Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born in Sarcenat, France in 1881. Teilhard entered the Jesuit order and was ordained a priest in 1911. He also pursued a scientific career, attaining a doctorate in geology and paleontology from the Natural History Museum of Paris in 1922. This is not unusual for members of the Jesuit order. Jesuit scientists have made significant contributions to the sciences during the centuries, especially in astronomy and mathematics.

Teilhard spent a good portion of his professional life in China, first with the Tientsin Natural History Museum founded by another Jesuit, Emile Licent, and then with the Geological Survey of China. Teilhard made major contributions to the geology of Asia and to the study of the evolution of species.  He participated in a key fossil discovery and analysis in China during the 1920's and 1930's dealing with human evolution, which came to be called "Peking Man."  

Evolution and Christianity

During the first half of the twentieth century, while much of the Christian world was immersed in a heated controversy with scientists about the threat of Darwinian evolution to traditional faith, Teilhard was able to formulate a theological interpretation of evolution that was not only compatible with Christian thought, but also inspiring and motivational. Teilhard saw biological evolution as a process of gradual growth toward spirit. Once spirit has appeared in the form of the developed human species, evolution has become conscious and free to make choices through individual human beings. This new stage of the world involves human unity, and any work that contributes to human progress participates in this stage, as discussed in other sections of this website.

The Mass on the World

Quite often during his scientific expeditions, Teilhard found himself unable to celebrate Mass, so he composed the following prayer to offer on these occasions:

Since once again, Lord — though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but 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 itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and sufferings of the world... One by one, Lord, I see and I love all those whom you have given me to sustain and charm my life. One by one also I number all those who make up that other beloved family which has gradually surrounded me, its unity fashioned out of the most disparate elements, with affinities of the heart, of scientific research and of thought. And again one by one — more vaguely it is true, yet all-inclusively — I call before me the whole vast anonymous army of living humanity; those who surround me and support me though I do not know them; those who come, and those who go; above all, those who in office, laboratory and factory, through their vision of truth or despite their error, truly believe in the progress of earthly reality and who today will take up again their impassioned pursuit of the light... Receive, O lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day...[1]

A friend recalls the times in China with Teilhard during the Second World War: "It was a difficult time for all us, and I owe to him my own spiritual and moral relief. He kept alive in me the flame of hope and faith in real values... What faith there was in him, and what goodness!"[2] Teilhard's thought was ahead of his time, and his writings were controversial during his life, so he prayed that his death would be a positive sign. He wrote to a friend three months before dying: "My one great prayer (and I include in it all whom I love) is to 'end well'. One way of another, I mean my death to 'seal' that for which I have always lived."[3]  Father Teilhard died suddenly on Easter Sunday, 1955 in a middle of a social gathering of friends.

[1] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., “The Mass on the World” in The Heart of Matter  (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 119-121.

[2] Laure Dorget, quoted in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., Letters from a Traveler (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 280.

[3] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., Letters from a Traveler, 359.