IN SOME WAYS it’s hard to appreciate today the significance of Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Much of what he wrote that was then viewed as heresy by the Catholic Jesuit Order — that the story of Adam and Eve is not scientific fact; that God’s creative work did not end with Genesis, but rather continues through evolution; that the entire material universe is at its core spiritual and grace-filled — are ideas that are now widely accepted within the church. In fact, Teilhard’s thoughts on the sacramentality of the world lie unabashedly at the heart of much of what Pope Francis has said about the environment.
The new PBS documentary Teilhard: Visionary Scientist paints a masterful and unexpectedly emotional portrait of this French priest who spent his life suffering for his love of the church and the world. Beginning with his youth and drawing frequently on his own words, Visionary Scientist walks with Teilhard as he is dazzled by the wonders of nature around his family’s home in Auvergne, then follows him into the Jesuits, where he’s taught that a religious vocation requires one to shun the world, to view it with contempt.
Teilhard is sent by the Jesuits to various places — Egypt, the English countryside, and later China — which reinforces his understanding of the world itself as the ongoing movement of God’s spirit. He writes passionately about his experiences, unaware that such thinking might get him into trouble. “I love the universe, its energies, its secrets, and its hopes, and ... at the same time I am dedicated to God,” he wrote in 1916. “That, above all, is the message I wish to communicate: the reconciliation of God and the world.”
Much of the power of the documentary arrives in the second hour, as Teilhard finds himself exiled from Paris after his comments about evolution lead the order to conclude he does not accept the story of Adam and Eve. In the decades to come, he finds himself again and again rejected by the Jesuits, despite his every attempt to make it clear that he is trying to help the church, not undermine it. His most important and celebrated works, including The Phenomenon of Man, would not be published until after his death, and then only because he accepted the advice of another Jesuit to bequeath his writings to a non-Jesuit.
In the documentary, co-producers Frank and Mary Frost, through the narrator, Franciscan brother Greg Friedman, allow Teilhard to speak for himself — a deeply meaningful choice, given the decades Teilhard was silenced. For as much as Teilhard suffered, his prose is profoundly hopeful, the words of a person in love and excited to share it. He begins one essay, “What follows springs from an exuberance of life and a yearning to live.”
Even near the end of his life, having been exiled permanently from his home and family, Teilhard writes to his superior general in Rome, “What might have been taken as my attitude during the last 30 years for obstinacy or disrespect, is simply the result of my absolute inability to contain my own feeling of wonderment.” To watch Teilhard: Visionary Scientist is to come in touch with that effervescent, infectious wonder.
Jim McDermott is a freelance screen and magazine writer in New York. He writes a Substack on pop culture and spirituality at Pop Culture Spirit Wow.
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