[Teilhard interviewed by Marcel Brion]
Les Nouvelles Littéraires, Thursday, January 11, 1951, pages 1 and 4
What follows is a translation of Marcel Brion’s interview with Teilhard de Chardin preceded by some notes on the historical context of the interview.
The Context of Teilhard’s Interview with Marcel Brion
In a letter dated January 28, 1951, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) wrote to his fellow priest and close friend Pierre Leroy (1900-1992):
“In a long interview (‘A Meeting with’) which appeared in the Nouvelles Littéraries of January 11, I arranged with Marcel Brion (in a text I wrote up myself and [René] d’Ouince reviewed) to say that I want to make my real intellectual position public and to address the false interpretations (millennialism and “Hinduism”) which are too often given.”1
In view of this testimony, it is a fair guess that Teilhard presented Brion with a text which he used as a basis for questions. Brion seems familiar with parts of “Le Coeur de la Matière” (The Heart of Matter), Teilhard’s autobiographical essay, completed in October 1950. In fact, Teilhard’s answers concerning his childhood fascination with iron and stone are almost verbatim excerpts from the early part of that essay, published only after Teilhard’s death. Indeed, apart from more focused scientific studies, all the writings that most clearly express what Teilhard here calls his “real intellectual position” appeared posthumously. Yet, he was already enough of a celebrity to merit a front-page interview in a major French literary newspaper. The situation invites comment.
Teilhard’s work as a geologist and paleontologist (highlighted in the interview) made him famous, but from his earliest essays written during the First World War, he strove to express his ideas about the fertile interconnections between science and religion. It is a vision in which the cosmos is reframed as a cosmogenesis, an evolutionary process of ever more complex forms of life and mentality, animated by a divine spirit, consummated in a personalized center he called Omega. The latest stage in the process—characteristic of “the human phenomenon”—is where the threshold of reflective thought has been crossed. As for the relationship between God and creatures, Teilhard says that God does not so much make things as to make things make themselves.2 Teilhard’s religious superiors always prohibited him from publishing the works in which he promoted these (and other) bold ideas. Indeed, at times, the preservation of these writings was precarious, as Church authorities sometimes ordered them destroyed.3
Three women were especially important in preserving and disseminating Teilhard’s wider corpus of writings: first, during World War I, his cousin Marguerite Teillard-Chambon (1880-1959) (who wrote pseudonymously as Claude Aragonnès), second, his longtime friend Simone Bégouën (1897-1960), and finally, Jeanne Mortier (1892-1982). In 1928, Bégouën proposed to Teilhard to type his manuscripts; she effectively served as his archivist as his cousin had done during the war years. In February 1933, Bégouën suggested duplicating his writings (using a renotype machine) for distribution to the increasingly large network of his friends who were both in agreement with Catholic thought and largely open to the modern world.4 With a certain rebellious irony, Teilhard called these copies of his works clandestins.5 The project was a considerable “underground” publishing venture, as hundreds of copies were printed and sent out. In a May 1937 letter to Lucille Swan (1887-1965), Teilhard spoke of “a real clandestine shop” at Simone Bégouën’s residence in Paris.6 Bégouën mastered the practice of compiling and distributing the clandestins, but when she and her husband (Max) left Paris in 1940 to live in Casablanca, she passed the torch to Mortier. In a 1946 letter to Mortier, Teilhard suggested that she preserve “the Bégouën system.”7 Mortier became Teilhard’s literary executor and it was she who, immediately after Teilhard’s death, shepherded his works to publication, freed from the oversight of religious censors.
