Marie Joseph-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: [unknown]
Surname/tag: Teilhard; Telihard de Chardin; Dompierre d'Hornoy; Teilhard Chambon; Argonnes; Leroy

Introduction
Many biographies have been written about Père Pierre Teilhard de Chardin S.J., but none that I have read have ever included the whole story. None have done justice to the extraordinary strength of his faith, hope in face of depression and anxiety, his capacity for love and the deep level of his conscious spiritual relationship with and awareness of and "seeing" God in self and within the world. The achievements of this valient priest, scientist, teacher, writer and friend to many, in face of the depression and anxiety that he endured throughout his life are all the more extraordinary than had he not experienced such personal trials of mind and body. For the most part, it seems to me that these medical conditions have been avoided, brushed over, named as something else or minimised. I can only speculate as to the reasons of authors for doing this. To my knowledge, only Teilhard's friend and confrère, Pierre Leroy S.J. has given a clear account of manifestations of the severity of the depression and anxiety and in all likelihood post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after WW I, experienced by Père Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Birth
Childhood
Adolescence
Young Adult
Middle Years
Elderly Man
Death

Research Notes

• TEILHARD. A Biography by Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas: Monsieur Teilhard, a tall, taciturn man, was one of the largest landholders in the Auvergne Province….. riding, fishing, and hunting on his little fief, carrying home to his various chateaux samples of flora and fauna, which he assembled into a respectable amateur collection. He was a member of all the local learned societies; and when the scholarly fit was on him, he sometimes spent whole days closeted in his study, with his dogs asleep under his desk, shuffling through yellow maps and charts, new French and English stud books and back copies of The Field – The English Country Gentleman’s Newspaper. Berthe Adele Dompierre d’Hornoy, his wife, was a Picarde from a well-connected family, a great grandchild of a sister of Voltaire. …..she was graceful, grave and gentle …… She took her place as the mistress of the Teilhard chateau in Auvergne as though she had been made for it. In twenty years she presented her husband with eleven children and she created for them a closed, Pascalian world, so sombre, strict and pious that acquaintances referred to it as “la Grande Grille”…… There was a rigidly scheduled regimen of study and devotional exercises, games with their cousins the Teilhard-Chambons and plain, gigantic meals …. Although the children had a governess (English or German), it was Maman who taught them catechism, sitting stiffly in the upstairs parlour of Sarcenat between an oleograph of the Sacred Heart and a statue of the Infant Jesus with his wardrobe of little dresses……For Monsieur Teilhard obedience to papal directives was always carried out with military dispatch. Though the setting was fairly pedestrian …. it offered (the children) a curious bled of the best of the old and the new traditions; they grew up bright, proud, romantic, inquisitive and adventurous. Teilhard was always the one who seemed to stand a bit apart from the rest….. the pensive one. Pierre never quite seemed to fit into the tight-knit company in which his character was formed….. Pierre was the complete temperamental opposite of his high-spirited and handsome older brother, Alberic…… and he could not really share his younger brothers’ interests either….”We never knew what he was thinking,” his brother Joseph has said. Teilhard wrote as an old man, that he was not the docile, pious child that he seemed to be….his inner life was so full of agitation that he felt compelled to keep it to himself for self-protection. … at the age of five…. A snippet of his hair fell into the fire, darkened and disappeared. (He) was seized with horror and disgust. What was disappearing…was part of himself …turning into nothing. “An awful feeling came on me at that moment,” he later wrote. “For the first time in my life I knew that I was perishable!”(pp 20 – 23).

• Alberic was probably born in about mid-1876. Marielle, the next born (1777 or 1878) died in infancy. Francoise was most likely born in 1879 or 1880.

• 01 May 1881 – Marie-Joseph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born at home in Sarcenat. His parents had been married for 6 years (married 18 May 1875). Berthe-Adele had given birth to four children, one of whom, Marielle died. He was the third of 10 living siblings.

• Six more children were born after Pierre - Marguerite (1883?), Gabriel Marie (1885?), Oliver (1887?), Joseph (1889?), Marie Louise who died at age 14 years (1891?), Gonzague (1893?) and Victor (1895?).

• Teilhard was about 14 by the time the youngest was born.

• The children were all educated at home by their parents and English or German governesses, up to age 11 years.

• In “The Album”. "… at a fancy dress party that my parents gave in our house in Clermont, an old seventeenth mansion. These old houses, with their cellar-like entrances, their huge staircases, cold and damp and their sombre, lofty rooms, were a grim setting for our childhood. But they never stopped us from playing … "

• 20 March 1889 Teilhard entered the Society of Jesus.

• 1900 Marguerite became ill with pleurisy which affected her all her life."

• He was 21 when his eldest brother, Alberic died 27 September 1902. Pierre was in the SJ Juniorate in Jersey at the time.

• He was almost 23 when his 13 years old sister Louise (LouLou) died August 1904 from meningitis. He was still in Jersey?

• He was one month off 30 years when his sister Francoise died in China 17 June 1911, of small pox at age 32. Teilhard was in Jersey.

• Pierre was ordained 24 August 1911 in Hastings, England, two months after his sister‘s death. (photograph of the family all stanind aloof.)

• He was in 33 when his second youngest brother Gonzague (about 21 years old) was killed, 12 November 1914, in action at the beginning of WW1

• December 1914 –1918: Mobilized, Teilhard served in World War I as a stretcher-bearer in the 8th Moroccan Rifles. He served in various places until 1918.

• For his valour, he received several citations, including the Médaille militaire and the Legion of Honour.

• By the time Pierre (age a 33 years) was called up for service in December 1914, barely a month after Gonzague’s death, four of Pierre’s eight siblings with whom he had lived at Sarcenat, were dead.

. “….. should seek, through our own personal efforts, to make sure that we have the backing of good, solid friendships, to save us from the weakness of body and soul …. But, if God intervenes to wean our heart, forcibly to divert to him alone, the appetite for well-being and mutual love that he aroused in us during the happy days of youth – then we must not complain. Do not hold it against our Lord if he wants to make of you more than what you call ‘just a Christian woman’. Since your activity has to be far-reaching it must emanate from a heart that has suffered: that is the law and ultimately a kind law….I beg you, that when you feel sad, paralysed, to adore and trust yourself to God. Adore, offering to God your existence that seems to you to be spoilt by your circumstances : what finer homage could there be than this lovely renunciation of what one might have been…” In 'Letters of a Soldier Priest', The Making of a Mind, Collins, London, 1965, page 67 - 68.

• Was “at the front” during the 1918 ‘flu pandemic.

• 03 May 1918 Pierre’s brother, Olivier (about 31 years old) was killed at Mount Kemmel. Pierre was almost 37 years old.

• 26 May 1918 he made his solemn vows with the Jesuit order.

• May 1923 began scientific exploration in the Ordos desert, China

• 12 December 1923. Pierre wrote from Tientsin to Leontine Zanta: “I think that one of the reasons why Our Lord wanted me so far away at this moment is to separate me, for a while, from those sweet things among which I ran a risk of not relying uniquely enough on him through and across all things (as I make my profession to do).”

• November 1924. The censors “want me to promise in writing that I will never say or write anything against the traditional position of the Church on original sin.”

• May 16, 1925. He wrote to Pere Auguste Valensin: “Dear friend, please help me. I’ve put a good face on it outwardly, but within it is something that resembles an agony or storm.”

• Ida Treat, an American, was born in 1869 and died in March 1978 at age 89 years. She was not a Christian, had ardent views on Marxism and was a pro-Communist political activist. Teilhard studied with her in the laboratory of Marcellin Boule.

• May 16, 1926 on board a ship, near Singapore, to Ida Treat, “I feel the need to begin again, to reorient myself – in the same direction, to be sure, but more clearly, more vigorously. I must return from this second voyage stronger in body and soul.”

• June 26, 1926. From Tientsin to Ida Treat: “I have recovered that familiar and very precious state of mind which makes me see and grasp some vital and intoxicating element at the bottom (or more precisely, at the end) of everything that exists ….”

• July 19, 1926 from Tangkwan to Ida Treat: ”Mentally, as I told you, I lack the precious inner dilation of excitement and success; but I have enough ‘deep relish’ for life to continue the effort” and “I sometimes live in the frustrating state of a deaf man straining his efforts to hear a music which he knows to be all around him.”

• October 15, 1926. To Leontine Zanta, a Catholic feminist much influenced by Henri Bergson and the first woman to receive a PhD from a French University, from Tientsin: ”Yet I am not unhappy in Tientsin. The calm to which I have returned this lovely autumn, after seven months of restlessness, seems exquisite to me.” During the 1920s and 1930s Teilhard frequently attended the literary salons at her apartment just outside Paris.

• October 30, 1926. From Tientsin to Ida Treat: ”I would like this publicity, for I have the feeling that I say sincere and incontestable things. I am more and more struck by the emptiness and rigidity of what is being written in France…… a grain of wheat in a ton of sawdust. They are not truthful and this irritates me.”

• November 14, 1926 from Tientsin to Ida Treat: “I feel that I have arrived at the moment that I have seen over ten years of calm inner delight”.

• December 25, 1926. From Tientsin to Ida treat: “Mentally I need a few weeks of peace. Physically I am absolutely fine.”

• January 22, 1927 from Tientsin to Ida Treat: “The less the people who inconvenience me interest me, the greater is my passionate confidence in the Force – much greater than they – which they represent in my eyes. I would take enormous delight in breaking all ties; but that would be a vital absurdity and I do not believe that solution can even be considered right now.” And: “ If only one had a little peace! (Actually I am perhaps illogical in desiring the peace when the present agitation is undoubtedly productive).”

• February 14, 1927 from Peking to Ida Treat: “I wish I knew that you were not alarmed by my dismal from the Catholic Institute. In your heart, I know, like Boule and many other friends, you will find me weak, and perhaps you will think less of me, because I will not make the gesture (which would be a relief for me) of dropping those who prevent me from telling what I see. …… only one things guides me: to try to be as true as possible to Life …..Would it be logical for me, by breaking with the Church, impatiently to force the growth of that Christian stem in which I am persuaded that the sap of the religion of tomorrow if forming? I am held fast in the Church by the very views which help me to see her insufficiencies.”

• February 27, 1927. From Tientsin to Ida Treat: “I feel a sacred aversion to ecclesiasticism and anything that happens to me can only serve to reinforce these sentiments…I understand very well the preference of certain persons for rebellion and rebels. And I will say again that nothing would be easier or more appealing for me than this attitude. Unfortunately (and perhaps you will say that here precisely lies my weakness or my tameness) I do not feel I have the right, just now, to adopt it.” And “I have experienced for a long time and I still experience, as a first reaction, your antipathy for Man. I have tried to analyse it and it seems to me that it has to do with the fact that another Man is, for each of us, another World, a rival World to our own, that is, the one centred around us ….. It is really the other, the rival, who we fear and hate in Man; and this aversion ceases as soon as we find a way to bring this other back into our unity.”

• April 30, 1927 from Tientsin to Ida Treat: “P.S. When I wrote to you that ‘I no longer feel anything’, as if ‘I had passed into a state of force,’ I was trying to express a state which is not exactly an absence but no doubt an extreme, a climax of sensibility.” And: “I am sufficiently happy in an isolated and independent life which prevents me from feeling the discordances that exist between me and my milieu.” (Gap in letters to Ida from 1927 to 1933. Teilhard begins writing to Lucile Swan in 1932.)

• August 22, 1928.In a letter to Leontine Zanta from Le Chambon, Marguerite Teilhard’s country home, Pierre wrote: “What a strange and mad force the heart is; nowhere else does life seem so rich, so new-born and so disturbing.”

