Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881-1955)

I recently watched the MGM classic The Shoes of the Fisherman.  This movie starred Anthony Quinn as a humble Russian pope and Oskar Werner plays a character who resembles Pierre Teilhard De Chardin.  This is a wonderfully acted and inspirational movie for the whole family to watch.  As I have been studying resourcing Christian mysticism from four to six hundred years ago, there are some forgotten heroes and saints of the twentieth century and Teilhard is one who should come to the top of the list.  Everyone knows Thomas Merton but few have heard of this paleontologist, world traveler, visionary mystic, and French Jesuit priest Teilhard De Chardin.

Teilhard tried to seek God through science and evolution.  For Teilhard, evolution not only did not contradict the revelation of the Bible but evolution is revelation.  He wanted to show scientists and people in the church that Christ ordered the universe and to hold both faith and science together.  My first encounter with Teilhard was in Bible college where I was taught that his ideas were dangerous and his cosmic Christ was heretical.  The Roman Catholic church therefore rightly silenced and exiled him.

The problem was I read Teilhard's critics without ever reading Teilhard's works first hand.  I condemned him without ever reading his own writings.  I had a similar experience with Karl Barth who I later considered the most brilliant Christian mind of the twentieth century.  I am only now discovering Teilhard's thoughts and writings.  The irony is Teilhard was a man way ahead of his times.  His beloved Catholic Church condemned his writings because he promoted the scientific ideas of evolution which ironically today are the teachings of the Catholic Church on science and origins of life on this planet.  Like Joan of Ark, he was condemned in one era only to be vindicated in another.

Teilhard passionately loved God and as a scientist was like a priest performing a holy duty.  Science itself is mysticism because its telos and hope is in God whether it recognizes this or not.  Teilhard's genius in reconciling science with Christianity and heaven with earth are shock waves that are only beginning to shake the churches teachings today.  God of the Christian gospel is the same God of evolution.  The great mystic connecter is "Christ the evolver."

This all reminds me of the deeper work the church needs to do in ressourcement theology and synthesizing and reconciling divergent areas together.  Georges Florovsky an Eastern Orthodox through the grid of "neo-patristic synthesis" brought together the Bible, tradition, liturgy, and church all mystically connected together.  Teilhard's creative genius brought together science and religion in the 1930's when these two fields of study had been segregated or separated.  Teilhard believed that evolutionary science and Christian faith converge together in the person of Jesus Christ.  Not only was the galaxy ordered from above but all things are brought together by the cosmic Christ.