Teilhard: Visionary Scientist is beautifully made but flawed. Had its narrative included church and Jesuit support for science, provided context about racism, eugenics, and science in Teilhard’s time while presenting Teilhard’s difficult words on these matters, and discussed Galileo acceptably—then it would have been a valuable film about a Jesuit scientist.
Teilhard opens with, “He is a Jesuit priest, and yet he’s a scientist” [0:00:25]. Why that “yet”? History abounds in Jesuit scientists. The Vatican Observatory’s astronomers are mostly Jesuits. Seismology is “the Jesuit science”—Jesuits being key to its development.
The film also highlights Teilhard wanting “to bring together science and Christianity [0:55:55]”. Teilhard seeks to help “his Catholic Church by opening it up to the world of science” [0:38:35], etc. However, in Teilhard’s lifetime, different popes established the Vatican Observatory, built highly visible telescope domes atop both the walls of the Vatican and the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo, and supported the Observatory’s collaboration in the “Carte du Ciel,” a then-cutting-edge international, photographic sky-mapping project. The film itself shows Teilhard being urged by his superiors to do science: he is warned to “limit himself to strictly scientific subjects” [1:06:40]; he complains about being prodded to keep to his science [1:39:15].
number four is a real obstacle in his mind. It states that the whole human race takes its origin from one proto-parent, Adam. Teilhard knows this is impossible in the eyes of science … and he also believes it stands outside the competence of theologians [0:55:35].
It is so impossible to include Adam and the earthly paradise (taken literally) in our scientific outlook, that I wonder whether a single person today can at the same time focus his mind on the geological world presented by science, and on the world commonly described by sacred history [“Note on Some Possible Historical Representations of Original Sin,” in Christianity and Evolution, trans. R. Hague, 47].
The film frames a narrative here of Teilhard’s “new insights into evolution creat[ing] conflict with religious authorities” [0:00:35] but overlooks how those insights might create conflict even today. Ledóchowski might have viewed rejecting “one proto-parent” as rejecting the unity of humankind—which “scientific racism” had been doing for some time then, asserting that different “types” of human beings, true and lesser, had differing origins and had evolved separately. Dark-skinned people were always lesser.
If the Negro had descended from the same parentage, or, except in color merely, was the same being as ourselves […] then it would be [a Christian’s] first and most imperative duty […] to set an example to others, to labor night and day to elevate this (in that case) wronged and outraged race—indeed, to suffer every personal inconvenience, even martyrdom itself in the performance of a duty so obvious and necessary
(145–46).
Of course, Van Evrie was certain that science and common experience showed that “the Negro” was not of the same parentage, not the same being. Scientific racists derided the unity of humankind, the single-family of Adam. They invoked Galileo’s name and poured scorn on theologians and their insistence on “monogenism.”
By Teilhard’s time, eugenics had arisen. In 1908, Alexander Graham Bell promoted eugenics in National Geographic, using the idea of “evolution” to urge the “breeding of better men and better women,” with “evolution” being “controlled by suitable immigration laws tending to eliminate undesirable ethnical elements.” Such a law was passed in the USA in 1924. People named “Ledóchowski” were not among its “desirables.”
very different from the monogenism of the theologians. […] The stem by which the human species is attached to the common main trunk of living beings must, in fact, be sufficiently complex to contain ‘in potency’ the great varieties of human types known to us. […] If we try to concentrate in one single individual (or one single pair) all the primitive characteristics that can be recognized in Heidelberg man, Neanderthal man, the Tasmanians, Australians, etc., we arrive at an extremely dehumanized being, maybe a monstrosity (46).
Any scientist today who wrapped together Indigenous people with Homo erectus (Heidelberg man) and Neanderthals in one sentence containing words like “primitive,” “dehumanized,” and “monstrosity” might face consequences much worse than Ledóchowski’s demands. The film moves from Ledóchowski to the Inquisition, and of course, Galileo (1:01:40): “Galileo scientifically proved” Earth’s motion around the Sun; he was condemned by the Inquisition for that proof; he muttered nonetheless, “it still moves.” The late Fr. George V. Coyne, S.J., appears in the film, supporting this narrative, unfortunately. Coyne was an outstanding astronomer, director of the Vatican Observatory throughout John Paul ii’s papacy. He practically re-built the Observatory, establishing a new telescope in Arizona as the skies at Castel Gandolfo brightened under wasteful night lighting. But his words in the film, which sometimes conflict with historical research he published with Ugo Baldini and others, cannot be explained. They also cannot excuse a narrative that is bogus at the “didn’t even read Wikipedia” level. Galileo neither proved nor muttered. Competent Jesuit astronomers opposed him with science, seemingly solid then, understood to be flawed today—but not shamefully flawed, like the science of race and eugenics. (For more regarding science, Bell, and Galileo, see Guy Consolmagno, S.J., and C. M. Graney, When Science Goes Wrong: The Desire and Search for Truth [Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2023].)
Teilhard has too many flaws to be a valuable film.