adèle de Dompierre d’Hornoy. Emmanuel was a devout Catholic, so he not only welcomed his new wife’s spirit of prayer and devotion, but also encouraged it. Like many other Catholic families in France, the Teilhard de Chardins kept holy pictures, statues, bibles, rosary beads, votive candles and prayer books in their home. Unlike most other families, the Teilhard de Chardins used these religious objects every day.
During summers, the Teilhard family lived in their countryside home, called Sarcenat, in the small village of Orcines. Each morning, Madame could be seen hurrying to the Church of St Denis to attend early mass. St Denis was the church where Pierre had been baptized. Gossip among the neighboring ladies suggested that Madame Teilhard de Chardin was so devout that she ran her home like a convent.
Pierre’s mother was a mystic with great dedication to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Under her guidance, Pierre’s soul caught fire. Throughout his life, he kept a picture of the Sacred Heart on his desk. Like most mystics, his mother’s image of God was of an unconditional loving Presence. It was different from the “account manager” God that most people seemed to worship. For her, God was the lover who receives everything and forgives everything. Under her guidance, at an early age, her son developed a special intimacy with a beloved God. Later in life, Teilhard wrote,
A spark had to fall upon me, to make the fire blaze forth. And, without a doubt, it was through my mother that it came to me, sprung from the stream of Christian mysticism, to light up and kindle my childish soul. It was through that spark that ‘My universe,’ still but half-personalized, was to become amorised, and so achieve its full centration.
The Heart of Matter[4]
Reflection
- What was the image or nature of God that you were taught, directly or indirectly, by your parents?
- Who introduced you to the spiritual life? (Not merely the person that taught you to say your prayers.)
- Do you have any images or symbols that help foster your spiritual life?
However far back I go into my memories (even before the age of ten) I can distinguish in myself the presence of a strictly dominant passion: the passion for the Absolute.
“My Universe”[5]
Pierre was quite different from his older brother Alberic and from other typical boys. Alberic Teilhard de Chardin was born five years before Pierre, and was the first child of Emmanuel and Berthe Adèle. He was named Alberic after his maternal grandfather. Unlike Pierre, who was quiet and reflective, Alberic was noisy and outgoing. He enjoyed fishing and hunting with his father. He rode horses. He probably had one of the first two-wheeled bicycles. He kept his own hunting rifle and had his own hunting dog. Pierre refused to possess either rifle or have a dog. When restless at home, Alberic enjoyed chasing his younger sisters and cousins around the house, and pulling their long braids.
Alberic attended the same Jesuit collège, Notre Dame de Mongré in southern France, where his father had studied years before. Five years later, Pierre was to attend the same Jesuit school. (In late 19th century France, an eleven-year-old entered a five-year collège, which spanned our middle school and high school.) Although Alberic was short in stature, he played in various competitive sports, including the rough-and-tumble sport of rugby. While Alberic always played to win, Pierre was never competitive or considered “athletic.”
Pierre showed keen interest in their father’s love of fossil-collecting and got to spend much time with him. It is likely that the competitive Alberic became jealous of his younger brother enjoying much of their father’s attention.
Alberic loved to travel and dreamed of visiting far off countries. He eventually joined the French Navy and, as a young naval officer in his 20s, was assigned as attaché to French dignitaries and ambassadors, which fulfilled his dream of traveling all over the world.
The more I think about it, the more clearly I see that I would be psychologically incapable of making the least effort [in any activity] if I were unable to believe in the absolute value of something in that effort.
“My Universe”[6]
Reflection
- Who among your family and friends made you realize that you were different from them?
- Describe the elements of contrast between you and that other person.
Human suffering, the sum total of suffering poured out at each moment over the whole earth, is like an immeasurable ocean. But what makes up this immensity? Is it blackness, emptiness, barren wastes? No, indeed: it is potential energy. Suffering holds hidden within it, in extreme intensity, the ascensional force of the world.
“The Meaning and Constructive Value of Suffering”[7]
Pierre’s younger sister, Marguerite Marie, admired him and taught him the power of suffering. Apparently, everyone called her Gugite (Gigi), except her father, who always called her Marguerite Marie (1883-1936). She was less than two years younger than Pierre. He was her favorite sibling, and she always wanted to do what he did. In a photo of the Teilhard de Chardin children, she appears to be as tall as Pierre.
As she got a bit older, she began to show an interest in exploring matter. It seems likely that in following Pierre around, she spent some time with him when he was cataloguing fossil specimens for their father. She showed little interest in the dull black and grey rocks that fascinated Pierre, but rather favored collecting the more colorful butterflies, beetles, and a variety of insects.
In her early teens, Gigi contacted a serious disease that was never clearly diagnosed. It kept her in pain and bedridden during most of each year, until she died at the age of thirty-one.
She and Pierre wrote to each other regularly throughout her short life. He sometimes sent her drafts of his writings, before he sent them to his cousin Marguerite. In mutual trust, as brother and sister, they shared with each other everything that really mattered in their lives. In a letter to his cousin Marguerite Teillard-Chambon, he wrote:
Yesterday, I sent Gigi the Milieu mystique so that she can send it on to you when she’s read it. I’d have liked you to have been the first to see it—the more so that you are certainly the person who will understand me best. I thought I rather owed it to Gigi to start with her.[8]
As part of his Jesuit training, Pierre was assigned to teach science in a collège run by Jesuits in Cairo, Egypt. During this period, Pierre wrote many letters to his family. He often addressed parts of these letters to Gigi, mentioning by name different species of exotic insects he had found in exploring Egypt. He even prepared some of these specimens and mailed them to her in her sick bed at Sarcenat.
Despite her debilitating illness, Marguerite Marie found ways to serve the needy in France. She was the president of the Catholic Union of the Sick, a network of prayer and mutual support for the sick. In a Preface to a book about Marguerite-Marie (Gigi), Teilhard wrote:
“O Marguerite, my sister, while, dedicated to the positive forces of the Universe, I was running the continents and the seas, passionately busy watching all the hues of the Earth rise, you, motionless, lying, were silently metamorphosing into light, deep within yourself, the worst shadows of the World. In the eyes of the Creator, tell me, which one of us will have had the better part?”
Reflection
- Did you have a childhood companion (a family or friend) whose company you enjoyed?
- What interests did you share?
- Did you keep in touch in later life?
Ever since my childhood, the need wholly to possess some “absolute” was the axis of my entire inner life . . . . This predilection will seem curious, but I can assure you that it was with me continuously. From those very first days I had an irresistible (and at the same time vitalizing and soothing) need to rest continuously in Some Thing that was tangible and definite; and I looked everywhere for this beautiful object.
The Heart of Matter[9]
Pierre’s older sister, Françoise, taught him how to live a dedicated life. Of all the Teilhard children, Françoise (1879-1911), was her own person. Two years older than Pierre, she was an intellectual and an avid reader. Françoise showed little interest in the novels other girls her age were reading. Even from an early age, she preferred serious books, history, biographies, philosophy. The consistent image we have of her is seated, totally engrossed in a heavy book.
We know that she took care of Pierre, in his childhood, as a “second mother.” “I am convinced,” said a friend, “that his two sisters, after their mother, made the most penetrating first impressions on Pierre Teilhard.”
Françoise entered the Little Sisters of the Poor in 1903. This move was a real spiritual battle, a battle that she fought with the help of her brother Pierre. It was to Françoise that Pierre, as a young Jesuit novice, said to her regarding her decision to enter religious life: “You look at your crucifix the wrong way around, it is not only the cross that you must see, it is Jesus Christ who is on it.”
Once she made her decision, she would say: “You must give yourself to God in three suitable ways: generously, simply, and cheerfully.“[10] She was assigned to missionary work in China. She became the superior of a convent there. Shortly before Pierre’s priestly ordination, she succumbed to smallpox.
When I was writing The Universal Element, I remember some things Françoise said to me—when she was already a Little Sister—about the unique and beatifying importance that the reality of God has assumed in her life—and I felt that I understood that we were fundamentally much more like one another than I had thought before. The only thing was that she was following a road where the realities of this world were more effaced or left behind than happens with me.
Making of a Mind[11]
Reflection
- Was anyone in your youth a model of dedication?
- Name a few people in your childhood whom you admired for their positive qualities, such as generosity, kindness, peacefulness, caring for others?
“Having set out, from childhood, to discover the Heart of Matter, it was inevitable that one day I would find myself face to face with the Feminine. The curious thing is only that in this case, the encounter waited until I was thirty years old before it happened.”
The Heart of Matter
In his cousin Marguerite Teillard-Chambon (1880-1959), Pierre found a soulmate.
Pierre’s father and Marguerite’s father were first cousins, close in age. Their two families lived near one another in Clermont-Ferrand. Their children spent much time together there and also in their various summer homes. Marguerite, the eldest child of the Teillard-Chambons, was closest in age to Pierre, about five months older than him. She was also close to his sisters Françoise (who was a year older) and Marguerite-Marie (who was three years younger).
In addition to their Auvergne roots and common holidays, Pierre and cousin Marguerite discovered that they were both animated by a deep spirituality. As a result of their intimate friendship during childhood, the young Marguerite may have at times fantasized that she and Pierre would become more than friends. However, when he decided to join the Jesuits, she remained most supportive to him. When he took his priestly vows as a Jesuit, she took a vow to remain single and to dedicate her life to teaching.
She grew to become a beautiful woman, sensitive, cultured, and brilliant. She attended university in Paris and was one of the first women to be awarded a master’s degree in literature (agrégé in Lettres) at the age of 23 in 1904. She devoted herself to teaching young girls and became principal at one of the largest school for girls in Paris. She also authored several books and became quite influential in the fullest education of women. When Teilhard came to Paris after his ordination to the priesthood, she introduced him to the intellectual life of Paris.
The letters written by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to Marguerite Teillard-Chambon during the World War, published under the title The Making of a Mind show how much he counted on her viewpoint. “My thought is still trying to find itself and once again I am seeking to clarify it by talking with you…you will tell me what you think.“
It is very likely that Pierre Teilhard owed her a lot because she played an essential role with him throughout his life. Pierre Teilhard noted in his diary on February 14, 1917: “Who knows me except Marg?”
