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Working with God
[Woodstock Report, June 2005, No. 82]
In April, the Woodstock Theological Center Library assembled an exhibit of materials relating to the life and thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., coinciding with an April 11 conference that examined the intellectual legacy of the Jesuit paleontologist. Most of the items on display were gifts from the late George and Dorothy Barbour, who were Scottish missionaries to China and longtime friends of Teilhard, as well as paleontologists in their own right. These included a 30-minute silent home movie of a Teilhard-Barbour paleontological expedition into the Chinese steppe country in 1934 - which ran continuously throughout the two-day exhibit. Other primary and secondary materials were gifts of the late Karl Schmitz-Moormann and his wife, Nicole (who is profiled on page 10). Woodstock senior fellow and library director J. Leon Hooper, S.J., wrote explanatory materials for the exhibit, including a comparative look at Teilhard and St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. Here is an adaptation of that summary.
Besides being a world-class paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., was also a theologian and something of a mystic. As a "son" of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Teilhard's theological reflections were deeply rooted in Ignatian spirituality as conveyed to all Jesuits in the saint's Spiritual Exercises.
Both Ignatius and Teilhard were "contemplatives in action." That is, their primary religious contact was with a God who acts, not in the first instance with a God of liturgical praise, or even the God of the human interior, as with other spiritual traditions. Praying as attending to God they did do. But it was attention to a God on the move. They worked with their God as that God worked to transform their world.
The difference between the two is the difference between the early and late modern periods. With the 15th century rise of the cities and increasing complexity of social living, Ignatius envisioned "working with God" as God works to redeem human history and human living. The spirituality matched well the gradually developing notion that humans are the subject, not simply the object, of human history.
Teilhard's theology is based on a similar but somewhat extended vision. Reflecting the late modern discoveries in scientific method, the paleontologist-theologian imagines humans working with God as God works to develop not only human social history, but even material existence itself. We work with God as God brings all human and material existence to the Omega Point, to the Christ of the end time.
The Woodstock Library's recent exhibit linked these reflections of Teilhard and Ignatius. On display was our first-edition copy of The Spiritual Exercises (1548), open toward the end of the book to the "Contemplation for Obtaining Love." (In the United States, the Library of Congress has the only other first-edition copy of that work.) In that exercise, Ignatius asks us to imagine God showering us with all the good things of material, social, and spiritual existence, and calling us to respond appropriately to our own actions.
Also displayed was a French copy of Teilhard's
Hymne de L'Univers (Hymn of the Universe), open to the beginning of his classic essay, "The Mass on the World." Through humans working with God, the entire cosmos is being brought back to the One whom Jesus called Father. Humans, as both matter and spirit, are representatives of matter and voices of matter in its transformation into God's very life. For both Teilhard and Ignatius, we mortals were truly coworkers of the Christ.
Teilhard Exhibit The Teilhard exhibit included a letter that the Jesuit sent to his longtime friend, George Barbour, on April 15, 1949. In it, Teilhard refers to the Society of Jesus' suppression of his ideas and writings, but also to the "great consideration and indeed affection" he had received from the religious order. Barbour translated the letter into English.
"I am therefore not a persecuted individual to be pitied or one who could complain," wrote Teilhard. "Moreover (and it is this above all which ought to reassure you on my account) the difficulties I have been meeting with regard to speaking or going into print are in large measure compensated by the satisfaction I am experiencing in seeing my credo becoming constantly better defined in my own spirit and in my heart - and reverberating ever more widely through the world Christian and agnostic all around.
"The fire is spreading of itself," he explained, alluding to the sort of underground attention that his unpublished ideas had received during his lifetime. "What more could I ask?"
