Word: teilhardisms
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During his lifetime (1881-1955), Jesuit Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin achieved a professional reputation as a distinguished paleontologist and one of the discoverers of Peking man. Since the publication of The Phenomenon of Man (TIME, Dec. 14, 1959), its author has emerged as one of the century's most remarkably prophetic thinkers, an Aquinas of the atomic era. For Teilhard was not only a scientist who studied the world's past. He was also a philosopher-mystic who saw man evolving toward the ultimate encounter with what Teilhard, ever groping for new ways to express ancient truth...
...Teilhard's life was branded with personal disappointment. He loved his native France as much as his scientific research, but obeyed when his superiors exiled him to long years of field work in Asia and Africa. His order also forbade him to teach or publish his nontechnical writing on evolution and theology-partly to spare him censure from the Holy Office. Nonetheless, Teilhard never lost his boundless optimism, which pulsates through the latest of his posthumous works, a collection of 22 essays called The Future of Man (Harper...
...essays illumine one of Teilhard's central beliefs: evolution has not stopped, but has merely shifted its emphasis from the material to the spiritual. "Life is ceaseless discovery," he wrote. "Life is movement." First, from layers of earthly matter billions of years old, evolved the biosphere, the realm of living organisms. But with man, argued Teilhard, came also what he calls the noosphere (from the Greek word for mind: noos, pronounced no-os), the realm of thought and spirit...
...reality of evolution in the noosphere, Teilhard believed, is reflected in the mushrooming of knowledge, research, thought, technological advance. He was convinced that this "eruption of interior life" would lead man-inevitably but freely-toward a new era of planetary unity, and thereafter, at the culmination of history, toward a meeting with...
Uniting the Implacable. Thus Teilhard discerned man's future with expectation and delight. Although he lived through two world wars, he argued prophetically that such social upheavals were merely the birth pangs of a new and greater era. "Every new war," he wrote in 1945 in The Planetisation of Mankind, "embarked upon by the nations for the purpose of detaching themselves from one another, merely results in their being bound and mingled together in a more inextricable knot. The more we seek to thrust each other away, the more do we interpenetrate...