Peirre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)—shortened to “Teilhard,” as he signed his letters (roughly pronounced “Tay-yar”)—was a Jesuit priest educated in the sciences, theology, and philosophy, with expertise in geology and paleontology. He was the fourth of eleven children of an aristocratic family in the Auvergne region of south-central France. Five of Teilhard’s brothers served during the first world war, two of whom were killed in action; Teilhard himself worked as a stretcher-bearer in some of the major battles of the war, earning him the highest honors for valor—the Croix de Guerre (War Cross) and the Médaille Militaire (Military Medal). After the war, at the recommendation of his regiment for his bravery under fire, he was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor).
Teilhard was first known outside of the Catholic Church for his contributions to science. His scientific work took him to all parts of the globe. His reputation as a priest involved in some of the most well-known digs in paleontology brought recognition. Most notably, he was the geologist for the expedition in 1929 that uncovered the skull of an early human in China popularly known as “Peking Man” (Homo erectus pekinensis).[1] In the popular press, Newsweek for example, Teilhard was treated as a curiosity, for the Church still kept evolution at arm’s length, yet he was a priest who unequivocally affirmed belief in evolution.
Teilhard faced resistance within the Church for his consideration of theological issues in light of evolution. He found himself at odds with the hierarchy over the question of an “original sin” committed by a human couple from whom all humanity descended (as found in Genesis). This issue led to his being deprived of his teaching post at the Institut Catholique in Paris, sent into virtual exile in China, and for the remainder of his life allowed only occasional visits to France. The larger issue was how to reconcile his faith and his science in a coherent world-view. His religious superiors consistently advised him to stick to science and forbade him to publish anything of a religious or philosophical nature. The Church erected a barrier between science and faith, whereas for Teilhard, it was more of a permeable membrane. His own analogy of the relation between his two vocations as a scientist and a priest was to imagine separate meridians on a sphere which meet at the poles.
Despite the guardrails placed around him, he kept up a steady stream of essays and he wrote three major books expressing his religious philosophy.
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With one notable exception of a brief article very early in his career (E), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) stressed that evolution is no mere hypothesis; it is, he insisted, a general condition to which all hypotheses must conform if they are to be thinkable and true (HP 152; PM 219). Influenced by his reading of Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), he was not referring to particular theories of evolution such as those of Lamarck or Darwin, scientists he respected but who he mentioned only in passing. He was referring to the generalized idea of development, which had been adopted not only by the natural sciences but also by all other endeavors to understand human beings and the world. Thus, he wrote, “Today, positive knowledge of things is identified with the study of their development” (HP 16; PM 46). Development is the simple but revolutionary idea that nothing appears de novo, without antecedents to which it is related. No thing or process within our experience of the world can be understood apart from the organic conditions of its appearance in the world. For example, Teilhard considered it to be contrary to a scientific approach to the world that a human could be “born adult,” as in a literal view of Adam and Eve (CE 210), or that languages could appear fully formed, as in the story of the Tower of Babel (VP 114). Teilhard could agree that these narratives have vital lessons to teach—about the promise and peril of being human, for example—but, like fables, myths, or parables, they are not scientific or historical accounts.
Teilhard often expressed awe at the contrast between, on the one hand, the biblically estimated timescales of thousands of years, by which scholars once gauged human history and, on the other hand, the eons and eras by which it came to be measured after geology and paleontology transformed our understanding of the earth (HE 168-169). He referred to this as the discovery of time. In Teilhard’s thinking this discovery goes hand-in-hand with evolution considered as processes by which genuinely novel forms of matter, life, and mind appear in the course of time. He used the metaphor of crossing thresholds but today we might speak of emergent properties. The appearance of reflective thought, for example, that is evident in hominization (the becoming of human beings) was, for Teilhard, a momentous stage in evolution. Reflection leads inevitably to asking about one’s significance in the scheme of things, and, by implication, the significance of human beings on earth and in the universe—questions addressed by science, philosophy, and religion.
