The Noosphere Revisited

During his lifetime (1881-1955), Jesuit Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin achieved a professional reputation as a distinguished paleontologist and one of the discoverers of Peking man. Since the publication of The Phenomenon of Man (TIME, Dec. 14, 1959), its author has emerged as one of the century's most remarkably prophetic thinkers, an Aquinas of the atomic era. For Teilhard was not only a scientist who studied the world's past. He was also a philosopher-mystic who saw man evolving toward the ultimate encounter with what Teilhard, ever groping for new ways to express ancient truth, called the "Omega point." Other men have called it God.



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Teilhard's life was branded with personal disappointment. He loved his native France as much as his scientific research, but obeyed when his superiors exiled him to long years of field work in Asia and Africa. His order also forbade him to teach or publish his nontechnical writing on evolution and theology—partly to spare him censure from the Holy Office. Nonetheless, Teilhard never lost his boundless optimism, which pulsates through the latest of his posthumous works, a collection of 22 essays called The Future of Man .

Six of these studies, written between 1920 and 1952, have never been published before; most of the rest saw brief light in scholarly European journals with modest circulations. Lucid and exuberant, they serve as useful footnotes to the grand themes of The Phenomenon of Man, and as testimony to the range of his interests. He could write with equal insight on the spiritual implications of the atomic age, the biological basis of the democratic spirit, the nature of Christian education.

The essays illumine one of Teilhard's central beliefs: evolution has not stopped, but has merely shifted its emphasis from the material to the spiritual. "Life is ceaseless discovery," he wrote. "Life is movement." First, from layers of earthly matter billions of years old, evolved the biosphere, the realm of living organisms. But with man, argued Teilhard, came also what he calls the noosphere (from the Greek word for mind: noos, pronounced no-os), the realm of thought and spirit.

The reality of evolution in the noosphere, Teilhard believed, is reflected in the mushrooming of knowledge, research, thought, technological advance. He was convinced that this "eruption of interior life" would lead man—inevitably but freely—toward a new era of planetary unity, and thereafter, at the culmination of history, toward a meeting with God.

Thus Teilhard discerned man's future with expectation and delight. Although he lived through two world wars, he argued prophetically that such social upheavals were merely the birth pangs of a new and greater era. "Every new war," he wrote in 1945 in The Planetisation of Mankind, "embarked upon by the nations for the purpose of detaching themselves from one another, merely results in their being bound and mingled together in a more inextricable knot. The more we seek to thrust each other away, the more do we interpenetrate."

This interpenetration, Teilhard believed, would unite even those men with apparently implacable hostilities. Man, he wrote in 1949, "is not yet zoologically mature." Perhaps, he suggested, the Christian faith and a God-rejecting belief in man need each other to reach their full development; the God rejected by Marx might prove to be a "pseudo-God," an image created by man, that would be stripped away to reveal the true divine reality. In Teilhard's eyes, the real division of mankind was between those who welcomed the future and those who feared it.

Many scientists are disturbed by Teilhard's works, which often shift disconcertingly from geological and biological realities to metaphysical conjecture. Nonetheless, his influence and impact have continued to grow, and he remains the contemporary Christian thinker who speaks most tellingly to the secular mind. An international committee of intellectuals, including Metahistorian Arnold Toynbee, French Minister of Culture André Malraux and Biologist Sir Julian Huxley, is sponsoring the publication of his collected works; the three Teilhard volumes previously published in the U.S. have sold 150,000 copies.

In Rome, which has so often scorned its own prophets in life and embraced them in death, there are signs of a thawing attitude toward Teilhard. Although the faithful have twice been warned against dangers in his work, Popes John XXIII and Paul VI have privately acknowledged his greatness. His fellow Jesuits have pioneered in the further study of Teilhard's thought; last August, for example, Fordham University held a well-attended conference on his work. Says Father Robert Francoeur, a biologist and executive coordinator of the newly formed American Teilhard de Chardin Association: "Teilhard was a pioneer in many areas of thought—the nature of creation, the relationship of body and soul, original sin, the meaning of man's personality. Of course, some of his terms have to be clarified. But in general his vision seems valid, and a coherent system is being developed out of it."

 Da: TIME Magazine

Friday, Oct. 16, 1964