• September 28, 1928. To Leontine Zanta re his book, “The Human Phenomenon,” from Paris. “I’m wondering if it won’t all seem rather mad”.

• From some time in 1929 until 1940, Lucile Swan, born May 10, 1887 in Sioux City, USA and died May 2, 1965, age 89 years, in New York, an American sculptor and artist, lived near Pierre Teilhard and except when either was out of Peking, they met at her house frequently. They corresponded with each other from 1932 to 1941. They also met occasionally later when both lived in New York.

• January 24, 1929 from Obok, French Somali, to Leontine Zanta. “As for morale, after a period of eclipse in the turmoil of material things, I feel I’m in pretty good shape; which means that I have a fairly intense perception of the taste for Being.”

• In April 1929 Teilhard accepted a post with the National Geological Society of China in Peking. • April 15, 1929 from Peking to Leontine Zanta: “I think in my whole life I shall never know a joy so sweet as that of feeling that my thoughts, which are the best part of me, passing into the heart and thought of friends such as yourself.” And, “This winter I went through a rather bad crisis of anti-ecclesiasticism, not to say anti-Christianity. Now this outburst has melted away into a broader and more peaceful outlook.”

• August 23, 1929 from “an inn in the depths of Shansi” to Leontine Zanta: “I hope I have weathered last year’s storm with no broken bones – it unquestionably marked a turning point in my intellectual and emotional life….. I am at peace with the church as with God.

• December 14, 1929, from, The National Geological Survey of China to Leontine Zanta. “.. I need the calm of Tientsin….. All in all, I’ve never been so calm as now. I have an ever accentuated impression of ‘inner escape’ away from all the apparently most constricting aspects of outward organisation: so that among examples of narrowness against which I used to be so in revolt, I now have a feeling that ‘they no longer touch me’. No question of pride, I feel, nor contempt- and equally no holiness: but simply the fading away of all that is seen as ludicrously irrelevant in face of the great universal Realities. And then, (a rather unexpected logical outcome) the pettiness of my Order and even of the Church affecting me but little, I find myself more free to appreciate their marvellous treasure of religious experience and their unique power of divinisation.” And, “I am a bit worried about Marguerite these days. She is depressed by Cecile’s crisis and she seems less and less able to rise above the pain of the separation. It weighs on me all the more as I feel rather responsible for our very great friendship.”

• January – August 1930: Tientsin, Shensi & Shansi, Peking, Mongolia & Gobi Desert.

• February 7, 1930 from Tientsin to Leontine Zanta; “I am proceeding more and more tenaciously, with perhaps an ever deeper sense of purpose, but with less and less sense of joy …..At the risk of - the impression that I have moved into a state of ‘force’, as if something had driven me out of myself and taken my place and was now pushing onwards …. I now find myself ‘beyond revolt’. • September- December 1930: France. • January – February 1931: in the USA • March-April 1931: in Peking • May 1931 – February 1932: With Citroen’s “La Crosiere Jaune” expedition and work in Peking

• 11 February 1932 Pierre’s (51 years old) father died while he was in China.

• 20 March 1932 from Peking to Leontine Zanta. “Once again I was able to observe how much the ‘lay’ milieu is my ‘natural’ milieu. Yet I have found no difficulty in returning to the minimum ecclesiastical framework in which life has placed me. I don’t take it seriously enough any longer for it to cause me deep suffering.”

• July 1932: Shansi • August – December 1932: Paris and London. • January 1933: France • February – April 1933: New York, USA.

• July 16, 1933 from New York to Lucile Swan: “ Here I am living in a nice home of my Order, close to the Hudson River, at 50 metre from Broadway…… They know more about me than I would have supposed ------ and yesterday I had to talk hours on the most delicate matters. I did it cautiously, but frankly. One at least of the fathers is able to understand, and to spread, what I think. It was some comfort to me to meet with such a friendly and sympathetic group of confreres. This is the true spirit of my church ------ very different from the stiff and timorous mind of Roma ….at the same time that makes me a bit ‘melancolique’ to think what I could do if I were allowed to print my best papers.”

• August 16, 1933 from California to Lucile Swan: “ I felt a bit blue in parting from my friends; but now I look forward to Peking – and to you.”

• November 1933: Peking • November 14, 1933 from Peking to Lucile Swan: “Because your friend, Lucile, belongs to Something Else, he cannot be yours – (and you would find very few left in him of what attracts you, if he tried to be yours) – just merely for being momentarily happy with you. Do you remember a thought expressed in the short page I gave you when coming back from America: ‘……to conquer the things, not for merely enjoying them, but for converging with them into something or somebody ever higher.’ …. Just because I am so foolish as to try to discover a new path – along which the World might breathe. Well for me. But what of the other? The other. Who perhaps does not see, not feel the same Star as mine. Am I not making her suffering, by a subtle selfishness of mine? – Do I really help her (as I would so much) to be more full, free and happy? – Sometime you will answer me.”

• January – February 1934: Kwangshi and South East China. • February 1934: Peking

• February 1934. Teilhard wrote an essay stating that chastity is the most sublime manifestation of all religions and that the energy of our interior life has roots in a passionate nature. “It is from man’s storehouse of passion that that the warmth and light of his soul arise, transfigured.” So when a man approaches a woman he finds he is, ‘enveloped in an indistinct glow of illumination.’……. when there is ‘no physical contact,’ there is ‘convergence at a higher level.’ So chaste ‘lovers are obliged to turn away from the body and seek one another in God.’

• This was the love that he proposed to Lucile. • March 9, 1934 from Peking? to Lucile Swan, 1934: “Reading your letter has been one of the most precious moments in my life. It was not only a ‘nice’ but a glorious letter. You have entered more deep than ever, as an active seed, the innermost of myself. You bring me what I need for carrying on the work which is before me in the tide of life”………”Sometimes, I think I would like to vanish before you into something which would be bigger than myself – your real self, Lucile – your real life, your God. And then I should be yours completely – Keep free of myself, if possible, Lucile, in having me.”

• March 13, 1934 from Peking to Lucile Swan: “…because you have left, I had a bit of a fight for keeping my inside bright and warm. But this is only a passing depression. Close or far you are for me the brightness in life.”…… “When we parted, you observed that I looked somewhat ‘unpersonal’. That is probably true……..when I look at you I am searching for something in you which is deeper than you – and which is, however, the very essence of you. But don’t believe that in doing so (this is the only way in which I am able to look at anything in the world) I am missing anything in you.”

• March 18, 1934 from Peking to Lucile Swan: “Dr Black (Davy) passed away… The apparently absurd of his premature end – the stoical, but blind, acceptance of this fate by surrounding friends – the complete absence of ‘light’ on the poor body lying in the ice-room of the PUMC have deepened my grief and revolted my mind…..we must believe. To awake this belief must be, more than ever, my duty. I have sworn it to myself on the remains of Davy – more than a brother, for me.”

• April 18, 1934 from Nanking to Lucile Swan: “I like you so much Lucile. And you are so ‘straight’ and courageous. I feel stronger and better because you like me and you are very powerful for giving me the light and strength I need, - just because you are so frank and because you understand me. Not to feel alone internally is the best of life, isn’t it?

• May 16 1934 from Hankow to Lucile Swan: “Lucile, my dear friend, It was a little distressing for me also, two days ago, to leave you. So, I went on, bringing with me your so precious letter….I feel …..your presence is with me, - or still more truly, - in me. …there I will find you during those few weeks of absence.”

• May 23 1934 from Ichang to Lucile Swan: “The only weak points is such a half-touristic journey, is that the mind is not so alert as in the quiet laboratory work, - or as in a real trip in the wild. I feel rather difficult, under such circumstances to ‘find myself’. I wonder sometimes where I really am. - But several experiences have proved me that, after such periods, something new has been softly growing in me. – So I know that when I come back to Peking, you will find me somewhat more myself, and yours. In the meantimes, I like to have my thought wandering to Peking, - to your dear little home.”

• May 29 1934 from a “very small steamer” on the Yangtze to Lucile Swan: In the meantime, I discovered my soul sufficiently alert. I have been thinking pretty much. And, as a result, I feel more and more a passionate child of Mother Earth – and yours.”

• May – July 1934 Yangtze Valley • 13 June 1934 from Peking to Ida Treat: “Inside, I continue to push forward, rather blindly, obscurely conscious of growing divergences, but determined to believe to the end that for the essential part I will succeed in making a synthesis. I cannot allow either my faith in God or my faith in the World to fail. So I try not to look too closely at what makes my present life a provocation or a challenge and let myself be carried forward, contrary to all probability. It seems to me that as long as I retain (and am therefore able to radiate) a passionate relish for “Being” and for its possibilities to come, absolutely nothing can represent a real loss for me.”

• 24 June 1934 from China to Leontine Zanta re Dr Davidson Black. “..the unexpected death of Dr Black (his disappearance is one of the greatest griefs of my life) … and “..I am gradually finding myself more and more on the fringe of a lot of things. It’s only the exotic life I am leading that this drift doesn’t lead to a break…”

• August – December 1934: Peking • 28 October 1934, Pierre (53) was in China when his youngest brother, Victor (age about 39) died.

• January – February 1935: Kwangshi and South China • January 12 1935: from Canton to Lucile Swan: … my thoughts are progressing, I feel it, --------specially concerning the value (and emptiness) of the past. I think that I have passed a critical point in my internal evolution, those past months ----------with you-------------“

• February 14 1935: from on board the Dollar Steamship Line to Lucile Swan: Too often, you know, I feel anxious, because I wonder whether I am right and wise trying to reconciliate together Earth and Heaven. – But when I happen to experience (as in our case) that breaking some respected boundaries means a torrent of new life, - then I feel safer and stronger; -because, you know it also, I don’t believe fundamentally in anything but the awakening of spirit, hope and freedom.”

• March – April 1935: Peking • April 10, 1935 from Peking to Ida Treat: “I am gaining more confidence in the spirit that leads me …. Storms are still possible, of course and also, which is perhaps worse, dead calms. Still, I believe that when one has succeeded in penetrating to the essential and omnipresent element of things, these squalls or depressions do not go beyond the surface of our being.”

• April 6 1935 from Peiping to Lucile Swan: “I needed this letter, I must confess you, because the pink charms of the Pekinese spring made me feeling a little sick, in your absence. But now that I know that you have left China sufficiently strong, happy and chiefly hopeful, this kind of shadow has almost disappeared, - and I can enjoy more directly the joy and the strength of our mutual and common conquests.”

• April 14 1935 from Peiping to Lucile Swan: “I felt a ‘shock of joy’ when I received your letter from Kobe …… Yes, I have been (and am still) a bit lost, every day, at 5.0pm. But even this pain has something enjoyable in itself, since it makes more tangible for me the place you have been taking in my Universe – forever, Lucile.-

• May – August, 1935: Paris, France • August 13 1935 from Auvergne, France to Lucile Swan: Internally I enjoy this rest in my native land. Yet, for several reasons, I do not feel perfectly comfortable. First, on account of the shadow of my close departure. But also because I cannot readjust myself to an old frame which has turned to be almost impersonal to me: in a way I do not find myself again in those familiar landscapes, or rooms, or furniture, or scents or noises, - but I have only the impression of looking curiously from outside as a child or at a young man which ‘happens to be myself’. – and chiefly for my poor mother I am still this young man! – Better to be away.”

• Undated from Paris to Ida: “Nothing can resist a person who smiles at life – I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him……..Have seen the lab ….just like the old days. It took me back to 1924. I fought back a slight feeling of melancholy. Yes, life is everywhere and ahead”.

