Faith in action
Posted on Saturday, May 10, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Religion/225324/
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
1881 – 1955 What he did: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin first went to China in 1923 as something of an exile.
For years, the Jesuit priest had irritated his superiors in Rome with his support of Darwin’s theory of evolution and his rejection of a literal Adam and Eve.
The Catholic Church hoped to halt the dissemination of Teilhard’s ideas by banishing him far from Europe. Instead, Teilhard ended up helping to unearth a crucial piece of evidence for Darwin’s theory.
Teilhard grew up on a prosperous family estate in central France, where from an early age he took an interest in the area’s rock formations. But after reading Thomas a Kempis ’ Imitation of Christ, Teilhard found he was more interested in religion than rocks. He decided to join the Society of Jesus.
Teilhard remained faithful even after an anti-clerical movement in 1901 forced him and other members of religious orders to flee France. He was ordained a priest in 1911 in Hastings, England.
He taught physics for a time in Egypt before eventually returning to France. He saved lives as a medic and stretcher-bearer in the brutal trenches of World War I, and received a French medal for his valor. He ultimately earned a doctorate in paleontology at the Sorbonne.
Teilhard continually sought to reconcile the fossil record with his faith. But he rejected a literal understanding of original sin — that is, that humans inherited sin through Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God. He viewed the Fall described in Genesis as a metaphor for all human failings. Wary of his lectures and essays, Jesuit authorities sent him to a Jesuit school on the Chinese coast about 80 miles from the city then known as Peking.
There, in 1929, Teilhard served as a scientific adviser to the team that discovered the skeleton of “Peking Man,” a 500, 000-year-old example of a Homo erectus (upright-walking man ). Teilhard played a key role in dating the skull. The fossil was far older than remains discovered earlier of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. Scientists soon recognized Peking Man as a “missing link” between humans and apes. His impact: The landmark discovery did not end Teilhard’s trouble with church officials. Throughout the rest of his life, his articles and books were heavily edited. Rome sometimes denied him permission to publish at all.
But the church never condemned Teilhard, and Teilhard never ceased his efforts to bridge evolution and theology. “There is a communion with God,” he wrote, “and a communion with the earth, and a communion with God through the earth.”
The Second Vatican Council led to greater acceptance of Teilhard’s teachings. By the 1980 s, the Jesuit’s rehabilitation was complete when Pope John Paul II made one of Teilhard’s main defenders a cardinal. Ultimately, his writings contributed to greater respect for Darwin’s theory in the Catholic Church. CONTEXT
1865: After experimenting with pea plants, Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel outlines the principles of heredity in two lectures.
1871: British naturalist Charles Darwin publishes The Descent of Man, which applies his theory of natural selection to humans.
1925: In the famed “monkey trial,” teacher John Scopes is found guilty of violating Tennessee’s ban on teaching evolution.
1959: At Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, Mary Leakey discovers a 1. 75 millionyear-old skull that belonged to an australopithecine.
1996: In an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II stresses the Catholic Church’s support for the study of evolution and urges fruitful dialogue between religion and science. SOURCES: The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution and the Search for Peking Man by Amir D. Aczel (Penguin Group, 2007 ); entry on Teilhard in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of the Christian Church by E. A. Livingstone (Oxford University Press, 2000 ); frequently asked questions at the Web site of the British Teilhard Association at www. teilhard. org. uk; and “Teilhard de Chardin: A Short Biography” by John and Mary Evelyn Grim at the Web site of the American Teilhard Association at www. teilharddechardin. org