Teilhard de Chardin is one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century in my field of study: science and religion. Unfortunately, I never liked his work. I came by avoiding his work honestly: he is not an easy read. He enjoyed coining new words and using them without really explaining them. He mixed technical scientific language with mystical theology, both of which are disorienting for the uninitiated. After a few pages of his magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Man, I gave up and put it back on the shelf.

The new PBS documentary on his life, Teilhard: Visionary Scientist, gave me another chance to taste his work and learn about his life. It charts his idyllic childhood in France where he learned a deep love for the natural world, his teenage choice to become a Jesuit priest, and his intense struggle between the world-denying spirituality he was taught and the sense of God he found through nature. The tension between his insights into the workings of the natural world and his application of them to Christian doctrine would become a defining feature of his life, ultimately leading to the banning of his works and exile from France.

In 1922 an unpublished essay Teilhard wrote on how original sin would be affected by human evolution was circulated without his permission and made its way to Rome. Opposition from the leader of the Jesuits led to the loss of his teaching job at the Institute Catholique de Paris. He was made to sign a theological declaration of Six Propositions in 1925, including one that said: “the whole human race takes its origin from one protoparent, Adam.”1 Despite signing this statement, which he found troubling, his Jesuit superiors sent him to effective exile in China in 1926. There, he was to continue field research in palaeontology for an indefinite period of time while he was simultaneously forbidden to publish on any topic that was not strictly scientific.

The placement in China turned out to be ironic since it put him in the exact place where one of the earliest Homo erectus fossils (“Peking man”) was discovered in 1929. His gentle and willing obedience to authority led to his involvement in one of the most important pieces of evidence that humans had evolved and were not directly descended from a single protoparent. He stayed in China until 1946, when he was able to return to France. The Curia – the administrative arm of the Holy See, acting for the pope – refused to grant him permission to take up a teaching position in France. Although he could not publish his spiritual works, he continued to write all through the years in China and in France, always hoping the winds would change and his thought might be accepted. Within five years of his arrival in France he was sent to the USA to work in New York, where he would live until his death in 1955.

Experiencing Teilhard’s life not in the impenetrable world of his words, but in the long arch of his biography, three things struck me as deeply insightful from his life for people today. First, one of the remarkable aspects of Teilhard’s story is his steadfast loyalty to his calling as a Jesuit, even when his Jesuit superiors blocked his advancement, silenced him, and exiled him. Had he left the order, he could have had a teaching job in the sciences in any university in Paris. Similarly, while in China, he built a very close friendship with a remarkable woman name Lucile Swan. She wanted him to leave the priesthood, marry her, and publish and speak freely. He wrote back affirming his love yet gently replying: “I do not belong to myself, and consequently I cannot give me entirely and exclusively to anybody.” Despite the open doors in front of him to success, fame, and romantic love, he remained steadfast to his teenage commitment to the Society of Jesus. In today’s world of fractured relationships, Teilhard’s actions may seem alien or even naive. Yet he used the discipline he was under to shape his character and his experience of God. No one can answer what his life might have looked like had he walked through those other doors. What can be said is that his faithfulness has left a rich legacy that has shaped the church he loved. His writings have been honored by the late Pope Francis and his work is widely read in seminaries across the globe.

Second, Teilhard anticipated many themes that are current in the science-and-religion debate. One of the most important of these is the debate over the basic nature of the universe. The question at heart is: How do spiritual realities interact with our material existence? How can our material brains think and experience spiritual realities? Scholars try to understand our minds by breaking them down into simpler parts. They find neurons, action potentials, and chemical and electrical states, but nowhere can they find what makes something an experience. Why does red look like red? Where do I get a sense of being me? Philosophers have come up with several solutions to this problem, from one extreme response that sees consciousness as simply a persistent illusion (Daniel Dennett) to the other extreme that sees reality divided into two completely different types of being: a dualism of matter and mind (Descartes). Chardin argued for a compromise between these two extremes: that matter and mind are two aspects of the same underlying reality. Sometimes called dual-aspect monism, this view has flowered into a school of thought called panpsychism. As the name suggests (pan=all, psyche=mind), panpsychism holds that consciousness is universal.