Teilhard was aware that astrophysics had established a universe many millions of years older than the biblically based estimates. He knew of, but did not discuss at length, the idea of a “primeval atom” (AM 171)—later known as the big bang—such as proposed by the Belgium priest George Lemaître (1894-1966) in 1927. Pope Pius XI (Pope from 1922-1939) embraced Lemaître’s work as evidence of the compatibility of science and faith. Teilhard’s work was more problematic, for he questioned whether all human beings are descendants of a single couple who had never been children. These notions strike at the heart of the idea of original sin as traditionally understood, for St. Paul had written, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (I Corinthians 15:22; cf. Romans 5:17-19). In Humani Generis (1950), Pope Pius XII (Pope from 1939-1958) reaffirmed the biblical account of “a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own” (section 37). Thanks to research by Mercè Prats (SCT), it is now known that this was directed in part at Teilhard’s work (see especially the Pope’s comments in section 13).
Teilhard sent a partial response to the encyclical to Rome, but it remained unanswered (CE 209-211). He stressed the contrast between humanity traced to a single couple (monogenism) and humanity arising from a single branch or phylum (monophyletism). Science, he argued, can only address the question whether humanity arose from a single or from multiple phyla (polyphyletism). He added, however, that while science cannot directly reject an individual Adam, indirectly that hypothesis is untenable by all we believe we know of biology and speciation. An aspect of Teilhard’s doubts about Humani Generis, which he did not mention in his response to it, is that he considered it highly probable that life, and intelligent life, exists elsewhere in the universe. If true, this suggests that life arose from multiple phyla on other worlds across the universe. In Teilhard’s view, any form of life that achieves the level of reflective thought would be no less subject to wrong-doing than are humans. In that case, as he wrote in 1953, original sin must “affect the entire Universe (down to the last galaxies)” (CI 84).
Because Teilhard stressed novelty, he did not accept a strictly deterministic account of evolutionary processes in which past causes, working by laws of nature, can fully account for every present reality (FM 251; VP 105, 130). In other words, for Teilhard, the idea of development does not entail the idea of unqualified determinism. Emergent properties are genuinely emergent. Put somewhat differently, there are creative processes within evolution which he labeled variously creative union (WTW 151-176) and creative transformation (CE 21-25). With this idea, Teilhard explores the frontiers between science and metaphysics. He often called his own views “hyper-physics” (LI 273; HP 2; PM 30) but his project is not unlike what others, especially those influenced by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), call process metaphysics. Moreover, with Whitehead—indeed, with process philosophy more generally— Teilhard’s creative transformation involves a two-fold denial, partly touching on scientific ideas, and partly touching on religious ideas. He rejected a determinism that traces all the contingencies of the world—“contingencies” meaning anything that might have been otherwise—to an initial creation, temporally distant from the present. Teilhard would not have accepted the idea in the medieval poem, the Rubayyat: “the first morning of creation wrote what the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”
On the religious side, Teilhard denied the idea of a divine creation from outside of time according to which all temporal events—past, present, and future—are fully definite and complete. Teilhard spoke of “the very texture of creation” (WTW 162) which the successive appearance of novel forms of matter, life, and mind reveal to us. In other words, evolution is not merely the unfolding of an array of time-indexed events, like a story that has already been written. In truth, these more traditional scientific and religious ideas are not so very different, for in each case, as Teilhard put it, time “touches only the surface aspect of things” (VP 129). In the deterministic view, time is inessential since the laws by which natural processes are understood can be read forwards or backwards—it is as though the future is a calendar in which all the events of every future day have been prerecorded in detail. In the classical theistic view, time is (as Plato put it) the moving image of eternity. Future events are “already” (from an eternal viewpoint) created—yet another case of a completed calendar of our lives. Teilhard was more impressed by the fact that, in practical terms, we must act, and by acting, we are partial creators of how the “calendar of events” is “filled in.”
