The first thing said about Teilhard de Chardin in PBS’s beautifully made documentary, “Teilhard: Visionary Scientist”, is, “He is a Jesuit priest, and yet he’s a scientist [0:00:25].”* That “yet” warns the viewer that, despite the film’s good qualities, it perpetuates an old and distorted narrative—that there is a fundamental conflict between being a scientist and being a Jesuit, or a priest, or a Catholic, or perhaps even a person of faith. Sometimes the film advances this narrative through omission of information. At least once, it does so through false information.
The next thing said about Teilhard is that “his new insights into evolution create conflict with religious authorities [0:00:35]”. However, as the film traces (in beautiful fashion) Teilhard’s growing interest in geology and fossils, the insights it highlights are not in the realm of science. We hear that Teilhard “claimed that the universe is ultimately a spiritual universe…. the stuff of reality is spirit [0:18:40]”; that, in his view, “evolution is not purposeless or random, but it is infused with Spirit [0:19:50]”; that, “he saw his buddies dying in the trenches…. he saw death… destruction, but he believed that out of this… would emerge a better world. That this was part and parcel of the evolution process [0:36:45]”. The film omits any real information about Teilhard’s actual scientific work, beyond mention of his collecting fossils.
Likewise, when Teilhard is teaching geology at the Institut Catholique and comes into conflict with the Jesuit Father General Wladimir Ledochowski, the difficulty is not Teilhard’s scientific work, but an essay he wrote (and only shared privately) on Original Sin. Ledochowski eventually requests that Teilhard formally agree to six statements, of which, the film says,
number four is a real obstacle in his [Teilhard’s] mind. It states that the whole human race takes its origin from one proto-parent, Adam. Teilhard knows this is impossible in the eyes of science; and to sign it would be dishonest; and he also believes it stands outside the competence of theologians [0:55:35].
The film does not quote from Teilhard’s Original Sin essay (“Note on Some Possible Historical Representations of Original Sin”, which can be found translated by René Hague in de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1969), so let us note that within it he wrote,
The truth is that it is so impossible to include Adam and the earthly paradise (taken literally) in our scientific outlook, that I wonder whether a single person today can at the same time focus his mind on the geological world presented by science, and on the world commonly described by sacred history. We cannot retain both pictures without moving alternately from one to the other. Their association clashes, it rings false.
In the film, Teilhard answers Ledochowski by, among other things, asking, “How are faith and experience to be reconciled, given that today they manifest grave opposition? You see, Reverend Father, I believe there is today an immense, almost desperate, need to bring together science and Christianity [0:55:55].” The film’s narrator reports that on July 1, 1925, Teilhard “submits” and “writes a letter of complete loyalty to Father General”, but “he sees himself in the same plight that faced Galileo more than three centuries before [1:01:05].”
In the film’s telling, Teilhard “feels he has a great gift to offer his Catholic Church by opening it up to the world of science [0:38:35]”; he is, as mentioned above, desperate to bring science and Christianity together; he seeks to present “his best case to his Church to embrace the insights of science [1:24:00]”; and in the end, “Teilhard leaves a profound legacy in a world starving for hope and love…. A robust ecological movement. Faith embracing science. Hope in a future ever emerging… [1:54:10].” Like Galileo, Teilhard faced an intransigent Church, closed to science, and he ultimately triumphed.
This idea of Teilhard striving to open the Church up to science stands in contrast to history. To describe Teilhard as a Jesuit priest, and “yet” a scientist overlooks the many Jesuit scientists throughout history. Indeed, there is even “the Jesuit science”—seismology, so named because of the enormous role Jesuits played in its development. And today the astronomers of the Vatican Observatory are mostly Jesuits.
John Heilbron notably assessed the Church as giving “more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and probably all other, institutions.” In the nineteenth century, Angelo Secchi, S.J. did groundbreaking work in spectroscopy and stellar classification, supported by Pope Pius IX (who himself had written a dissertation on telescope construction).
Then, during Teilhard’s lifetime, Pope Leo XIII founded the modern Vatican Observatory. In the early twentieth century, the domes housing the Observatory’s telescopes were located atop the walls of the Vatican. As Teilhard was doing his work, going to China and unearthing fossils, other priest-scientists at the Vatican Observatory were photographing the sky as part of the international “Carte du Ciel” project, while Sisters of the Child Mary in Rome were analyzing those photographs and reducing the data contained in them. Meanwhile, Pope Pius X would pay visits to the Observatory in the 1920s (at least once accompanied by Ledochowski, who was sending the pope Jesuits to staff the place). According to the notes of then-Observatory Director (and astronomer) Fr. Joseph Hagen, S.J., the pope was known to “stay for some time at the telescope”. In the 1930s, after the Lateran Treaty, the Observatory moved to the higher elevation and darker skies of Castel Gandolfo, and telescope domes were constructed atop the papal palace there.