It is mistake to think of the distribution of the clandestins as a case of disloyalty on Teilhard’s part. To be sure, in order to become a Jesuit, Teilhard took a vow of obedience. It is a vow he respected, although, where the publication of his works was concerned, there was some leeway and the situation was not always under his control. Nothing prevented him from distributing lecture notes to students, and he was not prohibited from sharing lengthy essays and manuscripts with fellow scholars. Teilhard referred to these works as his “scientifico-philosophico-religious writings.” They circulated widely, especially when he returned to Paris from China where he had been stranded by the events of the Second World War. René d’Ouince recalls:
[Teilhard] was received as a prophet by a crowd of those he did not even know. . . . Not simply a Parisian personality, he was a sort of movie star in the intellectual world, especially among students. Suddenly, as if by magic, his unpublished work proliferated.8
Rome was not pleased. At the beginning of 1947, he received an order from his superior general to put an end to the circulation of texts that had not been submitted to the official censor. Teilhard’s best intentions notwithstanding, the situation was out of hand. D’Ouince, as Teilhard’s immediate superior, was obliged to enforce the order, despite his support for Teilhard’s cause. He says that he collected two or three hundred notebooks from a little dispensary and paid those who were distributing them for the cost of printing them. D’Ouince says that he destroyed a certain number, but sheltered the rest in the hope that the order would be lifted. He indicates that the Father General did not wish an auto-da-fé in which Teilhard’s works would disappear. In any event, d’Ouince asked and received permission to keep a complete set; he avers that he was not the only Jesuit to do so.9
After 1947, it became increasingly difficult to obtain the clandestins.10 Teilhard did not make it easy on anyone eager to broadcast his views. He refused an offer to issue a privately published edition of Le Milieu Divin. In addition, he discouraged anyone wishing to author a book on his thought, and he refused permission to quote longer extracts from Le phénomène humain. Finally, he declined an offer to be feted during his brief return to Paris in 1954.11 Until the very end, Teilhard cautioned Mortier to be discrete so as not to contravene the formal directions from Rome. In a letter of October 20, 1954, he counselled to continue working within the Church: “Nothing to do, I fear, except continue the old (and expensive) tactic. Keeping the fire under the cinders, patiently waiting for the regime to change.”12 The flame, however, was not so easily contained, for the clandestins had made him a cause célèbre with the liberal-leaning press, especially in France. In an August 1950 edition of Le Figaro Littéraire, André Billy of the Academy Goncourt referred to Teilhard as “our greatest prose poet.”13 Teilhard’s nervous superiors might at least have been happy to learn that Billy indicated the difficulty in obtaining Teilhard’s works. Be that as it may, Teilhard’s popularity was not so well received among conservative Catholic outlets.14 The founder of Pensée Catholique, L’Abbé Luc Lefèvre published a critique of Teilhard and his thought titled L’Evolution Rédemptrice du P. Teilhard de Chardin (The Redemptive Evolution of Father Teilhard de Chardin).15 This was the first book-length treatment of Teilhard of any sort, issued fully five years before the works Lefèvre is criticizing began to be published; Teilhard indicated that he did not recognize his thought in Lefèvre’s book.16
Teilhard welcomed the Nouvelles Littéraire interview as an opportunity to clarify his thought and to counteract the misunderstandings of it. However, it is notable that,
notwithstanding his strong convictions about what he called a metaphysics of union, the evolutionary significance of Christ, and his belief in an Omega point of the evolutionary process, none of these ideas are specifically mentioned. In a word, he continued to walk the fine line—which in his less public pronouncements he criticized as artificial—between his religious vision of cosmogenesis and phenomena as they are available to science.
Teilhard’s unabashed public mention of Piltdown as one of two great opportunities in his career carries special interest. Almost three years after the interview, Piltdown Man was revealed as a hoax. Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) thought that Teilhard was complicit. Part of his case against Teilhard was how rarely he mentioned Piltdown in his scientific works. Gould considered this lacuna “inexplicable to the point of perversity . . .”17 In light of the Brion interview, this argument carries much less, if any, weight. (See note 22 below for more on Piltdown.)
Brion’s interview with Teilhard is accompanied by a sketch of the two men in conversation drawn by the Swiss artist Roger Wild (1894-1987). It would seem to be a rare piece of Teilhardiana as it is not reproduced in the most well-known works by and about Teilhard, including the major biographies as well as the Teilhard de Chardin Album, designed and edited by Jeanne Mortier and Marie-Louise Aboux (London: Collins, 1966).
In the translation that follows, I include footnotes that provide some further clarification.