Pierre once wrote to her trying to describe the evolving nature of their lifelong relationship:
This is why we must strive, through our personal efforts, to secure support in good and solid friendships, to guard ourselves from infirmities of body and soul . . . but if God intervenes to wean our hearts, to turn by force, on Him alone, the appetite for happiness and reciprocal love which He has aroused in us during happy years of youth, then we must not complain about it.
Don’t be angry with Our Lord if He wants to make you more than what you call “a simple Christian.” Because your action must be far-reaching, it must emanate from a heart that has suffered: this law is gentle, in fact . . . .
The Making of a Mind
Reflection
- Do you know of any people who are soulmates?
- What special qualities do you notice about them, individually and when they are together?
She gave a lot of time to endless details. Great care went into choosing stationery of good design, providing stemmed glasses rather than plastic ones for the sherry to be offered to visitors, arranging to have the new brochure designed by the Graphics Department of the Museum of Modern Art, furnishing the office with a handsome Parsons table in black marble formica made by a member’s husband, and handsome black and chrome stacking chairs purchased at a discount, answering all letters promptly, and planning every detail of the Annual Meetings. Needless to say, it was all accomplished on the proverbial shoestring. Underneath the efficiency there was a great religious dedication and if, at times, Minna could seem bored or disappointed with the talks and discussions, and a rather severe critic of any book that did not come up to the standard of Teilhard’s own work, it was because she herself had delved deeply into the Christological meaning of his insights and had little or no interest in the wide-ranging probings of the modern intellect. If some scholars felt slighted, it was also true that without Minna the center would not have held. Actually, both strands were necessary to make an effective Association.
All too soon the still-young association had to suffer departures of some of its most active directors. Dr. Dansereau in July of 1968 was appointed Professor of Ecology in the faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Montreal, and he resigned as President. At the Second Annual Meeting, held at Essex House in New York on April 26, 1969, Dr. Theodosius Dobzhansky, the world famous geneticist of Rockefeller University, replaced him. The annual speaker that year was Fr. George Maloney, S.J., whose topic was “The Cosmic Christ from St. Paul to Teilhard.” Later that year Michael Murray moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to work with Ivan Illich and to become rector of the Episcopal Church there. Beatrice-Bruteau went to North Carolina to continue her writing (she had a contract to do her book on Teilhard and the Hindu Traditions) and to set up her Philosophers’ Exchange. The Rev. Pieter de Jong replaced her as Second Vice-President. Another departure was that of Advisory Board member, Dr. Melady, who went to Africa as American Ambassador to Burundi.
If there were departures there were also arrivals. Bernard Towers, M.D., Chairman of the Executive Committee of the British Association, and one of the editors of The Teilhard Study Library, returning to England after a period of research work at the University of California, stopped off in New York to give a public lecture in March of 1969. This was another link with the Association across the Atlantic (Dr. Dobzhansky had already been elected a Vice-President of their Association) and with Bernard Towers personally, for he was to come onto our Advisory Board a few years later when he moved permanently to California. His talk made evident to all how he had successfully defended Teilhard against Sir Peter Medawar’s attack in the famous B.B.C. debate which had taken place a few years earlier.
Two new members came to the Board that year: Gertrud Mellon (a Trustee of the Museum of Primitive Art and member of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art) who had become interested in Teilhard while studying with Ewert Cousins at Fordham (indeed, she returned to the Catholic Church as a result of reading Teilhard), and Lauren Surget (of the Technical Staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories). Bob Francoeur was Chairman of the Executive Committee, and Anna Francoeur was Treasurer. Some new names appeared on the Advisory Board of persons who would later become officers and Board Members: Alice Knight and R. Wayne Kraft, whose book The Relevance of Teilhard had been published in 1968.
In November the Association presented a two-day conference on Process Thought: From Cosmogenesis to Christogenesis at Drew University Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, with Pieter de Jong, Clarence Decker, Robert Francoeur, and Ewert Cousins among the speakers.
That fall was to see, also, the first of the series of evening discussions and seminars that the Association would henceforth offer at its headquarters. Though it is not possible to record here all the evening programs that were given throughout the years, some of them will be listed so as to indicate the range of subjects and the approach to Teilhard. This first program consisted of the following: “Exploring Teilhard,” led by Sr. Anne Martin, “Applying Teilhard’s Insights to Contemporary Challenges,” led by Larry Surget, and “Church, Eucharist, Grace, Sin in the Thought of Teilhard,” led by Fr. Almagno. The Association at that time owned only fifteen fragile, old folding chairs, and we were pleased that they were all taken and that none collapsed.
A project dear to Minna’s heart was teaching Teilhard’s ideas to young people. Alice Knight, who had been giving a course on Teilhard to a group of ninth-grade students in the Sunday School of Christ Church, Greenwich, Connecticut, and also an adult class in the parish, convened a group of interested members. Dora Chaplin, Professor of Christian Education at The General Theological Seminary in New York, Sister Élise, C.H.S., of St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School in New York; Bradford Hastings, Rector of Christ Church in Greenwich, Connecticut; Sister Anne Martin, who was now studying for a doctorate at Union Theological but had formerly taught Teilhard to children in a depressed area of Detroit; Sister Mary Thérèse McVicar, Instructor in Education at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. These and others compiled a set of Teaching Outlines which the Association offered for sale for one dollar. Sales were good, and it was felt that another and important facet had been added to the Association’s program.
The great problem of the Annual Meetings was to find a place that would not be so ruinously expensive that we would have to charge too much for the luncheon tickets and thus defeat our purpose. Minna found a solution that served for a number of years, the Parish House of the Church of the Holy Trinity on East 88th Street in New York. It had a spacious library, a suite of bare but sunny Sunday school rooms, and a large auditorium. It also had an excellent cook and adequate kitchen facilities. A Hospitality Committee arranged the 1970 luncheon, setting up the tables the day before, arranging for buying of the food, filling the wine glasses, arranging flowers. It was a lot of work but worth all the effort. Ninety people came from as far afield as Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and Schenectady; old friends were greeted and new ones made. Renée-Marie Parry, Honorary Secretary of the British Association, was guest of honor. Dr. Dobzhansky consented to serve another term as President, Ewert Cousins joined Pieter de Jong as Vice-President, and the Secretary and Treasurer were reelected. Romano Almagno and Alice Knight became Directors, and Donald Gray, a future officer, was among those elected to the Advisory Board. About 150 persons were in the afternoon audience to hear the talks given by Mrs. Parry on “Teilhard and the Contemporary World Scene” and by Dr. Dobzhansky on “Evolution and Man’s Conception of Himself.”
That fall Donald Gray gave a seminar on The Phenomenon of Man (a wonderfully clear exposition of that difficult book) and Larry Surget brought his technical knowledge of remote sensing devices to his popular discussions of “Building Mankind” and “Human Energy.” In Connecticut Professor Alfred Stiernotte conducted a scholarly workshop at Quinnipiac College on “The Thought and Mysticism of Teilhard de Chardin,” an inquiry into Process Philosophy, Teilhard’s Christology, and the Mysticism of Process.
About this time Minna made a study of the geographical distribution of the members and reported as follows: *Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, *Iowa, *Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, *Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, *Nevada, *New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, *North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, *Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, *Vermont, Virginia, *Washington, *West Virginia, Wisconsin, Canada, *Burundi, France, *Italy, *Korea, *Mexico, *Peru, and *Yugoslavia. Ages spanned from that of a 17-year-old student to a New York lady of 92. (The asterisks signify only one member.)
In October 1970 Minna wrote of a problem that has always been at the core of the Association’s existence:
I am gravely concerned about the Teilhard Association. Money is tight all over the country as you know and our membership renewals are not coming in too well. We are getting a few new members but just about enough to make up for losses, if that… . We need money for rent, postage, printing, everything… . The wear and tear on me is really too much. It has gone on for four years now and is very debilitating.
Later that year Jean Houston and Alexander Wolsky came onto the Board. But there were still more departures: Fr. Romano Almagno was transferred to a Franciscan study center in Italy, for six years, as librarian at the Collegio International S. Bonaventura. Happily for the Association he not only continued to compile his scholarly bibliography on Teilhard (as yet unpublished for lack of funds) but he returned each summer to teach a course on bibliography at the University of Pittsburgh and stopped off in New York long enough to give a series of weekly lectures during the month of June. Some friends and admirers were always on hand to listen.
Late in the fall Larry Surget and his new wife set off on a pilgrimage to India. And then, early in 1971, Dr. Dobzhansky himself retired from Rockefeller University and moved out to the University of California at Davis.
But, if the Association seemed to be at a low ebb it was not for long, for 1971 was to see a resurgence of energy and interest, culminating in the very successful conference held in New York City on “Hope and the Future of Man.”
It would be difficult for me to work out again, or at least to explain in some detail, the complicated story in which, at that time in my life the various threads were formed and began to be woven together into what was one day to become for me the fabric of the Stuff of the Universe.
The Heart of Matter[12]
As soon as school was out, the Teilhard de Chardin family moved to their summer home, named Sarcenat. It was there in the foothills of ancient volcanoes where some of the threads of young Pierre’s life were “formed and began to be woven together.”
The stately Sarcenat, with its turrets, stood out in the small country village of Orcines, which lay about five miles from their winter home in the city of Clermont. We may assume that the family moved there annually in the late spring, since Pierre was born at Sarcenat on May 1, 1881, and baptized in the nearby Orcines church.
Life at Sarcenat was quite regulated. Teilhard and his siblings ate breakfast together with their governess. Their breakfast would be a simple one of fresh bread or biscuits with jam, and milk or cocoa to drink.
Informal education was part of their morning. The governess would teach them to speak languages other than French, usually German or English. Their father tutored them in Latin, since it was the language of the church. Their mother taught them the catechism. Everyone was encouraged to read. The Teilhard home would have plenty of books, magazines, and newspapers.
Afternoons were free for reading, games, and outdoor activities in the open countryside. Nearby were volcanoes to explore. Digging for fossils in the agate-rich volcanic foothills was a favorite hobby for Pierre and his father. Alberic preferred hunting and fishing with his father.
Everyone ate dinner together at six o’clock. After an hour of free time, the family and staff gathered for prayer in the dining room at eight o’clock. Since electric lighting was not available before the beginning of the 20th century, bedtime began soon after prayers.
Teilhard’s daily life at Sarcenat was centered on two things, God and the World of Matter.