Creative transformation is Teilhard’s way of acknowledging the tremendous influence of the past on the present, but without depriving the present of any dynamism of its own that makes for novelty. Teilhard’s insistence on the reality of time means that he is not merely presenting a view of the cosmos, but of cosmogenesis (FM 261). Creation is not a once-and-for-all moment in the past, nor an eternal act of an immutable God. In this way, Teilhard rejects the all-too-common assumption that divine creation is an event in the distant past (the big bang, for example). At the same time, he rejected the concept that divine creation is outside of time as in the classical theistic view of the God-World relation. For Teilhard, creation is an on-going reality, and this entails that it is incomplete (J 363). The universe, and we ourselves, are in-the-making. In his notebooks from the first world war, he wrote that we are not only created, but we are creators (J 285); it follows that we are, in our own small ways, co-creators with God, participants in and contributors to the drama that is cosmic becoming. Considered from Teilhard’s theological convictions, it is “a universe en marche” (TF 21), under way, even for God.
Teilhard was a loyal Jesuit, and as such, a devoted Christian. But his ideas of God and God’s creative acts, shaped by his ideas about evolution, depart from the dominant ideas about theism in his day. Creative transformation was, in his words, the idea of a God who “makes things make themselves,” using the materials that have already been made to make something new (CE 20, VP 25, 154). This is a far cry from classical theism’s God who acts but is never acted upon—in the words of Aristotle, baptized by Thomas Aquinas for Christian purposes, a God of pure act. Teilhard, by contrast, spoke of a “strictly bilateral and complementary relationship between the world and God” (CE 226). God acts, but is also acted upon by the creatures and, for this reason, there is genuine interaction between the world and God. Teilhard found in the doctrine of the Incarnation, a God who shares our suffering (CE 183). In addition, he spoke of a God who creates out of a need for loving communion with the creatures (J 221; CE 226; SC 180). He insisted that human activity contributes something to God—something that, apart from that activity, God would lack. For Teilhard, God is “at once, one and complex” (AE 149).
Creative transformation involves a rethinking of the concept of divine power.
Aquinas stressed that there are logical-semantic parameters for meaningful talk about what God can do. In simpler terms, there are true sentences beginning with “God cannot . . .” This is not because of any limits on divine power but because one must speak sensibly about it. In Aquinas’s examples, God cannot restore virginity to someone who has lost it (change the past), nor create a circle with unequal radii (an impossible object), nor do something evil (go against God’s nature). Teilhard agreed, but he extended this thinking to include “physical equivalents” (CE 33) to the necessities of geometry and value theory: God must work within the framework of an evolutive universe which includes the creatures that partially make and remake themselves. A world of such beings necessarily involves risk. Thus, Teilhard spoke of “God inviting us to the risks of Creation” (J 269) and “a whole succession of inevitable risks” (CE 31) that God takes in creating. This is one aspect of his answer to the problem of evil (HP 224-226; PM 311-313).
Even as Teilhard spoke of an open future, he argued that evolutionary processes have a convergent structure towards increasing physical complexity and psychic richness, a tendency he called “the law of complexity-consciousness” (LM 35; HP 216-218; PM 300-302). He did not restrict consciousness to human beings. Indeed, he uses the word consciousness (la conscience) to name all forms of mentality, or experience—not confined to human varieties—from the most primitive to the most elevated. He wrote, “There are as many wavelengths of consciousness as there are of living forms” (FM 218). Moreover, he was averse to a strict dualism between mind and matter. His ontology could be described as a dual-aspect theory, or even as panpsychism. He wrote, “Co-extensive with their Without [le Dehors] there is a Within [le Dedans] of things” (PM 56; HP 24). The Within is the experiential, the qualitative, the mental, whereas the Without is the structural, quantitative, the material. In Teilhard’s worldview, there are as many forms of consciousness as there are integrated combinations of physical particles. Because he was sensitive to the relation of parts and wholes, he distinguished “true” and “false” complexity so as to avoid speaking of a crystal, for example, as having a “within” (HZ 20-21). In whatever form true complexity takes, it implies a perspective, or point of view, from which any particular creature perceives its world—as philosophers are wont to say, there is something that it is like to be an experiencing entity. By denying a dichotomy of mind and matter, but accepting a structural relation between them, Teilhard sought to place “le phénomène humain,” the human phenomenon (the title of his magnum opus), in an evolutionary context, not as an exception to nature’s processes, but as a continuation of them, and even as the key to understand their meaning.