• September –December 1935: Kashmir and India. Teilhard represents the Peking Institute on the Yale North India Expedition, led by Helmut de Terra, a German geologist, explorer, archaeologist, author and anthropologist. He joined de Terra on a houseboat that he had rented with his wife, Rhoda de Terra and young daughter. Rhoda looked after the well-being of the two scientists and over the next few years a friendship developed between Teilhard and Rhoda. Letters from Teilhard to Rhoda that have been published span the years 1938 – 1950. In 1964 Helmut de Terra published a book, “Memories of Teilhard de Chardin.”

• September 8 on the S S Cathay near Malta to Lucile Swan: “And so I have left. Those dreadful days of parting are over. And now … the ‘Cathay’ brings me toward a new stage in my life! ….. I felt a bit uneasy and weak during those three months in which I had nothing serious ‘in doing’. Now it seems as if I was breathing more freely – as you like me -.”

• September 13, 1935 from Paris to Ida: “ We must, to a certain extent, look for a stable port; but if Life keeps tearing us away, not letting us settle anywhere, this itself may be a call and a benediction. The World is understood and will be saved …only by those who have no place to lay their heads. Personally, I ask God to let me die (metaphorically, at least) by the side of the road.”

• December 1935: Peking • January 1936: Java • January 22, 1936, from aboard the S.S. Tjineara en route to China to Ida Treat: “So everything is going well. I come out of this new experience with the strengthened conviction that we can do nothing better in life than take and follow the threads it offers us, step by step, toward something that we do not see but which must be there ahead, as surely the World exists.”

• February – June 1936: Peking • Two years after Victor died, Teilhard’s mother died 7 February 1936

• May 7 1936 from Peking to Lucile Swan: “Since yesterday I suffered much (more, I think than ever in my life) because I have realised that you were more dear to me than I knew, - and that, at the same time it might be a danger for you ……… I realise that I have become for you a center which has not the material consistencey which would be required for the safe support of your life. –To be an energy and yet not a center. Is that mere utopia? – What is born between us is forever: I know it.”

• July 1936: Shantung • August – December 1936: Peking • August 17, 1936. Six months after his mother died, Teilhard’s sister, Marguerite (about 53 years old) also died. Pierre was about 55 years old.

• Thus after August 1936, both his parents were dead and only two of Pierre’s 8/9 siblings, Joseph, aged about 47 years, and Gabriel (aged about 51 years) were still living. Pierre was about 8 years older than Joseph and was in China.

• January 1937: Peking • February – March 1937: USA • February 1937 Pierre (55 years) goes to the USA. • April – August 1937: France.

• June 28, 1937 from Murols, (his brother, Joseph’s home) Puy De Dome, France to Ida Treat: “I am convinced that to show men (in a really universalistic, human and triumphant form) the love of a Universal-Personal (imparted, this is a blunt fact, only by the Christian phylum) is the most urgent and effective work to be accomplished. To advance this work, I admit, there might in fact be a necessary gesture, different from, but comparable to those of Christ or Saint Francis. It is this I await, but which I do not see, but to which, I promise you, I will give myself as to the betrothed I have dreamed of all my life as soon as it appears to me.”

• July 20, 1937 from Paris to Ida: “shortly after I got back I had a third bout of fever (a brief one) …. And although they do not have absolutely positive proof, the doctors lean more and more toward malaria. …. I think that nothing will do more to put me back on my feet than knowing I am on my way again. I am anxious to get back on the spot in China, to see how things are working out at the Survey and to give a hand if necessary.”

• April 24 1937 from Paris to Lucile Swan: “ I have been caught in the whirl I expected (and was afraid of): a queer feeling to find oneself immersed in something which was formerly so tense and so alive, and to which one is no more adjusted, at the depth of oneself. A mixture of exaltation and anguish …..I try to cling to faith in life, and to go on, - without understanding much what is happening to me on the whole.”

• May 1937 – Paris: Teilhard was in ‘l’Hopital Pasteur’ with an intestinal infection and fever, thus putting paid to his lecture plans and appointments. This recurred in June, but Pierre did not go to Hospital.

• 22 May 1937 from L’Hopital Pasteur, Paris to Lucile Swan: “I am rather experiencing the less strong and glorious sides of myself – which, after all, is a useful experience since life is together increase and decrease.”

• September – November 1937: Peking • December 1937: Burma • January – March 1938: Burma and Java • May – September 1938: Peking

• June 22, 1938 from Peking to Rhoda de Terra (Rhoda (Hoff) de Terra was born in 1901 and died at age 98 in 1999. Rhoda and her husband separated in August 1938.(She was not a Christian): “ You can and you must help me in preserving and even increasing, the particular faith which is a real fire in my life…….the Paris atmosphere is so tense psychologically that the sense of the fight will obliterate for me many other feelings. To keep strong the fighting spirit, this is the essential thing for being happy under any circumstances….. I am not specially attracted by the prospect of the next winter in France. Bit I see more clearly that I have to go through this experience.”

• August 3, 1938 from Peking to Rhoda de Terra: “I begin to realise that it is easier to burn than to keep the spark always more alive, more easy to start one’s life than to end it nicely. In other words, I become aware of the fact that I have come to the difficult part of my existence…. I wish only that I could feel closer to God.”

• September – November 1938: USA • November – December 1938: France • November 12, 1938 from 15 Rue Monsieur, Paris to Rhoda de Terra: “One thing I envy you: to be in New York.” • January – June 1939: France • July – August: USA • August 30 – December 1939: Peking

• Teilhard spent the years 1939–45 at Beijing in a state of near-captivity on account of World War II. • In January 1939 Teilhard met Jeanne Mortier, who had studied scholastic philosophy at the Institut Catholique for 10 years and found no satisfaction. She had been overwhelmed when she read a typed copy of Le Milieu Divin. Teilhard told her that he appreciated her support in his “vague lights and aspirations in the meaning of a higher comprehension of chastity’.

• February 26, 1939 from Toulouse, France to Rhoda de Terra: “For the circumstances I am dressed in a long black gown and ….. I feel completely unnatural to myself.” And “America and France are interlocking in such a way in my life that I wonder sometimes where I belong.”

• August 23, 1939 from Kobe on the way to Peking to Rhoda de Terra: “After these weeks of incessant moving, I feel the moral and physical need to settle for a while.”

• September17, 1939 from Peking to Rhoda de Terra: “The past war made me. I would like to think that the present one will achieve me. But I don’t know how that might be possible so far! In any case I prefer that the war should have surprised me here than in Europe. Being too old for active service, I should have been terribly embarrassed what to do best. Here at least I have no choice but to wait, watch and to work. No news so far from my family or from my various friends.”

• October 6, 1939, from Peking to Rhoda de Terra: “Personally, I am still in a rather “mixed condition”. For some obscure reasons I do not yet feel exactly myself, physically, or if you prefer, nervously. A mere temporary accentuation, I guess, of some dispositions with which I have had to live since childhood. In the meantime I keep my old routine ….. and in addition I have to be especially careful not to scare people in my monastery.”

• November 20 1939, PUMC Department of Anatomy, Peking to Rhoda de Terra: “ I went to Tientsin to make what we call a retraite. Eight days of self-recollection are pretty long. Yet that was a useful time and .. I had a very comfortable and sunny room …. For the present time my existence.. is over-regular….I do not see much of the world – and more specially the evening world. But because I am busy, I do not object essentially to the situation …. To be true if cross-examining me, you would detect in all this a touch of feverishness. But, on the whole, I feel much better than last autumn…. My mind feels clear and alive.”

• From “Teilhard. A Biography” by Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas.McGraw-Hill1977, 1981. (WWII) In that first winter of the war the nervous depression which had troubled him since childhood descended on Teilhard with a vengeance. Though … he considered going on a lecture tour to South America to raise money for his little institution, Rome quickly refused him. Sometimes his semi-psychological distress took him with physical violence. He would wake at night, covered with sweat after dreaming that his heart and lungs had stopped and feel for his pulse or cough into a handkerchief for a sign of blood that never came. Nor did morning drive the dark away. Sometimes, even when he was in company, his eyes would lose their lustre and he would murmur, “Please excuse me, I don’t feel well.” Then Pierre Leroy had only two choices: following his to comfort him, or remaining where he was pretending that nothing had happened. Usually, in some embarrassment, he excused himself and left. For six long months the two unexamined copies of “The Phenomenon” lay in Teilhard’s desk drawer. By spring his agitation over them was unbearable. On March 6, 1941, concluding that anything was better than living with such uncertainty, he took one copy out, wrapped it carefully, and sent it off to Rome. ”Now,” he wrote to the Abbe Breuil a few weeks later, “the die is truly cast.”

• January – December, 1940: Peking. • February 9, 1940 from PUMC, Peking to Ida Treat:”Deep down, I cannot help knowing that my physical stamina is no longer quite what it used to be. Since my return here I am too often nervously depressed. A phase no doubt that will pass. The main thing is that I can work.”

• There is a gap of 18 months in letters to Ida treat. August 5, 1941from Peking: “Actually I feel as if for the moment I no longer have a country. But there is still the Earth”.

• April 8, 1940 from Peking to Rhoda de Terra: “ .. after having been left for years practically loose and free of my Order, I feel gradually tightening on me (at least as long as I am here in the monastery) the frame of ‘regularity’ which does not fit at all my type of activities, but which, for a lot of higher reasons, I feel obliged to accept and to some extent respect….”

• June 18, 1940 from Peking to Rhoda de terra: “ If sometimes you are doing something like praying, ask for me spiritual and physical strength. This is not the time for a breakdown, just now. Nothing really bad, with me; but an unpleasant feeling of depression, the reverse of myself. Since a fortnight, I am living rather pleasingly in my new home.”

• August 3, 1940 from Institut de Geobiologie to Rhoda de Terra: “I am really enjoying our new house in the legation quarter. We are four friends living here, with our books, an excellent cook and a dog. I expect two kittens very soon.”

• August 18, 1940 to Rhoda de Terra: “…this year was somewhat difficult, physically speaking….To be true, I do not know (nor did any doctor understand exactly) what was the matter with me. A kind of mental dizziness and anxiety (‘psychasthenia’) [a neurotic state characterized especially by phobias, obsessions, or compulsions that one knows are irrational] (told me with a smile the best clinician of Peking): …. I had touches of it since I was a boy. Very unpleasant. But the best remedy … is to go on as if nothing happened. To have my book to write was the best cure. Now I feel much better.”

• January – November 1941: Peking. December: Confined in Peking because of the Japanese occupation. • March 24, 1941 from Peking, 1941 to Rhoda de Terra: “Life is going on pretty much the same except that some kind of crisis is evidently approaching every day, together with the growing feeling that personal projects are just now rather futile. Two weeks ago, I have received an answer from Rome. Half, half ….Evidently the Number One down there, is just as suspicious about me as before ….”

• May 9, 1941 from Peking to Rhoda de Terra: “Do you realise how old I am, now? (66th birthday on May 18, 1941) And yet I hope to keep young up to the end, for God…..P.S. today, a beautiful day, I go to the Hills with my hammer and a good French friend: and day after tomorrow to Tientsin (for two days). A year since I did not take the train! Can you imagine that? In fact I feel happy here, in my new surroundings: my first home in my life. I am perhaps getting old, really?

• Pierre (about 59) was in Peking? when his brother, Gabriel (56) died in October 1941.

• From August 1941 to 1948 Lucile Swan was in the USA during World War 2. Teilhard remained in Peking, China. Only two of Teilhard’s war time letters from Peking – a year apart - reached Lucile in the USA. From September 1941he lived and worked with Pierre Leroy throughout the war years.'