The whole problem of my interior life, and all that gives it value and delight, has consisted, and still consists, in knitting together in myself the influences that radiate from each of the two Centers, God and the World—or to put it more exactly, in making them coincide.
My Universe[13]
Reflection
- What do you remember most about summer times in your childhood?
- Did your family do things together? Did you attend church services as a family?
For some years after their publication in French, volumes 6 and 7 of the Oeuvres had not been available in this country because Harper & Row had allowed the publication of the Teilhard books to lapse. Now Harcourt Brace Jovanovich took over the publication rights of the remaining books with the intention of bringing them out simultaneously with their appearance in England. Helen Wolff who was responsible for this move was a director of the Helen and Kurt Wolff division of the company and also a member of our Advisory Board. Volumes 6 and 7, Human Energy and Activation of Human Energy appeared in February of 1971.
What Robert Francoeur described as “the best conference I ever attended” – Teilhard de Chardin: in Quest of the Perfection of Man – took place in the splendid Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco in May under the co-chairmanship of Mayor Joseph Alioto and Seymour Farber, Dean of Continuing Education in Health Sciences, University of California in San Francisco. Mayor Alioto had been impressed by the influence that the Franciscan Fr. N. Max Wildiers, the great Dutch Teilhardian scholar, had had on his son and other students while he was lecturing at the University in San Francisco. Here was a voice speaking out to a generation in revolt against the Viet Nam War, “copping-out” of society, escaping to Haight-Ashbury. He offered them Teilhard’s challenge of the “grand option”: to face their problems and to “build the earth.” Fr. Wildiers inspired the American students much as Teilhard had inspired the worker priests and the students of Paris in earlier decades.
Fr. Wildiers, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Robert Francoeur, Christopher Mooney, S.J. and Bernard Towers were among the international roster of speakers that included, among many others, Dr. L. S. B. Leakey, and Connor Cruise O’Brien. The papers of that conference were published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 1973 (288 pages, $13.50), and the title of the book was that of the conference itself.
Back in New York, it was fitting that a theologian should be in the President’s chair because for over a year plans had been in process for the Association to sponsor a conference on “Hope and the Future of Man.” It was a theme appropriate to a Teilhardian Conference, for he had believed that hope was “the essential impetus without which nothing will be done” and also that there was nothing more important than creation of the future. The conference was conceived as a convergence of innovative thinkers who were having a far-reaching influence on contemporary theology, centering around three important Hope Theologians from Germany: Johannes Metz, Jürgen Moltman, and Wolfhart Pannenburg.
The idea for the conference had been Gertrud Mellon’s, and for a number of years, during summer visits to her native Freiburg and through Goethe House in New York City, she had sought financial help from the German government to make it possible. Philip Hefner of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, on sabbatical in Hamburg, had been in touch with the German theologians. Now plans had matured and travel expenses for the three scholars were to be underwritten by the German government. The dates of the Conference were set for October 8 to 10.Institutions that were to co-sponsor the Conference with the American Teilhard de Chardin Association were the Cardinal Bea Institute of Woodstock College, Union Theological Seminary, Trinity Institute where the scholars were to stay as guests, and Goethe House in New York City. Cooperation was also promised from Riverside Church where the public sessions of the Conference would be held. The Conference was to be financed through the operational budgets of the sponsoring institutions and the sum of $3,250.00 was made available to cover the stipends for the major speakers and travel expenses for the American speakers.
Among the American scholars were Carl Braaten (Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago), who represented the eschatological approach; John B. Cobb, Jr. (School of Theology of Claremont, California); Lewis Ogden, (The Divinity School, The University of Chicago); and Daniel Day Williams (Union Theological Seminary), all of whom represented Process Theology; Donald Gray (Manhattan College); Philip Hefner (The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago); Christopher Mooney, S.J. (President of Woodstock College, New York City); and Joseph Sittler (The Divinity School, The University of Chicago), representing the Teilhard theologians. A number of other scholars were invited to take part in the working sessions of the conference.
There were to be five public lectures and, in addition, private discussions between the specialists, some of which were to be open to students. Until a week before the Conference it had been planned to hold the public sessions in the Assembly Hall of Riverside Church which seats 400. Increasingly the Association had been inundated with letters and postcards from many parts of the United States and Canada – a party of four was flying in from California, or a group of eight were driving from Illinois – asking for suggestions of places to stay. Now aware of the unexpectedly large response to the Conference, the Association took the precaution of asking the church to transfer the public sessions to the huge nave which seats 1500. It was a wise move for though there was no formal registration it was estimated that over 2500 people attended. This large audience was a point singled out by an article in the New York Times on October 9th. The three German theologians were themselves impressed. “Who are all those people?” queried Johannes Metz at the first session as he adjusted his glasses to peer at the vast sea of faces. “How is it possible to assemble so many people for a Conference on Theology? And at 9:30in the morning!”
No précis can do justice to the Conference, but briefly (borrowing from a report by Ewert Cousins) it began with a public session at which three presentations were made on the meaning of the future, from a process, a Teilhardian, and an eschatological perspective. John Cobb, Jr. maintained that process theology provides a mediating position in the tension of present and future. Process does not guarantee progress. Although God’s activity in the world makes for progress as well as change, “there is no guarantee of progress in the short run, and in the long run it is inevitable that life on this planet will become extinct.” For Whitehead “the penultimate value and meaning of history becomes ultimate in God.” Dr. Cobb gave his own speculations on a post-personal future in which there would be “a rich interpenetration of each into the other to the intensification and harmonization of the experiences of all. This will constitute a new kind of community, transcending both collectivities and voluntary associations of autonomous persons.” Process theology gives Cobb hope that man can find his way through the now-threatening catastrophes, but it gives him no assurance that man will do so.
Speaking from Teilhard’s perspective, Philip Hefner developed six statements about the future: it is one of convergence and unification; of progressive personalization; it is open, not closed; it implies the worth and reliability of creation; it activates human energy; finally, love is the action which fulfills the world’s destiny. He concluded that “the activation of man’s energy is the crucial question of the future, because if that energy is not activated in the proper direction, we will be only moments away from the abyss.”
The eschatological approach was presented by Carl Braaten. He said, “The symbolism of the future comes to us in two forms of consciousness: the utopian and the eschatological. The utopian future is projected as another time in history; the eschatological future deals with the final fulfillment end of history.” He described the power of the eschatological future to provide hope thus: “The future gives rise to hope that a great reversal in the present can come about.” It can have an impact in the present, reversing trends and starting new ones. “The Christian view involves an axiomatic reversal in which the new reality is the starting point.” “Ultimately, what we mean by the future is what we mean by God. For God is our Future, the fulfilling power of the future in all things.”
The three theologians from Germany gave responses to the opening presentations by the Americans, and on each evening a public lecture was delivered by one of them, followed by responses given by representatives of the Teilhardian and Process points of view.
On the first evening Wolfhart Pannenberg of the University of Munich spoke on “Future and Unity,” and in a remarkably wide-ranging paper explored the relation of God to the future, the interaction of the divine and the human, the problems of the individual and society, the significance of resurrection and the role of religion in society, and the meaning of the eschatological future as the future of God’s kingdom in his eternal life and power. Throughout, Pannenberg discussed issues in the light of the thought of Teilhard and Whitehead. Donald Gray responded from a Teilhardian view, and Daniel Day Williams from a process perspective.
On the second evening Jürgen Moltmann of the University of Tübingen spoke on “Hope and the Biomedical Future of Man”. “For the first time,” he said, “human life in fact has become a moral task,” and he called for a new assessment of illness, aging and dying. He concluded that because biomedical progress elicits hopes, yet does not guarantee happiness, it must be guided by a humane ethics. Christopher Mooney responded from a Teilhardian perspective and Schubert Ogden of the University of Chicago from the Process approach.
The final evening lecture was given by Johannes Metz of the State University of Münster, and was entitled “The Future ex Memoria Passionais,” in which he contended that the future of our technological civilization is primarily a political and social problem and proposed the memory of suffering as a source for political and social action. The Christian memory of the crucifixion prevents us from ever becoming reconciled to the so-called “facts” and “tendencies” of our society. This memory should become “the ferment for that new political life we are now seeking on behalf of our human future.” Joseph Sittler of the University of Chicago and Lewis Ford of the Pennsylvania State University responded.
The complete papers of the conference may be read in the book Hope and the Future of Man, edited by Ewert Cousins and published by the Fortress Press in 1972. A modest royalty check that arrives every year attests to its continuing influence.
Ewert Cousins reported that “Evaluation of the conference has been positive both from the audience and the participants. Many claimed that important communication had occurred and that a significant exchange had taken place between European and American theologians. The conference involved a fruitful combination of communication, tension, opposition and technical clarification.”
Successful as the conference was, it had been conceived as only the first of a two-stage project. The second stage would bring the same group of theologians together with future planners: technologists, scientists, sociologists and political scientists, sociologists and political scientists. A budget of $25,000.00 was projected. This amount, far larger than that spent on the Hope Conference, was deemed necessary because an auditorium would be a more appropriate setting than a church and would have to be rented at a substantial fee. Also, speakers in the field of future planning were accustomed to larger fees than theologians! This second conference never materialized.
In November of that year Minna reported more cheerfully on the Association’s financial position: for the first time there were more than 500 members, brought about no doubt by the interest engendered by the successful Hope Conference.
These old houses with their cellar-like entrances, their huge staircases, cold and damp, and their somber, lofty rooms, were a grim setting for our childhood. But they never stopped us from playing—the terrible boys . . . wild and noisy, the girls more sedate. . . . If, as sometimes happened, they caught one of us by surprise, plaits were pulled and there would be tears. However, the arrival of a nice treat with jam and oranges soon restored peace.
Marguerite Teillard-Chambon
The Teilhard de Chardin Album[14]
During the fall and winter, the Teilhard de Chardins lived near the Teillard-Chambons in Clermont-Ferrand. The town was the proud capital of the Auvergne region, in the center of France. The city’s train station marked the last stop on the Paris-Clermont line. In the 1880s, the ride to Paris took about three hours.
Clermont’s cathedral, a short walk from the Teilhard home, was the center of the diocese. Children of both families attended the cathedral’s grammar school. There they learned the four Rs, Reading, (w)Riting, (a)Rithmetic, and Religion.
