As Sir Julian Huxley writes in The Introduction To The Phenomenon Of Man (1955), simply by looking at the facts of Pierre Teilhard’s life will give us a better understanding of his thought. Pierre was born in 1881, the fourth child of eleven. At age 10 he went to a Jesuit College in Auvergne where he grew up on the farm with his father, a gentleman and small land owner. His father was also an archivist with an interest in natural history.

At the age of 18, Pierre decided to become a Jesuit and entered the order. Six years later, at 24 years old, he was sent to teach physics and chemistry at a Jesuit College in Cairo, Egypt for three years. He then moved to Sussex, England where he studied theology for four more years. Pierre Teilhard became a Jesuit priest in 1912. His main inspiration up to this point in his life was reading Bergson’s Evolution Creatrice, inspiring him in his life long passion for both the facts and theories of evolution. While living in Egypt, Teilhard experienced the spark of divine life in the Egyptian desert. This force he believed was present throughout all of the evolutionary process. It guides, shaping the evolutionary thrust as much as the mechanistic forces of the physical sciences he believed.

In Toward A Science Charged With Faith: Chapter 5, God and Science (www.crosscurrents.org/chardin.htm) Charles P. Henderson is used as a referrence for this online discussion. “Teilhard would later codify this force into two distinct, fundamental types of energy, ‘radial’ and ‘tangential.’ Radial energy was the energy of Newtonian physics. This energy obeyed mechanistic laws, such as cause and effect, and could be quantified. Teilhard called radial energy the energy of ‘without.’ Tangential energy, on the other hand, was the energy from ‘within,’ in other words, the divine spark.”

Henderson goes on to explain that Teilhard described three types of tangential energy. “In inanimate objects, he called it ‘pre-life.’ In beings that are not self-reflective, he called it ‘life.’ In humans, he called it ‘consciousness.’ As Teilhard began to observe the world described by science, he noticed that in certain things, such as rocks, the radial energy was dominant, while the tangential energy was barely visible. Rocks, therefore, are best described by the laws that rule radial energy…physics. But in animals, in which tangential energy, or life, is present, the laws of physics are only a partial explanation. Teilhard concluded that where radial energy was dominant, the evolutionary process would be characterized by the traditional scientific laws of necessity and chance. But in those organisms in which the tangential energy was significant, the forces of life and consciousness would lead the laws of chance and natural selection.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, says in The Divine Milieu: An Essay On The Interior Life (1960), “All around us, to right and left, in front and behind, above and below, we have only to go a little beyond the frontier of sensible appearances in order to see the divine welling up and showing through. But it is not only close to us, in front of us, that the divine presence has revealed itself. It has sprung up universally, and we find ourselves so surrounded and transfixed by it, that there is no room left to fall down and adore it, even within ourselves.”

“By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers. In eo vivimus. As Jacob said, awakening from his dream, the world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.”

Chardin is not an official saint, but he is considered by many to be one of the most unique thinkers in Christian thought. Some would call him a saint while others would call him blasphemous.

It was at the height of his career in paleontology, while he was studying bones and fossils in northern China (in 1927) that Teilhard wrote what he called “a little book on piety” designed to convey both the sincerity and the orthodoxy of his faith to his superiors in Rome. In this book Teilhard speaks of The Divine Milieu. Its very title suggests his theme: the whole material world as the setting for a profound, mystical vision of God. It is in the world itself, as it is seen through the eyes of science, that the workings of God are most apparent.

Needless to say, writing this type of material did not reassure the religious authorities in Rome, for Teilhard affirmed the material world as a source of mystical illumination. Though Teilhard did not directly criticize any specific doctrines of the church in his little book of piety, this work constitutes an assault upon the skeletal supports of traditional theology. Teilhard was just as provocative when he was trying to reassure as when he was trying to stir up debate. Early on, he describes his book in two sentences, which were intended to convey the modesty of his position but in reality contained a theological time bomb. Teilhard says that he intends no more than to “recapitulate the eternal lessons of the Church,” but he goes on to assert that he is actually teaching the church how to see! As a scientist and an individual thinker, he is suggesting that the primary source of religious truth is to be found in the material world rather than in the magisterium of the church. In a real sense, it shall be science which shows theology how to see. It shall be the personal experience of a single priest, which will indicate to the highest ecclesiastical authorities what is essential in Catholic teaching.

Teilhard tried to accomplish the difficult task of turning theology downside up. He tried to demonstrate that the material world, the world of rocks and trees, stars and planets, plants and animals, rather than being the neutral subject of scientific investigation, was in fact the soil from which would spring a new vision of the holy. The very subject matter of pure science was nothing less than a mirror in which one could see reflected the face of God. Hence Teilhard did not succeed in calming the anxious theologians at the Vatican, and they were rightly worried. He had raised the material world to a level of importance it had seldom held for theologians, Catholic or Protestant. In a more candid statement of faith, written at the request of his confidant and colleague Bruno de Solages, rector of the Institut Catholique in Toulouse, Teilhard put the issue on a personal, even confessional plane:

“If, as the result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world. The world (its value, its infallibility and its goodness) that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe. It is by this faith that I live. And it is to this faith, I feel, that at the moment of death, rising above all doubts, I shall surrender myself.”

We must now ask what led Teilhard to believe so deeply in the world, and what in the world is worthy of belief in the first place? For the vast majority of us, the material world provides the raw material for scientific research, not mystical illumination. Yet here is a professional scientist working at the frontiers of research, part of an international team of geologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists, writing from an outpost of science in northern China. He boldly asserts, “If we Christians wish to retain in Christ the very qualities on which his power and our worship are based, we have no better way, no other way, even, of doing so than fully to accept the most modern concepts of evolution... Surely, the solution for which modern mankind is seeking must essentially be exactly the solution which I have come upon.” One can easily see why Teilhard raised cries of alarm within the hierarchies of both the church and the academies.

Ralph Abraham is one of the founders of chaos theory and co-author of The Web Empowerment Book: A World Wide Web Primer. In an online interview, Ralph Abraham says, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the early 1920s, while conducting research in the Egyptian desert, scratching around for the remains of ancient creatures, had a vision. He turned over a stone, dusted it off, and suddenly realized that everything around him was beautifully connected in one vast, pulsating web of divine life. Teilhard soon developed a philosophy that married the science of the material world with the sacred forces of the Catholic Church. Neither the Catholic Church nor the scientific academy, however, agreed. Teilhard’s premise, that rocks possessed a divine force, was seen as flaky by scientists and outright heretical by the church. Teilhard’s writings were scorned by peers in both camps.”

Teilhard de Chardin gets too little credit for the quality of his insights. He was successfully deprived of his influence by the popes. Throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s, the Catholic Church was on the verge of excommunicating Teilhard. But the philosopher was committed to his perspective, refusing to stop writing or leave the Church. As his problems with the Church escalated, Teilhard became something of a cause célèbre within his small circle in Europe. The Church responded by forbidding him to publish, and posted him to China, where he lived in a state of semi-exile, trekking through the Gobi desert and developing his philosophy in isolation. (His paleontological studies continued to circulate and were highly regarded.) The rest of his work was not published until after his death on Easter Sunday, 1955, when it caused a small stir in the theological world. It was read widely for only a short time. In the postmodern climate of today’s theology, Teilhard is once again out of favor among theologists, evolutionary biologists, and scientists, who view his work with derision.