An Astonishing Affirmation by Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin from the Other Side of the Veil
Matthew J. Milliner, a bold and lively author as well as a professor of art history at Wheaton College, has been conversing with the dead in a couple of delightful and thoughtful essays recently. In his most recent such conversation, I am astonished and encouraged to find that the famed Jesuit paleontologist, Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), found a summary that I wrote of David Bentley Hart’s concept of the meta-historical human fall to be compelling and helpful:
“Had such thinking been available to me,” said Père Teilhard, “it might have saved me considerable frustration. And it has ancient pedigree. During my lifetime, I too casually dismissed what I named the ‘Alexandrian type of Cosmogenesis,’ underestimating the depth of the great Christian thinkers of that city and their followers like Maximus the Confessor. I equated the big bang with the beginning of everything but did not consider that it might instead be the manifestation of a primeval catastrophe.”
Heavy.