A Prophet of Love

Teilhard de Chardin was a visionary French Jesuit priest, a paleontologist, a biologist, and philosopher. He spent the bulk of his life trying to integrate religious experience with natural science, most specifically Christian theology with theories of evolution. His writings were suppressed by the Catholic Church, and none of them were published until after his death.

Chardin was a prophet of love who took on the lifelong task of integrating science and faith. His aim as to teach how to see God everywhere, to see him in all that is most hidden, most solid, and most ultimate in the world. He was a prophet of immanence, which we can see in what he said at the end of his life:

If, as a result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world. The world (its value, its infallibility and its goodness)—that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe. It is by this faith that I live. And it is to this faith, I feel, that at the moment of death, rising above all doubts, I shall surrender myself.