• August 27 1941 from Institut de Geo-Biologie, Rue Labrousse, Peking to Lucile Swan: “And now begins seriously for me the period of an ‘isolated’ life. You were right, and I experience it. The difficult time is not so much the first two weeks after the separation. After a while one accumulates the need of being together again - to exchange and fecundate life. We had two years so completely for ourselves!”

• January – December 1942: Peking • In 1942 Jeanne Mortier dedicated herself to spreading Teilhard’s message – at first by mimeographing and distributing his texts.

• In 1942 Claude Riviere, a broadcaster, interviewed Teilhard on the air in Shanghai and they kept in contact. He would thank her for her “precious inspiration” and explain “We will communicate in the BECOMING. It is there we will converge.” And again his spiritual message: “I want to be able to help you discover for yourself and by your own path the One Thing Necessary and his universal Presence.”

• August 10, 1942 from Peking to Rhoda de Terra: “ For us, here, a kind of overwhelming dullness is the most dangerous enemy. Still a small number of good friends are left here; but so few a really inspiring! Inside I try to keep alive and wakeful as possible. My great fear, being here, is to lose contact with the new spirit which certainly is now in making all over the world. On this point..the last events did not change my mind. We are witnessing the birth of a new Man. This I believe more and more. …. I retreat, not to be in Europe or in America, really merged in one of the main currents which will combine tomorrow into something which we can hardly foresee. Here of course we are caught in a current, too: but this current is not ours We are externally surrounded and drifted by it: we do not feel it inside ….”

• January – December 1943: Peking • August 1944: Teilhard and other internationals released from Peking ‘detention’ after the Japanese surrender. • January – December 1945: Peking.

• October 10, 1945 from Peking to Rhoda de Terra: “ Cut as we are from the big world…we did not have any other escape but to develop a kind of mostly French microcosm, a rather warm nest, in fact, but only a nest. You could not fly very far… Physically I am four years older, past 64. My hair (what is left of it) is quite grey now….the body is still strong. But getting older does not make my nerves as calm as I would like. On the whole I have been spared by the war. Too much, I think. I have been living here in this backwater; and this is not so good for a would-be ‘prophet’. I trust God and Life that nevertheless I can still accomplish something in this new-born world of ours.”

• January – March 1946: Peking • May – December 1946: Paris, France.

• In his book “Letters From My Friend Teilhard”, Pierre Leroy wrote: “After a long sea voyage, he arrived in Paris on May 3….he moved back into his old room in the house at 15 Rue Monsieur where the staff of L’Etudes was quartered….It was a climate of uncertainty and stress that Teilhard, already worn down by the long fatigue of the Japanese occupation (China) and weakened by a lack of medical care and poor nourishment, took up his work. From the beginning his health was very fragile. He had already suffered a nervous crisis in 1939 and again in 1940. In the following years, new crises, less violently and equally ill-defined, repeated themselves without anyone’s attaching much importance to them. Back in France, the tension under which Teilhard was working built to a climax and he suffered a heart attack.

• May 26, 1946 from 15 Rue Monsieur, Paris to Rhoda de Terra: “Socially speaking, I have naturally found here a crowd of dear friends, many of them being, like myself, just returned from China. Atmosphere is warm here, and I feel like reborn in the intensity of Western life. Breuil has somewhat aged, but remains as indomitable as before. On a ground of so-called collaborationism (a true psychosis) he has cut V--- down, a situation which does not make life easy at the Institut. I keep carefully outside the conflict which does not interest me. Past is past. We must build ahead….. if you could manage to send me a few cigarettes, I would appreciate then very much.”

• July, 1946 from Rue Monsieur, Paris to Rhoda de Terra: “Life here is terribly exciting and interesting, so many people being on this quest for a thorough adjustment of the world and their own thoughts. And I am positively amazed, a little more every day, by the spreading, everywhere, during the war of my clandestine papers…..Yesterday I got your precious parcel of cigarettes. Magnificent! The only trouble is that the French Customs (very unkind of them) charge them with a heavy taxation that I am obliged to ask you to stop your munificence.”

• September 21 – 24, 1946 from Rue Monsieur, Paris to Rhoda de Terra

“Incessant talking obliges me to go deeper in thinking. I am still surprised and vaguely anxious by the way people are hanging on to my small papers, clandestines or not.

• November 1, 1946, from Rue Monsieur, Paris to Rhoda de Terra” “I hate this whole business of tickets, money, visas, vaccination etc. But I think I have to go; the call of Life. (Expedition in South Africa).

• January 5 1947, Teilhard set out to meet his fate. Prior to this critical meeting with Bruno de Solanges and Pere Lubac at Toulouse to correct “The Phenomenon”, Teilhard felt that one more failure would be unbearable. Though he maintained his winning public face, old friends like Leroy, d’Ounce, Jouve, Huby, Lecler and du Passage (who had rooms at Etudes beneath him, could see the pain behind it. His always broken worry-beads rosary was constantly in evidence and the dark floor boards of his room squeaked so much late in the night that du Passage made him a gift of a pair of carpet slippers. The meeting lasted two full days and, to Teilhard, it seemed endless. ….Solages suggested 50 major revisions; de Lubac 240. …. Even though his companions had tried to draw him into conversation in the wait before his train arrived, Teilhard was silent and distracted. No matter what anyone said, he knew that he was travelling to Paris in defeat, Clutching the manila envelope that held his manuscript, and staring blindly from the window of the northbound train, he felt a little desperate again….It was as though a shroud had dropped around him. (Biography. Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas pp 234 – 235.

• April 30, 1947 from Rue Monsieur to Rhoda de Terra: “In fact a birthday has ceased for me, since a long time, to be a particularly cheerful day. Really time is flying to fast, and faster, it seems…..Don’t believe that I feel especially sorry for myself. Just something human to face and get the best of it.”

• On the night of May 31 and June 1, 1947, Teilhard suffered a severe heart attack (myocardial infarction). Age 66 years. For two weeks he lingered between life and death. He spent several months in convalescence. His trip to the Transvaal had to be abandoned. Lucile did not know about the illness when she wrote to Teilhard in May and June.

• July 4, 1947 from Rue Monsieur, Paris to Rhoda de Terra: “This is the first letter I am trying to scribble, in a month. A proof to you that I am out of my bed and moving in my room. On the whole I am, and feel, much better. But the doctors are adamant: I must stay more or less in my room for a month (July) and then rest somewhere (in the vicinity of Paris) up to December 1. …This incident, I suppose, must be used as the beginning of something constructive and new.”

• July 17, 1947 from Rue Monsieur, Paris to Rhoda de Terra: “I shall try to tell you exactly how I feel. Physically I am getting better, fast, it seems … (in three days) I am supposed to spend a month in a resting house (well attended by nuns), just next to the St Germain forest, on the plateau….Morally I do not know exactly where I am standing …. Evidently I still feel sore about the African trip, which was apparently so exactly the next step to take for me. …Scientifically, I feel a bit afraid to be ‘out of the circuit’…. I cannot say that I feel particularly cheerful theses days. But I keep a perhaps growing interest in life.”

• July 1947 Teilhard’s nephew, his brother’s only son, age 26, drowned in a grassy pond. Teilhard wrote to Lucile Swan that this was his only living brother and the one on whom all his family love was concentrated.

• August 6, 1947 from St Germain-en-Laye to Rhoda de Terra: ”I write to you from a little clinic where I spend a quite comfortable time under the care of extremely attentive nuns (in white and blue dress) …. Days are passing pretty fast: first because I stay late in bed, but also because my mind is pretty active, with the help of many books and also many dear friends ….. I am still 'privilegie'. On the other hand, the family got a terrible blow. One of my nephews was drowned in Auvergne when taking a swim in the pond: caught on weeds. My brother came to see me last week; he is broken and the same time so quiet and so strong. Going on. It pays to have faith. Physically I am quite alright (by the way, what I got is labelled in barbarous French infarctus myocarde). But I have to keep quiet up to December 1.

• October 16, 1947 from Paris to Ida Treat: “Wendell Philips …. Formally requested me to join the Expedition. I had to tell him that unfortunately there could be no question of anything before next June or July; a matter of health…… In Rome they are applying the new measures even more strictly than my friends here expected.

• In 1947 the religious authorities made it clear that Teilhard’s presence in France was unwelcome. When he was invited to visit New York he accepted and sailed February 25 1948. (Leroy). AMERICA: • January – March 1948: Franc.e

• In 1977 Mary Lukas, New York, who wrote a biography of Teilhard, wrote (in the preface to the book, “Letters from My Friend Teilhard de Chardin”) with regard to his letters to Pierre Leroy: “I realize how crucial an acquaintance with them (the letters) is to any understanding of the man Teilhard…much less to any real comprehension of the meaning and development of his thought….present Teilhard with face unmasked – and the face .... is infinitely more attractive than the one infinite his cultist admirers have created. Even more important these letters present the Teilhardian vision in its most developed form ….considerable advanced from the one presented in “The Human Phenomenon.”….”confidences of personal pain and joy such as he gave to no-one as freely as he did to Father Leroy”’

• Pierre Leroy wrote of Teilhard in Post-war America: “The sectarianism of the American Church, its rivalry with Protestantism and its tendency to draw apart from the mainstream of American life bewildered him. Nor could he come to terms with the predilection of American priests for building churches, schools and universities, and, in general, for managing money as though they were only businessmen. The political climate aggravated his discomfort. In Europe the church stood embattled before the communist threat in the Italian elections; in America, the anti-Communist McCarthyite hysteria was at its height. Teilhard understood the ‘witch-hunt’ as a phenomenon which ‘confounded evil with change…’ The misunderstanding disturbed him deeply and gave political overtones to much of what he wrote.”

• March 1948 Teilhard arrived in New York to find both Lucile Swan and Rhoda de Terra waiting at the dock. The reunion was awkward and not without evidence of some jealousy. Rhoda had helped arrange Teilhard’s trip and his work at the museum on New York. Teilhard had sent his itinerary to Lucile in February.

• March 1, 1948, from National Catholic Weekly, New York to Pierre Leroy: “To tell the truth, I still do not feel spiritually at ease in this setting. I have the impression that for both the American priests and laity, Christianity means hiding the world, rather than revealing it – but maybe I am prejudiced.”

• March – June 1948: New York • April 16, 1948 from New York to Ida Treat: “I have just received your letter …..My mind is still in a state of confusion” (about some disaster, illness, experienced by Ida).

• April 24 1948 from National Catholic Weekly, 329 West 108th Street, New York to Leroy: “It is disappointing to realize how often in this area (research) (as in that of the faith in the future that the effort of discovery implies) so many good researchers are still children –nor even schoolboys – incapable of analysing or criticizing their action. To make this point I am enclosing a clip from yesterday’s ‘New York Times’ that shows how undervalued is the work of a research team in this country.

• May 13, 1948, New York to Ida Treat: “Sometimes I feel terribly weak and helpless, especially these days. But what reassures me a little (for my friends and myself) is that, as the great St Paul said again and again, what force and ardour I do have are not me, but deeper than me and are the more active the more personally vulnerable and fragile I feel…….How weak and vulnerable I feel at this moment! But, as I was saying in my last letter, is it not one of the principles dearest to Christianity that God is all the more likely to act through us, the more we are aware of our helplessness? …. Now that the veil of my person is beginning to wear thin (because I feel so vulnerable), I have confidence that God will take over for me somehow……The meeting on Monday went well. I was in good form and said what I wanted to say….. So everything would be fine if it weren’t for this nervous weakness that paralyses me in everything.”

• May 23 1948 from 108th Street, New York to Pierre Leroy: “I really should be satisfied. But at this moment I am undergoing one of those periods of nervous depression such as you witnessed two or three times in Peking. Everything seems mountainous to me. Patience!” ….

• June – August 1948: France • June 4 1948 from New York to Lucile Swan: “These few lines (I am not very much in the mood to write any letter.) to tell you how precious for me was your last letter. – No retreat! Let us go constructively ahead. You can, you must help me.”

• June 5 1948. The day after Teilhard wrote this letter to Lucile, he set out for Paris. Pierre Leroy said that he arrived grief stricken.

• Teilhard’s four month visit to America did not end satisfactorily. Frustrated in his projects and ill at ease in his intellectual solitude, Teilhard went back to Paris earlier than he had planned. Leroy was waiting for him at Gare Saint-Lazare …”I saw, climbing down from a train, a broken man who threw himself into my arms and burst into tears, powerless to put two syllables together. It took a great deal of effort on my part to find out what the problem was. And when I did, it turned out to be practically nothing. After stopping at customs at Le Havre, Teilhard had simply forgotten to lock the case that contained his papers and he was in terror of having lost them. I accompanied him back to ‘Etudes’. But when the dinner hour came, he refused to leave his room. He begged me not to leave him, and I tried, without success, to comfort him…… I .. took him into my arms, if only to give him a little human warmth. Eventually, though, his daily life took up its measured pace once more.”

• July 5, 1948 from Rue Monsieur to Rhoda de Terra: “Life is going along rather the same….. I was rather distressed by the letter from I----. Well the conclusion is always the same: Love is the most powerful and still the most unknown energy in the world.”

• June 18 1948 from 15 Rue Monsieur, Paris to Lucile Swan: “My trip was quite calm, but not too cheerful in the cabin fragrant with your memory and Eleonore’s flowers. A few pleasant acquaintances on board, but no real friends. Solitude in the crowd. I arrived in Paris rather depressed. Fortunately Leroy was waiting for me on the platform at Saint-Lazare and he started to comfort me. I am still not very strong, but I have a very good doctor friend who comes to talk to me. I think I am beginning to feel better. I still do not understand what happened. A purely organic problem says my friend, triggered by strong emotions.”

• July 6 1948 from 15 Rue Monsieur, Paris to Lucile Swan: “Physically I still do not feel that well (I have not completely recovered from my nervous depression) and I still take all sorts of pills. But I try to think as little as possible. Also, an excellent friend of mine, a doctor, is there to keep an eye on me.”

• July 8, 1948, from Paris to Ida Treat: “I am still in something of a nervous depression, but I am trying to think about it as little as possible….

• “Towards the middle of August, very fatigued, he left for ‘Moulins’ near Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne, to stay at the house of his brother, Joseph, who himself was then suffering deeply over the recent accidental death of his son. Teilhard went home to rest, but worry followed him. He, who so much wished to taste the blessed peace of the Divine Presence, was in complete interior conflict. It was the kind of discouragement that would easily have defeated another man and robbed him of all hope. But not Teilhard. He drove himself onward beyond personal difficulties and continued to work toward making the reality of his Point Omega more accessible to himself and others.” (Leroy).

• August 23, 1948 from Paris to Ida Treat: “I still can’t manage to completely shake off this form of anxiety (whose origin is purely physical, that has become quite clear) which began in New York. I have told you that it is something I have had before. I must be patient. I have a good doctor friend (now on vacation, naturally…….You heard about the death of Weidenreich, which grieved me very much. I still don’t know the details.”

• August 28 1948 from ‘Les Moulins’ to Leroy S.J.: “It really should be quite relaxing here. But, still, I remain fairly (on the physical plain I could say viscerally anxious. As I told you, it’s a recurrence, perhaps even worse, of my nervous attacks of 1939. In one sense, I wonder if the relative absence of action and distraction does not make me feel it all the more.”

• September 2, 1948 from Les Moulins par Neuville to Rhoda de Terra : “I have decided to make (rather less than more strictly)what is called my ‘retreat’: meaning that for a week I will try to keep in touch or contact with the Existence and the ‘Omnipresence’ of God. …. I feel certainly better and stronger for this kind of contemplation or prayer …. Physical anxiety hangs over me; I try to forget it. On the whole, I am certainly recuperating slowly here.”

• September 3 1948 from Les Moulins to Lucile Swan in Paris • “Here I enjoy complete quietness (I am even making, in a very moderate way, my ‘retreat’). Yet, I still feel too much this unpleasant physical anxiety, which is, since years, one of my weak points. – The country is beautiful.”

• September 13, 1948 from Les Moulin to Rhoda de Terra: “Tomorrow I am leaving dear Moulins and back again to Rue Monsieur. I feel some slight melancholy at the prospect. Because I have developed a kind of habit, being here, in the quietness of the woods….. I have some idea that too much protracted relaxation in not exactly best for my nerves.” And “Two days ago we paid a visit, on the border of the Allier River, to my sister-in-law, Caroline. I am very fond of her. To see her and the old house (still so full of my brother’s presence) moved me quite a bit; and so many souvenirs rose up in my mind which I thought were completely dead….”

• September 18 from Rue Monsieur to Rhoda de Terra: “Concerning Huxley’s book, it is really strange how close we come to each other. But I got ‘angry’ at the reviewer when he criticised Huxley’s warning that in the near future we shall be able to genetically control the products of human generation.”

• October 1948: Rome • October 15 1948 from Borgo S Spirito 5, Rome to Leroy SJ: ”What I think that I am feeling is that here, in the Roman climate, both my attachments and my distaste affirm and clarify themselves with equal force…..(I have learned all too well!!) that a lack of conviction exists here , extending all the way up to the summit of authority. In other words nobody here seems to realize the depth and clarity of the change in perspective we are undergoing….Man is crossing a new threshold: and people here flatter themselves that he is only going through a phase!”

• October 19, 1948 from Rome to Rhoda de Terra: “ I got two day ago, the first of the two critics (revisions) of my book … after the first reading of these ten long pages I felt rather discouraged by a decided ‘incapacity of seeing’ Man and the World …. Physically I feel alright; intellectually very much alive;”

• November – December 1948: France • December 3,1948 from Paris to Ida Treat: “To break with my Order could only hurt my influence and in fact I have no pretext for doing so except minor harassments which are obviously inflicted on me reluctantly (because in Rome they are forced to consider the ‘impression’ everything makes on other Romans)…… I have not yet recovered my inner ‘euphoria’ which may not be essential, after all.

• January – December 1949: Paris, France • January 12 1949 from Paris to Lucile Swan (in Asmara?): “These people on Tome are really impossible as if they were living in another planet. In the meantime I keep on going along more or less the same path. In spite of the flu which disturbs many appointments and parties, I continue to see many very different people …. This way life passes quickly and quite fully: but I find it a little bothersome not to have a basic and specific job.”

• January 25, 1949 from Rue Monsieur to Rhoda de Terra: “Still nothing from Rome!!... In despair, if I might say, I have asked and gotten from the Sorbonne the permission to give, in March, a series of five lectures on the structure and evolutive trends of the human group…. I have the funny impression never to have been so ’fragile’ in my body (and yet very well) and at the same time so ‘strong’ in my mind since I got this health business two years ago…. I hope I--- will excuse me for not having written to her for such a long time and yet I want to do it every day.”

• (to leave his order) would be suicidal as far as the success of my ‘Gospel’ is concerned …. The only thing to do is to work ‘from inside’.”

• February 4 1949 from 15 Rue Monsieur, Paris to Lucile Swan in Rome: “Since my last letter, sent to Rome, nothing much new, except a letter from my General (arrived this morning), - a far from satisfactory letter. Practically ‘No’ to everything, except for an extremely slight chance left to a book……..The whole thing is perfectly stupid. But in Rome they are much less concerned with facts than with the ‘impressions’ resulting of the facts…….Don’t worry, I am perfectly calm, because I know that ‘victory’ is already mine. Simply I have to keep working almost ‘underground’ (as before.)”

• February 22, 1949, from Paris to Rhoda de Terra: “I do not see so far any good reason to justify a stay in America. On the other hand, how to justify this protracted stay in Paris outside of any definite job …. I feel, in a confused way, that I should perhaps do something ---- but what?”

• March 1, 1949 from Rue Monsieur to Rhoda de Terra: “I was far from being in naturally good shape (a bit of flu …) … But the flu (or whatever it is) still hangs unpleasantly upon me. No fever, but some cough ----- and this dreadful feeling everyone knows of being in a tasteless world. La nausee as Mr Sartre says: but not of metaphysical origin…. I wish the presence and the sense of God should be more efficient to counter affect the depressing effects of a cold.”

• Teilhard returned to Paris from Rome empty handed. He was asked to give a series of lectures at the Sorbonne. Immediately after the first lecture illness drove Teilhard back to the hospital on the Rue Oudinot with pleurisy. This was followed by convalescence with the Sisters of Immaculate Conception in Saint-Germain where he had been in 1947.

• April 1949 from hospital in Paris to Rhoda de Terra: “I am now at the end of my stay in hospital; before Easter I hope to ne at Saint Germain-en-Laye. I do not feel particularly enthusiastic about this exile from Paris, but I cannot avoid it. I certainly need to recuperate in good ‘air’ and with serious food. The Sisters will provide. If I happen to experience the same type of reaction as two years ago (a kind of curious euphoria and mental freedom) during my convalescence that will be alright…. This month seems to me in many respects a perfect blank; and the future too …. This shock after the one of two years ago is something like a warning.”

• April 13 1949 from Hospital in Paris to Rhoda de Terra: “To be true this last week in the hospital room is not particularly amusing …. If only I could feel more quiet (less ‘anxious, physically) internally! Apparently the best assure us to ‘take it easy’ and try to transform anxiety into some overwhelming feeling of hope and active relaxation in God – which after all is the logical climax and core of my whole Weltanschauung and philiosphy.”

• April 27, 1949 from Clinique des Soeurs, St Germain to Rhoda de Terra. “This time I am not in the clinic (a much better arrangement, since I am now in a perfect physical condition), but in a little villa, on the border of the forest and yet in a perfectly sunny place…….every afternoon I had several visits (almost too many for peace of mind)…..in fact though these books interest me (Sartre), none of them brings me anything deep or new. As if I were living in another world…….of course I am not yet as quiet as I should be ‘internally’. But I suppose the best way to handle the situation is to remain calm and interested in a creative way…. Life still remains terribly vague before me….But I do not care so much as long as I feel I have something to say and to write – in other words as long as the internal fire keeps there.”

• June 1, 1949 from St Germain to Rhoda de Terra: “I feel something like a regret to leave the calm and the forest. But for many reasons I think it better to start again the ordinary life. It makes one shy to be always treated as a semi-invalid.

• September 1, 1949 from Les Moulins, France to Rhoda de Terra: “… this country acts on me in a . physically in soothing way. Last Sunday we went to see true, my sister-in-law, not far from here, along the River Allier. This is the place where I spent so many happy holidays when I was a child; and each time I go there I enjoy, in some strange way, remembering the old days. Youth!”

• January – December 1950: France. Elected to the “Academie des Sciences”.

