Some scholars consider Teilhard De Chardin none other than the greatest of modern Christian humanists, and with good reasons. For indeed De Chardin is the thinker/scientist who more than any other within modernity confronted the ongoing and open-ended process of evolution, which some positivists had seen as the final proof of the irrelevance of Man in the cosmos, to place Man right back into the center of the picture. He reaffirms value and quality within a positivistic science dedicated to quantifying and measuring and reducing Man to a mere function.

De Chardin has a genial intuition which has global universal implications, elaborates it into a scientific mystique of sort, and, not unlike Pascal, gambles on it. The intuition is this: God needs Man, since without Man God's creative plan cannot be fulfilled. Umberto Eco who was one of my professors at Yale University in the 70s, would like us to think that he is the first with this insight of "God's need for Man," but as somebody who wrote a dissertation on Thomas Aquinas and considers himself post-modern and post-Christian, he ought to know better. For the idea is as old as Aquinas and as modern as De Chardin: it is novantiqua. Both thinkers affirm that without Man God's face cannot be fully manifest in his evolving creation. For De Chardin Man is the locus of the divine epiphany. For in Man the universe has become conscious of itself.

At first, the official Catholic Church looked unfavorably upon De Chardin doctrine. In so doing if failed to perceive (as it had failed with Galileo and Giordano Bruno) that the doctrine more than being a challenge to Christian theological thought, was a challenge to scientific positivism and its Cartesian underpinnings. As it turned out, scientists were better predisposed and more friendly toward De Chardin's doctrine than the theologians who saw him as a revolutionary of sort. And so paradoxically it was the Church's opposition and censorship which conferred on De Chardin the aurea of a charismatic authority championing those who were fed up with indexes and imprimaturs and inquisitions, those abuses which lent credence to those who had an ax to grind against religion in general and Christianity in particular and whose mind-set predisposed them to throw out the baby (religion, of Faith) with the dirty bathwater (the abuses and corruptions of religion) .

Henri De Lubac wrote what could be considered the summa of De Chardin's spiritual doctrine: the book La pensée religieuse de Theilhard De Chardin who was infelicitously translated in English as The Religion of Teilhard De Chardin, seems to suggest that De Chardin devised his own brand of Christianity, thus playing into the hands of his detractors. In any case, De Lubac was eminently qualified to examine De Chardin's religious thinking. He was a bona fide Catholic theologian whose specialization was the origins of Christian Humanism beginning with Origen, the Greek Fathers, all the way to Thomas Aquinas. De Lubac points out that in De Chardin you have a providential combination of the scientific and the mystic; almost a novelty at the time. Even his humanism is quite orthodox in the sense that he has made Man once again the center of the universe, not just spatially or metaphorically but "structurally." For De Chardin, not only religion but science itself confirms that "Man is the greatest telluric and biological event of our planet; the supreme achievement of the organizing power of the cosmos." Which is to say that Man is none other than the key to the whole of nature.

Neither De Chardin nor De Lubac knew Vico, but had they known him they would have more than welcomed Vico's constant insistence that "self-knowledge" was not only the key to Man but also the key to nature; which is to say, knowledge of Man to himself, man narrating to himself his own story as he develops cosmologically and historically from the Big Bang to today. Man is his own history. Indeed Francis of Assisi had it right all along when he affirms that the sun is literally our brother (see his poem "The Canticle of Brother Sun" which is learned by every grammar school child in Italy and is none other than the cornerstone of post-medieval Italian humanism). To know Man and his historical evolution is to know everything. This is De Chardin's (and Vico's) great challenge to scientific positivism. This is science that unlike positivism has not forgotten its humanistic roots.

PART ONE
PART TWO