About Teilhard de Chardin’s Vision of Love and Unity [Longer Commentary]

De Chardin’s envisagement of love “developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth” offers a visionary roadmap for humanity’s evolution. While on the surface, the evolutionary process seems to be characterized by competition and survival of the fittest, de Chardin hints at an undercurrent of collective growth powered by love. As humans, our destiny isn’t just to survive and reproduce, but to expand our consciousness and capacity to love until it encompasses all of humanity and even the Earth itself. This evolutionary trajectory proposes a future where barriers of race, nationality, and ideology blur, leading to a global civilization unified by mutual understanding and compassion.

Lastly, de Chardin’s perspective is imbued with both a challenge and a promise. The challenge is for humanity to recognize and cultivate the power of love as an evolutionary force, transcending immediate self-interest and narrow visions of the world. The promise, however, is grand. Should humanity rise to this challenge, the outcome isn’t just survival but the manifestation of a higher order of existence — one characterized by unity, shared purpose, and a deep recognition of our common destiny on this shared Earth. In the current global landscape, with its complexities and myriad divisions, de Chardin’s words resonate as a timely and urgent call, beckoning us towards a brighter, more unified future.

The Phenomenon of Man

The Phenomenon of Man (Le phénomène humain) is a 1955 book written by the French philosopher, paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In this work, Teilhard describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness.

Additional Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

“A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.”

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [The Phenomenon of Man (Le phénomène humain), 1955].

“If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level—indeed in the molecule itself—it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form… Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [The Phenomenon of Man (Le phénomène humain), 1955].

“The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe. Beyond the vibrations with which we are familiar, the rainbow-like range of its colours is still in full growth. But, for all the fascination that the lower shades have for us, it is only towards the “ultra” that the creation of light advances. It is in these invisible and, we might almost say, immaterial zones that we can look for true initiation into unity. The depths we attribute to matter are no more than the reflection of the peaks of spirit.”

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [“The Evolution of Chastity” (1934), as translated by René Hague in Toward the Future (1975)].

“What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them. And so we cannot avoid this conclusion: it is biologically evident that to gain control of passion and so make it serve spirit must be a condition of progress. Sooner or later, then, the world will brush aside our incredulity and take this step: because whatever is the more true comes out into the open, and whatever is better is ultimately realized. The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [“The Evolution of Chastity” (1934), as translated by René Hague in Toward the Future (1975)].