Many older homes and buildings in Clermont—and even its strange-looking black medieval basilica of Our Lady, Notre Dame du Port—were constructed of the area’s plentiful black granite, cut from some of the many ancient volcanoes spread throughout the region.
Clermont enjoyed ancient lineage that could be traced back to the Roman armies, and a major French diocese of the medieval church. Despite its long history, the civic leaders of Clermont were modern thinkers. Among them was Marguerite Teillard-Chambon’s father. He was instrumental in seeing that his town in 1900 was the first in Europe where people could travel throughout the city in electric streetcars.
During Pierre’s grammar school years, France watched the completion of the 1,000-foot-tall Eiffel Tower and celebrated the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. The Teilhards certainly attended the centennial festivities in Paris.
For many years, Paris had been and remained the intellectual, social, and cultural capital of the Western World. The sprawling city was the preferred site of international expositions and world’s fairs, where the latest scientific inventions were introduced. Paris claimed to publish as many as eighty newspapers, some daily, many weekly, and fewer monthly. Many of them artfully displayed photos, drawings, and cartoons. Newspapers and magazines made their way from Paris to the Clermont-Ferrand train station. Many were available in the Teilhard home or in the home of their cousins.
The Chardins descended from a line of French aristocracy among the Bourbon royalty. Even though they accepted Pope Leo XIII’s request for the French nobility to rally to the Republic, the men in the family still walked proudly erect, manifesting their royal lineage.
I am doing my best just now to recapture and express my feelings, as a child, toward what I have called, later on, la sainte Matière (holy matter), a rather delicate and critical point, since it is unquestionably out of these early contacts with the “essence” of the World that my whole internal life has sprung and grown.
from Letters to Two Friends[15]
Reflection
- What or who in your childhood helped build your self-esteem or your sense of self?
- What are some positive memories you have of your school life?
- Did you have any memorable teachers?
[1] Heart of Matter, 20.
[2] Quoted in Ursula King, Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin, 6.
[6] Ursula King cites this quote as coming from the essay “My Universe,” but I cannot find it there.
[7] Teilhard de Chardin: Pilgrim of the Future, 23-26.
[10] Memoirs of Marguerite Teillard-Chambon. Family archives. Reported in “Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Feminine.” Talk given by Marie Bayon de la Tour at The American Teilhard Association’s Annual Meeting (online), June 12, 2021.
[14] Jeanne Mortier and Marie-Louise Aboux, eds. Teilhard de Chardin Album, 15
[15] Letters to Two Friends, 214. Cited in The Heart of Matter, 77, n2.
Getting to Know Teilhard: Early Jesuit Influence
“…all abstract knowledge is only a faded reality, because to understand the world knowledge is not enough, you must see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the vital heat of existence in the heart of reality.”
The Heart of Matter, 71
It was the Jesuit Collège de Notre-Dame de Mongré. For over three hundred years, Jesuit schools had shaped many of the finest minds in Europe. In France, the Jesuits were known as confessors of kings and educators of royalty. Even after Frenchmen overthrew the monarchy in 1789 and France became a republic, Jesuit high schools, known as collèges in France, were forced to adapt. They not only adapted, but also flourished. When young Teilhard entered high school, he had at least a dozen schools in France run by Jesuits to choose from. These schools continued training the youth of the elite: the young men who would become France’s military officers, higher clergy, government leaders, lawyers, university professors, and outstanding businessmen. Following a family tradition, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin entered the Jesuit high school Notre-Dame de Mongré in 1892 at age eleven. His older brother Alberic had just graduated Mongré and entered the French Navy. Pierre’s father and his uncles had attended the same school in their youth. The curriculum at Mongré would be intense: Latin, Greek, German, mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, philosophy, and religion. Classes were designed to develop a classical mindset and an intellectual methodology. Students learned to decline Latin nouns for the same reason musicians practice their scales, to cultivate discipline and maintain proficiency. Life in the dorms at Mongré would be Spartan, food in the cafeteria plentiful but simple. Early rising, daily mass, and a regimen of classes defined the life of the student. Perhaps more importantly, during their five-year program of study at Mongré, students formed lifetime friendships and alliances. Such camaraderie, fostered also through school sports and weekend outings, likely played a more significant role in the long run in their careers than getting a high grade in second year Latin class. Unlike his brother Alberic, who delighted in sports, fun, and exciting outings with his friends during weekend breaks, Pierre preferred to walk alone along a nearby river, looking for unusual stones. A few of the friends he made there would, like him, elect to join the Society of Jesus after they finished at Mongré. During summer vacations, Pierre rejoined his family at Sarcenat, their summer home. There, he eagerly resumed his rock-picking with his father in the nearby mountains.
“Even if my passion for stones, and even more for antiquities, has not completely flared up again, I shall rekindle it during the summer holidays, for the fire is still in me, more active than ever.”
Letter to his Parents from Mongré (Spirit of Fire, 10)
[Mongré was located about ten miles from the city of Lyons, on the outskirts of a small town called Villefranche-sur-Saône. Villefranche borders the Saône River.] Reflection: Did your years in high school help shape your mind and outlook on life?
” . . . mysticism (even Christian mysticism) has never doubted but that God must be looked for only ‘in heaven’ . . . Yet all the time . . . the natural movement of my thought had been . . . counter to this traditional orientation . . . I can look back and distinguish the first traces of this opposition in my years at school, when I remember my pathetic attempts to reconcile the evangelism . . . of the Imitation of Christ on which I drew for my morning prayers, with the attraction I found in Nature.”
The Heart of Matter, 45-46.
Yes. When Pierre Teilhard de Chardin entered the Jesuit high school Notre-Dame de Mongré in France, traditional spirituality—love of God and hatred of the World—dominated religious life throughout France and Europe. Typical of teenagers, who often wish to explore other interests than those of their parents, Pierre began to read spiritual books referred to him by his teachers. Among books recommended to Pierre was The Imitation of Christ, a book whose spirituality was very prominent among many Jesuits of that era. The advice in its pages caused confusion in Pierre’s soul. The Imitation told him to despise things of the earth for they would keep him from union with God. Pierre passionately loved the earth, especially searching for fossils and other treasures hidden in matter. If he wanted to love God, would he have to give up his love of rocks? Unable to resolve his dilemma, he sought the counsel of one of his teachers. The priest to whom he confided his spiritual dilemma assured Pierre that his geological enjoyment would not hinder his spiritual life. However, we know from Teilhard’s later writings about his inner life that he did not resolved this dilemma for many years, even well after his priestly ordination. Again and again, he was tempted to abandon his love for geology in order to devote himself entirely to God. Yet, again and again, his passion for rocks reasserted itself. His spiritual pendulum continued to swing from one side to the other. It was at the Jesuit school Notre-Dame de Mongré where Pierre, at age eleven, received his First Holy Communion. More than a decade would pass before the church allowed young children to receive the Eucharist. At Mongré, Pierre was also introduced to devotion to the Blessed Virgin. During his senior year, he was elected president of the Sodality of Our Lady. During his final year at Mongré, he decided to enter the Jesuit Order. As a Jesuit novice, he would continue to hear his Jesuit mentors extol a spirituality based on hatred of the world.
“It does seem to me as though God is offering me a vocation to leave the world. You can well imagine that once I’m certain that I’m not mistaken, I shall answer this call; and I know too that you will be the last to raise any difficulties. All I now need is for our Lord to make me feel unmistakably what he wants of me and to give me the generosity of spirit that is needed.” Letter to his Parents from Mongré
Reflection: Did you ever have a crisis of faith in your life? How would you describe it?
“Father Bonner, the philosophy teacher . . . showed us how we can attain holiness by the practice of the least showy virtues and by the simple performance of everyday duties just as well as by undergoing martyrdom or by miracles.”
Letter to His Parents (Spirit of Fire, 11)
During fifth year of high school, every student in France was required to take the baccalaureate exam. According to historians, the Baccalaureate was started by Napoleon in order to promote the study of philosophy among French youth. The famous general saw philosophy as a pursuit very natural to the French. France had already produced many great philosophers in its history—Abelard, Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu. Napoleon wanted that tradition to continue. It is perhaps why, when someone receives a doctorate today, even in mathematics or physics or sociology, he or she is called a Ph.D., a doctor of philosophy. To this day, young people in France must take courses in philosophy during their high school years and sit for the “Bac,” as they call it today. This four-hour exam requires students to write an extensive essay on a philosophical theme assigned that morning. The theme is chosen by a national committee. It is based on a perennial philosophical theme, such as justice, conscience, freedom, duty, desire, existence. Students are expected to explore the assigned theme from the perspective of ancient as well as contemporary philosophers. Imagine American high school students taking courses in Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, Hegel, Kant, Camus, and the like! Scores achieved in the two-tier Baccalaureate determine whether or not a student can (1) graduate and (2) go on to university studies. However, if one wanted to pursue a higher degree in a scientific field, there was also a separate qualifying baccalaureate exam in mathematics to endure. Over the years, students at the Jesuit school would have collected and saved baccalaureate exam questions. Using past-years’ questions, Jesuit teachers would coach their students on how to write successful essays. Students would rehearse taking the exam again and again in their classrooms. Tradition has it that students at Mongré never failed a Baccalaureate. During Pierre’s final years at Mongré, he became deeply physically and mentally exhausted, and spiritually troubled. After passing both tiers of his baccalaureate exam, he returned home for a year to rest and recuperate. In his favorite room at Sarcenat, he studied for the mathematical exams. He was given a private exam in Clermont, evaluated by a private jury. He passed, qualifying him to pursue a university degree as well as a science doctorate. After his priestly ordination and a stint in military service as a stretcher-bearer during World War I, he would return to Paris to earn his doctorate in geology.
“. . . one of my classical pupils was a little fellow from Auvergne, very intelligent, first in every subject, but disconcertingly well behaved. . . . it was only long afterwards that I learned the secret of his seeming indifference. Transporting his mind far away from us was another love, a jealous and absorbing passion—stones.”
Letter from a Jesuit teacher at Mongré
Reflection: Did anyone ever inspire you to begin thinking about the meaning of life in general and the purpose of your life in particular?
