POPE FRANCIS has sparked a revolution in the Catholic Church with his encyclical “Laudato Si.” The encyclical speaks about the environment and ecology. How do we deal with the environment today? Francis calls for us to love Creation. He mentions Teilhard de Chardin, who believed in the evolution of the universe. With his theory, Chardin himself also triggered a revolution in the Church. I did some research on him, and I would like to mention here some highlights of his life.
Chardin was a mystic and a scientist. Born on May 1, 1881, in France, he entered the Order of the Jesuits at the age of 18. He became famous for working out a profound theological synthesis, integrating the theory of evolution with his own cosmic vision of Christianity. To him, evolution is an ongoing process of unfolding the potentialities of matter and energy of simple life forms into ever more complex organisms which culminate in the human consciousness. This process must continue to its final destination which he called the Omega Point. As a Christian, he identified this Omega with Christ, the beginning and end of history. In Jesus, God-made-flesh, we had a guarantee of our ultimate destiny. Here the Spirit of God and the principle of matter were definitively joined.
Chardin had a strong devotion to the Holy Eucharist. During World War I (1914-1918) he served courageously as a stretcher-bearer in the battlefield against the Germans. He described an experience that occurred as he sat in a chapel near the battlefield, meditating on the consecrated host. It seemed as if the energy of God’s incarnate love expanded to fill the room, and ultimately to encompass the battlefield and the entire universe. In “Hymn to Matter,” he wrote: Blessed to you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you would force us to work if we would eat… Blessed be you, mortal matter! Without your onslaughts, without your uprooting of us, we should remain ignorant of ourselves and of God.
Chardin was thrilled with the idea that through work in the world, human beings were participating in the ongoing extension and conservation of God’s creation.
Many times while on the road, he lacked the requirements for Mass. Because of this, with his devotion to the Eucharist, he was inspired to write his “Mass on the World”: “Since once again, Lord… I have neither bread nor wine nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and suffering of the world.”
Chardin’s last “exile” and final years were spent in New York. He had wished “to die on the day of the Resurrection.” So it came to pass: He died on April 10, 1955, Easter Sunday. In dying, his vision was at last released to the world: The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
—ARNOLD VAN VUGT, nolvanvugt@gmail.com