The French theologian and paleontologist Marie Joseph Pierre Teillhard de Chardin (1881-1955) synthesized scientific evolutionary theory, theological interpretation, and mystical vision into a dazzlingly creative and controversial view of man and the universe.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born on May 1, 1881, at his family's ancestral estate near Auvergne. His family was a devoutly Roman Catholic one. His mother influenced Teilhard's piety, and his father awakened the boy's interest in natural history.

Formative Years, 1899-1922

Teilhard attended the Jesuit school at Villefranche, and at the age of 18, he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Aix-en-Provence. When Roman Catholic religious orders were expelled from France in 1902, his Jesuit community moved to the Isle of Jersey, where he continued his studies for 3 years. He was then sent to teach physics and natural history at the Holy Family College in Cairo, Egypt. During his 3 years there he studied geology and paleontology, and he acquired a fascination with the Eastern world.

After the Egyptian interlude Teilhard spent the last stages of his training (1908-1911) at Ore Place, Hastings, England. He began to integrate his earlier absorption in the world of matter into the world of spirit and thus to forge his characteristic world view. Taking evolution as his key idea, he saw the whole universe as an evolutionary process— what he called cosmogenesis. Everything in the universe, including man, was bound together in complete organic interconnection and unity. Matter and spirit were not two separate things but rather two dimensions of one reality.

The evolution of the cosmos was the progressive spiritualization, or personalization, of matter, with God as the Omega Point, or fulfillment of the cosmic process, and Christ as the incarnation in time of this ultimate cosmic purpose. The emergence of human consciousness, the "noosphere, " on this planet was the leading edge of the cosmogenesis and the clue to the direction of the whole universe. With man, cosmic evolution became self-directing; it "folds in upon itself, " converging increasingly toward spirit and person. Teilhard's two passionate loves were God and the universe, and the whole of his thought and life sought to integrate the two.

Teilhard was ordained a priest in 1911, and he completed his theological studies in 1912. He then did doctoral studies in science at the Sorbonne. When World War I broke out in 1914, he volunteered as a stretcherbearer in the French army; he served throughout the war and was twice decorated. In 1919 he returned to his studies and received a doctorate in paleontology from the Sorbonne in 1922.

Long Exile, 1923-1955

In 1922-1923 Teilhard taught as professor of geology at the Institute Catholique in Paris. His influence as a scientist began to be felt at this time. But he was eager to return to the East, and in 1923 he joined Père Licent, a fellow Jesuit and scientific pioneer in China, at Tientsin to found the French Paleontological Mission in China. Soon after Teilhard's arrival they made an expedition to Inner Mongolia and the Ordos Desert, bringing to light the first evidence that Paleolithic man had lived in North China.

In 1924 Teilhard returned to France. His superiors in the Society of Jesus had been concerned for some time over the boldness and seeming heterodoxy of some of his philosophical and theological views. They believed him to be overoptimistic about the problem of evil and heterodox in his interpretation of the Fall of Man. He was also accused of having pantheistic tendencies. As a result, Teilhard was barred from teaching in France. Thus began his lifelong ordeal with the Church, which brought him much personal suffering and prevented the publication of all his major writings until after his death. He accepted the decisions of the Church and the constant accusations of heresy with obedient submission, but the situation brought him incalculable anguish.

In 1949 he wrote Man's Place in Nature (1966), perhaps the best succinct introduction to the ideas more fully expressed in The Phenomenon of Man. In 1951 Teilhard was elected to the Académie des Sciences and went to live in New York City as a member of the Wenner Gren Foundation, where he devoted himself to anthropological studies. He returned to France only one more time in his long ecclesiastically imposed exile, in 1954. At that time new restrictions were imposed on him by his superiors. He died in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1955.

He ranks as one of the three or four most decisive influences in contemporary Christian theology. His thought was a significant new bridge between religion and science and between Christianity and the life and politics of modern man. His theory of cosmic evolution restored man to a central role in the universe, and his notion of human consciousness as evolving toward greater unification gave new optimism to spokesmen for social change.

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