The Spirituality of Teilhard de Chardin
This topic was the theme of NZCCM Auckland Retreat July 2023
by Maureen Eberhard (This article was first published in the NZCCM Stillpoint magazine, March 2024.)
The retreat in Auckland was attended by 20 people and held at the St Francis Retreat Centre aka The Friary.
The retreat organiser was Vincent Maire and the speaker was Adriana Janus who based her talks on the books by Kathleen Duffy - Teilhard’s Mysticism, Teilhard’s Struggle and Rediscovering and Teilhard’s Fire.
By Phillippe Halsman - Archives des jésuites de France, CC BY-SA 3.0
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born in the Château of Sarcenat, on 1 May 1881, as the fourth of eleven children. He was educated at home by his devout Catholic mother and Librarian father.
He collected rocks, insects and plants and was encouraged in his nature studies by the family. He became almost obsessed with the natural world and saw God in all of creation. The solid objects of iron and stone reminded him of God’s permanence and solidity. He saw that he could have a relationship with God through God’s creation.
When he was twelve, he went to the Jesuit College of Mongre in Villefranche-sur-Saône, where he completed a Bachelor Degree in Philosophy and Mathematics. In 1899, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Aix-en-Provence.
For the next four years he studied in Hasting in the UK. He was very much influenced by the work of Charles Darwin on evolution and also Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson, about which he wrote that "the only effect that brilliant book had upon me was to provide fuel at just the right moment, and very briefly, for a fire that was already consuming my heart and mind." Bergson's ideas were influential on his views on matter, life, and energy. On 24 August 1911, aged 30, he was ordained as a Jesuit priest.
From 1912 to 1914, Teilhard worked in the palaeontology laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History, France, studying the mammals of the middle Tertiary period. Mobilised in December 1914, Teilhard served in World War 1 as a stretcher-bearer in the 8th Moroccan Rifles. For his valour, he received several citations, including the Médaille militaire and the Legion of Honor.
During the war he first started writing about his thoughts on the development of humanity and of creation of the earth and universe. He wrote letters to his cousin, Marguerite Teillard-Chambon, who later published a collection of them.
In 1916 he wrote his first essay, La Vie Cosmique (Cosmic life), where his scientific and philosophical thought was shown to be very mystical. In 1919 he wrote The Spiritual Power of Matter. He then entered the University of Paris where he obtained degrees in Geology, Botany and Zoology and became a Palaeontologist. In 1922 he became an Assistant Professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris and lectured in Geology. At the same time as this scientific study, he was also continuing his study with the Jesuits and saw no conflict between science and religion, indeed he felt that the one complemented and verified the other.
In 1923 the Jesuits sent him to China where he worked as a Palaeontologist in his spare time, as well as being a Jesuit missionary and teacher. He was also part of the team who did excavations and discovered Peking Man. The church didn’t like the way his thoughts were going and later forbade him to teach, and concentrate on his geological research in China. There he wrote numerous essays on his thoughts about his findings.
He went back to France for a while but later returned to China where he stayed for 20 years and worked on his books The Divine Milieu and his main work, The Phenomenon of Man. The Vatican forbade him to publish any of his books or mystical writings as they couldn’t reconcile his ideas on creation with the Church’s concept of creation at that time.
During all these years, Teilhard contributed considerably to an international network of research in human palaeontology related to the whole of eastern and south-eastern Asia and the ongoing excavations of the Peking Man.
On 15 March 1955, at the house of his diplomat cousin Jean de Lagarde, Teilhard told friends he hoped he would die on Easter Sunday. On the evening of Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, during an animated discussion at the apartment of Rhoda de Terra, his personal assistant since 1949, Teilhard suffered a heart attack and died.
During all the years of his work, research and writing, the Catholic Church continued to forbid him to publish. Fortunately, he left all his writings in his will to Rhoda de Terra and she published them all soon after his death.
Guest speaker at our retreat, Adriana, shared with us that Kathleen Duffy explained Teilhard’s view of the cosmos as a series of circles of creation.
Teilhard’s View of the Cosmos
The first circle was the Circle of Iron and Stone. The birth of matter.
The second circle was the Circle of Consistency. Energy is in all matter and is what holds it together. He saw God as this Divine Energy. It isn’t a static energy but a spinning, vibrating moving force. It is growing towards the completion of God’s plan for creation. Everything is made up of atoms in every increasing complexity, forming structures - rocks, crystals, plants, animals, humans. Then it breaks down again into its component parts and is then reformed over and over again. This is the cycle of creation/birth/death/decay. Even though this process causes suffering and loss, it is necessary for life and creation to continue to evolve and grow. We may become dust, but we are just reintegrated into the matter of the earth and the cosmos. When Jesus died on the cross it was the way for him to be resurrected into his new, energetic body. He was changed from just an ordinary human being. We know he was different because Mary Magdalene didn’t recognise him at the empty tomb.
Circle Three is the Circle of Consistence. All things are interdependent and depend on each other for their being. I am a mother because I have children. I am a wife because I have a husband. We need each other for our identity. Divine consistency holds everything together in relationships, just as covalent bonds hold atoms together. Human relationships hold people and communities together. God holds everything together.
Circle Four is the Circle of Spirit. Universal Consciousness. Teilhard described love as an energetic force. So far as we currently know, man is the only creature with consciousness that can reflect on itself and its place in the cosmos. But he says that other forms of creation are evolving along a path towards this same consciousness. He talks about a global consciousness and we are seeing that today with the development of technology. We have access to all knowledge from around the world via the internet and who knows what will be developed next.
Circle Five is the Circle of Person. The world is becoming Christ’s body. Cosmic convergence and Christ’s emergence. Richard Rohr also wrote about this in his book The Universal Christ.
Teilhard saw the whole world evolving in a sequence leading towards the second coming of Christ and he called this the Omega Point. He says that Christ was before all creation began and he is the end point of the evolving cosmos where we will no longer live our self-centred lives but will all be one in Christ with one purpose, which is the glory of God.
Adriana also gave us exercises to do in our free time. These included a nature walk where she invited us to really observe what we were seeing and be aware of our breath, that as we breathed out, the trees and plants were breathing our breath in - the interconnectedness of us and the natural world. She invited us to look at times of chaos in our lives and were these times opportunities for change and growth.
She gave us a reflection on one of Teilhard’s quotes from The Divine Milieu, which I personally found quite lovely. It was:
“Now the earth can certainly clasp me in her giant arms. She can swell me with her life or take me back into her dust. She can deck herself out for me with every charm, with every horror, with every mystery. She can intoxicate me with her perfume of tangibility and unity. She can cast me to my knees in expectation of what is maturing in her breast. But her enchantments can no longer do me harm, since she has become for me, over and above herself, the body of him who is and of him who is coming.”