Those domes were, and are, visible for miles. The many photos we see of recent popes standing on the balcony there generally do not have a wide enough angle to reveal that directly above that balcony is the dome of an astronomical observatory. Science and Christianity could be seen together rather clearly throughout Teilhard’s life.
This togetherness is actually visible in the film, so that the film’s conflict narrative is at odds with its own contents: Teilhard is “warned emphatically by the top Jesuit in France that he is to limit himself to strictly scientific subjects [1:06:40]”; he complains that, “I am once more asked to keep to purely scientific subjects”, and that “It would be better to give Rome the impression that I am delving back into ‘pure science’ [1:39:15].” The film thus tells us that the Church was open to Teilhard’s scientific work. His non-scientific ideas were the problem.
The film notes Teilhard wanting to bring together science and Christianity, but omits the repulsive history of some science in his time. Ledochowski might have been concerned that rejecting the idea that “the whole human race takes its origin from one proto-parent” sounds like rejecting the unity of humankind. Scientific racism had been rejecting that for quite some time, asserting that different “types” of human being had different origins and separately evolved (supposedly) into true human, and more or less human-like, beings. The film describes Teilhard as taking “an evolutionary interpretation of the Great Chain of Being [0:16:25]”. Arguably scientific racism did the same, putting Europeans at the top of the earthly end of the chain, with dark-skinned people like sub-Saharan Africans and indigenous Australians further down, just above apes.
The potency of the idea of that “one proto-parent” can be seen in the following, from J. H. Van Evrie (M.D.), in his 1861 book urging the inherent inferiority of people of African descent (the offensive title of which is best left to the footnotes):
If the Negro had descended from the same parentage, or, except in color merely, was the same being as ourselves…. then it would be [a Christian’s] first and most imperative duty… to set an example to others, to labor night and day to elevate this (in that case) wronged and outraged race—indeed, to suffer every personal inconvenience, even martyrdom itself in the performance of a duty so obvious and necessary.
But of course, Van Evrie was certain that science, and even common experience, showed that “the Negro” had not descended from the same parentage, and was not the same being. Van Evrie was not alone. Scientific racists derided the unity of humankind, the single family of Adam. As Br. Guy and I discuss in Chapter 5 of our When Science Goes Wrong: The Desire and Search for Truth, they invoked Galileo’s name and poured scorn on theologians and their insistence on “monogenism”.
By Teilhard’s time scientific racism had been supplanted by eugenics. Thus in 1908, Alexander Graham Bell could use the idea of “evolution” in National Geographic, urging “practical plans that might lead to the breeding of better men and better women” through a “simple process of promoting the marriage of the superior with the superior”:
A new people [is] being gradually evolved in the United States by the mingling together of the different races of the world in varying proportions. It is of the greatest consequence to us that the final result should be the evolution of a higher and nobler type of man in America, and not deterioration of the nation. To this end the process of evolution should be carefully studied, and then controlled by suitable immigration laws tending to eliminate undesirable ethnical elements, and to stimulate the admission of elements assimilated readily by our population and that tend to raise the standard of manhood here.
Such a law was passed in 1924. People with names like “Ledochowski” were not among its “desirables”.
Of course, the science of 2024 stands against scientific racism and eugenics. The discoveries of the last century indicate that, the existence of a literal Adam aside, all human beings are clearly of one family; racial differences are insignificant. But that was not the situation a century ago, when Ledochowski would have found the following in Teilhard’s Original Sin essay:
Zoologists are practically unanimous in admitting a true unity of the human race. Nevertheless, we should be careful to note that they attach to this unity a meaning very different from the monogenism of the theologians. As natural scientists see it, mankind probably emerged from one and the same animal group. Its appearance, however, must have been gradual, through a number of avenues and perhaps through a number of channels of transmission. The stem by which the human species is attached to the common main trunk of living beings must, in fact, be sufficiently complex to contain ‘in potency’ the great varieties of human types known to us. This presupposes its having a section (a numerical base) of considerable width, and considerable shading-off at its edges. If we try to concentrate in one single individual (or one single pair) all the primitive characteristics that can be recognized in Heidelberg man, Neanderthal man, the Tasmanians, Australians, etc., we arrive at an extremely dehumanized being, maybe a monstrosity. In any case (and quite apart from the extreme improbability of the realization of a zoological type in one individual) such a procedure gives us an Adam most ill-adapted to bearing in himself the complete responsibilities of our race.
It is not Europeans like himself that Teilhard wraps together in a single sentence with Homo erectus and Neanderthals, using words like “primitive”, “dehumanized”, and “monstrosity”—it is modern indigenous Australians and Tasmanians. Any scientist who used language like this today might face consequences more severe than Ledochowski’s demands.
