Teilhard de Chardin: Cosmic Christ

If Western religion can be characterized by a pivotal notion around which it has turned in the last century in anticipation of the new millennium, it might best be encapsulated in a single image: the Cosmic Christ. The bold theory of combining the scientific evolution of nature and consciousness that played such a powerful role in ushering in a call by many contemporary writers for a metaphor to unite science with the globe’s perennial philosophies and religions had its inception in the writings of the French Jesuit priest and mystical visionary Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). He spent 20 years in China doing paleontology, and he had a wide view of history and culture, nature, and spirit. He sought to blend science and religion into a single theory of evolution with the early postmodern insight that a scientific study of nature and psycho-spirituality cannot be separated, because:

… the investigations of science have proved beyond all doubt that there is no fact which exists in...