Donald Wayne Viney
July 14, 2023
Meeting with Father Teilhard de Chardin
[Teilhard interviewed by Marcel Brion]
Les Nouvelles Littéraires, Jeudi 11 Janvier 1951, pages 1 and 4
Thirty years ago, Frédéric Lefèvre began, under the title An hour with, which was to become so famous, a vast investigation which constitutes a veritable panorama of the French intellectual movement between the two wars. We wanted to mark this important anniversary in the life of our newspaper by undertaking a new series, entitled Meeting with, which will not only be a series of interviews with eminent personalities, but also critical studies of their work and an evocation of their life. Our collaborators Marcel Brion and Gabriel d’Aubarède will carry out these consultations by addressing writers, philosophers, historians, scholars, artists at the height of their careers, as well as men who already occupy a place of prominence, but which are still being debated. Thus, it is that Gabriel d’Aubarède will soon give us Meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre.18
We wanted to inaugurate this series with a personality who established himself before the war, in the fields of geology and paleontology and, today, in that of philosophy and metaphysics. There is no need to emphasize the importance of the interview that you are about to read. Let us confine ourselves to recalling that this is the first time that Father Teilhard de Chardin has agreed to allow declarations of this importance to be published and that they constitute a synthesis—which has never been attempted before—of the doctrines of the one whom the Institute de France recently called upon to join its ranks.19
Each time I met Father Teilhard de Chardin, I was struck by this “climate” of high spirituality and pure science that he carries with him everywhere. He is, in his cell in the rue Monsieur, as he is on the excavations of China or in the laboratory of the Museum, with this amiable and ironic grace, this acute finesse, benevolent at the same time, and this Oxfordian distinction that makes one think of some English scholar, who would be both Darwin and Newman. He is happy and worried at the same time to see that his doctrine—it must be called that, because theory or system would be insufficient—reaches an increasingly vast public, increasingly attentive, and I would say, myself, more and more enthusiastic and convinced, in spite of the obstacles which the dissemination of his thought has sometimes encountered up to now. Happy, because this scientist brings to humanity a message of confidence, of hope, of vital dynamism, of an invitation to a higher awareness of the possibilities of progress which are offered to it and of the increase in responsibilities which is also the consequence. Worried, since this recently explicitly formulated doctrine has already found itself disfigured, deformed, falsely interpreted, in certain scientific and other circles, and since, as a result, many misunderstandings have arisen and controversies have begun even before that the works in which Father Teilhard de Chardin exposes, in an overview, the results of his scientific work and his reflections have been published.
How was he led to the discoveries which made his name popular and led him to formulate a whole new theory of man and the universe? This is what I had the inquisitiveness to ask him, and I think that the readers of Nouvelles Littéraires will also be happy to listen to the confidences he was kind enough to share with me.
Teilhard: My early childhood was spent among the stones, in the mountains of Auvergne, with a naturalist father who gave me a taste for nature and guided my budding passion for geology. My walks among the rocks inspired me with the desire to know this mineral world, so mysterious and so fascinating, which already exerted a powerful and tenacious attraction on my child’s mind. Then, I studied at the Collège de Mongré, near Lyons, and no doubt, having breathed the atmosphere of this holy house, I entered the Society of Jesus at the end of my studies. You know, those of you in Aix, the calm and silent rue Lacépède, you who have lived in Aix-en-Provence for a long time? This is where my time [was] spent in the novitiate, enhanced by holidays and vacations at our country house in Tholonet . . .
Brion: In this intensely geological landscape of the Sainte-Victoire mountain, of which Cézanne made a kind of cosmic myth, of original divinity, of primary element, raised in the mineral vehemence of metamorphoses?
Teilhard: Yes, but it wasn’t long before I left France for the Channel Islands; at that time, indeed, the congregations were driven out of the country and forced to seek refuge abroad.20 There, while pursuing my philosophy studies in Jersey, I was lucky enough to find on this island a veritable mineralogical garden where I could initiate myself scientifically to the study of matter: an object that had always fascinated me.
Brion: You have written, I remember: “Through the rocks, I found myself engaged in the direction of the planetary.”21 Instinctively, in the mineral, you were looking at the same time for the durable, the incorruptible. As a child, you were sorry when you discovered that iron was perishable and rusted . . .
Teilhard: Yes, so much so that, to comfort myself, I looked for equivalents elsewhere. Sometimes in a blue flame floating (at once so material, so elusive and so pure) on the logs of the hearth. More often in some more transparent or better colored stone: crystals of quartz or amethyst, and especially shiny fragments of chalcedony, such as I could pick up in my country of Auvergne. In the latter case, the cherished substance naturally had to be resistant, unassailable and hard.
And that’s how, little by little, I woke up to the notion of the stuff of things. Gradually and subtly, this famous consistency, which I had hitherto pursued in the solid and the dense, was revealed to me in the direction of something fundamental [un élémentaire] everywhere widespread—whose very ubiquity formed its incorruptibility.