“When I was seventeen, the desire for the ‘most perfect’ determined my vocation to the Jesuits . . . The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I would be psychologically incapable of making the least effort, if I were unable to believe in the absolute value of something in that effort.” Spirit of Fire, 16
Just a few months before his 18th birthday, Teilhard began his Jesuit life at the Jesuit novitiate in Aix-en-Provence. In a Jesuit novitiate anywhere in Europe and America, life would have been the same. Teilhard spent his first few weeks as a “postulant,” growing accustomed to Jesuit daily life—rising at 5:30 am, donning and belting an unfamiliar Jesuit cassock, meditating privately for an hour on one’s knees, attending community mass at seven, and finally enjoying a hearty breakfast, in silence, at eight. Daily life in a two-year Jesuit novitiate excluded the “world” as much as possible. A novitiate library held only books on spirituality, histories of the church, and lives of the saints, especially Jesuit saints. There were no newspapers or magazines. No novels or books that might “upset” the mind of a young man destined to spend his life serving God. Any mail sent or received might be checked by the novicemaster or his associate. A daily schedule was posted on a bulletin board each morning by the Manuductor, a second-year novice, appointed by the novicemaster. Besides keeping a daily log of all novitiate events (in Latin), the Manuductor arranged each novice’s indoor housework assignments—cleaning toilets, mopping halls, setting tables in the refectory, working with the cook, washing dishes, etc. Silence reigned in novitiate rooms, corridors, dining hall, and kitchen. If someone needed to say a few words, one spoke quietly and only in Latin. When outdoors, during recreation or doing yard work, French was permitted. Learning to converse in Latin was essential, because during the rest of Jesuit training all courses in philosophy and theology would be conducted in Latin. Oral exams were also conducted in Latin. We can assume that Teilhard adapted well to the strict discipline of novitiate life. Its peaceful atmosphere nurtured his quiet and devout personality. We have no extant letters to his parents or anyone else during his novitiate. Jesuit indoctrination was very thorough—unquestioned obedience to a command of a superior. Strict punctuality to any assignment or event was essential. Ignatius had said that if a bell rang to call you to an assignment, you were to stop whatever you were doing instantly and obey the call of the bell. If you had been writing a sentence and had just begun writing a word, you were to stop in the middle of that word, get up and go to where the bell called you. You were not even to cross a “t” or dot an “i.” Once you were accepted as a novice, your fellow Jesuits became your true family. There was no returning home for summer vacation. A novice did not get permission for a home visit, even for a family wedding or a funeral. During Teilhard’s novitiate, he was reborn as a Jesuit. He learned to think like a Jesuit and act like a Jesuit. His biological family, with permission, might visit with him on a Sunday afternoon, a few times a year. Some young men could not deal with such physical, emotional, and psychological indoctrination, so they quietly left the novitiate. Some left during the first months. A few left later in the year, since Christmas holidays away from family were too much to bear. After two years, novices pronounced their first religious vows. They became Jesuits forever.
“At the novitiate, he was a model novice, modest and apparently shy, but always ready to oblige others . . . He was simple and unassuming, anxious not to appear in any way different from others, joyful and lively, and a great walker . . . ” Teilhard de Chardin Album
Reflection: Did you ever experience anything like Teilhard’s novitiate, where you were strongly impacted physically, emotionally, and intellectually?
Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord,
and by this means to save his soul.
And the other things on the face of the earth
are created for man that they may help him
in prosecuting the end for which he is created.
From this it follows that man is to use them
as much as they help him on to his end,
and ought to rid himself of them
so far as they hinder him as to it.”
Principle and Foundation
Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises
Soon after the new novices became accustomed to novitiate life, they underwent a 30-day retreat based on St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. Stages of the retreat followed the four “weeks” of the Exercises. Each retreat day included as many as five hours of prayer, according to the activities prescribed by Ignatius.
Perhaps most difficult for many was its 30 days of almost total silence. Even outdoor work had to be done in silence. There was no recreation time. The only time a retreatant got to use his voice was in private conference with the novicemaster or in hymns and responses during liturgical events.
Although Ignatian spirituality in the Spiritual Exercises promoted “finding God in all things,” much of the spiritual literature assigned to be read and studied during the novitiate contradicted this fundamental Jesuit attitude. Spiritual writing produced during the centuries after the council of Trent was typically written by men living protected lives in monastic abbeys. They emphasized keeping distance from the wiles of the world and other people.
In this spirituality, human accomplishments held no spiritual value or purpose. Prayer alone had value. One’s life was to be focused not on Earth but on Heaven and attaining heavenly bliss.
This proved confusing to Teilhard, the young novice, because, in contrast, fully formed Jesuits were expected to live and function immersed in the world. It was also confusing because he continued to feel his passion for exploring rocks and the mysteries of matter. A Jesuit was to choose “only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created,” namely, the salvation of one’s soul.
“For this it is necessary to make ourselves
indifferent to all created things
in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will
and is not prohibited to it;
so that, on our part,
we want not health rather than sickness,
riches rather than poverty,
honor rather than dishonor,
long rather than short life,
and so in all the rest;
desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us
to the end for which we are created.”
Principle and Foundation
Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises
Reflection: Later in his life, Teilhard recognized that this Ignatian Principle and Foundation was based on a fixed universe, not an evolving one. In a fixed universe, saving one’s soul is most important. Would saving your soul still be your most important goal, knowing that you live in an evolving universe and have responsibility for the future?
I am at last entirely at the disposition of the Blessed Virgin . . . completely attached, forever, to the Society at the very moment when it is being so severely persecuted . . . I shall never forget all you have done to foster my vocation. But keep on praying that I may continue to be equal to whatever God asks of me.” Teilhard’s letter to his parent after taking his first vows in the Society of Jesus.
When Pierre finished his novitiate in Aix-en-Provence in south-central France, he moved with his classmates to the Jesuit Juniorate in Laval. Laval was a very old city in the northwest corner of France. Here Pierre took his first religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and thereby became a full-fledged member of the Society of Jesus. He could now write S.J. after his name. Although these vows were called “first vows,” they were not temporary vows meant to last only a period of years; they were permanent. In Laval, Teilhard and his classmates, about 15 of them, entered into the period of formal Jesuit educational training. The Jesuit Juniorate, a two-year process immediately following the novitiate, focused on the study of poetry and drama during the first year, and rhetoric during the second. Poetry year covered not merely French poetry and drama, but the poetry and drama of the ancient Greeks in Greek—Homer, Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Euripides; and ancient Romans in Latin—Horace, Ovid, Catullus. In French Juniorates, young Jesuits would also study German poetry (in German), Shakespeare, and other classical works of drama. The second juniorate year focused on the art of public speaking. Every Jesuit would become a teacher, a professor, a philosopher, a scientist, a parish priest, or a missionary. They would all have to know how to speak in public and explain things clearly and convincingly. Jesuits turned to the elite of Greek and Roman oratory—Thucydides, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Cicero—for their lessons. They learned how to use symbol, metaphor, imagery, parable, example, logic, history, and story-telling to captivate and convince their listeners. The juniorate was a very heady and challenging intellectual time. Teilhard’s juniorate was broken up by a French law that forbade the church and religious orders from running educational institutions in France. This law, commonly referred to as the Combes Law, separated activities of church and state. (Religious congregations may establish a private school, as long as it was not administered or run by priests or nuns.) Combes Law affected all Jesuit schools in France as well as its seminaries. Teilhard’s class had to move from Laval in France to a Jesuit school on the English-speaking Isle of Jersey, in the English Channel, about 14 miles from the French coast. It was Teilhard’s first encounter with a new culture and a new language. In France at this time, there was a growing hatred of Catholic clerics because of their association with royalty. So, to remain inconspicuous leaving France, the young Jesuits decided to make the trip in nonclerical clothing. Teilhard and his classmates, with only religious outfits to their names, wrote to parents to send lay clothing for them to wear for the journey. Unfortunately, since it was already wintertime, much of the clothing that came in packages from home was outdated or appropriate for summer wear, too big or too small. Pierre’s family sent him personal clothing he had left at home when he entered the Jesuits; Pierre had outgrown all of it. Apparently, one young Jesuit from a wealthy family received a package containing a tuxedo complete with top hat. Naturally, the young Jesuits were humorously and totally conspicuous. The Isle of Jersey was Teilhard’s first encounter with a new culture and a new language. As he and his classmates got off the boat on the Isle of Jersey, in October, 1901, dressed as if going to a masquerade party, it is difficult to imagine what the local Protestant fishermen on the dock thought of these men.
“The sudden emptying of so many seminaries at once had, as a side effect, the tossing of many young men with minds of real distinction all together on a foreign beach. Since they inevitably sought friends of their own intellectual level, circles formed where the thought and conversation were of an unusually high order. In Jersey, little companionable groups came into being that were not unlike the small community of devoted brothers Ignatius Loyola had envisioned for his Society . . . “
Teilhard: A Biography. Mary and Ellen Lucas, 32
Reflection: How did your academic training shape you for the challenges of life? Who were some of the great minds that influenced your life and career?
“Soon he was spellbound by the magic appeal of the wide, open sea, the wind and waves, the lonely rock-strewn shores. These captured his senses and imagination. Here was nature in the raw, untamed and wild, full of grandeur and overwhelmingly powerful forces.”
Spirit and Fire, 18.
As the boat with a group of young Jesuit “juniors” approached the Isle of Jersey, Pierre Teilhard’s eyes were captivated by the most stunning rock formations he had ever seen. Once he settled into his room at the Jesuit residence, he strolled around the island and was awed by the natural beauty of the place.
“Rocks and sea surrounded him,” wrote Ursula King, his biographer, “conveying majestic solidity. They made him inquire into their nature, search more deeply into the stuff of matter” (Spirit of Fire, 20-21). The study of rocks became his absorbing passion.
However, while on Jersey, four family events occurred that interrupted his preoccupation with exploring the geology and mineralogy of the island. His elder brother Alberic, the naval officer, died of tuberculosis. His older sister Francois entered the convent and was assigned to work in China. His closest younger sister Marguerite Marie (Gigi) was stricken with an incurable illness that kept her mostly bedridden for the rest of her short life. And another, even younger sister, Marie Louise died of meningitis at the age of thirteen. These four close family events shook Teilhard to the core, and made him question the purpose of his life as a Jesuit and his fascination with rocks.
