Recently I pulled a book off my bookshelves. It had been given to me over thirty years ago by my "training" Vicar who became a good friend, when I was his curate. The book is by Mary & Ellen Lukas, Teilhard: A Biography (London: Collins, 1977). I had not consciously decided to read it: I opened it and began to read the first few pages. I continued to read, and took it away and read it over the recent holiday weekend. It is a fascinating book, and extremely well written, though a little dated in places.
Teilhard, as the subtitle suggests, is a kind of biography, but one which aims to convey something of this French Jesuit's philosophy in the framework of his life. There is quite a bit about the main lines of his writing, and thought, set amongst an account of the incidents of his life. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is, of course, now well-known as having been a priest-scientist, a palaeontologist by training, as well as a Jesuit scholar.
Teilhard's life was marked by a strong loyalty and obedience to a Church, and a religious order which often muzzled him, and restricted his ability to publish his work. Indeed what he saw, perhaps, as his magnum opus, known in its English translation as The Phenomenon of Man, was first published, in French, shortly after his death in 1955. When he died, Teilhard was in exile in New York, having previously spent a large part of his life in China, also a kind of exile. He was unable to apply for an academic post at an institution in Paris, blocked by his Jesuit superior, and submitted several revisions of the draft of his book, The Phenomenon of Man, trying to make it acceptable to Rome. There was a deep suspicion of his thought, which brought Teilhard much frustration, and at times some quite deep depression. Nevertheless, he determined to remain faithful to his calling as a Jesuit priest, and obedient to the Church.
Nevertheless, he was able to give lectures, and quite a bit of his writing appears to have been published in his lifetime, mostly as essays and articles in journals and magazines. Some of his writing was circulated amongst scholar friends and acquaintances. I must say that I am not sure that I would read his material, as it seems to me, from some of the descriptions of his thought, that it would be quite difficult and abstruse. Some of it would, no doubt, be quite beyond me.
Briefly, Teilhard believed in evolution, and wanted to marry an evolutionary understanding of the development of humankind with his Christian faith. Evolution, as Teilhard understood it, is a process of upward movement whereby a "radial" energy (as opposed to the various manifestations of physical energy) drove all elements of the world, or creation, upward from a "natural state of pure disorder" (p.159). Put another way, the "Creative Force" (perhaps another name for God?) battled against disintegration. One particular group was moved by this "radial energy" across a threshold towards "reflectivity", that is, the ability to be "self-conscious" in way that know it itself as self-conscious. This "moment" is when humankind evolved from pre-human states. A new stage began with human "reflectivity", namely a further drive toward social and economic interdependence ("human socialisation"). As a network of rapid communication developed, human "planetization" began to evolve, that is, a move towards co-operation. Along with this came a turn inward (a development of "spirituality" - my interpretation), both collectively and individually, towards a search for union with a "Being more living and conscious than [humans] were themselves. And such a Being could only be that mysterious force which lay at the heart of reality from the beginning - the point of incandescence and personal passage to which Teilhard gave the code name 'Omega'" (p. 164). Here the authors make clear that Teilhard means by his "Omega Point...the cosmic aspect of Christ, much referred to in the epistles of Saint Paul."
On a personal level, Teilhard seems to have been a warm and engaging human being, with a wide circle of friends. He seemed to be able to mix easily with many different types, though mostly, one gets the impression from the book, people of a fairly middle-to-upper, well-to-do, and intellectual social class (no doubt, some of his fellow-religious aside; though even here the fellow Jesuits, he mixed with were mostly scholars). Despite his years in China, he never learned Chinese, and it is difficult to determine what he made of Chinese culture, and he seems to have moved quite a lot within the expatriate circles in the cities where he lived. Teilhard had a circle of women friends (including a cousin) with whom he confided and maintained quite close relationships - though none that were not purely platonic in terms of sexual relationships. He had an interesting relationship with a couple of women, one a widow, the other married, who seemed to wish to "mother" him, though the American widow was quite sweet on him too. These two carried on something of a rivalry in their relationship with Teilhard. Rhoda de Terra, who was married to an geologist, Helmut de Terra, with whom Teilhard worked (and with whom Teilhard hoped to work on a dig in South Africa, but was denied by his superiors), later in his life accompanied him on some of his travels (including to South Africa when he was later allowed to go), but her husband seems to drop out of the picture (why or how is not made clear).
The book has some anecdotes that made me laugh out loud. These three in particular: the first about a palaeontologist at the Paris Museum of Natural History, called Marcellin Boule, and described as "plain-spoken, corpulent, and constitutionally close with his purse strings".
I have described this as a "serendipitous read". This is partly because I was reading another book at the time, on loan to me, called Crazy Love, by Francis Chan. It is a challenging read, with themes of discipleship, not being a "lukewarm" Christian, and being "obsessed with Jesus". Teilhard was an interesting counterpoint and corollary to this book. It showed me the life of a Christian whose life experience, background, religious expression and intellectual life is quite different from mine (and indeed from those portayed in Crazy Love), who worked out his discipleship in an intellectual struggle with the Church he was determined to serve and remain within. As a scientist and palaeontologist, searching for the story of human origins, much of Teilhard's interest was "earthbound" and "of the world". In 1929 he wrote to a friend: "The things I believe in now are very few: first, Christ; then, the world..." (p. 105).