For Teilhard, Einstein’s theory of relativity provided the scientific account that brought unity to the apparent difference between matter and mind. By accepting Einstein’s theory that matter is energy (E=mc²), he simply added that the energy was “psychic.” All matter could then be seen as an aspect of mind insofar as energy itself was mind-filled. One last step brought this scientific view of the world into his Christian belief: the psychic energy that pervades the universe is God’s love. Thus matter and mind are at their core outworkings of divine love, and are being drawn back into that love that powers the cosmos.

Teilhard’s expansive vision of a love-powered universe also influenced his ideas around ecology and the care of creation. Teilhard’s work involved a cosmic vision of Christ, where every part of the evolutionary history of the world is drawn into Christ. All things work toward an “Omega-point” of total unification with the divine. Teilhard held together these abstract theologies with fine-grained scientific observations. He knew the rocks and trees, the flora and fauna in the places he lived and incorporated these into his spirituality. His Mass on the World, in which he offers the whole world to God as a sacrament, remains one of his most impactful writings. Part of what is compelling about his vision is that it looks beyond human influence. In his view, humans are an important step in the evolutionary process, but their successes and failures cannot supplant the divine providence that guides the history of the universe. Human failure is not more powerful than God’s creative plan. In our time of dramatic human-caused climate change, this is a comforting thought.

A third way that Teilhard’s life resonates with our moment is in the question of censorship. Throughout his life, Teilhard was silenced because he thought that both theological and scientific authority should be respected and that they could be brought into harmony with one another. He dared to let his theology be touched by his scientific views, and his scientific views were pickled in his theology and mystical experience. Today, the siloed nature of education and the boundaries of identity politics are again silencing voices that inhabit the interpenetrated middle. Religious authorities question the usefulness of vaccines and the reality of climate change. Meanwhile, scientists who try to push the sciences to consider the more-than-materialist nature of the universe (as Teilhard also did) are strongly opposed by their fellow scientists. For example, a 2013 TEDx talk Rupert Sheldrake gave on how science would only advance when it began to question some of its own materialist dogmas was removed from the main TED YouTube channel after protests from Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers and relegated to a corner of their website with strong warnings around its content. Other cultural debates where both scientific and religious beliefs are deeply relevant – from abortion to transgender persons – are so prone to mass violent reaction that it often feels unsafe to discuss them in public. While Teilhard’s desperate cry was for science and religion to be held together, there remains a huge question of “how”?

At the numerous science and religion conferences I attend, there is almost always a debate around method. Just what are we trying to do in this field? What are the ways that theology challenges science? What are the ways that science informs theology? Why do we talk about “science” and “theology” rather than “sciences” and “theologies”? Are we pursuing a dialogue, a harmonization, or a creative tension between these bodies of knowledge? The more we discuss, the more diverse and diffuse the conversation becomes.

It turns out, there are no hard and fast rules. Whether we call it “science-engaged theology” or “a theology of science” or “creative mutual interaction,” attempts to create a clear path for how to properly bring science and religion together always seem to fail. I think this is because the content matter is too complex to follow a simplistic rule or formula. With simple things, like how to calculate the internal angles of triangle, simple strategies work. With more complex enquiries like “How do you paint a great picture?” there are so many correct ways that it simply cannot be held by a rule. It will require the whole of a person’s intuition, experience, and knowledge to be brought together. The danger of not having a rule or method is that work can stray into the dodgy and fantastical – but of course, this is precisely the accusation brought against Teilhard. When we break new intellectual ground, and bring our whole selves to the work, it is never entirely comfortable. It is precisely this discomfort that pursued Teilhard throughout his life.

At the end of the documentary, I found myself inspired by the thrilling whole-person passion with which Teilhard felt his work, and the life of careful faithfulness to God that undergirded it. The documentary gave me a new way to enter the work of this remarkable man, and I have now finally made my way through Teilhard’s greatest work, The Phenomenon of Man. I have found, after all, it was well worth the effort.

Footnotes

1. The content of these Six Propositions was long thought to be lost, but new archival work has turned them up and they are published with translation in David Grumett and Paul Bentley, “Teilhard de Chardin, Original Sin, and the Six Propositions,” Zygon 53:2 (2018): 303–330.