Quick Answer
Twenty-two essays by a Jesuit palaeontologist arguing that evolution has not stopped with us, that humanity is being drawn together into a single planetary mind, and that the process ends in a point he called Omega. It is the most accessible of Teilhard's books and the most exposed, because it was written across two world wars and the atom bomb and never once lost its confidence. Whether that confidence is vision or blindness is the question the book leaves you with.
Key Takeaways
- Evolution continues in humanity, now as convergence rather than divergence.
- The noosphere is the layer of thought forming over the planet, and he thought it was becoming a single thing.
- Omega is the end point, personal rather than a dissolution, and he identified it with Christ.
- The optimism survives Hiroshima, which is either the book's greatness or its failure.
- Read this before The Phenomenon of Man, not after.
17 min read
What This Book Is
L'Avenir de l'Homme, published in French in 1959 and in English in 1964, gathers twenty-two essays, lectures and addresses written between 1920 and 1952.
None was published in Teilhard's lifetime in the form given here. Most circulated as typescripts among friends and were assembled after his death, as all his religious and philosophical writing was.
The pieces range from a few pages to thirty. They are arranged roughly chronologically and share a single preoccupation: given what evolution has done so far, what is it doing now, and where is it going?
The answer he gives is consistent across three decades. Humanity is not the end of evolution but a new phase of it, and the phase is one of convergence toward a single centre.
Where it sits. The Phenomenon of Man is the systematic work, dense and difficult. The Divine Milieu is the devotional one. The Future of Man is the collection you can read a piece at a time, and it is where his ideas are stated most directly and with the least apparatus. If you have bounced off the big book, start here.
Who Teilhard Was
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born in the Auvergne in 1881, entered the Jesuit order at eighteen, and trained as a geologist and palaeontologist alongside his theological formation.
He served as a stretcher-bearer through the First World War, refusing a chaplain's post so as to be with the men, and was decorated for it. Several of the earliest essays here come from that period.
His scientific career was real and substantial. He worked in China for twenty years, took part in the excavation of Peking Man at Zhoukoudian, and published extensively on Asian geology and fossil mammals.
He died in New York on Easter Sunday 1955, having been kept away from Europe and from publication by his order for most of his adult life.
The Enforced Silence
The circumstance that shapes everything about how these essays read.
In 1925, a private paper of Teilhard's on original sin reached Rome. He was required to sign a statement repudiating it, removed from his teaching post in Paris, and sent to China. For the next thirty years he was forbidden to publish anything outside strict palaeontology.
He obeyed. He remained a Jesuit, continued to ask permission, was refused each time, and arranged for his writings to be held by a lay friend so they could appear after his death without implicating the order.
The essays here were written knowing they would not be printed. That gives them a peculiar freedom and a peculiar loneliness. He is arguing with nobody in public and with everybody in private.
In 1962 the Holy Office issued a warning against his works. It has never been withdrawn, though popes since have quoted him approvingly.
Evolution Has Not Stopped
The claim the whole collection rests on.
The ordinary view, in 1930 as now, was that human beings had emerged from evolution and were now outside it, or at most subject to slow biological drift. Teilhard rejected this entirely.
His argument is that evolution has always been an increase in complexity accompanied by an increase in consciousness, from atoms to molecules to cells to organisms to brains. That increase did not stop when brains appeared. It changed medium. Instead of producing more complex organisms it began producing more complex arrangements between them.
Culture, language, technology and social organisation are, on this reading, evolution continuing by other means. The unit that is evolving is no longer the individual body but the collective.
The strength of the argument is that it makes human history continuous with natural history rather than a break from it. The weakness is that it uses evolution as a name for any increase in complexity, which is not what biologists mean by the word.
From Divergence to Convergence
The geometric image at the heart of his thinking.
Biological evolution diverges. A lineage branches, the branches separate and specialise, and they do not rejoin. The tree of life is a tree.
Human evolution, Teilhard argued, has reversed this. Because the earth is round and finite, the spreading of humanity across it has reached the point where the branches are meeting again. Populations that diverged for a hundred thousand years are now in contact, mixing, and pressed together.
