Word: teilhard
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Like James Joyce or Sigmund Freud, the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and paleontologist, has become an inescapable intellectual presence of the age. Until, and even after, his death in 1955, the Vatican forbade the publication of his nonscientific works, largely because he accepted evolution as the key to human history. In the eyes of Rome, Teilhard remains a near heretic. Last month the Holy Office issued a solemn warning for religious superiors "to guard souls, especially of the young, against the dangers contained in the works of Father Teilhard de Chardin and his followers...
This evolutionary striving, he feels, is the means and end and sanction of life. In this, he has been strongly influenced by the thought of the late French Jesuit philosopher-anthropologist, Father Teilhard de Chardin (TIME, Feb. 10). "But the striving and aspiring must be social to be fruitful." Vercors insists. "The yogi working by himself for himself is a dead end. In my book, the forms and standards of society are represented by Richwick-that's why he may seem something of a prig. But it is these very forms, personified in Richwick, that give Sylva a direction...
...Teilhard is not addressing firm-in-the-faith Christians, he writes, but "the waverers, both inside and outside" the church, "whose education or instinct leads them to listen primarily to the voices of the earth." His book's dedication is: "For those who love the world...
...Labor of Seaweed. Teilhard was certainly one of them. He writes: "A thought, a material improvement, a harmony, a particular expression of love, the enchanting complexity of a smile or a look, all the new beauties that appear for the first time, in me or around me . . . I cherish them like children and cannot believe that they will die entirely in the flesh...
...Christianity, Teilhard believes, teaches that these things indeed do not die, but play their part in the continuing work of God with man-the spiritualization of the universe. "The labor of seaweed as it concentrates in its tissues the substances dispersed, in infinitesimal quantities, throughout the vast layers of the ocean; the industry of bees as they make honey from the juices scattered in so many flowers-these are but pale images of the continuous process of elaboration which all the forces of the universe undergo in us in order to become spirit...