Later, when I would do geology, one might think that I was simply exploring, with conviction and success, the chances of a scientific career. But, in reality, what would invincibly bring me back for a lifetime (even at the expense of paleontology) to the study of large eruptive masses and continental bases, is nothing other than an insatiable need to maintain contact with some sort of universal root or matrix of beings. Curious thing, I admit, this axial place invariably held by the passion and science of stones throughout my spiritual embryogenesis!
Brion: You left Jersey, I believe, at the end of this mineralogical initiation, around 1905?
Teilhard: Yes, because at that time I was appointed professor of physics in Egypt. A real godsend, since it is in this Nile valley where a prodigious civilization was born and developed over the millennia that the study of the fossils exposed on the surface of the desert made me drift towards paleontology.
Brion: Which is, I know, your great specialty . . .
Teilhard: In fact, my scientific interest has always been and remains divided between human paleontology and questions of continental geology, a bit, if you will, like Darwin between fossils and crystals. In this competition, however, it was ultimately the study of the human phenomenon that ended up taking over my tastes. And this by virtue of a series of events that I could call the great opportunities [chances] of my career: the first of these being (just after my time in Egypt) to have found myself involved, around 1910, in the discovery of the famous Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus) in the Quaternary gravels of southern England.
Brion: By chance?
Teilhard: Yes, by chance. One day when I was hunting for dinosaur fossils around Hastings, I met another geologist engaged in the same research. But this competitor was Charles Dawson himself (the discoverer of Eoanthropus) who invited me right away to come and participate in his excavations, then just in progress. And so it was that, alongside Sir Arthur Smith-Woodward (then director of the British Museum), I was able, soon after, to assist and collaborate in the discovery of one of the most enigmatic and discussed fossil men of the world. This with, for me, an important practical result, since it is my participation in the affair (in addition to my quality of being from Auvergne [d’Auvergnat]) which earned me, a little later, the sympathy of Marcellin Boule and my admission to his museum laboratory in 1912.22
Brion: The adventure of Eoanthropus, so decisive for your orientation in paleontology—it was a fine start— was it not accompanied for you, at about the same time, by another discovery, of an entirely different genre, but also important for your career?
Teilhard: Yes, in the realm of scientific thought, the discovery, the realization [prise de conscience], I mean, of the idea of evolution—biological evolution, I mean—which allowed me to connect, in the field of experience, the two notions of material energy and psychic energy.
Brion: And then you had to leave the museum in 1914, for the front, with the Zouaves and the skirmishers. But was it not at the front that the notion, so original and fruitful, of a noosphere around the earth germinated in you? And would you like to define, for our readers, what you mean by this word noosphere?
Teilhard: I used this word, for the first time, in one of my first essays on the human phenomenon, around 1927. But the idea was actually born in me, in the trenches, of a human spiritual community extending to the organic: the idea, I mean, of a kind of special biological “mega-unit” constituting the thinking envelope of the earth. This, for me, is the noosphere.
Brion: At the end of the war, did you immediately resume your work in the field and in the laboratory?
Teilhard: Not immediately. My dear friend Jean Boussac, the son-in-law of the great Termier and like him a geologist, having died in Verdun, did me the honor of thinking of me for the chair of geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris. However, I didn’t stay there long, for, no sooner had I set foot there, than the second great opportunity [chance] of my life occurred unexpectedly. Fr. Emile Licent, the explorer of Northern China and the founder of the Tientsin Museum, was looking for a geologist to accompany him. Thanks to the protection of my master Boule and the late Lacroix, one of the pillars of the Academy of Sciences, I found myself in charge of a mission in China, by the Museum, in 1923. And it was then that Fr. Licent and I had the chance, in the loess of the Yellow River basin, to get our hands on the first known traces of a paleolithic period in China. An important find, but soon to be eclipsed by an even more sensational discovery: that (by Dr. Anderson, Dr. Davidson Black and the Geological Survey of China) of Peking Man, or Sinanthropus, a close relative of the Pithecanthropus of Java—both representing perhaps the oldest and most primitive fossil men yet known.23
Brion: I also know (another opportunity of your life!) that you were led to collaborate very closely in this discovery which earned science six Sinanthropus skulls, a good half-dozen mandibles and several scores of isolated teeth, all of this during ten years of research, from 1927 to 1937.24 Is this not so?