He compared it to meridians on a globe. They spread from one pole and inevitably converge at the other. Humanity has passed the equator.
The image is exact for his purpose because it makes convergence a consequence of geography rather than of goodwill. People are not choosing to unite. The shape of the planet is forcing them together, and the only question is how they will bear it.
The Noosphere
The word most associated with him, and the concept these essays develop most fully.
The geosphere is the rock, the biosphere the living film over it. The noosphere is the film of thought over that: the totality of human minds, and the web of communication and shared knowledge that connects them.
Teilhard's claim was that the noosphere is not a metaphor. It is a real layer, as real as the biosphere, and it is undergoing its own evolution. It is thickening, becoming more interconnected, and moving toward a state in which it functions as a single reflective whole.
He was writing before television, before computers, before any of the things people now point to. What he saw were the railways, the telegraph, radio, the growth of cities, and the rapid multiplication of scientific collaboration. He extrapolated.
The extrapolation is the interesting part. He did not think the noosphere would simply get bigger. He thought it would fold in on itself, and that at some point it would become conscious of itself as a whole, as a brain does.
The Omega Point
Where he thought it was all going.
Convergence needs something to converge on. A process that draws all centres together must have a centre of its own, and Teilhard named it Omega: the final point, in which the whole of evolved consciousness is gathered.
He argued, on grounds that are more philosophical than scientific, that Omega must have four properties. It must be already existing, since a merely future goal could not exert present attraction. It must be personal, since only a person can gather persons. It must be irreversible, since a union that could dissolve would not hold. And it must be transcendent, outside the process it completes.
Readers will recognise a theological argument in evolutionary clothing. Teilhard made no secret of this. Omega, for him, was the Christ of the Pauline letters, in whom all things hold together, seen from the far end of evolution.
The move from noosphere to Omega is where most secular readers part company with him, and it is worth seeing why. The noosphere is an observation with an extrapolation attached. Omega is a demand: the process must have this kind of end or the process is meaningless. He states plainly that he cannot accept a universe that leads to nothing, and that his argument for Omega is in part an argument from the need for hope. That honesty is characteristic and it does not make the argument stronger.
Why Union Does Not Dissolve the Person
The distinction that separates him from most convergence thinking, Eastern and Western.
The obvious objection to a single planetary consciousness is that it sounds like the end of the individual. Ant-hill, hive, totalitarian mass. Teilhard heard this objection all his life and answered it with a formula he repeated in nearly every essay: union differentiates.
His evidence was biological. Cells that unite into an organism do not become less distinct; they specialise, and a liver cell in a body is far more particular than an amoeba on its own. Real union, he argued, sharpens the parts. Only false union, mere aggregation or compression, blurs them.
The test of any proposed unification of humanity is therefore whether it makes people more themselves or less. A convergence that flattened would not be convergence at all but collapse.
The formula is elegant and it is not obviously true. It is true of organisms. Whether it is true of societies is exactly the question, and he tends to assume it.
The Atom Bomb Essay
The piece that tests the whole system, written in 1946.
Most thinkers who lived through 1945 treated Hiroshima as a rupture: proof that human power had outrun human wisdom. Teilhard's essay on the spiritual repercussions of the bomb reads it the other way.
The bomb, he wrote, was the first time a group of human beings had deliberately reached into the structure of matter and released its energy by design. What that showed was not danger but capacity. Humanity had discovered that it could act on the universe at the level of its foundations, and having discovered it, could not go back.
He acknowledged the fear and set it aside. The greater fact, for him, was that the bomb was built by a team, an international collaboration of minds working as one, and that this collaboration was itself a sign of the noosphere organising.
Read today, the essay is either the purest statement of his vision or its reductio. He looked at the worst thing his species had made and saw evolution working. Many readers cannot follow him there and the book does not help them.
Democracy, Communism, Fascism
The political essays, which are more interesting than their reputation.
Writing in the 1930s and 1940s, Teilhard read the three competing systems as three attempts at the same thing: the unification of humanity that convergence demands. Each, he thought, had grasped part of the truth and failed on the rest.
Democracy understood the person and undervalued the whole. Communism understood the whole and crushed the person. Fascism understood energy and direction and had no idea what the direction was for.