Teilhard, as the subtitle suggests, is a kind of biography, but one which aims to convey something of this French Jesuit's philosophy in the framework of his life. There is quite a bit about the main lines of his writing, and thought, set amongst an account of the incidents of his life. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is, of course, now well-known as having been a priest-scientist, a palaeontologist by training, as well as a Jesuit scholar.
Teilhard's life was marked by a strong loyalty and obedience to a Church, and a religious order which often muzzled him, and restricted his ability to publish his work. Indeed what he saw, perhaps, as his magnum opus, known in its English translation as The Phenomenon of Man, was first published, in French, shortly after his death in 1955. When he died, Teilhard was in exile in New York, having previously spent a large part of his life in China, also a kind of exile. He was unable to apply for an academic post at an institution in Paris, blocked by his Jesuit superior, and submitted several revisions of the draft of his book, The Phenomenon of Man, trying to make it acceptable to Rome. There was a deep suspicion of his thought, which brought Teilhard much frustration, and at times some quite deep depression. Nevertheless, he determined to remain faithful to his calling as a Jesuit priest, and obedient to the Church.
Nevertheless, he was able to give lectures, and quite a bit of his writing appears to have been published in his lifetime, mostly as essays and articles in journals and magazines. Some of his writing was circulated amongst scholar friends and acquaintances. I must say that I am not sure that I would read his material, as it seems to me, from some of the descriptions of his thought, that it would be quite difficult and abstruse. Some of it would, no doubt, be quite beyond me.
Briefly, Teilhard believed in evolution, and wanted to marry an evolutionary understanding of the development of humankind with his Christian faith. Evolution, as Teilhard understood it, is a process of upward movement whereby a "radial" energy (as opposed to the various manifestations of physical energy) drove all elements of the world, or creation, upward from a "natural state of pure disorder" (p.159). Put another way, the "Creative Force" (perhaps another name for God?) battled against disintegration. One particular group was moved by this "radial energy" across a threshold towards "reflectivity", that is, the ability to be "self-conscious" in way that know it itself as self-conscious. This "moment" is when humankind evolved from pre-human states. A new stage began with human "reflectivity", namely a further drive toward social and economic interdependence ("human socialisation"). As a network of rapid communication developed, human "planetization" began to evolve, that is, a move towards co-operation. Along with this came a turn inward (a development of "spirituality" - my interpretation), both collectively and individually, towards a search for union with a "Being more living and conscious than [humans] were themselves. And such a Being could only be that mysterious force which lay at the heart of reality from the beginning - the point of incandescence and personal passage to which Teilhard gave the code name 'Omega'" (p. 164). Here the authors make clear that Teilhard means by his "Omega Point...the cosmic aspect of Christ, much referred to in the epistles of Saint Paul."
Such union meant, of course, a collective detachment of the finally united psyches from the fragile physical bases that had brought them into being and supported their existence. Teilhard, the priest, was persuaded that such a progress had been at work since reflectivity appeared. All the time that evolution did its work on this side of death, a world of de-materialized psychological centres, he believed, had been collecting on the other side, in the wholly stable personal Centre which first began and then sustained creation. All through human history, it had been so, with psyches drifting, one by one, out of their bodies when physical death occured. The only difference between these individual deaths and the "general" death at world's end lay in the fact that in the last great leap of consciousness, thinking centres woudl be shaken all together, from their physical supports into the one non-physical and utterly stable Centre, where the other prematurely detached, isolated psyches long ago freed from their disintegrated physical bases were now waiting. (p. 164).Granted that this is Teilhard refracted through the summaries of the Lukas sisters, I am not quite sure what to make of this. At one level, this almost sounds like a Hindu-type reunion with Absolute Reality. Throughout his life, Teilhard struggled to reconcile an understanding of evil and "original sin" with the evolutionary process. His thought here is also a little difficult to follow. Sin arises out of a battle of the Creative Force with disintegration which arose from the fragility of Matter. "[I]ts inevitable tendency towards distintegration [meant that] sickness and death were necessary accompaniments of Life from the moment it existed on the planet" (p. 68). When humans appeared as "reflective beings" a new "fragility" appeared, this time within the moral order. This was "the Fall" which is "a shorthand description for all the human infidelity and cruelty man saw about him and within him, as well as an explanation of the presence of death and pain - sin's portents in the subhuman world" (p. 69). Tielhard saw the Cross as the central symbol and event of the Christian faith, but, if I understand the Lukas's summary aright, it functioned as a kind of exemplary spur within the evolutionary struggle towards "self-achievement" and the end-point of human development. This is how the Lukas's put it:
Properly understood, only the example of a crucified God, forced by the very nature of his fierce love to penetrate Creation to the death - to the angony of his broken flesh and the blind terror of human despair - could give mankind the courage to attempt the next step forward. Only the concept of a Christ who was crucified no simply "to carry the sins of the world" but "to carry the weight of an evolving world" could convert the "sign of contradiction" into the seal of strength. Once church doctrine reinterpreted the Cross in this light, Teilhard concluded, the symbol would stand again where it belonged: at the place where faith and advancing human values met. And only then could if effectively become the criterion by which man would judge himself, rise or fall, stop where he was, or edge painfully forward on the long road before him. (p. 297)I think I can see the difficulty there lies in the way of reconciling a theological understanding of the human condition with an evolutionary understanding of human development. Teilhard certainly believed that the Church needed to come to terms wtih evolutionary thought. If not, he felt, the Church would render itself obsolete and irrelevant to contemporary people. Many thinking Christians and scholars have since tackled the question of the relationship between evolutionary thought, and a Christian understanding of creation and human development. What Teilhard's contribution to this thinking and study is, I am not in a position to judge.
