Word: teilhardisms
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...World War I, those knapsack-carried notebooks of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin contained the essence of many innovative theories, including his central concept of human evolution progressing toward an "Omega point," an ultimate unity in Christ. When elaborated upon in later writings, these ideas proved so unsettling that church officials forbade him to publish them. As a result, during his lifetime Teilhard was celebrated only as a paleontologist who worked on the Peking man discovery. It was not until after his death 20 years ago this week that his philosophical works (among them: The Phenomenon of Man, Christianity...
Break a Shell. Teilhard's diary remained unpublished even longer, partly because his Jesuit colleagues were embarrassed about his ecclesiastical candor (e.g., a complaint about the church's "egoism, cultivated idleness, ridiculous self-satisfaction"). Only in 1971 did the Teilhard family agree to publication of the notebooks. The first of two volumes will appear in Paris next month. The intimate, unguarded diary, which fleshes out the previously released wartime essays and letters to his cousin, will be essential reading for Teilhard aficionados...
...Corporal Teilhard, the war was a "baptism in reality." The theological musings in the diary amount to a rough draft of The Divine Milieu, the 1926-27 treatise (finally published in 1957) in which Teilhard formally set out his view of God as a "center" who "fills the whole sphere" of creation. Despite his disclaimers, the church found this idea dangerously akin to pantheism, the idea that God and the universe are identical. A comment on the last day of July 1916 summarizes his lifelong attempt to reconcile Catholicism and modern science: "My mission = very humbly but ceaselessly to take...
...first pages of the diary read like the usual soldier's notebook, but for much of the rest, the wretched drudgery of rescuing bodies, dead and half living, is unmentioned. In fact, Teilhard's cosmic philosophy had the disconcerting result of making the horror of war almost benign. On Sept. 21,1917, he wrote that warfare creates "a certain superhuman atmosphere where life takes on an interest out of proportion with the preoccupations of ordinary existence...
...undermine the defined teachings on church authority. Technically, the statement was a monitum, a warning against serious error. Such silencings, and sterner measures, were once routine. But last week's was the first monitum against an individual theologian since 1962, when the Vatican posthumously condemned the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin...