A Jesuit Philosopher of Joy
by Deacon John Linsenmeyer
How could you not warm to a man, a scientist of note, who wrote: “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”  That was Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., one of my favorite Jesuits. He was born in the Chateau de Sarcenet near Clermont-Ferrand in 1881 and died at the Jesuit Residence at St Ignatius on Park Avenue, NYC, on Easter Sunday [April 10], 1955. In his Jesuit Formation in France and England, he came to synthesize his scientific, philosophical and theological knowledge in light of evolution. His scientific training was as a paleontologist and he concluded that the principle of evolution was universal throughout creation, including in the spiritual realm.

 His career was interrupted by World War I in which he was drafted as an enlisted man, since the anticlerical French regime of the day did not exempt ordained clergy.  He served as a ‘medic’ with the 8th Moroccan Rifles, so heroically that he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur. Then after the War, he spent about twenty years as a paleontologist in China and Mongolia , work which including participating in the discovery of Peking Man, fossil specimens of a hominid ancestor who lived an astonishing 750,000 years ago. He found this work so elevating that he said, “Research is the highest form of adoration,” that is, to study the realities of God’s world is to praise its Creator. And all the time he was developing his thought on evolution. He concluded that “This world, this palpable world, is a truth a holy place.”

He said “Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient...Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you.” Naturally, being original as well as profound in his thinking, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, SJ was in constant trouble with the haughty scolds in the Curias of Popes Pius XI and XII, especially with the aggressive Cardinal Ottaviana, who, it seems to me, never met an idea he didn’t understand that he didn’t immediately brand heretical. So, Fr. Pierre was constantly being forbidden to publish. 

He never wavered in his faith, submitted in Holy Obedience to this intellectual brutality, and went on to write: “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”