• All through 1950 Teilhard’s personal life remained at an impasse…..In July five Jesuits, most of them professors of theology at Lyon, were quietly dismissed….In 1949 the Maoist forces took Peking, In 1950 the Chinese revolution triumphed on the mainland and missionaries were expelled, dispersed or imprisoned….What had become of them? Teilhard knew nothing of the fate of most of them. The censors in Rome had finally rejected the manuscript of "The Phenomenon of Man" on the grounds that it went beyond the bounds of science properly described. Both the caution to silence and anew demand that he renounce his mission made life and agony for Teilhard. But his strength of character and courage held firm. Pope Pius XII released the Encyclical "Humani Generis" which turned out to be a fiasco in France. The father general of the Society of Jesus chastened the Jesuit intellectuals for laxity in defending the document.

• January 22 1950 from 15 Rue Monsieur, Paris to Lucile Swan in India: “Here, life for me is going on, more or less the same. Physically, I was a bit too much ‘nervous’, last month, - for some mysterious reasons, connected with health, weather or God knows what. Better, now.”

• January 25, 1950 from Paris to Ida Treat: “In a scattered way I have been quite busy of late, except that a recurrence of my nervous anxiety which is more or less my birth right (and which returns a little with age) has slowed down my activity a little.

• August 10 1950 from Paris to Lucile Swan. At the end of July Teilhard saw Lucile in Paris several times before he went to Auvergne to visit family: “These few lines as a conclusion to a sweet and basically fruitful meeting (although somewhat painful and troubled), I tell you this. For almost twenty years, you have always helped me (and I have tried to help ypou) to go up toward an always more luminous and warm God. I count on, I believe, that this beautiful and strong collaboration can and must go on. And, as far as I am concerned, be sure that I will continue (because of a personal inner need) to keep you informed about what I see, what I think, what I do and what happens to me.”

• August 22, 1950 from France to Rhoda de Terra: “… we went..to a famous old 'abbaye' (La Chaise-Dieu)… As usual in such cases, I felt only the surge (stronger than ever, distinctly) of a kind of revolt and anger: the utter impossibility for me to adjust myself any more to a medieval form of faith and worship; as if I got choked by being immersed in a ‘rarefied’ God. The same kind of impossibility that I felt yesterday at Sarcenat, to re-enter my former ‘myself’ … I could (not) deny the importance and the ‘persistence’ in my present spiritual structure, of my native makeup (when I was a child): but the germ is not the tree.. Two main things I brought back from this drive to Sarcenat were a) the conformation that the psychological analysis … of my mystical trends (when I was a child) is correct; and b) the final evidence that an entire previous circle of myself is completely dead (because the wave is much deeper inside).”

• August 28 1950 from Les Moulins, France to Rhoda de Terra: “I have…started doing my retraite. Which means that, for a week, I will try to concentrate on the Presence of God. I don’t like particularly to interrupt the writing of my essay. And I must confess that both the retreat and the essay are still somewhat conflicting in my mind. But … the conflict is not very serious, since both .. are finally concerned with the same thing, namely the research for a better vision of God.”

• August 29 1959 from ‘Les Moulins’ to Leroy SJ: “Right now I am making my retreat peacefully in a house which has just regained its calm after two very busy weeks full of visits. More and more, now, ‘making a retreat’ is becoming for me an occasion for me to return ,myself to the presence of God. I simply cannot understand how people can still be satisfied with (much less carried away by) the ‘Exercises’. Of course their schema is quite splendid. But the ‘cosmology’ (and hence Christology!) is so childish that it literally stifles me from beginning to end….The problem of the ‘Exercises’ only reflects the whole tragedy of the present-day Church.”…..”I sometimes wonder whether in this year’s Roman gestures a good psychoanalyst might not discover clear traces of a specific religious perversion and orthodoxy fraught with masochism and sadism, in which one actually takes pleasure in swallowing the truth, or making it swallowed, under the grossest and most stupid form. But perhaps I go too far!”

• September 6, 1950 from Les Moulins, France to Rhoda de Terra: ”My retreat being over, I have resumed (successfully enough) the writing of my essay on Matter, Love and Christ ….. The most difficult part (first of three parts) … since it deals with the intricate roots of my present state of mind… it turns out to be a piece of psychological analysis rather than an ‘or ‘poetic’ description of my youth’s experience.”

• September 8, 1950 last published letter to Rhoda de Terra from Les Moulins, France: “Here, Nothing much. … Yesterday my sister-in-law, her son and little Chantal (the granddaughter) dropped in for a short visit, followed by a carful of rather remote cousins and cousines – very nice people, but who make you painfully realise how much, for many human and beings, life is completely uneventful; (they do not seem to be conscious of it, luckily).”

• November 11 1950 from Paris to Leroy SJ: “..at the end of October I went to Belgium for two days to give conferences at Liege and Brussels (the Provincial of southern Belgium came) and to speak at dinners. It was all too crowded and fatiguing, but interesting. I am really quite worn out. I know that I made a good impression there, but I do not know what Rome thinks. …..All the while the world agonises, unable to find its way, because the Church, keeper of the flame of modern monotheism, refuses to give it the God it waits for, I grow indignant when I hear people say (even Lejay!) say that all things being equal , the Encyclical is not too bad;……No, I am not bitter. I’m as optimistic as possible.”

• January – June 1951: Paris France. April 22 1951 New York. • July 2, 1951 Teilhard appoints Jeanne Mortier as his literary executrices and she arranged publication of his works after his death. (Epilogue. “The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin & Lucile Swan”)

• In January 1951, before Teilhard left for Africa in July, an eminent scientist, Lucien Cuenot, zoologist and biologist, died, touching him with sadness. In February there were new attacks against Teilhard published in the conservative France Catholique. Both his superior Rene d’Ounince and his provincial Jacques Goussault rose to his defence. Teilhard had difficulty with the inevitability of his trip to Africa. Twice in recent years he had been seriously ill, he was 70 years old and no longer felt an attraction of an unknown adventure. His interest in the past had transferred to a focus on the future. Eventually his apprehension passed and the decision to go on the voyage was made.

• July – November 1951: South Africa. Johannesburg.. • After about eight weeks in Africa, Teilhard set out for North America by way of Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Trinidad. In New York for the winter, Teilhard sometimes had tea with Lucile Swan. These visits became less and less frequent. Lucile knew that Teilhard often saw Rhoda de Terra and she told him that she felt superseded. Teilhard pointed out to Lucile that he was an old, sick man who needed care and that the role of nurse did not suit Lucile. At that time Rhoda de Terra “… kept an eye out for his health, arranged his social calendar, deposited him and picked him up at many of his appointments, took care of his nuisance errands, introduced him to her literary cousins, the Roger Strauses, and ….. avoided prying into his relations with his Order”. (Luka, 307).

• August 12, 1951 (last published letter) from Johannesburg to Ida Treat: “I feel very happy here, free again in this vast milieu. …. These lines to send you my deep sympathy, my prayers and my wishes for a quick recovery….. May you and I grow in the Vision and the Presence of this Unique Necessity through all our successes and failures of our lives.”

• August 15 1951from Langham Hotel, Johannesburg to Leroy SJ: “..I’m telling you that (physically) I am quite well – distinctly better than I was three years ago. For example, I’m waking up these mornings happy and clearheaded again, without anxiety – and I am sure it is to Rhoda’s management that I owe it. Without her I would not have been able to leave Paris. I know that too well.”

• October 12 1951 from Cape Town to Very Reverend Father Janssens SJ in Rome: “1. First of all I think you must resign yourself to accepting me just as I am, even with my congenital quality (or weakness) because of which, from my earliest childhood, my spiritual life has always been completely dominated by a sort of ‘feeling’ for the organic reality of the world.” (Leroy SJ) • November 1951: South America. December 1951: New York.

• As a staff member of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, Teilhard made his home there from December 1951. The question of his returning to France and taking up any further work there no longer existed. He was once more in exile. It was there that Teilhard pursued his last scientific work and wrote the final pages of his philosophic and religious works. During 1952 he wrote 19 letters to Fr Pierre Leroy SJ. He occasionally spent time with friends such as Malvina Hoffman, Lucile Swan and Tillie Hoffman, once on the staff of the American Embassy in Peking. In April, 1952, Teilhard attended a three day meeting at he Academy of Sciences where he found the intellectual atmosphere “suffocating”.

• December 10 1951 from Wenner-Gren Foundation, 14 East 71st Street, New York to Leroy SJ: “ • ...And that’s about it for the moment. Sometimes I have a vague sense of homesickness in being cut off from Paris. – But there are compensations. And the feeing will pass. The important thing is that I may be able to do some good here. I’m quite distressed … at the state of Jouve’s health…”

• January – July 1952: New York. • January 13 1952 from 14 East 71st Street, New York to Leroy SJ: “– I still have only rare contacts with the Fathers here, especially on a personal level. But perhaps that may come one day. In any case, everybody is pleasant, and I try to be pleasant (if not regular) and above all, not to annoy anybody – as in a regiment one tries to pass unnoticed.”

• August 1952: Glacier park • September – December 1952: New York • September 29 1952 from New York to Leroy SJ: “Thank you for your letter telling me about the death, or rather deliverance, of dear Jouve. It makes a terrible void in my life. – With you and after you, he was one of the few Jesuits to whom I could say everything, sure of being understood – yes, and yes again, there is Only One Thing Necessary ……De Breuvery just arrived at the Park Avenue residence which is extremely pleasant for me. He wants to join an international economic section at the United Nations, which would be splendid. But would you believe that one of the only hitches which remain to the project is the question of wearing a Roman collar (!!!) – a point on which Spellman is absolutely intractable. O monumental and too-significant stupidity!

• In early November 1952: Lucile noted in ```` brief journal entry that a lunch she had with Teilhard had been ‘all wrong’.

• November 30 1952 from New York to Lucile Swan: “...…after a year of experience, I wonder if it would not be better and more constructive, for both of us, if I spaced a little my visits. – To see you is good for me. But, at the same time, it still disturbs me. Maybe, with some ‘spacing’ as you say, the strain will disappear and the relationship between you and me will become (as it can and must be) a really comforting and relaxing friendship.”

• Teilhard called on Lucille the day after Christmas. She wrote on her calendar “nice”.

• For the first half of 1953 Teilhard was unwell. He suffered from some kind of mental fatigue and was tormented by inexplicable crises of anxiety during which he lived with more perplexity than assurance and during which small events took on inordinate importance. He would wrap himself in silence to the bafflement of those around him. His characteristic reserve stopped him from giving voice to his pain, but his face stiffened with a curious austerity. His inner world seemed so concentrated that to others it seemed that for him the outside world no longer existed. Teilhard never thought or wrote that he was tired of living and during periods of depression he keot on writing. (source?)

• January – June 1953: New York • January 24 1953 from New York to Lucile Swan: “Since your letter reached me, I have been thinking (and also praying) over the kind of ‘impasses’ in which we find ourselves: a paradoxical situation, indeed, since it should be so simple for two people who have such deep feelings of friendship for one another to be talking and thinking constructively together. Well, emotions are strange. And the truth is that we still disturb each other whereas, both of us, we need absolutely ‘peace’.

. In her letter of January 31 Lucile admitted that she felt pride, vanity, jealousy and possessive love and that until she mastered herself there was no use their meeting.

• February 28 1953 Teilhard phoned Lucile and she wrote in her calendar, “He said he was not well so he needed my help.” They met in her studio apartment.

• March 1 1953 from New York to Leroy SJ: “…I have fallen miserably back into one of my crises of anxiety. (It is more or less like the one I had back in 1948, and is quite painful.) Fr Ravier very intelligently and vigorously told me not to yield to it, but to go to Africa …. I pray that God will fortify me from within.

• March 22 1953 from New York to Leroy SJ: “My dreadful ‘nervousness’ continued, even though my doctor (Simard, a friend of Carrel as well as Malvia …agrees that I seem better. Still, I pray God it will subside. The most painful aspect of this problem is the anguish that I feel every time I have to make a decision, or move out of myself in any way. – And the moment when I must be particularly bright is upon me!”

