region. As a young man he experienced three passionate callings: the priesthood, science, and Paris. He was the sort of worldly priest European hostesses at the turn of the century died for: tall, dark, and handsome, and aristocratic on top of that, with beautifully tailored black clerical suits and masculinity to burn. His athletic body and ruddy complexion he came by honestly, from the outdoor life he led as a paleontologist in archaeological digs all over the world. And the way that hard, lean, weathered face of his would break into a confidential smile when he met a pretty woman—by all accounts, every other woman in le monde swore she would be the one to separate this glamorous Jesuit from his vows.
For Teilhard also had glamour to burn, three kinds of it. At the age of thirty-two he had been the French star of the most sensational archaeological find of all time, the Piltdown man, the so-called missing link in the evolution of ape to man, in a dig near Lewes, England, led by the Englishman Charles Dawson. One year later, when World War I broke out, Teilhard refused the chance to serve as a chaplain in favor of going to the front as a stretcher bearer rescuing the wounded in the midst of combat. He was decorated for bravery in that worst-of-allinfantry-wars’ bloodiest battles: Ypres, Artois, Verdun, Villers-Cotterêts, and the Marne. Meantime, in the lulls between battles he had begun
writing the treatise with which he hoped to unify all of science and all of religion, all of matter and all of spirit, heralding God’s plan to turn all the world, from inert rock to humankind, into a single sublime Holy Spirit.
“With the evolution of Man,” he wrote, “a new law of Nature has come into force—that of convergence.” Biological evolution had created step one, “expansive convergence.” Now, in the twentieth century, by means of technology, God was creating “compressive convergence.” Thanks to technology, “the hitherto scattered” species Homo sapiens was being united by a single “nervous system for humanity,” a “living membrane,” a single “stupendous thinking machine,” a unified consciousness that would cover the earth like “a thinking skin,” a “noösphere,” to use Teilhard’s favorite neologism. And just what technology was going to bring about this convergence, this noosphere? On this point, in later years, Teilhard was quite specific: radio, television, the telephone, and “those astonishing electronic computers, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second.”
One can think whatever one wants about Teilhard’s theology, but no one can deny his stunning prescience. When he died in 1955, television was in its infancy and there was no such thing as a computer you could buy ready-made. Computers were huge, hellishly expensive, made-to-order machines as big as a suburban living room and bristling with vacuum tubes that gave off an unbearable heat. Since the microchip and the microprocessor had not yet been invented, no one was even speculating about a personal computer in every home, much less about combining the personal computer with the telephone to create an entirely new medium of communication. Half a century ago, only Teilhard foresaw what is now known as the Internet.
What Teilhard’s superiors in the Society of Jesus and the Church hierarchy thought about it all in the 1920s, however, was not much. The plain fact was that Teilhard accepted the Darwinian theory of evolution. He argued that biological evolution had been nothing more than God’s first step in an infinitely grander design. Nevertheless, he accepted it. When Teilhard had first felt his call to the priesthood, it had
been during the intellectually liberal papacy of Leo XIII. But by the 1920s the pendulum had swung back within the Church, and evolutionism was not acceptable in any guise. At this point began the central dilemma, the great sorrow—the tragedy, I am tempted to say—of
For Teilhard also had glamour to burn, three kinds of it. At the age of thirty-two he had been the French star of the most sensational archaeological find of all time, the Piltdown man, the so-called missing link in the evolution of ape to man, in a dig near Lewes, England, led by the Englishman Charles Dawson. One year later, when World War I broke out, Teilhard refused the chance to serve as a chaplain in favor of going to the front as a stretcher bearer rescuing the wounded in the midst of combat. He was decorated for bravery in that worst-of-allinfantry-wars’ bloodiest battles: Ypres, Artois, Verdun, Villers-Cotterêts, and the Marne. Meantime, in the lulls between battles he had begun
writing the treatise with which he hoped to unify all of science and all of religion, all of matter and all of spirit, heralding God’s plan to turn all the world, from inert rock to humankind, into a single sublime Holy Spirit.
“With the evolution of Man,” he wrote, “a new law of Nature has come into force—that of convergence.” Biological evolution had created step one, “expansive convergence.” Now, in the twentieth century, by means of technology, God was creating “compressive convergence.” Thanks to technology, “the hitherto scattered” species Homo sapiens was being united by a single “nervous system for humanity,” a “living membrane,” a single “stupendous thinking machine,” a unified consciousness that would cover the earth like “a thinking skin,” a “noösphere,” to use Teilhard’s favorite neologism. And just what technology was going to bring about this convergence, this noosphere? On this point, in later years, Teilhard was quite specific: radio, television, the telephone, and “those astonishing electronic computers, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second.”
One can think whatever one wants about Teilhard’s theology, but no one can deny his stunning prescience. When he died in 1955, television was in its infancy and there was no such thing as a computer you could buy ready-made. Computers were huge, hellishly expensive, made-to-order machines as big as a suburban living room and bristling with vacuum tubes that gave off an unbearable heat. Since the microchip and the microprocessor had not yet been invented, no one was even speculating about a personal computer in every home, much less about combining the personal computer with the telephone to create an entirely new medium of communication. Half a century ago, only Teilhard foresaw what is now known as the Internet.
What Teilhard’s superiors in the Society of Jesus and the Church hierarchy thought about it all in the 1920s, however, was not much. The plain fact was that Teilhard accepted the Darwinian theory of evolution. He argued that biological evolution had been nothing more than God’s first step in an infinitely grander design. Nevertheless, he accepted it. When Teilhard had first felt his call to the priesthood, it had
been during the intellectually liberal papacy of Leo XIII. But by the 1920s the pendulum had swung back within the Church, and evolutionism was not acceptable in any guise. At this point began the central dilemma, the great sorrow—the tragedy, I am tempted to say—of
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