'L’eternel feminin' in Teilhard de Chardin intoning the creation Octave, with Promises to Keep!

Abstract

Was Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) really “a scientist among theologians and a theologian among scientists,” as Karl Rahner describes him in one of his studies? The judgment may sound ironical or simply too harsh, but paradoxically it may also suggest an alternative way of reading Teilhard de Chardin. To those familiar with the Eastern way of thinking, spirituality is dogma seen from within. Teilhard had plenty to say about the outside (“outer face”) and the inside (“inner face”) of things in general, and as a palaeontologist he laid stress on the latter. This same approach, through the interiority of things rather than through their exterior appearance, is recommended in seeking access to a thinker of Teilhard’s complexity. There are many things which elude a facile categorization, either because they are the elementary blocks on which everything else is built, such as protoplasm, or because they afford the highest criteria available, as do transcendentals in metaphysics, which help define but cannot be defined. Many of the great discoveries were not made by experts scrupulously applying a sophisticated method but rather by those who used method in an unorthodox way, thereby poaching on neighbouring territory at the risk of many a surprising twist and turn.