On a personal level, Teilhard seems to have been a warm and engaging human being, with a wide circle of friends. He seemed to be able to mix easily with many different types, though mostly, one gets the impression from the book, people of a fairly middle-to-upper, well-to-do, and intellectual social class (no doubt, some of his fellow-religious aside; though even here the fellow Jesuits, he mixed with were mostly scholars). Despite his years in China, he never learned Chinese, and it is difficult to determine what he made of Chinese culture, and he seems to have moved quite a lot within the expatriate circles in the cities where he lived. Teilhard had a circle of women friends (including a cousin) with whom he confided and maintained quite close relationships - though none that were not purely platonic in terms of sexual relationships. He had an interesting relationship with a couple of women, one a widow, the other married, who seemed to wish to "mother" him, though the American widow was quite sweet on him too. These two carried on something of a rivalry in their relationship with Teilhard. Rhoda de Terra, who was married to an geologist, Helmut de Terra, with whom Teilhard worked (and with whom Teilhard hoped to work on a dig in South Africa, but was denied by his superiors), later in his life accompanied him on some of his travels (including to South Africa when he was later allowed to go), but her husband seems to drop out of the picture (why or how is not made clear).
The book has some anecdotes that made me laugh out loud. These three in particular: the first about a palaeontologist at the Paris Museum of Natural History, called Marcellin Boule, and described as "plain-spoken, corpulent, and constitutionally close with his purse strings".
A possibly apoccryphal but wholly characteristic story of him, still cherished by his friends, concerns his acquisition of the Chinese dinosaur egg which is still proudly displayed on a red velvet backing in the great hall of the Museum of Palaeontology. It had been brought to him one day by a missionary who hoped to sell it to get money to support his work. To the priest's confusion, Boule simply accepted the gift as though it were the museum's due, and sent him packing with the thanks of French science. Then, just as the missionary was approaching the door, the old lion, taken with a cramp of conscience, bellowed down the staircase to his secretary, "Madeleine! That fellow who's going out. Stop him! Give him a franc!" (pp. 37-38).Another in describing the excitement in the ex-patriate community in Peking (sic) following the discovery of "Sinanthropus":
One hostess even circulated the story that when her Chinese "boy" had called to drop a note into the door slot of one of the scientists' houses, he had seen it whisked away by a hairy hand, heard a simian gallop back and forth across the courtyard, then saw the reply poked through the slot by the same improbable hand. (p. 113)And on how a colleague and he spent some of their spare time in Peking.
Occasionally they made excursions to local monuments as far out as the Summer Palace - where once, forgetting the Chinese habit of writing even English from right to left, they stood baffled (like many other Latin-educated clerics) before a sign that read "SUB LAPICINUM", until the advertised vehicle arrived to take them back to town." (p. 171)I thought of Alan, my Vicar, as I read, and regretted somewhat not having read this book he gave me earlier, so I could have talked with him about it, and thanked him for it, having read it. On the other hand, I think perhaps I would not have appreciated it in the same way back then. I may have understood some of the summaries of Teilhard's thought even less, and dismissed it as simply idealistic (and, in truth, some of his ideas about human progress towards greater co-operation does seem a little so in the face of our world), or even heretical.
I have described this as a "serendipitous read". This is partly because I was reading another book at the time, on loan to me, called Crazy Love, by Francis Chan. It is a challenging read, with themes of discipleship, not being a "lukewarm" Christian, and being "obsessed with Jesus". Teilhard was an interesting counterpoint and corollary to this book. It showed me the life of a Christian whose life experience, background, religious expression and intellectual life is quite different from mine (and indeed from those portayed in Crazy Love), who worked out his discipleship in an intellectual struggle with the Church he was determined to serve and remain within. As a scientist and palaeontologist, searching for the story of human origins, much of Teilhard's interest was "earthbound" and "of the world". In 1929 he wrote to a friend: "The things I believe in now are very few: first, Christ; then, the world..." (p. 105).