Whereas “Teilhard: Visionary Scientist” omits information regarding the Church and science and regarding evolution, eugenics, and racism, it gives false information regarding the Galileo story. Unfortunately, some of this is via a Jesuit scientist. The late Fr. George Coyne, S.J. was Director of the Vatican Observatory throughout the papacy of St. John Paul II. Coyne was an astronomer of great accomplishment. He practically re-built the Observatory, developing a new telescope in Arizona as the skies at Castel Gandolfo were subject to increasing glare from waste artificial lighting at night.
But Coyne states, regarding Teilhard’s work, that the Church “did not have a firm grasp of the difference between a literal interpretation of scripture and understanding the story-telling nature [0:41:15].” This is puzzling. Augustine dealt with scripture and discoveries about nature. Astronomers then had a solid proof that stars must be bodies larger than the moon, contradicting Genesis 1 which describes the moon as one of the “two great” celestial lights. Aquinas also treated this matter. Genesis speaks to what our eyes see, both said, not to the details of astronomy; we need not read “two great” lights literally.
Coyne himself co-authored a small book that showed that, like Augustine and Aquinas, the Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (who played a key role in the “Galileo Affair”) understood this idea. Coyne and Ugo Baldini (The Louvain Lectures of Bellarmine and the Autograph Copy of His 1616 Declaration to Galileo—Studi Galileiani 6:2, Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications, 1984) found that Bellarmine had once urged, contrary to the standard astronomical model of his time, that scripture plainly indicated that the stars were not fixed to a crystalline sphere. But, Bellarmine said, if astronomers “ascertained with evidence” that the sphere did exist, then scripture would have to be interpreted in a non-literal manner, “for it is certain that the true meaning of Scripture cannot be in contrast with any other truth.” However, the Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli, in the generation after Bellarmine, emphasized that reinterpreting scripture for science absent “manifest necessity”, absent solid evidence, was dangerous; even “the most holy dogmas” would be subject to the whims of passing scientific ideas.
Later in the film, Coyne appears and relays the story of Galileo (having been compelled to renounce the heliocentrism of Copernicus with its moving Earth) saying, “Eppur se muove”—“It still moves”. Even a casual internet search reveals how dubious this story is. But Coyne uses the phrase, twice, to emphasize a point—that a person of faith “does not have to give up on his science… because some people think it conflicts with religious belief”. The film’s narrator states that Galileo “is said to have muttered” the phrase, giving triple emphasis to this dubious history (1:02:05).
The narrator also states how, at Galileo’s time, “the Catholic Church officially held the common belief that the sun moved around the Earth.” Then, unfortunately, “But Galileo scientifically proved that the opposite was true. The Earth moved around the sun. For this, he was condemned by the Inquisition [1:01:40].”
That Galileo proved this, and was condemned by the Inquisition for proving it, is false. The falseness is all the worse for its use in this film to reinforce its conflict narrative. The film says that Teilhard saw himself “in the same plight that faced Galileo”—the plight, in other words, of being a scientist in the Church that condemned a man (supposedly) for scientifically proving that Earth orbits the sun.
Had Galileo proved this, the accommodations that were made for the “two great” lights, and that Bellarmine envisioned making for the starry sphere, would certainly apply. In the eyes of many competent astronomers, however, the heliocentric model suffered from serious scientific difficulties. Galileo’s groundbreaking telescopic observations did render the old astronomical model obsolete. However, new models other than heliocentrism were fully compatible with telescopic observations. Science did not prove Earth’s motion. No accommodations were necessary. Proof of heliocentrism would come long after Galileo.
PBS’s “Teilhard: Visionary Scientist” is a beautifully made documentary that advances an old and distorted narrative about an intransigent Church, closed to science and the ultimate triumph of the scientist—in the manner (supposedly) of Galileo. Had the film noted the Church’s active support for science in Teilhard’s time; had it provided some context about racism, eugenics and evolution and that “most holy dogma” of the unity of humankind, and let the viewer hear Teilhard’s own difficult words on these matters; had its discussion of Galileo been historically and scientifically correct—then it would have been a really good, really valuable film about a Jesuit scientist.
*Spellings, capitalizations, time stamps, the use of “Teilhard” for Teilhard de Chardin, etc. are as found in the transcript/captions of the film provided by PBS at “Teilhard: Visionary Scientist” (https://www.pbs.org/video/teilhard-visionary-scientist-pt9dc1/ and https://ga.pbs-video.pbs.org/captions/mpt-presents/bb5f011a-3a40-4423-9ff7-55a59bc4100e/captions/n96bXC_caption_en.txt).
