Teilhard de Chardin Pierre (1881–1955), French paleontologist, Jesuit priest, and philosopher. His philosophical work, while published only posthumously, was vigorously discussed throughout his career. His writings generated considerable controversy within the church, since one of his principal concerns was to bring about a forceful yet generous reconciliation between the traditional Christian dogma and the dramatic advances yielded by modern science. His philosophy consisted of systematic reflections on cosmology, biology, physics, anthropology, social theory, and theology – reflections guided, he maintained, by his fascination with the nature of life, energy, and matter, and by his profound respect for human spirituality.
Teilhard was educated in philosophy and mathematics at the Jesuit college of Mongré, near Lyons. He entered the Jesuit order at the age of eighteen and was ordained a priest in 1911. He went on to study at Aix-en-Provence, Laval, and Caen, as well as on the Isle of Jersey and at Hastings, England.
Returning to Paris after the war, he studied biology, geology, and paleontology at the Museum of Natural History and at the Institut Catholique, receiving a doctoral degree in geology in 1922. In 1923, shortly after appointment to the faculty of geology at the Institut Catholique, he took leave to pursue field research in China. His research resulted in the discovery, in 1929, of Peking man (Sinanthropus pekinensis) – which he saw as ‘perhaps the next to the last step traceable between the anthropoids and man.’ It was during this period that Teilhard began to compose one of his major theoretical works, The Phenomenon of Man (1955), in which he stressed the deep continuity of evolutionary development and the emergence of humanity from the animal realm. He argued that received evolutionary theory was fully compatible with Christian doctrine. Indeed, it is the synthesis of evolutionary theory with his own Christian theology that perhaps best characterizes the broad tenor of his thought.
Starting with the very inception of the evolutionary trajectory, i.e., with what he termed the ‘Alpha point’ of creation, Teilhard’s general theory resists any absolute disjunction between the inorganic and organic. Indeed, matter and spirit are two ‘stages’ or ‘aspects’ of the same cosmic stuff. These transitions from one state to another may be said to correspond to those between the somatic and psychic, the exterior and interior, according to the state of relative development, organization, and complexity. Hence, for Teilhard, much as for Bergson (whose work greatly influenced him), evolutionary development is characterized by a progression from the simplest components of matter and energy (what he termed the lithosphere), through the organization of flora and fauna (the biosphere), to the complex formations of sentient and cognitive human life (the noosphere). In this sense, evolution is a ‘progressive spiritualization of matter.’ He held this to be an orthogenetic process, one of ‘directed evolution’ or ‘Genesis,’ by which matter would irreversibly metamorphose itself, in a process of involution and complexification, toward the psychic. Specifically, Teilhard’s account sought to overcome what he saw as a prescientific worldview, one based on a largely antiquated and indefensible metaphysical dualism. By accomplishing this, he hoped to realize a productive convergence of science and religion. The end of evolution, what he termed ‘the Omega point,’ would be the full presence of Christ, embodied in a universal human society. Many have tended to see a Christian pantheism expressed in such views. Teilhard himself stressed a profoundly personalist, spiritual perspective, drawn not only from the theological tradition of Thomism, but from that of Pauline Neoplatonism and Christian mysticism as well – especially that tradition extending from Meister Eckhart through Cardinal Bérulle and Malebranche. D.Al.