Robert J. OConnell - Teilhards vision of the past: the making of a method

Copyright 1982 by FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
All rights reserved
LC 82-71279
ISBN 0-8232-1090-1 (clothbound)
ISBN 0-8232-1091-X (paperback)

Printed in the United States of America

For
all my Jesuit confreres at Enghien and Chantilly,
where Teilhard's best was the air we breathed.
But especially for Rgis Bernard, Michel Bouillot, Andr Derville,
and Casimir Gnanadickam, whose spirit still pervades my personal
"Comment je Crois."

When The Phenomenon of Man appeared in English translation in 1959,1 it was pelted with a storm of criticism by the Anglo-Saxon scientific community. Two of the best-known reviews of Teilhard's synthetic work, by his friend George Gay-lord Simpson, and by the Nobel prizewinner P. B. Medawar,2 were especially severe, and, in the latter case, surprisingly intemperate. In both cases the attack was aimed at Teilhard's claim to have written a "treatise" which was "purely scientific." So, at least, read the very opening sentence of the English translation, and neither Simpson nor Medawar seems ever to have gotten beyond that very partial description of the work's genre, or checked whether the translator had done justice to the original French.3 That translation, as it happens, is misleading, and, furthermore, Teilhard goes on from there to define the genre of his work much more precisely than that opening sentence could ever hope to do. The result of ignoring those further qualifications is that the hasty-lazy assumption undergirding Medawar's and Simpson's approach to the work is so thoroughly misguided as to make the majority of their criticisms a series of irrelevancies.4 Theodosius Dobzhansky, on the other hand, has written kindly about Teilhard's synthesis; perhaps the conti