Teilhard: These human remains, belonging to about thirty individuals, were collected, during important and prolonged excavations, in a vast pocket (virtually 50 meters) representing the contents of an old cave filled and leveled: many associated stone tools, and an enormous amount of fossilized bones of deer, elephant, rhinoceros, camels, buffaloes, antelopes and various carnivores, almost all representing species long extinct. It is of course still difficult to date this distant cousin of modern man in years. But what we can affirm is that, when he lived, the mantle of yellow earth had not yet been deposited on the soil of China. Which throws us very far, very far back. A matter, at the very least, of a hundred millennia . . .
Brion: At that time, hadn’t you become adviser to the National Geological survey of China?
Teilhard: Yes, and theoretically I still am. A good part of my heart stayed there. And it would be with joy that, if conditions allowed, I would resume there a work interrupted by the war of 1940.
At that time, I had had the good fortune to follow many scientific expeditions to the Far East. Roy Chapman Andrews Expedition, Gobi (1930). Hardt-Citroën Trans-Asian Expedition (1931). Yale-Cambridge Expedition, North and Central India (1935). Carnegie Expedition, Burma and Java (1938). So many high peaks used or chosen for a vast triangulation making it possible to determine, as a first approximation, in central, eastern and southern Asia, the main phases of human expansion during Pleistocene times. A last and important campaign was planned for the summer of 1940, in the Hundes basin (between the two Himalayas), intended to bridge the gap between the quaternary of India and that of Chinese Turkestan . . . And it was then that events stopped everything.
Brion: I know the general conclusions to which your long career as a scientist has led you. Would you like to summarize them for our readers? It is not a question, of course, of going into the details of the problems, but only of glimpsing this “ultra-human” which scientifically, according to you, takes shape at the end of the evolution of homo sapiens, as paleontology makes it known to us and invites us to extend it?
Teilhard: Specifically, please note, I am neither a philosopher nor a theologian, but a student of “phenomenon” (a physicist in the old Greek sense). However, at this modest level of knowledge, what dominates my vision of things is the metamorphosis that the human phenomenon [l’homme] obliges us to subject the universe around us from the moment when (in accordance with the imperious invitations of science) one decides to consider it as forming an integral, native part of the rest of life. As a result, in fact, of this effort of incorporation, two capital observations emerge, if I am not mistaken, in our experimental perception of things. The first being that the universe, much more than by an “entropy” (bringing it back to the most probable physical states), is characterized by a preferential drift of part of its fabric towards more and more complicated states, and underpinned by ever-increasing intensities of “consciousness.” From this strictly experimental point of view, life is no longer an exception in the world; but it appears as a characteristic product—the most characteristic—of the universal physico-chemical drift. And the human, at the same time, becomes, in the field of our observation, the provisionally extreme term of the whole movement. The human: a goal of the world .
This being said, the second observation to which one finds oneself led, in my opinion, by an integral scientific acceptance of the “human phenomenon,” is that the current of complexity-consciousness, of which the reflective psychism (that is to say, thought) is experimentally derived, is not yet settled; but that, through the biological totalization of the human mass, it continues to function—carrying us, by biological effect of socialization, towards certain still unrepresentable states of collective reflection—in other words, as I say, towards some “ultra-human.”
All this, I repeat, by simple extrapolation of a law of recurrence positively observable over the entire extent of the past, that is to say outside of all sentimentality and all metaphysics.
Now it is this strictly objective position which, misunderstood, has given rise to and spread, on my account, a certain number of legends, the most harmful of which can be reduced to the following two:
First, I was seen as a blissful optimist or utopian, dreaming of human euphoria or comfortable millennialism. As if the human maturation that the facts seem to me to announce did not present itself, in my perspectives, not as a rest, but well and truly as a crisis of tension—a crisis paid for by an immense trail of disorders and suffering; a crisis laden with risks and therefore more dramatic still, owing to the enormity of the interest involved (the success of a universe, no less!), than all the self-absorbed [égoïstes] and morbid imaginations of contemporary existentialism.
Worse still, people go on repeating that I am the prophet of a universe that destroys individual values; since, in my eyes, it is towards a synthetic state that, according to me, experimentally, the world is moving. But, in truth, my great concern has always been to affirm, in the name of facts, that true union does not confuse, but differentiates; and even that, in the case of thinking and loving beings (such as man), far from mechanizing, it personalizes, and this doubly: intellectually, first, by super-reflection, and then affectively, by unanimization.
