Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“As I looked at this scene of bitter toil, I felt completely overcome by the thought that I had the honour of standing at one of the two or three spots on which, at this very moment, the whole life of the universe surges and ebbs—places of pain, but it is there that a great future (and this I believe more and more) is taking shape.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit scientist, wrote these words during World War I, when he carried stretchers on France's front line. When Teilhard died on Easter Sunday 1955, only a few friends attended his funeral the following day in New York City. Silenced by the Catholic Church, his quiet death was a paradox. His life was over, but his influence was only beginning. His friend would help publish manuscripts, including the seminal Phenomenon of Man, which Teilhard wasn't able to publish while alive. In the next decades, his writings would inspire students, scholars, and scientists. When several thousand gathered in New York City last April to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death, Teilhard's “great future” was still taking shape.

Born in 1881, Teilhard worked as a paleontologist in China after the war. He studied the geosphere, the earth's layer of nonliving matter, and the biosphere, the earth's layer of living matter, and began using the word “noosphere” to describe the layer of the earth's collective mind. With this development, the idea of human consciousness began to be incorporated into evolutionary theory. “Evolution,” Teilhard wrote, “by becoming conscious of itself in the depths of ourselves, only needs to look at itself in the mirror to perceive itself in all its depths.”

Reflecting on these words, Lothar Shafer, a chemistry professor at the University of Arkansas who spoke during the April conference, noted that for Teilhard, consciousness was both the foundation of reality and a phenomenon that evolved through history to its advanced state in humans. Like love (Teilhard's “affinity of being with being”), consciousness is present in all levels of the universe—from atoms to trees to stars—although sometimes in rudimentary form, such as the information gathering of cells.

As is true of many visionaries, Teilhard was not widely accepted in his time, in part because he was ahead of that time. His idea of the noosphere, for example, has only come to be understood within frameworks that had not arrived by 1955. In fact, at the April conference, people were still working to define this concept. Ursula King, a religion professor at Bristol University in England, said that the noosphere is not an isolated function of the mind but is embedded within the biosphere. She said its network-like and participatory nature can be seen in institutions and structures like the United Nations and the internet.

Indeed, the internet, by integrating the panoply of human thought into an easily accessed body, is closely associated with Teilhard's noosphere. By way of example, one conference attendee recounted how she had recently participated in an internet discussion about the Iraq War with people from around the world. Over four days, thirteen thousand people met online in small groups and continued to share thoughts about the war until a collective declaration evolved and was presented at Riverside Church in Manhattan on April 2. “Maybe the noosphere had something to do with that,” the woman said.

Other forms of technology were also said to make up the noosphere's connective tissue. Television and radio broadcasts mobilized millions during the tsunami and showed the whole world what was happening in New York City and Washington, DC, on the morning of September 11, 2001. “Never before in the history of humanity has every human being, regardless of location or identity, been the spectator of the collective adventure of the human species at the very moment at which it is occurring,” said Jean Boissonnat, author and founder of the weekly magazine Expansion.

But while the noosphere captured the imagination of many Teilhardians, they also spoke of a more disturbing part of the Catholic priest's thought. Although Teilhard saw hope on the front lines of World War I, he was not blind to the accompanying misery and destruction. In his writings, he projected that in two or three generations, as humanity and the world transitioned to an integrated global community, tremors of upheaval would disturb human advancements.

Boissonnat sees these upheavals manifesting themselves today. He compared the mechanics of globalization to the mechanics of acceleration, which causes the distances between groups to widen. This, he noted, is seen in the widening gap between rich and poor nations. Others, led by Thomas Berry, have adapted Teilhard's warnings to the environmental movement. Mary Evelyn Tucker, a religion professor and the vice president of the American Teilhard Association, pointed out that humans are the primary cause of the mass extinction of plants and animals happening across the planet. “The global environmental crisis is clearly the largest challenge to us as a species and a planet as a whole,” Tucker said. “We are at a moment in history where we can imagine that our common good as a species rests on our care for our common ground, the earth.”

Many scholars consider Teilhard a visionary who gave humanity new eyes with which to see and contemplate itself. Shafer noted that the goal of evolution, in Teilhardian thought, is the Omega Point, “the keystone in the vault of the noosphere,” in which global unity occurs and human consciousness unites with a supreme, super-personal consciousness. For Teilhardians, globalization and the internet are not only advancements in human capabilities but small steps toward meeting the divine.

Tucker pointed to Teilhard's own words to underscore what the noosphere means for future generations: “However unstable life may appear, however impressive its connections with limiting space and forces of disintegration, one thing above all is certain—spirit will always succeed, as it has done till now, in defying risks and determinisms. It is the indestructible part of the universe.”

Teilhard's life testified to his notion of the indestructibility of the spirit. As a child, he was entranced by the solidity of rocks. As an adult, he dug into the earth on three continents, finding the culmination of the human journey toward God not in some heavenly realm but in the world itself. He dedicated his book The Divine Milieu to those who love the world. If only he could have known that millions would read his words, that his death would be the seed from which his own indestructible spirit would blossom, or that fifty years later, people would fly from as far away as Korea to kneel by his grave and kiss the earth in front of hundreds who love him.