From Newman through Teilhard and Beyond

Abstract

From Newman through Teilhard and Beyond Laura Eloe (bio) Nihil recipitur in aliquo nisi secundum proportionem recipientis. —I Sent. 8,5,3C Thomas aquinas reminds us in the first book of his commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences that nothing is received except according to the manner of the receiver. John Henry Newman's thought is no exception. How it was received by twentieth-century minds depended in part on the sort of minds that were the fertile ground in which his thought was planted. The purpose of this article is to investigate one of those minds, that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Jesuit priest, soldier, mystic, theologian, philosopher, and world-renowned paleontologist. One of Teilhard's biographers notes that "no book was more seminal to Teilhard's thinking than Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,"1 and the fact that Newman influenced the young Jesuit is widely reported in both the scholarly and popular literature on Teilhard. Considerably less has been written on the particularities of that influence; this study seeks to address some of those particularities. Careful reading of the primary sources makes it clear that Newman's thought was not simply appropriated by Teilhard. Nor was it only Newman's ideas that would influence the soldier-priest who was destined to become a lightning rod during the stormy years when the Church2 struggled to understand and articulate its relationship with "the world"; Newman's life and struggles found a home in Teilhard's reflections as well. This article's first task is to give a brief account of Teilhard's life and writing in order to paint a picture of the sort of mind that was encountering Newman's life and thought. The second task is to discuss particular aspects of Newman's life that captured Teilhard's imagination and inspired the sort of work he would do. The third task is to address how some of Teilhard's [End Page 51] ideas show compelling similarities to Newman's ideas, which were copied into Teilhard's war-time journal and about which he wrote to his cousin; some of these ideas received Teilhard's full assent, while others provided inspiration in some adapted form. Finally, this article will remark on how Newman's ideas as engaged by Teilhard are receiving renewed attention in our twenty-first-century context. teilhard's life and writing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. was, according to those who knew him, complex and fascinating. He was born 1 May 1881 in the family home in Sarcenat, a small village northwest of Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the Auvergne province of France. His mother, Berthe-Adèle, was a deeply pious woman who supervised her children's catechetical instruction and taught them to read. His father, Emmanuel, ran several estates but had time to teach the children Latin and direct their reading in the years before they left for secondary school. He was well-connected to the world of English naturalists, and he encouraged in his children a love of natural history and of making collections of natural objects.3 In the shelter of the self-sufficient society of his childhood family, Teilhard was immersed in the oneness of spirit and matter that would characterize his life's work. "On a wall in the drawing room at Sarcenat," noted another of his biographers, "hung a picture representing Christ offering his heart to the world. From the window of the same room one looked out on a vista of volcanic hills. These two, the Sacred Heart and the firm earth, molded Pierre and set the pattern his life would follow."4 In April of 1892, just before his eleventh birthday, Teilhard left his family to begin his secondary education as a boarder at the École Libre de Notre-Dame de Mongré in Villefranche-sur-Saône, nearly one hundred miles from home. The Jesuit-run school was a leader in France for education in the natural sciences, especially physics. The Jesuits claimed to teach their students the "sanctifcation of science through religion and the service of religion by science, a relatively advanced formula at that time," but the primary...