Scientists today often speak of convergent evolution because similar abilities evolve in different species—for instance, eyesight in insects, amphibians, and mammals, flight in insects, bats, and birds, and echolocation in bats, whales, and dolphins. Teilhard would approve, although in the case of hominization, which involves crossing the threshold of reflective thought, the various rivals of homo sapiens have long since gone extinct. We are all that remains. And we have enveloped the earth as no creature before us, creating what Teilhard called the noosphere—the “thinking envelope of the earth, (MT 242),” analogous to the biosphere, the sphere of life (VP 61). Teilhard recalled coining the word “noosphere” in his conversations with Édouard Le Roy (1870-1854); Le Roy also employed the word in his work (LE 76). Teilhard believed that the noosphere would itself become more and more complex as interrelations among humans grew more interconnected and global. Teilhard is sometimes credited as being quasi-prophetic in foreseeing something like the world-wide web.
When Teilhard projected the arc of complexity-consciousness into the future, he conceived of a sort of planetary group-mind. He was alert to the criticism that such an idea would dissolve human personality into an indeterminate mass. He was aware of the political dangers of collectivist movements and populism that make the individual a slave to the state, resulting in what he called “the most appalling linkage in chains!” (HP 182; PM 257). Nor did he see value in the idea of a transcendent oneness in which everything distinctive about a person is absorbed. Teilhard championed human personality—that which is distinctive in each of us—and he considered Christianity to be “essentially the religion of personality” (HE 91). He believed that we would finally give ourselves only to something greater than ourselves that enhanced our distinctiveness. He insisted that “True union differentiates” (LS 46). He argued that we are never more fully in possession of ourselves as when we lose ourselves to another in love. Some find God only above (en haut), but Teilhard argued that the God above is also ahead (en avant), giving the idea of divine transcendence a temporal architecture (FM 269; TF 160)—a supreme personalizing “center of centers” which he called Omega (HE 68). It is not that God exists in the future; rather, God, active in the present, lures us towards the future.
No merely heliocentric, much less geocentric, cosmology is true to Teilhard’s vision. For Teilhard, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation concerns not simply the man Jesus, but the entire cosmos. As he suggested to the philosopher Claude Tresmontant (1925-1997), the doctrine of the two natures of Christ—human and divine—should be amended to include a “cosmic” nature enabling Christ “to act as Omega” (CI 138). He appropriated certain New Testament passages, not as proof-texts, but as anticipations of the idea of a “Cosmic Christ,” a divine Logos (John 1:1), the Alpha and Omega (Revelation 1:8), “in whom we live, move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28) and toward which all creation has been laboring (Romans 8:22) for fulfillment—the pleroma (cf. Ephesians 1:23, 3:19; Colossians 2:9).
Teilhard’s global and cosmic perspectives were reflected in his thinking about political and ethical issues. He saw great value in human diversity (MM: 125-126) and he was deeply critical of the narrowness of national identities (LI 261). He knew that his vision of Omega would not occur on its own without human effort. He wrote: “The age of nations is past. The question before us now, if we would not perish, is to shake off old prejudices, and to build the earth” (HE 37). He did not address questions of ecology, but it is a logical extension of his thinking that we must be sensitive to the fact that we are not the only denizens of this planet. He wrote to his cousin and confidant, Marguerite Teillard-Chambon (1880-1959)—aka Claude Aragonnès—that he aspired to express a psychology of one who sees himself not as French or Chinese, but as “a terrestrian” [one of “la terre,” the earth] (LT 133), but a terrestrian of the human variety, with “the dangerous power of thought!” (AM 236). His cousin summed up his attitude well: “Pierre Teilhard was heart and soul a citizen of the universe” (LT 51).
