Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 

 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest, palaeontologist and theologian. He was born in central France in 1881 and died in New York in 1955.

The story goes that he acquired his love of science from his father and his love of God from his mother. Certainly, from a very early age he developed an interest in natural history, as his father was a keen naturalist, and while both parents were devout Catholics, it was his mother in particular whose deep piety made the greater impression on the young Pierre, as he later acknowledged in his writings.

At the age of twelve, Teilhard de Chardin attended the Jesuit college in Villefranche-sur-Saône, where he would ‘graduate’ in philosophy and mathematics six years later. Around this time he told his parents that he wished to become a Jesuit. This transpired in 1901, when he took his first vows.

The French government of the day’s anticlerical stance forced many religious associations into exile. The Jesuits retreated to Jersey—and Teilhard with them, studying there until 1905. Gifted in science, he was then sent to Cairo to teach physics and chemistry at the Jesuit college there. Through prolonged trips into the nearby countryside, Teilhard improved his knowledge of the natural world and fossils in particular. He published his first article on this in 1907 and, as a result of finding shark teeth in the locality, he actually had an unknown species named after him, Teilhardia. In 1908, Teilhard returned from Cairo to England to complete his theological studies at a Jesuit seminary in Hastings. Here he spent the next four years living the disciplined life of a Jesuit scholastic in addition to pursuing his scientific ideas still further. In 1911, he was ordained a priest. From 1912 to 1914, Teilhard worked in the palaeontology lab of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, from where he became involved in the Piltdown Man excavations back in England. When war broke out in 1914, Teilhard served first as a stretcher bearer and then as a chaplain at the front, becoming engaged in some of the most brutal battles, for which he was later awarded the Legion of Honour. Miraculously, he was never wounded. Before the war ended, he took his final vows while on leave.

After being demobbed in 1919, Teilhard returned to Jersey to recuperate and prepare for finishing his doctorate in geology at the Sorbonne in Paris, where, three years later, he was awarded a doctorate with distinction. Shortly after, he was elected president of the French Geological Society and appointed to the Chair of Geology at the Catholic Institute in Paris. Throughout this time, Teilhard had spoken and written on the close relationship between evolution and Christianity. Unfortunately, his views did not square with the conservative opinions of the French church, and he was cautioned from trying to unite science and religion. He was also forbidden to publish anything on this issue. In 1926, his teaching licence was revoked by the Jesuit Order and he was told to leave France for China, where he should concentrate solely on his science. For the next twenty years, Teilhard remained in China taking in part in various expeditions, notably the excavations that led to the discovery of Peking Man, where Teilhard was a lead scientist. Throughout this time he continued to write in private.

Though Teilhard submitted his most important theological work, The Phenomenon of Man, to Rome in 1941 for approval, by 1947 he was forbidden to write or preach on such subjects. Ten years later, matters had reached the point where his books were banned from libraries and Catholic bookshops. It was not until after his death that the The Phenomenon of Man was finally published in France in 1955, enabling another important work, The Divine Milieu, to be published in the UK and the US in 1960. The official response: in 1962, though Teilhard’s works were not placed on the Index, the church issued a warning that they contained numerous ambiguities and serious errors opposed to Catholic doctrine. It was to take just short of forty years before, in 2000, the future Pope Benedict XVI described in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy how Teilhard’s vision of Christ could be regarded as central to the Christian vision. John Booth