The old dilemma, that he first experienced in high school and again in the novitiate, reared its head for a third time. Did God really want him to pursue his scientific explorations, or were these four family-shattering events clear signs from God that he was called to a life of prayer and contemplation. His heart was torn.
Fortunately, the priest who had been his novice master in France had also moved to Jersey. Teilhard went to see him, and poured out his dilemma: Shall I commit myself to the love of Earth and discovering its story or shall I leave that pursuit and commit myself exclusively to the love of God and my spiritual perfection?
The novice master Fr. Troussard gave him a nondual answer to his either/or question.
“I seriously considered the possibility of completely giving up “the Science of Rocks” which I find so exciting . . . And if I did not run off the rails this time, it is to the robust common sense of Father Troussard that I owe it. He assured me that what the God of the Cross was looking for from me was the natural expansion of my being as well as its sanctification. But he did not explain how I could accomplish this, or why. What he said, however, was enough to leave me with a firm grasp of both ends of the challenge. And so, I emerged from that trial unscathed.”
Teilhard’s personal journal while on the isle of Jersey
Reflection: Have you ever found a nondual answer to one of your either/or questions? Did someone ever help you find a nondual answer?
“The East flowed over me in a first wave of exoticism. I gazed at it and drank it eagerly —the country itself, not its peoples or its history (which as yet held no interest for me), but its light, its vegetation, its fauna, its deserts.”
The Teilhard Album
After the first seven years of Jesuit life in the quiet seclusion of academia, every Jesuit is given a three-year teaching assignment in a Jesuit school. This period of training is called regency, where young Jesuits get a chance to apply some of the teaching skills they learned in classes or observed in their own professors. Some of his classmates were assigned to schools in Europe, Africa, or the mid-East. Teilhard was assigned to teach physics and chemistry at a Jesuit high school in Cairo, Egypt. He was also to look after the school’s “museum,” which he found in total disarray when he arrived. His many, many letters written to family and friends during this period have been gathered and assembled in a book called Letters from Egypt 1905-1908. Some of these letters are as long as six or seven pages, full of great detail, forming a rich memoir of an observant traveler. Religiously, Egypt houses many churches, synagogues, and mosques. Teilhard became acquainted with many different Christian denominations functioning there: Orthodox, Coptic, Maronite, as well as Roman Catholic. Teilhard got to experience their various liturgies and met with their dignitaries. During summer vacations, he took excursions on the Nile, visited pyramids, and the major cities of Egypt, especially where archaeological excavations were happening. He also spent weekend with his hammer and chisel excavating nearby geological sites. His lesser discoveries he placed in the school’s museum. Others, more significant, he took to the museum in Cairo or to the Institute of Egyptology, where he became friends with curators. In turn, they suggested other rich geological sites nearby that he could explore on weekends. They kept some of his finds in their museums and even published a few of his observations and discoveries in their bulletin. They invited him to scholarly meetings as well. In a letter to his father and sister, he reported finding species of butterflies and insects that people in France had only read about. His invalid sister Marguerite Marie (Gigi) had become a collector of butterflies, so he delighted in sending her samples through the post. Sadly, he never learned to speak Arabic, which he regretted. He wrote home once, telling his parent he wished they had provided an Arabic-speaking governess during his childhood summers at Sarcenat, rather than the German-speaking one he had had. He wrote to his sister Françoise, then superior of a convent in China, that after ordination, his greatest dream was to return to Egypt, because he found much happiness there.
“A week ago we had a very violent storm: that is how the summer usually ends. The clouds banked up in the evening, moving up the Nile, and from our school’s terrace the sight was remarkable. Half the sky was black, all fissured with such beautiful flashes that I had my science students leave their work to show them this display of electricity; the other half, above the desert, was without a vapor, and the full moon was rising. The storm began with an avalanche of hailstones, many of which were as big as nuts. Then there was a little rain; and fifteen minutes later, the sky was studded with stars. What was most typical was the joy of the Arabs, who all ran into the streets to pick up the hailstones and eat them.”
Letters from Egypt, 201-2.
Reflection: Is there somewhere in the world that you once experienced so powerfully that you longed to return there to recapture the same experience?
Getting to know Teilhard: the Priest
#1 In what ways is Teilhard a different kind of priest?
“Because I am a priest…I would be more widely human and more nobly terrestrial in my ambitions than any of the world’s servants.”
“The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 222
Traditionally, the role of the priest was to withdraw from the world to become one with God and, of course, to provide the Eucharist and the other sacraments to the faithful. However, Teilhard was looking for more. As a priest, he challenged himself to become one with God precisely by committing himself “nobly” and directly to help transform the world. When World War I began, instead of becoming a military chaplain serving the troops behind the scenes by offering Mass and hearing confessions, Teilhard chose to serve at the battlefront among the infantry—not as a soldier, but as a stretcher-bearer. In spring 1918, while on leave from the military, Teilhard made his profession of solemn vows as a Jesuit in the Society of Jesus. For Teilhard, this vow-taking ceremony celebrated the culmination of his formation and the total commitment of his life to Christ. It is not surprising then that Teilhard’s thoughts in the ensuing weeks at the battlefront would often return to this solemn commitment and its connection to his priesthood. He writes:
“As far as my strength will allow me, because I am a priest, I would henceforth be the first to become aware of what the world loves, pursues, suffers. I would be the first to seek, to sympathize, to toil; the first in self-fulfillment, the first in self-denial—I would be more widely human and more nobly terrestrial in my ambitions than any of the world’s servants.”
“The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 222
This is Teilhard’s clearest description of his role as priest. What is unusual is his desire not simply to be aware of the faithful whom he will serve, but also to be totally aware of what the world loves, pursues, and suffers. Already we see the cosmic expanse of his desires. As a priest, he wanted to share the insights of the noblest human minds on the planet and to dedicate his effort to what those noble minds envisioned as being best for the good of the world. He also knew that his commitment to the priesthood included being the best servant of both God and the World. He saw no conflict in his double commitment to the service of God and to the growth and development of the world. He counsels his fellow priests:
“Remember that over and above the administration of the sacraments, as a higher duty than the care of individual souls, you have a universal function to fulfill: the offering to God of the entire world. Going far beyond the bread and wine the Church has put in your hands, your influence is destined to extend to the immense host of humankind.”
“The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 223
Reflection: Do you share with Teilhard his double commitment: to God and to the development of the world?
#2 Why would a priest want to serve at the front lines in a war?
“At last I’ve had a spell in the trenches; not yet in the heroic trenches where your feet get frozen and bullets rain down, but still in real front-line trenches; right next door to the Boche, where you hear the whistle of shells and the crack of bullets if a head shows over the parapet for too long. I decided that it would be better for me to be seen as much as possible all along the line.”
Letter to his cousin Marguerite Teillard-Chambon The Making of a Mind, 50
All young Frenchmen were expected to serve in the military during the war. Teilhard’s brothers had already enlisted. When he was conscripted, Teilhard, as a priest, could have chosen to be a military chaplain. But like his brothers, he wished to be involved on the front lines. So, he volunteered instead to serve as a stretcher-bearer. Even though he could not celebrate Mass in the trenches with the infantrymen in the front lines, the soldiers would become his congregation. In the heat of battle, he would be with them and care for them. He would serve there, too, but without having to wield a weapon. Always, he remained conscious that he was a priest. His desire resonates with the words of St. Paul:
“We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Rom 14:7-9
Of course, as a priest, Teilhard still wished to celebrate Eucharist whenever possible. From time to time in local villages, on a day without fighting, he had the opportunity to celebrate Mass in a church or chapel. But he often found himself with infantrymen in forests for days on end without the bread and wine thought necessary for a Eucharistic liturgy. His desire to find a way to exercise his priestly role, alone and in the middle of a forest, inspired him to write a prayer. Taking a new notebook, he began to compose his version of the Eucharist. Some years later, he would edit and expand this prayer into what he called his “Mass on the World.” It would be a Mass that included everyone and everything—the whole world.
“To bring Christ, by virtue of a specifically organic connection, to the heart of realities that are esteemed to be the most dangerous, the most unspiritual, the most pagan—in that you have my gospel and my mission.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 220
Reflection: How do you attempt to bring Christ to the World?
#3 How did Teilhard celebrate “Mass” when he had no bread and wine?
“For the last three days I have been deprived of saying Mass, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to say it again.” Letter to his cousin Marguerite Teillard-Chambon The Making of a Mind, 75
During breaks in the military action, Teilhard would often take up his pen and begin to write. He wrote his essays in longhand, in school notebooks provided by his cousin Marguerite Teillard-Chambon, headmistress of a girls’ school in Paris. Typically, he would make a few copies of each essay by hand. One copy was always entrusted to Marguerite, with whom he carried on a continual correspondence throughout the war. Besides sharing Teilhard’s essays with Teilhard’s sister and a few friends, Marguerite saved her copies as well as the many letters he wrote to her from the battlefront. These essays now fill the 250-page book Writings in Time of War. She also compiled and edited his letters, which are found in The Making of a Mind. Both books give us a deep understanding of Teilhard’s process of personal and professional transformation as he continued to integrate modern science, particularly evolution, into his Christian theology. In his essay “The Priest,” Teilhard describes the setting for the Mass he will celebrate alone in the forest. He envisions the altar not as a small altar like the ones found in a church, but instead as the entire surface of Earth. Since he has neither bread or wine, he offers instead the labors and suffering of the world. And for Teilhard, the true celebrant of his Mass is the Universal Christ. During his time as a stretcher-bearer, Teilhard likely used his essay “The Priest” in personal prayer frequently. He was anxious to know what Marguerite and a few intimate friends thought of it.
“Since today, Lord, I your Priest have neither bread nor wine nor altar, I shall spread my hands over the whole universe and take its immensity as the matter of my sacrifice.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 205
Reflection: How and where do you offer your life and that of the whole world to God?
#4 How did St. Paul’s letters confirm Teilhard’s sense of the Universal Christ?