Teilhard’s vision of the future of humanity as well as of the cosmos is at odds with the projection of a final thermodynamic “heat-death,” where all energy available for work has been exhausted. As early as 1929, he wrote, “‘The highest consciousness’ has replaced for me ‘Entropy’ in its value as the essential physical function of the Cosmos” (LV 118; LT 151). He was not deterred in his optimism by this conflict of cosmologies. To be sure, consciousness costs something in the way of physical energy. As Teilhard says, “To think, we must eat.” He added, “But what a variety of thoughts we get out of one slice of bread” (HP 30; PM 64). Teilhard speculated that there is only one sort of energy, which is psychic, but that it has two aspects, which he called tangential and radial. Physical or tangential energy links elements of the same complexity as themselves. Psychic or radial energy draws the elements of the universe to ever greater levels of complexity (HP 30-31; PM 64-65). As the example of eating and thinking suggests, very high radial values may be combined with low tangential values. He drew an analogy with special relativity theory: just as relativistic effects become evident only at extreme velocities nearing the speed of light (HZ 23-24), so radial values become evident only at the extremes of physical complexity. Teilhard believed it necessary to posit something like radial energy to account for the drive towards complexification in the universe.
Teilhard’s speculations about the different energies remain, for me, at the level of metaphor, with no real understanding of how these ideas might reveal themselves in actual research. I am deeply puzzled by the concept of energy as it relates to the universe as a whole. When I read about the “big bang” it seems more like a violation of thermodynamics than an instance of it. How is it that the elements of the periodic table come to exist? Once they exist one can speak of how they exhibit thermodynamic principles, but those principles in themselves don’t seem to explain the appearance of these elements. I take solace in the fact that I am not alone in being puzzled by this. Paul Davies, the physicist and science popularizer, who knows a great deal more about physics than I could ever hope to know, apparently agrees that there must be something beyond thermodynamics that explains the universe’s habit of complexifying its elements. Perhaps this is an instance of the more general difficulty that an account of the universe purely in terms of physics and chemistry is seriously deficient in explaining all of its features; at best the philosophy of mere physicalism is a promissory note.
Teilhard shared these perplexities about a complexifying universe. Like William James (1842-1910), who Teilhard read, he struggled from the beginning to the end of his career with the philosophical problem of the one and the many, of unity amidst multiplicity, of monism and pluralism (J 270). He was dissatisfied with scholastic philosophy’s idea of God as Being, complete and sufficient unto itself. As already noted, he developed what he called, creative union, creative transformation, or alternately, a “Metaphysics of Union, dominated by Love” (LM 35). He toyed with the idea of defining Being in terms of Union, or Uniting but finally hit upon the idea that Being and Union (Esse and Unire) form “a linked pair,” as he explained, “equally primordial and fundamentally irreducible, ontologically inseparable—like two surfaces of one and the same plane—and constrained to vary simultaneously in the same direction (TF 207; LM 40).” Creation itself, he believed, is a process of unification.
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Teilhard struggled to present, and to re-present, his vision of a cosmos in motion—on the one hand, to a Church that kept evolution at arm’s length, and on the other hand, to nonbelievers reluctant to accept a universe animated by a divine spirit. In a letter of May 9, 1940 to his close friends Max and Simone Bégouën, he predicted, “I will have both the pure scientists and the pure adepts of metaphysics against me” (RA 167). He was not entirely mistaken, but this is in large measure because he was a man of feeling, something of a poet, also a mystic in the best sense of that word. He was someone for whom the aesthetic dimensions of experience reveal a world that cannot be completely contained in the categories of either science or metaphysics. He suggested that this explained the incomprehension he sometimes encountered. Although he sought never to leave the plane of science or of sound metaphysics, he wrote to Ida Treat (Feb. 14, 1927) that, above all, he was not precisely proposing an intellectual system, but rather, “a certain taste, a certain perception of the beauty, the pathos, and the unity of being.” Should he have said “the unity of becoming”? He did say that he wished he could translate his vision into music (LTF, 59). Music, with its timing, rhythms, themes, melodies, and emotional power, is well-suited for the aesthetic expression of the dynamic processes of cosmogenesis, a cosmos in-the-making. For many of us, it is as much the “music” of Teilhard’s thinking as the intellectual potency of his vision that accounts for its enduring value.
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