Teilhard and man's faith in science

The controversial Jesuit thinker, Teilhard de Chardin (left), was born 100 years ago this week. His influence is still felt. Here Fr John Gallagher SJ assesses his life and work.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN was born exactly 100 years ago at Sarcenet in central France. He was the fourth of 11 children, and later in life wrote of the great debt he owed to his family. The father often took the children on long walks to show them the wonders of nature, and young Pierre developed a strong interest in the material world.
He went to the Jesuit college at Villefranche, and at the end joined the Society of Jesus. He studied in Jersey, Cairo and England. He served in the First World War and was awarded the Military Medal and Legion of Honour.
He had long been interested in the Far East and was suddenly called there. He arrived in Tientsin in May 1923 and then moved on to the more intellectual atmosphere of Peking. He spent about 30 years in China, and though the war between China and Japan made things difficult, he was able to write and teach. In 1951 he was elected a member of the Academie des Sciences. and was invited to New York, He died suddenly there on Easter Sunday, April, 1955.
In China he was "all things to all men". One of his Jesuit companions. Pere Leroy wrote: "There was something paradoxical in a priest who seemed outwardly so little the ecclesiastic. who was at home in even the least religious circles, who took his place in the advancement of thought and devoted his life to the study of the properties of man as an animal.
"It seemed paradoxical too that a specialist in the scientific history of the past should be interested only in the future.
"But above all he was a priest deeply attached to the Church
and its teaching, faithful to the end in spite of annoyances and difficulties. the insinuations too that assailed him from • every side.
He teaches us to rediscover the truth that God created the world, that it is evolving, and that in the end it will find its fullest completion in God. By helping to make God's creation more perfectly fulfilled, we are sharing in God's creative activity. He shows that Christ, who took to himself the nature of man. transformed matter, and as a result the life of the world is deeply bound up with the Cross.
Christ provides the divine milieu in which we live. our universe is thus moved and compenetrated by God in the totality of its evolution.
Prolific
He was a prolific writer and his four major works are The Phenomenon of Man, Le Milieu Divin, Letters from a Traveller, and The Future of Man. The first is the most important and the most difficult to read. It is essentially scientific and philosophical. It is a vision of the world with Man as the highest point of creation.
Teilhard was primarily a palaeontologist, concentrating on human plaeontology. He believed that a study of the world provided a key which would help us to understand the future. He wrote: "The past has revealed to me how the future is built, and preoccupation with the future tends to sweep everything else aside."
He stresses the necessity of adopting an evolutionary approach to nature. Man differs from other products of evolution because he is the only being who can think. And not only is man conscious of evolution but he is an active agent in it, and in the final completion of the evolutionary process.
He tried to bring together ideas of a theological, philosophical and scientific nature to provide an overall picture of the world created by God. He aimed at one vast synthesis which would sum up the whole of human knowledge of God and of the world He created.
Teilhard's influence was great. It was summed up by a contemporary: "His 'presence' in the scientific world, his profound authority, his technical competence allied to his friendliness, and with it all his transparent and wholehearted faith. could notfail to make a deep impression. He did a great deal to help a whole generation undermined by scientism to listen to the message of faith.
"There was no untimely proselytising nor 'indiscreet zeal. but Teilhard, simply by what he was. by the integrity of his scientific effort and the sincerity of his
religious belief, lit the flame of hope in the modern world, in academies, universities. laboratories, in the men of today who bear the mark of progress, of development in organisation. or of the machine age; the hope of reconciling Christian thought with the claims of research and the autonomy of science.
Some of his statements are perhaps open to theological misunderstanding and his Jesuit superiors refused to allow him to publish his major works, while the Holy Office issued a warning against some of his expressions. Yet it is significant that Vatican II, far from repeating the warning, incorporates many of his ideas in its teaching.
Step forward
Pope John XXIII. opening the Council seven years after Teilhard's death, used words which are redolent of Teilhard's spirit: "The spirit of the whole world is looking for a step forward towards a deeper penetration of doctrine and a development of human consciousness in complete and faithful conformity with orthodox teaching; but this teaching must be studied and presented through the methods of research and into the linguistic forms of modern thought.
"The substance of the old teaching of the deposit of faith is one thing. the way in which it is presented is another."
So Teilhard gives us a faith for the twentieth century. Just as in the fifth century Ambrose and Augustine clarified the faith through contemporary philosophy, in the thirteenth Aquinas used the work of Aristotle for this end. so in the twentieth Teilhard calls upon our vast scientific knowledge to interpret the same faith to our modern world.