Teilhard de Chardin and spirituality
09
Mar
I often quote the fact that Chardin was sent by the Jesuits to 
China because they considered his thinking a little advanced for the time, to say the least, his first trip was in 1923, but there were so many between the years 1923 and 1945 that he considered it his “second homeland, and says about it: I prove for China, my adopted country, a great recognition. China was the luck of my life. It contributed, with its immensity and the norm of its dimensions, to broaden my thinking and elevate it to a planetary scale ”(apud Teixeira, 2012, p. 171), that is why I say that China“ confirmed ”its theses and its spirituality.
Such was his luck, that he told a friend, Father Leroy, who recorded in a book: “I can tell you that I now live permanently in the presence of God”, Chardin made his passage precisely at the Easter of 1955, in New York, at the age of 74
I put three works as fundamental to understand your spirituality: The Human phenomenon, the Divine Environment and the Human Zoological Group (1948), unfortunately part of your personal correspondence and your diary were lost, and could very well complement your thinking.
As an intellectual rejects the naive theological-philosophical thinking that almost always falls into the traps of pure Devotion (devotion is important), of superficial dogmatism (religion has dogmas) and seeks to make a reading more suitable to contemporary man.
It refuses the tendency towards extreme specialization and thus walks with other current thinkers towards the so-called “paradigm of complexity”, in the human phenomenon sees man as the process of complexification of life developed in the Biosphere, what led many to see him as an evolutionist and some theologians as a pantheist.
The deplorable situation in which Christianity finds itself was one of his constant concerns and at the same time he had a desire to return to his origins, how to update it in contact with a modern world that has undergone cultural and social transformations, he wrote:
“… The great objection of our present time against Christianity, the true source of mistrust that makes whole blocks of humanity watertight, is not precisely historical or theological difficulties. It is the suspicion that our religion renders its faithful inhumane (CHARDIN, 2014, p. 35).
Says a Portuguese cardinal-poet José de Tolentino Mendonça: ““ Being a Christian is a risk, a human being is a great risk ”, he also seeks a realistic view of the modern world and as a poet seeks to integrate himself with him, the divine environment is also the human environment in Chardin and is immersed in the universe, the great mystery of the Love of God and the great divine environment in which life emerged.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, Pierre. The Divine Environment: rehearsal of inner life. 2. ed. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2014.