Thus, despite the primacy that I technically grant to the whole in relation to the element, I find myself, by the very structure of my scientific thought, at the antipodes either of a social totalitarianism leading to the termite mound, or of a Hindu pantheism seeking the outcome and the ultimate figure of the spiritual in the direction of an identification of beings with a common background underlying the variety of events and things. Not mechanization, therefore, nor identification by fusion and loss of consciousness; but unification by laborious ultra-determination and love.
Admittedly, these biological views may have some implications for our appreciation of human values. They incline us to a certain humanism of a renewed type, based, no longer as in the sixteenth century, on a rediscovery of the past, but on unexpected possibilities held in reserve for us by the future.
But isn’t the birth, around us, of such a “neo-humanism” (linked in my religious thought to the progress of “charity”) quite precisely one of the distinctive characteristics of the times we are going through?
Notes
1. Pierre Leroy S. J., Lettres Familières de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Mon Ami, Les Dernières Années: 1948-1955 (Vendôme: Éditions Centurion, 1976): 93-94. See also Letters from My Friend Teilhard de Chardin 1948-1955, translated by Mary Lukas (New York: Paulist Press, 1976): 85. Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas indicate that “all of d’Ouince’s persuasiveness” was needed to secure Teilhard’s right of censorship over the interview. Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas, Teilhard: The Man, The Priest, The Scientist (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company): 293.
2. In early 1920, Teilhard wrote: “Properly speaking, God does not make. He makes things make themselves. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, translated by René Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971): 28. A year and a half later he expressed the same thought: “. . . God, as one might say, does not so much ‘make’ things as ‘make them make themselves’.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Vision of the Past, translated by J. M. Cohen (New York : Harper and Row, 1966): 25.
3. For example, Gérard-Henry Baudry notes: “. . . between 1940 and 1944, the order was given to the Jesuit houses to destroy all of Teilhard’s writings.” See Baudry’s Dictionnaire des Correspondants de Teilhard de Chardin (Lille: Chez l’Auteur, 1974): 93. This must be an exaggeration since Teilhard’s strictly scientific works were not prohibited.
4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le Rayonnement d’une Amitié, Correspondance avec la Famille Bégouën (1922-1955), Éditée par Michel Hermans et Pierre Sauvage (Bruxelles: Lessius, 2011): 6, 34, 63.
5. Baudry, Dictionnaire: 25. Patrice Boudignon points out that “clandestine” is pejorative, for the writings were not anonymous. They bore Teilhard’s name and the date of composition, and they were known to his superiors. See Boudignon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Sa Vie, Son Œuvre, Sa Réflexion (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2008): 162.
6. The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan, edited by Thomas M. King, S. J. and Mary Wood Gilbert (Scranton, Pennsylvania: University of Scranton Press, 2001): 86.
7. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Lettres à Jeanne Mortier (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984): 28
8. René d’Ouince, Un Prophète en Procès: Teilhard de Chardin dans l’Église de son Temps (Paris : Aubier-Montaigne, 1970): 149.
9. Ibid.: 150. From 1935 until 1973, D’Ouince (1896-1973) was the superior at the Jesuit house in Paris, home of the periodical Études. He and Teilhard had a warm relationship. D’Ouince’s actions cannot be interpreted as an effort to silence Teilhard, for he was in deep sympathy with his project. He sought, rather, to moderate his friend’s pronouncements and to protect him from a more serious censure from Rome which others had experienced. His book, Un Prophète en Procès (A Prophet on Trial) is perhaps the finest source on Teilhard’s relations with the Church written by one who was in the thick of the controversy. For more on D’Ouince, see Baudry’s Dictionnaire des Correspondants de Teilhard de Chardin: 101-103.
10. Exceptions are mentioned in Lettres à Jeanne Mortier: 60, 67, 69, 71, 176.
11. D’Ouince, Un Prophète en Procès:179-181.
12. Ibid.: 164.
13. André Billy, “Un grand poète à demi clandestin,” Le Figaro Littéraire, 5 Août 1950.
14. Teilhard’s notoriety extended beyond France. For example, there is a story in the March 27, 1937 edition of Newsweek (pages 30-31) concerning Teilhard which includes a photograph of him. Both Newsweek (April 25, 1955, page 73) and Time (April 25, 1955, page 104) carried notices of Teilhard’s death.
