Word: teilhardisms
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...death Teilhard was known to the public largely as the "missing link" priest, the handsome, aristocratic paleontologist who helped to analyze the Peking Man and other protohuman skulls unearthed in China. But there was also a hidden Teilhard: the writer-mystic who integrated his scientific and spiritual passions into a grandly eccentric philosophy of the evolutionary progress of mankind. During his lifetime, only a narrow Catholic elite was aware of this private Teilhard. Wary of his ideas, and prodded by Vatican censors, the Society of Jesus, Teilhard's then deeply conservative religious order, forbade him to publish his books...
Shortly after his death, however, friends arranged for the publication of his major work, The Phenomenon of Man. Other hitherto suppressed books soon followed. Teilhard became a theological sensation just as the Catholic Church was entering the period of intellectual freedom stirred by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65. Since then, the Teilhard boom has waned considerably, though he continues to have a strong following-a cult, some would say -in many areas, notably France...
...Teilhard is still widely celebrated among Catholics as one of the church's major doctrinal martyr figures in the decades prior to Vatican II. His then unpublished writings were deemed so threatening that they were implicitly attacked in Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII's 1950 encyclical against dangerous opinions about the evolution of mankind. In 1962 the Vatican went so far as to publicly censure Teilhard by name in a so-called monitum (warning...
Omega Point. The Jesuit priest-scientist's following may expand with the publication of Teilhard (Doubleday, 360 pages, $10), the first full-scale biography of him in English in a decade. The book, by Freelance Writers (and sisters) Mary and Ellen Lukas, is not the full-dress exposition of Teilhard's thought that English Actor-Author Robert Speaight achieved in his 1967 Life of Teilhard de Chardin. The Lukases' reportage tells of the man behind the legend, providing much new material culled from ten years of interviewing Teilhard's friends and acquaintances...
...Teilhard never recanted his basic notion about the existence of a spiritual reality that suffused all matter (man and animals included) and had evolved into a "noosphere"-his term for a layer of human awareness that enveloped the earth like some psychic biosphere. As this envelopment progressed, Teilhard believed, man would eventually transcend his individualism and converge at the "Omega Point" with the Omega -God. Instead of God's creation at the beginning of time, Teilhard emphasized instead his ongoing and future creative activity. To orthodox critics, this vision destroyed the distinction between man and nature, and veered perilously...