We turn finally to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's essay, The Cosmic Life, provides a starting point for consideration of his life and thought written in 1916 while he was a stretcher bear in World War I. The essay concludes, "There is a communion with God, and a communion with the Earth, and a communion with God through the Earth." Imagine this was written in the trenches during the First World War. This communion experience hearkens back to John's Gospel and it's opening emphasis on the word logos, yet it is a radical turn because of Teilhard commitment to an understanding of evolution as an unfolding process with spiritual implications. One of Teilhard's lasting contributions then was his articulation of human life as manifesting and manifested in the larger story of the Earth and the universe. This was because of his profound belief in the Cosmic Christ. He writes, "Christ has a cosmic body that extends throughout the universe." Teilhard's understanding of the incarnation follow John's Gospel that Christ was the Logos in all things. He writes, "The great cosmic attributes of Christ, those which particularly in St. John and St. Paul, accord him a universal and final primacy over creation. These attributes only assume their full dimension in the setting of evolution that is both spiritual and convergent." He also writes, "Through the incarnation of God descended into nature in order to super animate and take it back to him " Teilhard was trained as a Jesuit priest and remained in this religious order until he died in 1955. He was educated as a paleontologist, a student of early life fossils. He was able to integrate these two fields of religion and science. They provided him with the thoughtful stimulation for a life of devotion to scientific investigation of the Earth and to cultivation of a vision of a sacred Universe. Central to Teilhard's thinking was evolution, which became much more than a scientific concept for him. From the French philosopher, Henri Bergson's book, Creative Evolution, Teilhard received a dynamic vision of evolution. For Bergson, evolution was continually expanding, a tide of life, as he described it, undirected, however, by an ultimate purpose. Teilhard would eventually disagree with Bergson, with respect to the direction of the universe. Later he put forward his own interpretation of the evolutionary process based on his religious life and his years of field work. While accepted as a world-class paleontologist, Teilhard struggled with the Catholic Church, which at that time did not accept the theory of evolution. Gradually, Teilhard realized that the great need of the church was, as he says, to present dogma in a more real, more universal way, a more cosmogonic way. He was convinced that if he had understood evolution, as he felt he had, then that understanding would shine forth despite the obstacles. This is because he believed deeply in the power of seeing. This is what began his primary work, human evolution, these words "Seeing. One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing. If not ultimately, at least essentially. To be more is to be more united. Unity grows, and we will affirm this again, only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, a vision. That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes at the heart of a cosmos where it is always possible to discern more. See or perish. This is a situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence, and thus, to a higher degree, this is the human condition." Magnificent lines for his life work on how the human fit into the larger process of evolution it is in this period that Teilhard began to use the term of Edward Seuss, biosphere or earth layer of living things, in his geological schema, along with the hydrosphere and the lithosphere. Teilhard then expanded the concept to include an additional Earth layer of thinking beings that along with the Russian thinker, Vladimir Vernadsky, he called the noosphere, from the Greek word nous, meaning mind. This noosphere of consciousness that he was referring to in that passage from Seeing. In 1928, the Jesuits, following a Vatican directive, told Teilhard that all his theological work must come to an end, it was too controversial, and that he was to confine himself to scientific work. In this oppressive atmosphere, Teilhard was exiled to China, where he continued his paleontological studies, indeed through the Second World War. It was for the next 18 years Teilhard was in exile in China, broken only by travel-related to his scientific work and five brief visits to France. The most significant accomplishment of this period, however was the completion of this major work on evolution, The Human Phenomenon, in 1940. An important contribution of this work is the creative manner in which it situates the emergence of the human as a unifying theme of evolutionary processes. The Human Phenomenon presents the fourfold sequence of the evolutionary process, namely galaxies and stars, the planets, life on Earth, and the emergence of reflexive consciousness in humans. Teilhard's pioneering work establishes a new integration then of religious ecology and religious cosmology in Christianity. His work goes on both here in the US and in France. He is followed by many, many people around the world as well
