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Teilhard never recanted his basic notion about the existence of a spiritual reality that suffused all matter (man and animals included) and had evolved into a "noosphere"—his term for a layer of human awareness that enveloped the earth like some psychic biosphere. As this envelopment progressed, Teilhard believed, man would eventually transcend his individualism and converge at the "Omega Point" with the Omega —God. Instead of God's creation at the beginning of time, Teilhard emphasized instead his ongoing and future creative activity. To orthodox critics, this vision destroyed the distinction between man and nature, and veered perilously close to pantheism.
In the new book, the man with these radical ideas emerges as a charming, courtly Frenchman who proved singularly attractive to women. One major figure in the Lukases' story is Lucile Swan, a well-to-do American sculptress separated from her husband. She talked long hours in Peking with the priest and eventually became embittered at his total commitment to celibacy. Teilhard could willingly suffer the privations of expeditions into the northwestern wastes of China. But he seemed more at home attending salon gatherings with personalities ranging from Biologist Julian Huxley to Actress Linda Darnell.
The Lukases found a Teilhard curiously detached from events that surrounded him, even while he constantly urged upon his church the importance of the material world. He lived through 23 turbulent years of Chinese history, yet knew few Chinese and, the Lukases report, never learned a word of their language. In 1937, while observing from the deck of a ship Chinese cities ravaged by fire and cholera, he completed his most optimistic essay (Human Energy) on mankind's prospects. When he learned that the Piltdown Man find—in which he had played a minor role—was a well-planned hoax, he preferred to suppose that "someone innocently threw the bone fragments from a neighborhood cottage into the ditch." In his philosophy, evil was to be endured as part of inevitable progress toward good. Sometimes, in fact, his optimism could overwhelm his apprehension of evil; once during a debate that covered the Nazi experiments at Dachau, he told an astonished audience that "man, to become fully man, must have tried everything to the very end."
Teilhard's works have become "the property of a cabal of admirers, quite outside the mainstream of modern thought," assert the Lukases. Opinions vary on whether that will change. The secular scientists whom Teilhard had hoped to attract tend to ignore his work. British Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper recently dismissed him as one of the "great charlatans" of modern letters. His influence among Protestant thinkers is minimal.
Among Catholics, many conservatives, embarrassed by the church's treatment of Teilhard during his lifetime, now go out of their way to find and praise valuable insights in his writings. The Jesuit-run Pontifical Gregorian University reports with pride that Teilhard leads its compilation of the most-read Catholic thinkers over the past ten years. Even so, says French Theologian Yves Congar, "it is certain that his influence is diminishing." American Jesuit Avery Dulles thinks Teilhard's impact persists, though mainly through writers who were influenced by him.