His proposal was a synthesis in which the binding force would be neither law nor coercion but an inward attraction between persons, which he called, without embarrassment, love.
The analysis is schematic and it is also detached in a way that dates it. He writes about fascism as a phenomenon to be classified while fascism is burning Europe. That detachment was the palaeontologist's habit of the long view, and it has a cost when the view is of the present.
Love as Physical Force
The claim that sounds softest and is meant hardest.
Teilhard used the word love as a technical term. He meant the attraction of centre for centre, the pull that draws distinct consciousnesses toward each other without merging them. He traced it back through the whole of evolution as the psychic face of what physics calls attraction, and forward as the only force capable of holding a converged humanity together without compressing it.
He thought it was underdeveloped. Humanity had tamed fire, electricity and the atom, and had not yet learned to harness the one energy that could bind it. The famous line about the day when human beings would harness the energies of love and discover fire for the second time comes from this collection.
Whether love can be a physical force in any sense a physicist would accept is doubtful. Whether it is the only thing that can unite without flattening is a proposition worth arguing about, and he argued it.
The Spirit of Research
An aspect of the book that gets less attention and deserves more.
Several essays concern science as a vocation. Teilhard saw research as the specifically human form of evolutionary striving: the noosphere feeling its way forward. He thought the scientist was doing something religious whether or not the scientist knew it.
He called for research to be organised on a planetary scale, for the pooling of effort across nations, and for a shift from science as the accumulation of facts to science as the deliberate direction of evolution.
Much of this has happened, in the shape of international projects and global collaboration. The spiritual reading he gave it has not, and the essays are a reminder that he expected both together.
The Christian Layer
What the theology adds and what it costs.
Teilhard was a priest before he was anything else and he never separated the vision from the faith. Omega is Christ. The noosphere is the body of Christ forming. The convergence of humanity is the building of the kingdom by evolutionary means.
For Christian readers this is what makes him valuable: a reading of evolution that does not treat it as a threat but as the very mechanism of the incarnation working itself out in time. The line of thought runs through later theology of evolution and into the environmental encyclicals.
For readers outside that faith the identification is arbitrary. Nothing in the argument from convergence requires the centre to be the Christ of the Pauline letters, and Teilhard's insistence that it is reads as the point where observation ends and confession begins. He would have said that the two were never separate. Readers must decide for themselves.
The Question of Science
The objection that has followed him since 1961.
Peter Medawar's review of The Phenomenon of Man is among the most savage in the history of science writing, and its charge applies equally here: that Teilhard dressed a mystical vision in the vocabulary of biology, that his use of energy, evolution and complexity does not correspond to anything measurable, and that the whole is rhetoric rather than argument.
The charge is largely fair as stated and it misses what the essays are. Teilhard was not doing biology in them. He was doing what philosophers of nature have always done, which is to ask what the findings of science mean, and he was doing it in the only vocabulary he had.
The fair complaint is not that he was unscientific but that he did not always say when he had stopped being scientific. The essays would be stronger with that line drawn.
The Internet Reading
The revival that made him fashionable again.
From the mid-1990s, writers on networked technology discovered Teilhard and claimed him as a prophet of the web: the planetary membrane of thought, every mind connected to every other, the noosphere made literal in fibre.
The resemblance is real and the claim is only partly right. What Teilhard described was a convergence of consciousness, an inward unification, and not merely a connection of devices. He would have seen the internet as infrastructure for the noosphere and not the thing itself, in roughly the way that a nervous system is not a mind.
Still, of all the thinkers of the interwar period, he is the one whose description of the next century reads least strangely now. That is worth something.
The Objections
Four, and they are the ones readers keep raising.
The optimism. He wrote through two world wars and the bomb and never revised the direction of travel. The book contains no serious treatment of the possibility that convergence fails, that the noosphere fragments, or that humanity destroys itself. That absence is glaring.
The vocabulary. Evolution, energy, complexity and consciousness are used loosely enough that the argument can rarely be tested.
The coercion problem. Union differentiates is asserted about societies on the strength of organisms, and the twentieth century supplied a great deal of evidence that enforced unity compresses.
