If the only Jesuit you ever met was the subject of a biography in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life? In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library he entered the search term “Jesuit” and filtered it through the genre of “Biography”. The books that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar but still very real Jesuits.

                         In this piece, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, as presented in the paleontological biography: The Jesuit and the Skull – Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for the Peking Man by Amir D. Aczel, published by Riverhead (Penguin) in 2007.   

Proceed with caution. Two years after his death, the Holy Office announced that “the books of Father Teilhard de Chardin SJ must be withdrawn from the libraries of seminaries and religious institutes; they may not be sold in Catholic bookshops; and they may not be translated into other languages.” This was music to the ears of international publishers. From 1959 onwards  they began to release de Chardin’s works in mass-market paperback format, packaging him as a countercultural cosmic Catholic.

His suppression underlines the serious difficulties that this priest/scientist encountered with both the Society of Jesus and the Vatican because of the theological questions raised by his paleontology discoveries and his theological speculations. He wrote some 500 scientific papers in geology, paleontology, and paleoanthropology, even as the Jesuit curia kept moving him: China, India, Burma, Africa, and finally, America.

His reputation is essentially posthumous even though his expressions ‘The Cosmic Christ’ and ‘The Omega Point’ entered the Catholic vocabulary of the 1960s and 70s. His battered reputation has been re-assessed, if somewhat grudgingly. At a 2010 conference on faith and science, Cardinal William Levada, (then) Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said, “We need to pursue the dialogue with science and technology. Many scientists speak of their personal faith; yet the public face of science is resolutely agnostic. Here is a fertile and necessary field for dialogue. Teilhard de Chardin attempted an apologetics for the world of science with great imagination, though not entirely successfully.” (www.vatican.va/…/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20100429_levada-new-apologetics_en.html – 27k – 2010-04-29 )

               Slightly warmer, was the mention in a homily by Emeritus Pope Benedict who referred to him as a model for priesthood:  

“The role of the priesthood is to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy. This is also the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin: in the end we shall achieve a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host.” (www.vatican.va/…/benedict_xvi/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20090724_vespri-aosta_en.html – 12k – 2009-07-24)

In today’s biography, The Jesuit and the Skull, Amir Aczel presents de Chardin as a Jesuit squeezed by his priestly vocation and his scientific research. He sets a similar tone as Rene d’Ouince SJ, de Chardin’s onetime superior who was moved by his “paradoxical blend of audacity and fidelity.” (Introduction to de Chardin’s Letters to Two Friends 1926-1952, New American Library, 1967.) 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was the fourth of eleven children born into a comfortable family in Auvergne in the south of France in 1881. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1899 and was ordained in 1911. He studied botany and paleontology. His research at the Paris Museum of Natural History was interrupted by the First World War, when he became a stretcher bearer, earning a medal for heroism “under violent bombardment to recover a wounded soldier. “ (p. 77)

After the Armistice, de Chardin says he wrote La Vie Cosmique “in an attempt to find a solution for the doubts that beset my action – because I love the universe, its energies, its secrets, and its hopes, and because at the same time I am dedicated to God, the Origin, the only Issue and the only Term.” (p. 78) Soon after he wrote, “The life of Christ mingles with the life-blood of evolution.” (p. 78)

He was moved to China, not as a missionary in the manner of Matteo Ricci SJ, but as an assistant to Emile Licent SJ, at the Jesuit school and museum of paleontology at Tientsin (Tianjin), near Peking. Research and digs there resulted in his Sorbonne doctorate. But the more he wrote about evolution the more he became vulnerable. Many scientist colleagues thought he should just quit the Society, but they misunderstood his Jesuit vocation. “I still have just one choice: to be a perfect religious or to be excommunicate.” (p. 102)

Working in Mongolia, surrounded by evidence of prehistoric life, de Chardin wrote, “Since once again, Lord … in the steppes of Asia – I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real self; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and sufferings of the world. “ (p. 91)

His Jesuit commitment cost him. “Light once twinkled for me from every surface I saw, and I took immediate pleasure in everything. Now it seems extinguished. The passing film of colors and places now bores me to tears. That which I love I see no more.” (p. 123). Then the more petulant: “The time has come for us to save Christ from the clerics, in order to save the World.” (p. 132)

Excavating the Zhoukoudian caves alongside his Canadian and non-Jesuit colleague, Davidson Black, they discovered Sinanthropus pekinensis (now Homo erectus pekinensis ) – the Peking Man, “as typical a link between man and the apes as one could wish for.” (p.143) This skeletal evidence challenged literal interpretations of Genesis and brought him acclaim and suspicion. As de Chardin was sought after by universities, cautious Jesuit superiors suppressed his next book, Le Milieu Divin – An Essay on the Interior Life. Honorary degrees were offered and suddenly withdrawn, but he remained a loyal Jesuit. He wrote to his superiors, “I have no need to say, you may count on me. I am too surely convinced – and more so day by day – that the world can only be fulfilled in Christ, and that Christ can only be found through an interior submission to the Church.” (p. 205) 

In 1947, shortly after the suppression of another work, Le Phénomene Humain (The Phenomenon of Man), de Chardin suffered a heart attack.

Man is not the centre of the universe as once we thought in our simplicity, but something much more wonderful – the arrow pointing the way to the final unification of the world in terms of life. Man alone constitutes the last-born, the freshest, the most complicated, the most subtle of all the successive layers of life. 

This is nothing else than the fundamental vision and I shall leave it at that. (p. 222 of Aczel, quoting p. 223 of The Phenomenon of Man.) 

Physically vulnerable in his final years, he remained confident about his discoveries. “Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that lines must follow.” (Phenomenon, p. 218) It would be for later generations to determine his significance. “If I have had a mission to fill, it will only be possible to judge whether I have accomplished it by the extent to which others go beyond me.” (p. 244)

One colleague offering a judgment was Pierre Leroy SJ, a friend and early biographer.

“The look in his eyes when they met your eyes revealed the man’s soul: his reassuring sympathy restored your confidence in yourself.  Just to speak to him made you feel better, you knew that he was listening to you and that he understood you. His own faith was in the invincible power of love: men hurt one another by not loving one another. And this was not naïveté but the goodness of the man, for he was good beyond the common measure.”  (p. 148)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ died in New York on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Jesuit and the Skull – Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for the Peking Man, by Amir D. Aczel, is published by Riverhead, a division of Penguin Books, in 2007. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Next in Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Biography –  the remarkable Canadian philosopher, Bernard Lonergan SJ.  

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++