New documentary explores life of ‘visionary’ Jesuit scientist

Thirteen years ago, Frank and Mary Frost did not set out to make a 2-hour documentary about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and scientist.

The Virginia-based filmmakers were in the Woodstock Theological Library at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and there was a bust of Teilhard on the table.

“I was looking at this bust, and people kept saying, ‘You ought to make a movie about Teilhard,’” Frank Frost said.

At a screening of “Teilhard: Visionary Scientist” July 29 at St. Ignatius College Prep, Frost allowed that he’d always been curious about the man. Frank Frost was a Jesuit scholastic teaching (and starting a film club) at St. Ignatius from 1965 to 1967, just a few years after the Holy Office issued a “monitum” (warning) about Teilhard’s works that were published after his death in 1955.

“They told all the Jesuit seminarians not to read them, so of course, everybody did,” Frank Frost said. “I found my copy and found that I had annotated nearly every page, although I didn’t remember doing that.”

Teilhard’s works of religious philosophy argue that the universe is evolving towards greater unity in love, that matter and spirit are not opposed and are indeed the same cosmic “stuff,” and that creation must be respected as a visible sign of the Creator, rather than being in opposition to the divine.

While at least one proponent thought raising money for the film would be easy, Frank Frost said, fundraising proved the biggest challenge, which is common for independent films.

Adding travel and crew and other staff in France and China increased the challenge, but the movie could not be made without those trips, he said.

“We knew we couldn’t do it without the support of the Teilhard family,” Frost explained. The Frosts met with a woman in the family to share their proposal. “She said yes, the Teilhard family would support what we were doing. But we would need to walk in the footsteps of Teilhard, come to Orcines, and we stayed with them. … It really made him so real to us and kind of transformed the project, and it made us feel close to the family, so we couldn’t stop. We kept working on it. The rest was just persistence.”

The effort was aided by the opening of Jesuit archives with letters between the Jesuit superior general and Teilhard’s local superiors, and the fact that many of Teilhard’s friends saved his letters to them.

“We found boxes and boxes of documents that Teilhard had written,” Frost said.

The documentary, now available to stream on PBS, connects Teilhard’s upbringing in Orcines, France, with his love of science, especially paleontology and geology, and his love of the church. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1899 and professed first vows in 1901.

The first quarter-century of his priesthood was marked by ongoing scientific study and teaching, and attempts to explain the entrance of original sin into the world in a way consistent with evolution. Those attempts drew the ire of the Jesuit generalate in Rome, at a time when the Catholic Church was entrenching itself against modernism.

He was sent to China in 1925 under instructions to pursue his scientific work and not write about a religion, a directive that he honored only by not publishing his works on religion, and he was named scientific adviser to the National Geological Survey of China.

“This is a purely scientific enterprise in which religion is pretty much unmentioned,” Mary Frost said. “That’s why they sent him to China, so he wouldn’t talk about theology and philosophy.”

His position put him on the scene for the 1929 discovery of Peking Man — then considered a “missing link” between prehuman hominids and Homo sapiens.

“This was before carbon dating, so it was Teilhard who used the different strata of the rocks to date the fossils,” Frank Frost explained.

In researching and filming the movie, the Frosts learned that in China, Teilhard is honored and seen as one of the founders of paleontology there.

“I don’t think even his family in France knew how much he is honored there,” Frank Frost said. “The Chinese deeply revere Teilhard.”

For two decades, China was Teilhard’s home base, with trips to France as well as the United States and to other parts of the world. He returned to France after World War II, but was frustrated by the Jesuits’ refusal to publish “The Human Phenomenon” and “The Divine Milieu,” two of his most significant works, and by delays in allowing him to accept academic opportunities, which then evaporated.

It was during this period that he suffered a heart attack. When he recovered, his local superior in Paris suggested he name a layperson his literary executor.

In 1951, Teilhard moved to New York, where he would live out the rest of his days. He died Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955, and was buried in the cemetery at the house of formation at St. Andrew-On-Hudson. Eleven people attended his funeral two days later, and his name was initially spelled wrong on his headstone.

But by the end of that year, “The Human Phenomenon” was published in France, as was “The Divine Milieu” two years later. Both books were published in English by the end of 1960, and when the Second Vatican Council opened two years later, many council fathers spoke approvingly of his work.

Later, Jesuit theologian Father Henri de Lubac would say that parts of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (“Gaudium et Spes”) had “Teilhard’s fingerprints all over them,” Frost said.

As to what the filmmakers think of Teilhard now?

“We’re not saying Teilhard has the answer to everything in philosophy,” Mary Frost said. “But he has a beautiful answer.”