The confession. Omega is Christ by decision, not by argument. The book is honest about this and it still leaves the non-Christian reader with nowhere to stand at the end.
Who Should Read It
Read it if the noosphere is a word you have met and want to see in the hands of the man who coined it.
Read it if you are interested in evolutionary readings of Christianity and want the source that later theology keeps returning to.
Read it alongside Aurobindo, who was building a remarkably similar vision in Pondicherry at the same time, and alongside Bucke, who had anticipated part of it decades earlier.
Read it if you want to see what unbroken hope looks like in the face of the worst century on record, and decide for yourself whether it is a virtue.
The most durable idea in the collection is the geometric one. Humanity did not decide to converge; the planet is round, and the branches that spread out from one point must meet at the other. Everything since, the crowding, the contact, the collisions, the pooling of knowledge, is the pressure of a finite surface on a species that has filled it. Teilhard's question was never whether we would be pushed together. It was whether the pushing would compress us into a mass or unite us into something in which each part is more itself than before. He was certain of the answer. The century since has been less certain, and the question has not gone away.
Twenty-two essays on where evolution is going, from the man who named the noosphere.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our reservations about the optimism and the vocabulary are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Future of Man about?
A collection of Teilhard's essays and lectures from 1920 to 1952 on where human evolution is heading, arguing that humanity is converging toward a unified planetary consciousness he calls the Omega Point.
Who was Teilhard de Chardin?
A French Jesuit priest and palaeontologist, 1881 to 1955, who worked on Peking Man and whose attempts to reconcile evolution with Christianity were suppressed by his order during his lifetime.
What is the noosphere?
The layer of thought and mind that Teilhard saw forming over the biosphere as human beings became linked by communication and shared knowledge, a new stage of evolution above the biological.
What is the Omega Point?
The end toward which evolution converges, a supreme centre of consciousness in which all personal centres are united without losing themselves. Teilhard identified it with the cosmic Christ.
How does this differ from The Phenomenon of Man?
The Phenomenon is one sustained argument from matter to mind to Omega. The Future of Man is twenty-two shorter pieces looking forward from the present, more political and more hopeful.
Why was Teilhard censored?
The Jesuit order and the Vatican objected to his treatment of original sin, his evolutionary reading of Christ and his optimism about human progress. He was forbidden to publish his religious writings while alive.
Is his optimism justified?
The book's central weakness. He wrote several essays after Hiroshima and kept the optimism intact, treating the bomb as evidence of human power rather than of danger, which many readers find hard to accept.
What does he say about the atomic bomb?
The essay Some Reflections on the Spiritual Repercussions of the Atom Bomb reads it as the moment humanity discovered its collective power over matter, a step toward convergence rather than a threat to it.
Is it science?
No. Teilhard was a working scientist but these essays are speculative philosophy and theology using evolutionary vocabulary. Biologists such as Medawar objected to the blurring.
Did he anticipate the internet?
His description of a planetary membrane of thought linking every human mind has been read that way since the 1990s. He was describing something more inward than a network, but the resemblance is real.
How does he treat democracy and totalitarianism?
As competing forms of the same drive toward unification. He thought both failed by compressing people rather than uniting them from within, and he proposed a third way based on love as the binding force.
Who should read it?
Readers who found The Phenomenon of Man too dense and want the same vision in shorter, more accessible pieces, and anyone interested in the theology of evolution and the idea of planetary consciousness.
Decide what the pressure is for
Teilhard's world is one in which everyone is being pushed closer to everyone else and nobody chose it. That is simply the world, and it has become more so since he died. His contribution was to refuse the two easy responses, retreat into the individual or surrender to the mass, and to insist on a third thing: a union that makes each part sharper. Whether that is possible is not settled. What he offers is the standard by which to judge every form of togetherness you are offered. Does it make you more yourself or less? If less, it is not union. It is compression, and he thought compression always fails.
Sources & References
- Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Future of Man, trans. Norman Denny, Image Books edition.
- Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu.
- Medawar, Peter. Review of The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 1961.
- Holy Office monitum on the works of Teilhard de Chardin, 1962.
- King, Ursula. Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin.
- Cuénot, Claude. Teilhard de Chardin: A Biographical Study.