“You can imagine . . . how strong was my inner feeling of release and expansion when I took my first still hesitant steps into an ‘evolutive’ Universe.” The Heart of Matter, 26
While in the seminary, Teilhard often wondered whether his love for Earth and the world was incompatible with the notion of loving God with one’s whole heart. This struggle helped him search for ways to express his synthesis: “Communion with God through Earth.” But a true solution to his dilemma was still to come. Sometime before his ordination, a classmate shared with Teilhard a copy of a newly published book that stunned its audiences in Paris. The book was Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson. The ideas in Creative Evolution eventually triggered Teilhard’s awareness that evolution is not restricted to biology, but could apply to any field of science or thought. This led him to recognize that ours is not a simple, fixed universe, but that from the beginning the universe has been evolving. If this were true, Teilhard reasoned, then Christian theology had to be open to an evolving universe. Searching the writings of St. Paul, he found over thirty passages that are compatible with his growing ideas about a God for Evolution. To Teilhard’s delight, he discovered, in reading the letters of St. Paul, a Cosmic Christ—a Universal Christ—in whom we all live and move and have our existence. Paul clearly recognized that the physical body of Christ on Earth is still developing, still evolving. He wrote this:
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit . . . If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” 1 Cor 12:12-13, 26-27
What a relief to realize that his instincts were on target! He shared his joy with Marguerite.
“And I saw that the dualism in which I had hitherto been enclosed was disappearing like the mist before the rising sun. Matter and Spirit; these were no longer two things but two states or two aspects of one and the same cosmic Stuff, according to whether it was looked at or carried further in the direction in which (as Bergson would have put it) it is becoming itself or in the direction in which it is disintegrating.” The Heart of Matter, 26-27
Reflection: Do you realize that you live in an evolving world? How did you come to realize that?
#5 What value does Teilhard place on human labor and suffering?
“That Christ may enter deeply into us we need alternately the work that widens our being and the sorrow that brings death to it.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 209
For Teilhard, all human experience is of two kinds: activities and passivities. Activities are the things we choose—our intentional labors. Passivities are the things done to us—things over which we have no control, difficult things that we must undergo and the sufferings we endure. These include unwelcome experiences, such as sickness, death, loss, rejection, failure, abuse, prejudice, defamation, and all other forms of diminishment. During his time on the battlefields of World War I, Teilhard was confronted not only with his own passivities, but also those of the world around him. Wherever he looked, suffering and death surrounded him. Rather than seeing these as obstacles to growth, he realized that he could unite the sufferings of his world with the sufferings of Christ. Although it is best to avoid suffering when possible, Teilhard realized that not only is suffering an essential part of life, what we suffer is capable of being divinized. When we unite our suffering with that of the crucified Jesus, we participate in the healing of the world. Certainly, he must have felt that when found himself immersed in the horrors of the War. For Teilhard to internalize the suffering of the world is perhaps even more important than action since the compassion one feels in the process will serve to move one to ever more authentic action. It was so important to him that during the Offertory of his Mass, Teilhard’s gifts were symbols of the activities and the passivities of the whole world. These were his bread and wine being transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. He encouraged his fellow priests who were serving in the war to understand the value of their suffering:
“Never have you been more priests than you are now, involved as you are and submerged in the tears and blood of a generation—never have you been more active—never more fully in the line of your vocation.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 223
Reflection: Have you learned to redirect your experience of suffering toward the healing of the body of the universal Christ?
#6 How did Teilhard the priest come to view the Eucharist liturgy as a cosmic event?
“Permeating the whole atmosphere of creation, God encompasses me and lays siege to me.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 210
When Teilhard was celebrating Mass in the forest without the bread and wine usually assumed needed for this ritual, he instead transcended these symbols. And all at once the Bread and Wine came alive for him.
“The Bread takes hold of me and draws me to itself. That small host has become for me as vast as the world, as insatiable as a furnace. I am encircled by its power. It seeks to close around me.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 215
Teilhard is aware of the Universal Christ in his midst. He says:
“I see your flesh extend throughout the entire universe, there to be mingled with it and so extract from it all the elements that can be made to serve your purpose. There is not a single atom that does not pay tribute to your totality, even though that be the prelude to its own destruction.”
On that special day, Teilhard met Christ alive in the Universe. Yet he knew that tomorrow, Christ would grow because of our efforts and sufferings of today—as we strive to transform our lives and the world itself into Christ. Tomorrow, the Universal Christ will become a bit more manifest in the world. At the end of time, there will be one Body and one Spirit in love. For Teilhard, the Incarnation will not be complete until every particle of the universe becomes fully alive in Christ. Teilhard clearly accepts his personal role and responsibility for fostering the continued health and growth of the Universal Christ. He prays to the one who fills the Universe:
“I kneel before the universe that has imperceptibly become your adorable Body and your divine Blood. I prostrate myself in its presence. I recollect myself in that universe. The world is filled by You! O universal Christ, true foundation of the world, I worship you. I am lost in the consciousness of your plentitude permeating all things.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 210
Reflection: Can you imagine including some of the cosmic dimension that Teilhard incorporated into his Mass into your celebration of the liturgy?
#7 How did Teilhard’s Mass challenge him in life?
“That small, seemingly lifeless Host has become for me as vast as the world, as insatiable as a furnace. I am encircled by its power.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 215
Now when Teilhard looks at the Host in his hands during a Eucharistic celebration, he envisions the Universal Christ who contains the entire created world as it is today. He hears Christ asking him to open his heart and mind and make a fundamental choice. He rises to the challenge. First, he allows the divine to flood into the universe through him. Then he allows the Universal Christ to flow into himself. Receiving the Eucharist is not only a communion between himself and Christ. It is also a communion with all humanity and all of nature. In receiving the host, Teilhard agrees to fulfill his part in the task of creating a loving union with all.
“Since by virtue of my consent, I shall have become a living particle of the Body of Christ, all that affects me must, in the end, help in the growth of the total Christ. Christ will flood into me and over me, me and my cosmos.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 216
Teilhard wished to feel Christ’s “activity coming ever closer.” He sensed Christ’s “presence growing ever more intense, everywhere around [him].” Not only did he welcome the presence of Christ within him, but he also felt the Christ presence in “his cosmos,” in the world around him. In receiving the Eucharist, Teilhard wished to welcome and experience both forms of Christ’s presence: the one within and the one without, which surrounded him on every side. As Teilhard considered how to allay Christ’s spiritual hunger and thirst, he realized something startling: Christ is also hungering for His own fulfillment. The Universal Christ needs the food only we humans can provide. He says to Christ, “To allay your hunger and quench your thirst, to nourish your body and bring it to its full stature, you need to find in us a substance which will be truly food for you.”
For Teilhard, the food Christ needs to nourish the growth and development of his Universal Body consists in this: Teilhard must liberate the spirit in himself as well as in the cosmos. This will require human effort.
“I pray that this brief and limited contact with the sacramental species may introduce me to a universal and eternal communion with Christ, with his omni-operant will and his boundless mystical Body. An inexhaustible and universal communion is the term of the universal consecration. I cannot, Lord, evade such massive power: I can only yield to it in blissful surrender.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 218
Reflection: What responsibilities do you accept and renew when you receive the Eucharist?
#8 When did Teilhard realize his vocation to proclaim an evolving Universal Christ?
“In obedience to the law that governs every plenitude in a universe that is still multiple and exteriorized [diffuse], I must spread abroad the fire you have imparted to me.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 218
Teilhard announces his unique vocation very clearly in the final section of “The Priest,” written in 1918. He claims he has a unique vocation; to present to the world, not simply a mystical Body of Christ, but also a very physical one—a planet-sized, cosmic-sized organic body in continual evolution. He writes, “And now, my God, that in and through all things you have made me one with you, I no longer belong to myself.” In “The Priest,” Teilhard includes a section called “The Apostolate.” This section begins with a quote from scripture: “What can I give in return to the Lord?” He spells out his answer in the opening quotation of “The Priest”:
“Every priest, because he is a priest, has given his life to a work of universal salvation. I must spread abroad the fire you have imparted to me.”
Teilhard was aware of the special character of his vocation:
“I feel that this duty has a more immediate urgency for me, and a more exact meaning, than it has for many others—many far better than I. The various regions, nations, social groupings, have each their particular apostles. I for my (very lowly) part, would wish to be the apostle—and, if dare be so bold—the evangelist—of Christ in the universe.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 219
This is Teilhard’s mission. It is an evolutionary mission whose message is meant for absolutely everyone. He spells it out again in a sentence, every word of which is emphasized in italics:
“To bring Christ, by virtue of a specifically organic connection, to the heart of realities that are esteemed to be the most dangerous, the most unspiritual, the most pagan—in that, you have my gospel and my mission.”
He wished all could hear this message and take it to heart.
“If only they could understand that, with all its natural richness and its massive reality, the universe can find fulfillment only in Christ; and that Christ, in turn, can be attained only through a universe that has been carried to the very limit of its capabilities.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 220
And Teilhard lived his mission to the full. Despite the official church’s rejection and prohibition of his message, he continued to write and speak about the integration of Christ’s Good News with the universality of evolution. Only after his death did that message, in the form of hundreds of unpublished articles and letters, burst forth on a waiting world.
“Through my thinking, through the message I bring, through the practical activity of my whole life, I would wish to disclose and make known to [all] the bonds of continuity that make the cosmos of our restless ferment into an ambience that is divinized by the Incarnation, that divinizes by communion, and that is divinizable by our cooperation.” “The Priest” Writings in Time of War, 219
Reflection: Have you ever attempted to spell out in writing the essence of your unique vocation?
Teilhard’s Influence on My Life and Work
Teilhard has helped me to leave the mythical garden of Eden and relish in the dynamism of the unfolding universe, which is continually in the process of becoming. This unfinished and expanding universe is being lured into its future by the Cosmic Christ, who embraces all in Love. This is who excites and energizes me—this God of evolution’s future. Like Teilhard, I want to harness for God the energies of love and to become Love at the heart of the universe through graced participation in the divine life.
As Carmelites, when we enter the novitiate we take a title—a name of God that is significant for us. Inspired by Teilhard, I chose the Cosmic Christ. In choosing this title, I wanted to express the interconnectedness of every living being, including the earth and the entire cosmos; an interconnectedness that in and through the living Christ leads to a profound communion, and a transformation of consciousness that carries with it the possibility of true liberation. A liberation from the individualistic, small self that lives in competition with the whole, and moves us into the realm of the deeply personal self who shares consciousness with the whole: the ultrahuman.
