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IN FOCUS: On Teilhard's Trail
[Woodstock Report, June 2005, No. 82]
"I tell people that there have been two men in my life," Woodstock fellow Nicole Schmitz-Moormann said with a soft chuckle.
The first man was her late husband, Karl Schmitz-Moormann, an internationally renowned German scholar who was widely recognized for his studies of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The second was Teilhard himself, although she was a teenager in Paris when the Jesuit paleontologist and philosopher died in 1955.
Nicole Schmitz-Moormann has been engaged in Teilhardian work ever since 1963, when she married Karl. While neither she nor her husband ever met the celebrated Jesuit, Schmitz-Moormann has long been a household name in Teilhard circles. The couple was formally authorized by Teilhard's extended family in France to collect and publish many of his far-flung (and, in some cases, long-lost) writings. Husband and wife collaborated in editing 11 volumes of Teilhard's scientific works during the 1970s.
A few years ago, Nicole Schmitz-Moormann bestowed upon Woodstock the fruits of her most extensive scholarly endeavor: bringing to life the cahiers, the personal notebooks or journal kept by Teilhard for decades. Her transcriptions and clarifications of his hard-to-decipher renderings are held in Woodstock's offices at Georgetown and available on request for use by scholars. (See the account of her presentation at the recent Woodstock Forum, which begins on page 3 of this edition).
Likewise, she is planning to give Woodstock the fruits of similar work on her collection of Teilhard's extant personal correspondence. Collecting those letters required detective work as well as scholarship. She and Karl had to track down many of the documents in China, where the forward-thinking Teilhard was relegated during much of his ministry.
James Salmon, S.J., a Woodstock senior fellow based at Loyola College in Maryland, befriended the Schmitz-Moormanns in 1987.
"I don't think there's any question that he [Karl] was the greatest Teilhard scholar in the world," said Father Salmon, a professor of chemistry and theology who collaborated with Karl Schmitz-Moormann on a book, Theology of Creation in an Evolutionary World, published in 1996. "He was just a brilliant guy." He died that year while serving as a research fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey.
For her part, Nicole Schmitz-Moormann prefers to keep the focus on Teilhard and his legacy, as well as her husband's.
"She's very definite about it - 'I'm not a scholar. I'm a physical therapist,'" said Father Salmon, referring to the licensed professional work that occupied her days for decades as she devoted personal time to Teilhard's cahiers. "But of course, she is a scholar, and a great one, at that."
Cracking the
CahiersWhat has made Nicole Schmitz-Moormann's presentation of Teilhard's personal notebooks such an achievement is the often-inscrutable quality of these cahiers. She deciphered and translated all of the Jesuit's extant notebooks, dating to 1915, when he was a stretcher-carrier for the French army on its front lines during World War I, and ending a few days before his death in April 1955. The approximately 1,700 pages of her work do not include the journal entries between 1925 and 1944, which are believed lost in a trunk somewhere in China.
"It's very, very, difficult work," Father Salmon said of the task that Nicole Schmitz-Moormann undertook with assistance from her husband. "I don't think Teilhard ever imagined his cahiers would ever be published." (Church authorities had barred Teilhard from publishing his cutting-edge philosophical and theological writings.)
To begin with, Teilhard often used a single letter, sometimes a Greek letter, to represent a word or term. Nicole Schmitz-Moormann had to discern, for example, that Teilhard varyingly used the Greek character ø to abbreviate either "feminine," "philosophy," or "physics."
In an article published in the March 1995 edition of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, she further explained:
"Often Teilhard adds sentences or a few words in the margins, or he adds short sentences in the middle of the text and later inserts them with parentheses, arrows, or asterisks into the already written text. He often includes diagrams and sketches. First the meaning of the text must be understood to avoid any confusion. Then the appearance of the original text, as written by Teilhard, must be reproduced as faithfully as possible, to avoid any misunderstandings by the reader."
In that article, she stressed that it was "important to reproduce the original appearance of the text since it offers precious information about Teilhard's thought processes."
For that reason, the transcribed version made available to scholars through Woodstock is a typed copy of Nicole's rendering of the handwritten documents.
She says many people, including French diplomats, scientists, and scholars, have searched for the trunk that Teilhard left behind in China in 1945. He had expected to return there and to his belongings, which included nearly 20 years of journal entries, but the Communist revolution made that impossible.
The Schmitz-Moormanns traveled to China in 1984, 1985, and 1991, but came away empty-handed, as far as the journals go. They did, however, find roughly 150 letters and papers of Teilhard's, which Chinese authorities allowed them to microfilm though not carry away. Nicole Schmitz-Moormann's deciphering and transcriptions of those documents will eventually go to Woodstock, she said.
Aside from the journals and other Teilhard materials already donated to Woodstock, she has produced a "critical edition" of his classic work, The Divine Milieu, which analyzes differences between the posthumously published book and various unpublished versions held by Teilhard's family and friends. In addition, since 1997 she has contributed her time and work as a Woodstock fellow.
"People ask me, 'Don't you get bored?' I say, 'Never. I'm always discovering some new things in Teilhard," she told the Woodstock Report.
Schmitz-Moormann does not intend to have his journal published. "It is really for Teilhard scholars who not only can read French but are familiar with his thoughts," she said, referring to his distinctive words and expressions. "It can never be for the general public. I don't see that at all."
And, she holds out the possibility that one of the many Teilhardians around the world will one day discover the lost trunk in China. "To this day," she said, "we're still hopeful."
Several French-language sets of Teilhard's Oeuvre scientifique ("Scientific Writings") are available through the co-editor, Nicole Schmitz-Moormann. Each set, including 10 volumes plus a volume of Teilhard's geological maps, costs $70 plus shipping and handling. Inquiries can be made to her through the Woodstock Theological Center, c/o Matthew Gladden, Georgetown University Box 571137, Washington, D.C. 20057-1137
Conceived in Combat
Following is an excerpt from Nicole Schmitz-Moormann's preface to The Journal of Father Pierre de Chardin, S.J., which she spent years deciphering and transcribing for scholarly use. The full preface is available here.
At the beginning of [his journal], Teilhard reports first about war-related events, [writing as] a soldier who, out of intellectual and spiritual curiosity, looks at what is happening around him. He addresses basic issues, like evil and social questions, only briefly. But very soon his focus changes and war events become secondary, making place for an outpouring of new ideas that flash in short sentences. The boundaries of this world-vision . do not resist, in the end, the experience of life and death on the front lines [of World War I].
For Father Teilhard his Journal was the foremost tool for intellectual reflections. He wrote down a multitude of ideas and reflections which he developed and deepened over a period of days, or weeks, or sometimes even months and years. Some ideas, partly abandoned, never appeared explicitly in any of his published essays. Certain points, only briefly addressed, were not picked up again, although they showed a surprising lucidity about the relevance, the importance, or the impact of the subject. Other ideas would be revised later and corrected. Others, elaborated and polished at a certain time or in a certain context, would be integrated later into his vision; and then, having become very clear to him, they would appear in his essays as definitive.