Teilhard in the Trenches

In August 1915, a Catholic priest serving as a lowly stretcher-bearer with a French infantry regiment was cited for displaying "the greatest self-sacrifice and contempt for danger" during a ruinous battle. But there is no mention of the honor in the cheap school notebook in which, during the same week, the priest began keeping a diary "to force myself to think, to observe, to be precise."

By the end of World War I, those knapsack-carried notebooks of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin contained the essence of many innovative theories, including his central concept of human evolution progressing toward an "Omega point," an ultimate unity in Christ. When elaborated upon in later writings, these ideas proved so unsettling that church officials forbade him to publish them. As a result, during his lifetime Teilhard was celebrated only as a paleontologist who worked on the Peking man discovery. It was not until after his death 20 years ago this week that his philosophical works (among them: The Phenomenon of Man, Christianity and Evolution) were printed, and he became a popular cult figure in theology.

Break a Shell. Teilhard's diary remained unpublished even longer, partly because his Jesuit colleagues were embarrassed about his ecclesiastical candor (e.g., a complaint about the church's "egoism, cultivated idleness, ridiculous self-satisfaction"). Only in 1971 did the Teilhard family agree to publication of the notebooks. The first of two volumes will appear in Paris next month. The intimate, unguarded diary, which fleshes out the previously released wartime essays and letters to his cousin, will be essential reading for Teilhard aficionados.

To Corporal Teilhard, the war was a "baptism in reality." The theological musings in the diary amount to a rough draft of The Divine Milieu, the 1926-27 treatise (finally published in 1957) in which Teilhard formally set out his view of God as a "center" who "fills the whole sphere" of creation. Despite his disclaimers, the church found this idea dangerously akin to pantheism, the idea that God and the universe are identical. A comment on the last day of July 1916 summarizes his lifelong attempt to reconcile Catholicism and modern science: "My mission = very humbly but ceaselessly to take part in sanctifying natural progress, evolution, by revealing ... its sacred end." On the day after Christmas 1917, he wrote: "We are going over a threshold in the history of dogma --we must break a shell, the shell of complacent belief in the possession of a universal explanation of the world."

The diary reveals a striking view of sex, little discussed in his formal writings. A characteristically dense entry of Feb. 8, 1916 stated: "Just as speech was born by the unexpected use of organs being bent to emit articulated sounds--but originally formed for different ends--so, perhaps the love-liaison with God on which the mystical body's cohesion rests, is the fortuitous, secondary use of a passion-subjected temperament." Put more directly in another passage, this meant that "for a man, God must be loved through woman by using her."

The first pages of the diary read like the usual soldier's notebook, but for much of the rest, the wretched drudgery of rescuing bodies, dead and half living, is unmentioned. In fact, Teilhard's cosmic philosophy had the disconcerting result of making the horror of war almost benign. On Sept. 21,1917, he wrote that warfare creates "a certain superhuman atmosphere where life takes on an interest out of proportion with the preoccupations of ordinary existence."

It was typical of Teilhard's evolutionary optimism that he could find virtue even in human combat. "Through the present war," he wrote, "we have really progressed in civilization. To each phase of the world's development there corresponds a certain new profoundness of evil ... which integrates with the growing free energy for good."

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