• March 24 1953 from New York to Lucile: “I am still easy prey of the most amazing varieties of ‘anxieties’, - an old disease of mine, which (if only I was a more spiritual man!) should force me into an ever growing ‘abandon’ in the hands of God. Pray for me, I am praying for you.”

• March 24 1953 Teilhard wrote to Lucile that it was annoying that the doctors had found that Rhoda de Terra had developed a rather large ‘fibrome’ (not malignant) and would have surgery April 1. April 3 he wrote that the surgery had been postponed until the following week. April 18 he wrote that Rhoda was still in hospital because of complications. When Teilhard went to South Africa in August he wrote from Johannesburg August 14 1953, to Lucile that “Rhoda is of immense help for me. In fact she helps me a lot, even in my work for the Foundation, on the most essential social and psychological planes, - a plane where, as you know, probably, I am not particularly gifted.”

• April 16 1953 from New York to Leroy SJ: …Finally I really feel I am emerging from my depression of last winter. (It had its clarifying effects, which I’ll explain to you one day.)”

• May 31 1953 New York to Leroy SJ: “I’m completely done with Theologians! – Still, I become furious when I see them maintain Christianity in so stunted a form that the Gentiles (to say nothing of many Christians) are disgusted by it.”

• July – August 1953: South Africa • September – December 1953: Rhodesia • November 1953 – May 1954: New York

• In November 1953 Teilhard learned that the ‘Piltdown Man’ was an elaborate hoax, Teilhard had worked briefly at the fossil site in Sussex in 1912 – 1913.

• During 1954 Teilhard visited home (France), X-Rays showed problems with his lungs and American immigration authorities were hesitant to give him a permanent visa. A number of things went badly during the year. Teilhard’s letters to Leroy SJ were less exuberant, less enthusiastic than usual. Inner worry affected him physically. (Source?) • January – May 1954: New York

• January 1 1954 from New York to Lucile: “I still feel a bit shaky, these days. So I think it wiser for me (and perhaps for you? To wait a little before coming to see you.”

• March 2 1954 from New York to Lucile Swan: “In fact, my nerves are stupidly somewhat tense these days. But I try to forget it, and to lean on God, - the closer for it. …. At St Ignatius (Park Avenue) they start new constructions, - so I am obliged to search for another shelter. A big nuisance. I wonder if they have a room for me at Riverside. Anyway I will find something. I will let you know.”

• A problem with rebuilding at St Ignatius meant that Teilhard had to find another place to live. • March 7 1954 from the Lotus Club, 5 East 66th Street, New York to Leroy SJ: “…all this moving about neither facilitates my work nor calms my nerves. The latter are pretty ragged at the moment. I just must be able to establish myself a little better in the ‘milieu divin’. ……./after the loss of dear Auguste Valensis, that of Pierre Charles has left me feeling quite abandoned …. One more Loss. And when will my turn come?”

• April 16 1954 from New York to Lucile in Boston: “Why is it I should still feel somewhat too tense? God knows better, I suppose. The main thing is that, in the process, I should feel Him always closer, and warmer, and unique, - And, I think, He does.”

• May 7 1954 from The Viking Fund, New York to Lucile: “Pardon my silence. I am still groping for myself. – But I am convinced that we are ‘converging’ upward, all right. I am leaving for France at the beginning of June (coming back probably in September – with Leroy – who has to do some work in Chicago). You can reach me at Etudes, 15 Rue Monsieur. P.S. In fact, I am going to France with ‘mixed’ feelings ..”

• June – August 1954: France • August 15 1954 from Purchase, New York to Leroy SJ: “Forgive my long silence. I’m still a bit bewildered by those agitated weeks in Paris – by the multiplicity of too rapid contacts, by hectic rhythm of attachments and detachments. – “

• September – December 1954 – April 10 1955 New York. In October Teilhard was still out of St Ignatius so he and Fr de Breuvery decided to take a double room apartment at Hotel Fourteen (East 60th Street). At some time after the end of November 1954, probably before Christmas, Teilhard suddenly became ill when he was out walking and fell onto the footpath. He was taken to Dr Jean Simard (on the upper side of East New York) who phoned Lucile Swan as the stricken Teilhard had asked for her. Teilhard’s fellow Jesuits also came and drove him to the Jesuit residence. After Christmas Teilhard apparently joined Lucile several times for tea. There are no letters or records of visits during the following three months.

• March 30 1955 from New York to Lucile: “Yes, stupidly enough, I am still nervous, - more nervous than I would, - should be, And at the same time, I definitely need your presence, your influence, in my life. I hope (I am sure) that things will gradually settle, ‘emotionally’ speaking. – In the meantime and as a minimum (or as a provisional ‘optimum’) we might try to see each other at the rate of two-three times a winter….Phone me any time you like.” That was Teilhard’s final letter to Lucile Swan. He died eleven days later.

• In July 1954, in Paris, Teilhard read again the final passages from his 'Heart of Matter'. He began weeping “at the memory of all the reproachful ‘Beatrices’ he knew and he had hurt unwittingly.” Lukas, Mary and Ellen, Teilhard, New York. Doubleday, 1977 p 337.)

• December 23 1954 Pierre Leroy spent two days with Teilhard. He found him to be tired, seemed dispirited, without apparent joy and none of the sunny optimism which had always characterised him. Teilhard was quiet and seemed to be absorbed in meditation. He said to Leroy, in the street, almost in surprise at the sound of his own voice, “I can tell you that I am now constantly living in the presence of God”. Teilhard did not really feel secure in New York. Such administrative administrative matters, such as arranging for an extension to his tourist visa, annoyed and paralysed him. Leroy SJ received only two more letters, one January 22 1955 and the other April 4 1955, from Teilhard before his death. Teilhard suffered the intransigence of Rome to the end and, having heard that there was to be a symposium in Paris in April wrote to forbid his participation. Inexplicably, Rome also prohibited translation of some of his already published works into German by friends at Louvain University.

• January – April 1955: New York • Teilhard used to say Mass for Lucile Swan on the feast day of St Lucia in December and on her birthday in May. On her last birthday before his death he wrote, “My Mass of May 9 will be for you, --- as every year; -for you and somewhat at the same time for me, so that we should at last! Find ‘each other’ in the best and highest way.” Here, as elsewhere, Teilhard’s remarks convey calm and serenity, but several letters give the impression that nonetheless he remained emotionally troubled to the end, especially as he was suffering from a nervous condition. (Ursula King, ‘Teilhard and Lucile Swan in ‘TEILHARD IN THE 21ST CENTURY’. Edited by Arthur Fabel and Donal St John 2003).

• Despite the pain of rejection, he continues to write with the hope that one day his vision would take hold. Although in later life he was tortured by bouts of depression his faith remained strong…………As he wrote to his brother Joseph on the occasion of the death of their ister Marguerite, “The only way of making life bearable … is to love and adore that which, beneath everything, animates and directs it.” (Kathleen Duffy SSJ, “Teilhard’s Mysticism. Seeing the Inner face of Evolution” Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 1970.

• April 4 1955 from New York to Leroy SJ: “Would you believe that Rome: 1. Will not give me permission to go to Paris for the paleontological symposium at the Sorbonne in April 1955 to which I was invited by the CNRS? …. 2. Put a stop to the proposal made by the House of Benziger to publish a German translation of my published articles….. ---- It’s curious (‘anxious’ as I am, and remain, on so many points) that I feel untroubled:”

• Two days after Teilhard’s last letter arrived, Father de Breuvery phoned Leroy in Chicago to tell him of Teilhard’s sudden death. He did not see Teilhard until Easter Monday. His body was laid in a private Chapel of the Jesuit Fathers of St Ignatius High School. He was dressed in violet vestments, his hands crossed on a rosary and crucifix, and his face a little sunken, he lay in the silence of death….Everything that he preached, Teilhard had intensely lived…”It is not toward endless progress that the world is moving…but toward an ecstasy outside the Universe.”

• Only Joseph was still living after Pierre died on Easter Sunday 10 April 1955. He is buried in the cemetery of the former Jesuit Novitiate (now the Culinary Institute of America - CIA) at Poughkeepsie. Lucile was among a handful of mourners who attended his funeral Mass at St Ignatius Church in New York. She died ten years later, May2 1965 and is buried in Sioux City, Iowa. AS I MOVE TOWARDS BLESSED SURRENDER

When the signs of age begin to mark my body .... and still more when they touch my mind.... When the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me....

When the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old.... At that moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces ''

that have formed me.... In all those dark moments, Loving God, grant that I may understand that it is you ... who are painfully parting the fibres of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself. The more deeply and incurably that evil

is encrusted in my flesh, the more it will be you that I am harbouring – you as a loving, active principle of purification, and detachment. The more the future opens before me like some dizzy abyss or dark tunnel, the more confident I may be of losing myself and surrendering myself in you, of being assimilated in your body .... Holy One, you are the irresistible and life-giving force....

You are the Stronger One.... It is on you that falls the part of consuming me in a union that can weld us together. It would be a blessing to die while actually receiving the body and blood of Christ in holy communion.... But I ask for something more precious – the grace to welcome death itself as an act of communion with you.

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN – PSYCHOLOGICAL/SPIRITUAL FACTORS AFFECTING HIS LIFE.

1. Temperament 2. Cognitive exceptionality 3. Environmental factors in early childhood 4. Deaths in the Family 5. World War 1 6. Isolation in China during World War 2 7. Authorities in Rome and the Jesuit Order. 8. Catholic Church in America 9. Catholic Church 10. Deaths of friends 11. Spirituality and Mysticism.

TEMPERAMENT Temperament includes behavioural traits such as sociability (outgoing or shy), emotionality (easy-going or quick to react), activity level (high or low energy), attention level (focused or easily distracted), and persistence (determined or easily discouraged). These examples represent a spectrum of common characteristics, each of which may be advantageous in certain circumstances. Temperament remains fairly consistent, particularly throughout adulthood. Similar temperaments within a family may be attributable to shared genetics and to the environment in which an individual is raised. Studies of identical twins (who share 100 percent of their DNA) and their non-twin siblings (who share about 50 percent of their DNA) show that genetics play a large role. Identical twins typically have very similar temperaments when compared with their other siblings. Even identical twins who were raised apart from one another in separate households share such traits. Scientists estimate that 20 to 60 percent of temperament is determined by genetics. Temperament, however, does not have a clear pattern of inheritance and there are not specific genes that confer specific temperamental traits. Instead, many (perhaps thousands) of common gene variations (polymorphisms) combine to influence individual characteristics of temperament. Other DNA modifications that do not alter DNA sequences (epigenetic changes) also likely contribute to temperament. Large studies have identified several genes that play a role in temperament. Many of these genes are involved in communication between cells in the brain. Certain gene variations may contribute to particular traits related to temperament. For example, variants in the DRD2 and DRD4 genes have been linked to a desire to seek out new experiences, and KATNAL2 gene variants are associated with self-discipline and carefulness. Variants affecting the PCDH15 and WSCD2 genes are associated with sociability, while some MAOA gene variants may be linked to introversion, particularly in certain environments. Variants in several genes, such as SLC6A4, AGBL2, BAIAP2, CELF4, L3MBTL2, LINGO2, XKR6, ZC3H7B, OLFM4, MEF2C, and TMEM161B contribute to anxiousness or depression. Environmental factors also play a role in temperament by influencing gene activity. In children raised in an adverse environment (such as one of child abuse and violence), genes that increase the risk of impulsive temperamental characteristics may be turned on (activated). However, a child who grows up in a positive environment (for example a safe and loving home) may have a calmer temperament, in part because a different set of genes is activated Scientific journal articles for further reading  Bratko D, Butković A, Vukasović T. Heritability of personality. Psychological Topics, 26 (2017), 1, 1-24.  Manuck SB, McCaffery JM. Gene-environment interaction. Annu Rev Psychol. 2014;65:41-70. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115100. PubMed: 24405358  Power RA, Pluess M. Heritability estimates of the big five personality traits based on common genetic variants. Translational Psychiatry (2015) 5, e604; doi:10.1038/tp.2015.96; published online 14 July 2015. PubMed: 26171985 PubMed Central: PMC5068715 To find out more about the role of genetics in temperament: The Dana Foundation. One of a Kind: The Neurobiology of Individuality.