15. L’Evolution Rédemptrice du P. Teilhard de Chardin (Paris: Librairie du Cèdre, 1950). No one is listed as the author of the book, but Mlle Mortier learned that it was Lefèvre. See Lettres à Jeanne Mortier: 64.
16. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Review of L’Evolution Rédemptrice du P. Teilhard de Chardin” in Nichol et Karl Schmitz-Moorman, eds., L’OEuvre Scientifique 10 (Olten/Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Walter Verlag, 1971): 4290. A second book critical of Teilhardism appeared two years later: Louis Cognet, Le Père Teilhard de Chardin et la Pensée Contemporaine (Paris: Au Portulan, chez Flammarion, 1952). For Teilhard’s comments on this book see Letters from My Friend Teilhard de Chardin: 131.
17. Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983): 216.
18. A chaplain of students told René d’Ouince: “If you want to pack a room full at the risk of seeing some chairs broken, just invite Jean-Paul Sartre or Father Teilhard.” D’Ouince, Un Prophète en Procès: 149.
19. On May 22, 1950 Teilhard was elected as a non-resident member of the Institut de France. Teilhard interpreted his election not only as a recognition of his scientific achievements but also as “a gesture of approval for freer ‘religious’ thought . . .” Claude Cuénot, Teilhard de Chardin: A Biographical Study, translated by Vincent Colimore and edited by René Hague (Baltimore: Helicon, 1965): 276. Translated from Cuénot’s Pierre Teilhard de Chardn: Les Grandes Étapes de son Évolution (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1958): see page 334
20. The year 1901 saw the lois d’exception in France restricting the activities of religious orders. In 1902, when the antireligious ex-seminarian Émile Combes became Premier the law was enforced and the Jesuits and other religious orders were expelled from France. On this subject, the Lukas sisters speak of the “periodic anticlerical nervous breakdowns” of the French Republic. Teilhard: the Man, the Priest, the Scientist: 26.
21. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le Coeur de la Matière (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976): 28; The Heart of Matter, translated by René Hague (New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978): 20.
22. Almost three years after this interview, in November 1953, the news broke world-wide that Piltdown was a hoax. In his first comment on this revelation, in response to an inquiry from K. P. Oakley, Teilhard wrote: “I congratulate you most sincerely on your solution of the Piltdown problem. Anatomically speaking, ‘Eoanthropus’ was a kind of monster. And, from a paleontological point of view, it was equally shocking that a ‘dawn-Man’ could occur in England. Therefore, I am fundamentally pleased by your conclusions, in spite of the fact that, sentimentally speaking, it spoils one of my brightest and earliest paleontological memories . . .” L’OEuvre Scientifique 10: 4561. The reason Teilhard spoke of Piltdown as a monster is that, like so many other scientists, he could not reconcile the mandibles of the Piltdown skull with the jaw and its teeth. In a letter dated April 27, 1929 to Max Bégouën he said, “I wrote at length to Boule about the pieces already unearthed: two mandibles, with entirely human dentition and an almost chimpanzoid shape. It’s very curious.” Le Rayonnement d’une Amitié: 44-45. In fact, the jaw was that of an orangutan. Teilhard was ever reluctant to suspect Charles Dawson of fraud, although subsequent investigations show that he was almost certainly the perpetrator and that he acted alone, For a narrative account of the entire affair, including Teilhard’s unwitting role in “discovering” the canine tooth which seemed to confirm that the bones were genuine, see John Evangelist Walsh, The Science Fraud of the Century and its Solution: Unraveling Piltdown (New York: Random House, 1996). Walsh effectively refutes Gould’s energetic case for the prosecution that Teilhard was complicit. For Gould’s case, see chapters 16 and 17 of his book Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History. See also Thomas M. King, S.J., “Teilhard and Piltdown” in Teilhard and the Unity of Knowledge, edited by Thomas M. King, S.J. and James F. Salmon, S.J. (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1983): 159-169.
23. Sinanthropus and Pithecanthropus are now classified by paleontologists as specimens of homo erectus.
24. In a letter dated April 8, 1930 to Max Bégouën, Teilhard speaks fondly of his experiences at Piltdown and his role in working with the discoverers of Peking Man: “I love to see in these two opportunities of my life the smile of the Savior proving to me that my effort to reincarnate Christ in our modern views of the world is wanted by Him.” Le Rayonnement d’une Amitié: 53.