Teilhard’s conceptualization of the noosphere has been incredibly significant for me and my understanding of it deepened throughout the pandemic when we relied on various technologies, such as Zoom, to connect us in a new way. This sphere of human consciousness enveloping the world became so evident to me as our community shared prayer over Zoom with people throughout the world. I couldn’t help but feel that through these virtual connections we were engaging the dynamism of the noosphere and were pressing into the realm of the ultrahuman. We weren’t just individuals in little boxes on the screen. Much like Teilhard’s vision of “the picture” he describes in “Christ in the World of Matter,” the sharp demarcations of each box began to merge and I could sense that the energy flowing between each person was not only animating each of us, it was affecting the consciousness of every particle of Matter across the miles that separated us—enmeshing us into the depths of God’s Love, a force which unites and compels us to lean into the collective WE for the sake of the transformation of the world and the future of humanity.
Shortly before the pandemic, Sr. Liz Sweeney, SSJ, introduced our community to WE Space Dialogue, a contemplative practice where we shift our attention from the “I” to the “WE” and lean into what is emerging among us. Our community continued this practice over Zoom throughout the pandemic and I have come to see it as a vital part of our becoming pioneers of this evolutionary future.
For many of us the language of emergence is new. The shift in focus from what we have done to who we are becoming leaves us with new questions, opens us to new possibilities and new conversations, and is sure to bring new challenges. However, as Teilhard indicated, the next step on this evolutionary journey is for us to do our part to usher in a new consciousness of shared being and to transcend the boundaries that have traditionally defined us.
As is evident each time I turn on the news, we are a people on the way, living in an unfinished universe. While the work of an evolutionary God moves us onto “the edge of chaos,” it also allures us into the future with a sense of wonder, and element of surprise, and abundant hope. As I encounter the pain of the world, I am tempted to despair. The image that comes to mind is that of individual particles—repelling, colliding, destroying, bursting into flames. And I wonder, what is the threshold whereby these repelling particles will begin to unite?
This question leads me to the hope I feel Teilhard holds out to us in 2022—the conviction that by continuing to put love on the currents of human consciousness and allowing ourselves to be woven into the fabric of the noosphere, we will reach a critical mass whereby the energy of Love will impel us to live from a place of communion and wholeness. Confident of this, I join Teilhard and all of you, in offering to God the labors and sufferings of the world this day.
As a spiritual seeker with scientific training, I love the way Teilhard unabashedly crosses disciplines and speaks from a deep internal place of knowing, imagining, and wondering. Because he is as multi-faceted as a diamond, I connect with him as my spiritual mentor and guide and allow him to influence the many facets of my life. As an engineer, I approach his corpus with a critical eye, weighing the parts I love and the parts that make me cringe, the parts that inspire deep spiritual thought, and the parts that bring me instantly to an ecstatic state of prayer. Teilhard offers some deep truths that linger, as well as a hope for the future.
Teilhard has given me permission to be wrong. As an engineer, I try to be precise and accurate in everything, but there is also a place to posit theories, to play with ideas, so that others might grasp them and turn them into more. Teilhard wasn’t afraid to let his ideas evolve. As he writes to his cousin Marguerite, “your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste” (Making of a Mind, p.57). So when reading his work, it’s important to know when it was written and the context of his life at that particular time. Was he writing from the battlefield? Was he a young Jesuit teaching in Egypt? Was he in the middle of a dig?
As a professor of engineering, I have learned from Teilhard how to lean in to the fear of being rejected by fellow faculty. He encourages me to research more than widgets and to look beyond the walls of the engineering building for inspiration. Teilhard gives me permission to be both scientist and religious. He truly helps me to realize my calling to religious life and allows my love of science to influence my spirituality. He said, “to tell a religious to take up science, without at the same time allowing [her] to re-think [her] whole view of religion, is indeed . . . an impossible assignment—and to condemn [her] to producing results of no real value, in an interior life that is torn two ways” (Science and Christ, p. 217).
While I once did feel torn between these two ways of life, Teilhard helped me to understand my calling. He showed me as a young religious how to live my vow of obedience in an adult way. Despite his many attempts to publish The Divine Milieu during his lifetime, he remained faithful to his vocation and obeyed when Church authorities said “no,” time and time again. He was both respectful to his superiors and to his inner calling. However, he found a loophole and continued to write, knowing his works would be published after his death.
I have read all of Teilhard’s work twice. When I was in the novitiate, I studied his essays chronologically to see how his thought evolved over time. And this past year, I examined his essays and letters with my friend and mentor Sister Kathleen Deignan. Inspired by Teilhard’s suggestion that “we need . . . a new and higher form of worship to be gradually disclosed . . . adapted to the needs of all of tomorrow’s believers without exception” (Science and Christ, p. 220) and entirely over zoom (what would Teilhard of that), we composed a Book of Hours using Teilhard’s own words, so that we might pray along with our spiritual guide.
Sometimes Teilhard’s language can be problematic. He sometimes speaks less suitably about people outside his race. Despite his many friendships with women, his writings to and on women can be patronizing at times. While I acknowledge that I am reading translated, edited versions of his work, and he was a man of his time, parts of his texts are out of place in today’s world. However, we Teilhardians wish better of him and recognize the intent behind the language. It’s our responsibility as researchers to bring his thinking into the 22nd century, not for today but for tomorrow. Thus, we can interpret his work using gender neutral, respectful, non-binary language, to make his theories, his hope for a better future accessible to larger audiences. Just as we gently correct the language of an elder who crosses the line at a family party, so we must do for Teilhard, because his message is extremely important, and we don’t want it clouded or misinterpreted. This is our responsibility as devotees.
What ultimately drew me to Teilhard was that he wasn’t bound to one area of knowledge. He balanced art and science. He found a way to worship while digging and helped to find evidence for evolution. Teilhard gives each of us the freedom to go beyond what we perceive as our limits. He calls us to the more, to constantly bettering ourselves and our world. He says, “Henceforth, no intellectual seeker worthy of the name can work . . . unless, in the depths of [her] being, [she is] sustained by the idea of carrying further, and to its extreme limit, the progress of the world [she lives] in” (Science and Christ, p. 216).
As a university ombudsman, I work to help people navigate challenges and conflicts on campus. In broad terms, I work in the field of conflict resolution or conflict transformation, and in this work, Teilhard is the great prophet of movement toward unity. I see my task as helping people who might not otherwise talk with each other find ways to communicate productively. I want to help individuals who work together actually work together with some recognition of their common mission and interests. And Teilhard inspires me to do this well. In one of his early wartime essays, Teilhard writes, “True growth is effected in progress toward unity” (Writings in Time of War, 95). And we have his passionate cry, his irresistible and hallowing desire from his essay, “The Mass on the World,” “Lord, Make us One.”
In my work, I often use the following definition of conflict as a grounded and practical instrument: conflict is “a perceived divergence of interest, or a belief that the parties’ current aspirations cannot be achieved simultaneously” (Dean G. Pruitt and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate and Settlement, 4). And there are words here with room for movement. The divergence of interest is “perceived,” it is a “belief.” The aspirations of the two parties cannot be achieved “currently,” but the future is unwritten.
In short, conflict transformation is optimistic. It looks toward creative synthesis. Each time I begin a workshop or a mediation, I think of Teilhard for this reason. And I think of the profound reality of Christian mysticism he articulates: that the boundaries, gaps, or conflict I perceive between human beings are just that, perceptions obscuring a deeper reality. Teilhard describes the divine milieu as a center where “all the elements of the universe touch each other. . . There they shed, in their meeting, the mutual externality and the incoherences which form the basic pain of human relationships” (The Divine Milieu, 114-15). In fact, God is not far away from us. In the divine milieu, Christ “consoles by gathering up everything that has been snatched from our love or has never been given to it” (The Divine Milieu, 120). As the Qur’an reminds us, “God is closer than our jugular vein.” (Qur’an 50:16). And as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “for Christ plays in ten thousand places, /Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his /To the Father through the features of men’s faces” (Poems and Prose, 51).
And so, to use another key Teilhardian term, the work of conflict transformation is the work of “seeing” and the work of helping others see how they too might act out a creative role in this divine reality.
Teilhard began to influence me long before I was conscious of it. His work represents something so big and emergent. It is rising up through me like ground water moving slowly through the Earth, and continues to evolve and travel within me. I feel myself falling in.
Teilhard’s influence has formed the basis of my ministry and my sense of becoming. It has led me to become, almost without knowing it, a practitioner of Teilhard’s work. And I would call myself a practitioner before a scholar of Teilhard. As a priest and a pastoral care provider, as an interpreter of scripture and the Gospel message, I find I am drawn into something that has practical application, relevance, urgency, and immediacy. Finding language for that and reaching for that language has been part of my journey, and I find that language in Teilhard as I go back again and again to his writings.
Before I was ordained a priest, I was as a science teacher in Maine. Even then I was yearning to bring together the whole sweep of things: science, art, pattern, beauty, and deep life; the deep web of life, cosmos, and mystery. I was discovering in Teilhard a language for my spiritual hunger, a sense of becoming more, a sense of becoming more together, and a feeling that I was part of something larger than myself. How we see ourselves as part of this world, responsible and interconnected, truly matters.
In my journey from science teacher and outdoor educator to priest and then into ministry exploring the cosmic dimensions of Christianity, Teilhard has been my bridge, my grounding, and my touchstone. And I am drawn to the sacramental worldview. I remember reading Teilhard’s “Mass on the World” for the first time, ecstatic with the language that he brought into my heart. He proclaims, “We make the whole earth our altar and on it we offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world . . . We call before us the whole . . . of living humanity . . . This restless multitude . . . this ocean of humanity . . . it is to this deep that I thus desire all the fibres of my being should respond.” In this sense of the sacramental, we are all called to wake up, to see ourselves, to realize we matter, that even the small things matter.
We can feel crushed and overwhelmed by so many things, and, yet, when we become deeply present to this mystical sense, we can see that we are actually radiating energy and becoming conduits. We are doing more than we realize, and we are needed. When I experience impasse, either when my spiritual journey meets an obstacle, or when I feel with the Earth a great convergence, I find in Teilhard a great companion. Sometimes my spiritual experience runs deeper and broader than the church in its present form can express. In that deep sense of yearning and in that sacramental worldview I find Teilhard guiding me into the future, showing me how we can worship and how we can gather. I also trust in what Teilhard calls the “slow work of God.” I love this reflection and I am drawn to trust in that work patiently.