The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin, Part I

Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was one of the great Christian thinkers of the 20th century. He was a Catholic priest, a member of the Society of Jesus. He was also a leading paleontologist, geologist, and expert on biological evolution.

One might think that the scientific work of this great Frenchman was contradictory to his Christian faith, in that the theory of evolution seems to contradict the biblical account of creation in the book of Genesis. But Teilhard recognized that the seeming contradiction was a false one. He wrote several books about the subject. The overarching theme of these books was that sciences of evolution, properly understood, were testimony to the reality of Christian hope.

(How do you say his name? "pee-YARE tay-ARE duh shar-DAÑ" comes close. The final "Ñ" is nasalized. "Teilhard" is his surname, by the way, not "Chardin.")

Teilhard saw the evolution of life on Earth, culminating in our species of conscious living beings, as a crucial part of the development of the universe. It reveals the hidden pattern in cosmic history. Everything is converging! Instead of simply collapsing, instead of just dissolving in an outward direction, instead of moving ineluctably toward the nothingness physicists speak of as entropy, it is, in a more complex and esoteric way, moving inward. History, said Teilhard, is converging toward a central, cosmic resolution.

Calling it the "Omega Point," he identified this beneficent culmination of all cosmic history with Christ. Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and the New Testament was written in Greek. The New Testament, at its culmination in the book of Revelation, speaks of the "Second Coming" of Christ. For Teilhard, this Second Coming was the convergence of all cosmic history into one supernal Omega Point.

Philosophers seek to know the "absolute," and theologians identify God with the absolute. Teilhard identified the absolute with Christ as the Omega Point of the history of Creation.

Rather than being just some cold, impersonal abstraction, the Omega Point, said Teilhard, is personal and loving. And it is "supremely present" to us in the here and now. As conscious, intelligent creatures, we who are all already "in Christ" can knowingly participate in the convergence of cosmic history toward the Omega Point.

More later, in "The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin, Part II" ...