COGNITIVE EXCEPTIONALITY - ASYNCHRONOUS DEVELOPMENT Asynchrony is the term used to describe the mismatch between cognitive, emotional, and physical development of gifted individuals. 1 Gifted children often have significant variations within themselves and develop unevenly across skill levels. For example, a gifted child may be excellent in math, but poor in reading--or vice versa. Often, intellectual skills are quite advanced, but fine motor or social skills are lagging. Experts do not completely agree, but because asynchrony is so prominent in gifted children, some professionals believe asynchronous development rather than potential or ability, is the defining characteristic of giftedness. 2 A definition of giftedness that captures the essence of this uneven development was developed by the Columbus Group in 1991:

Giftedness is asynchronous development in which advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm. This asynchrony increases with higher intellectual capacity. The uniqueness of the gifted renders them particularly vulnerable and requires modifications in parenting, teaching, and counselling in order for them to develop optimally.

A number of theorists and researchers have independently written about asynchronous development. Gowan (1974) discussed the implications of cognitive capacities that outstrip emotional (affective) development. He referred to asynchronous development as “dysplasia”:

…..a disagreement, dissonance, or disparity either between the age of the individual, which should place him in one stage, and the … stage he is actually in, …or disparity between the cognitive stage he is in and the affective stage he is in… (p. 165).

Gowan emphasized the trauma that can result when an individual is thrust prematurely and abruptly into a higher level of cognitive awareness…^[1]

It is important for parents, teachers, and caregivers to realize that "one size does not fit all" for gifted children--and even those with similar IQ scores may not have similar skills, personalities, rates of development, abilities, or interests. The individual traits of one gifted child may be extremely different from another. And, the more highly gifted the gifted child, the more asynchronous she may be. For example, it is not unusual for a 7-year-old highly gifted child to be reading at a 6th grade level, performing math tasks at a 4th grade level, and have fine motor skills at a 2nd grade level. At times, the child may appear to be functioning socially at a level far below her age mates.

1 Morelock, 1992.

2 Webb et al, 2007; The Columbus Group, 1991.

EARLY CHILDHOOD ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

ATTACHMENT is one specific and circumscribed aspect of the relationship between a child and caregiver that is involved with making the child safe, secure and protected . The purpose of attachment is not to play with or entertain the child (this would be the role of the parent as a playmate), feed the child (this would be the role of the parent as a caregiver), set limits for the child (this would be the role of the parent as a disciplinarian) or teach the child new skills (this would be the role of the parent as a teacher). Attachment is where the child uses the primary caregiver as a secure base from which to explore and, when necessary, as a haven of safety and a source of comfort.

Attachment is not ‘bonding’. ‘Bonding’ was a concept developed by Klaus and Kennell who implied that parent-child ‘bonding’ depended on skin-to-skin contact during an early critical period. This concept of ‘bonding’ was proven to be erroneous and to have nothing to do with attachment. Unfortunately, many professionals and non-professionals continue to use the terms ‘attachment’ and ‘bonding’ interchangeably. When asked what ‘secure attachment’ looks like, many professionals and non-professionals describe a ‘picture’ of a contented six-month-old infant being breastfed by their mother who is in a contented mood; they also often erroneously imply that breastfeeding per se promotes secure attachment. Others picture ‘secure attachment’ between a nine-year-old boy and his father as the father and son throw a ball in the backyard, go on a fishing trip or engage in some other activity. Unfortunately, these ‘pictures’ have little, if anything, to do with attachment, they are involved with other parental roles (eg, their role as a caregiver in the case of the breastfeeding mother and as a playmate in the case of the father and son playing catch in the backyard). One might ask why the distinction between attachment and ‘bonding’ matters. The answer may lie in the fact that ‘bonding’ has not been shown to predict any aspect of child outcome, whereas attachment is a powerful predictor of a child’s later social and emotional outcome. TYPES OF ATTACHMENT AND THEIR ANTECEDENTS There are four types of infant-parent attachment: three ‘organized’ types (secure, avoidant and resistant) and one ‘disorganized’ type (Table 1). The quality of attachment that an infant develops with a specific caregiver is largely determined by the caregiver’s response to the infant when the infant’s attachment system is ‘activated’ (eg, when the infant’s feelings of safety and security are threatened, such as when he/she is ill, physically hurt or emotionally upset; particularly, frightened). Beginning at approximately six months of age, infants come to anticipate specific caregivers’ responses to their distress and shape their own behaviours accordingly (eg, developing strategies for dealing with distress when in the presence of that caregiver) based on daily interactions with their specific caregivers. Three major patterns of responses to distress have been identified in infants, which lead to three specific ‘organized’ attachment patterns. TABLE 1 Types of attachment and antecedents

Quality of caregiving Strategy to deal with distress Type of attachment Sensitive - Loving Organized Secure Insensitive - Rejecting Organized; Insecure-avoidant Insensitive - Inconsistent Organized; Insecure-resistant Atypical - Atypical Disorganized; Insecure-disorganized

Secure: Infants whose caregivers consistently respond to distress in sensitive or ‘loving’ ways, such as picking the infant up promptly and reassuring the infant, feel secure in their knowledge that they can freely express negative emotion which will elicit comforting from the caregiver. Their strategy for dealing with distress is ‘organized’ and ‘secure’. They seek proximity to and maintain contact with the caregiver until they feel safe. The strategy is said to be ‘organized’ because the child ‘knows’ exactly what to do with a sensitively responsive caregiver, ie, approach the caregiver when distressed.

Insecure – Avoidant: "Infants whose caregivers consistently respond to distress in insensitive or ‘rejecting’ ways, such as ignoring, ridiculing or becoming annoyed, develop a strategy for dealing with distress that is also ‘organized’, in that they avoid their caregiver when distressed and minimize displays of negative emotion in the presence of the caregiver. The strategy is said to be ‘organized’ because the child ‘knows’ exactly what to do with a rejecting caregiver, ie, to avoid the caregiver in times of need. This avoidant strategy is also ‘insecure’ because it increases the risk for developing adjustment problems. Insecure – resistant: Infants whose caregivers respond in inconsistent, unpredictable and/or ‘involving’ ways, such as expecting the infant to worry about the caregiver’s own needs or by amplifying the infant’s distress and being overwhelmed, also use an ‘organized’ strategy for dealing with distress; they display extreme negative emotion to draw the attention of their inconsistently responsive caregiver. The strategy is said to be ‘organized’ because the child ‘knows’ exactly what to do with an inconsistently responsive caregiver, ie, exaggerate displays of distress and angry, resistant responses, ‘hoping’ that the marked distress response cannot possibly be missed by the inconsistently responsive caregiver. However, this resistant strategy is also ‘insecure’ because it is associated with an increase in the risk for developing social and emotional maladjustment.

WORLD WAR 1 and POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

PTSD is a mental health diagnosis characterized by five events or symptoms: A life threatening event. This includes a perceived-to-be life threatening event. Whether or not it actually is, it’s really about the perception of the person who experienced or witnessed the event that it could happen to them again. 1. Internal reminders of a traumatic event. These signs of trauma typically present as nightmares or flashbacks. It’s important to realize that these are not simply memories. They are unwanted, intrusive episodes in which a person feels as though they are in the life threatening situation again – like they’re watching a movie or seeing it unfold in front of them. It feels very real to them. 2. Avoidance of external reminders. Those with PTSD often do whatever they can to not think about their traumatic event, to suppress the feelings associated with it - dissociation. They might avoid alleys if they were assaulted in one, or they might refuse to drive if they were in a car accident. 3. Altered anxiety state. PTSD can leave people feeling on edge and looking out for danger (hypervigilance) - more anxious. Their startle response is exaggerated. They’re jumpy or looking over their shoulder more often. It’s a physical sign of PTSD and reaction to the body’s increased anxiety and the need to be aware of possible threats. 4. Changes in mood or thinking. People with PTSD can see the world as a very dangerous place. And because they focus on protecting themselves from it, it’s often difficult for them to go out in public. The isolation can lead to depression, or sometimes a person may act in an opposite way when they see no future. In that case, they may take more risks or engage in risky behaviours.

Anxiety and Heart Attacks ^[2] When someone is anxious, their body reacts in ways that can put an extra strain on their heart. The physical symptoms of anxiety can be especially damaging among individuals with existing cardiac disease.

Anxiety may have an association with the following heart disorders and cardiac risk factors:

Rapid heart rate (tachycardia) – In serious cases, can interfere with normal heart function and increase the risk of sudden cardiac arrest. Increased blood pressure – If chronic, can lead to coronary disease, weakening of the heart muscle, and heart failure. Decreased heart rate variability – May result in higher incidence of death after an acute heart attack. Anxiety and Heart Attack Recovery

Anxiety disorders come with a high degree of fear and uncertainty. Anxiety can interfere with:

Sticking to prescribed exercise regimens Taking prescribed medications Following through with a healthy diet Getting a proper amount of quality sleep Reconnecting with friends and family Confidently resuming job career and family responsibilities

Different Types of Anxiety Disorder Panic disorder – can be associated with cardiac disease or mistaken for heart attack. Feelings of extreme agitation and terror are often accompanied by dizziness, chest pains, stomach discomfort, shortness of breath, and rapid heart rate. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – a condition that can follow a shocking or frightening incident or sudden, life-threatening event such as a violent crime, major accident, or heart attack. A person suffering from PTSD often has trouble dealing with anything associated with the incident that caused their condition, and experiences feelings of jitteriness and detachment. Obsessive-Compulsive disorder – People with OCD will manage unreasonable thoughts and worries by performing the same actions over and over. For example, an individual obsessed with perceived cardiovascular symptoms that have been checked and cleared by a physician may compulsively research them or find new ones for hours on end. "Free floating anxiety" - Free-floating anxiety refers to experiencing worry or panic without a known trigger. Sometimes this anxiety ebbs and flows over the course of time. In other cases, this anxiety is persistent, and it may be characteristic of other anxiety disorders, like generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

Depression and Heart Attacks. ^[3] Depression and heart disease are among the most disabling diseases we face. They are both very widespread among the general population and often occur simultaneously in the same individual.

There is thought to be a two-way relationship between heart disease and depression:

A percentage of people with no history of depression become depressed after a heart attack or after developing heart failure. And people with depression but no previously detected heart disease, seem to develop heart disease at a higher rate than the general population.

It is somewhat hard to prove that heart disease directly leads to the development of a first-ever episode of depression. That is because some people who have had previous episodes of depression may not have it formally diagnosed until they see their doctor for heart problems.

“What we can say with certainty is that depression and heart disease often occur together,” says Dr. Roy Ziegelstein, vice dean for education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine . “About one in five who have a heart attack are found to have depression soon after the heart attack. And it’s at least as prevalent in people who suffer heart failure.”