"I am forced to choose," he wrote to a priest friend, "between two opposing ideas; the one, the rather 'brutal' thought that nothing in life really matters except God; the other, an ever-sharpening awareness of how heavy-handed, narrow-minded, and weak is the modern Church."
Yet Teilhard, who kept images of Christ and Galileo beside his bed throughout his life, wanted to reconcile the mysticism of religion with the rationality of science, especially with regard to evolution. "[T]he ideas of evolution became so powerful that they convinced him that everything in the universe [was] in constant flux, ever evolving as decreed by God," explains Aczel. "The goal was a point where everything would converge to form the body of Christ. This was Teilhard's Omega Point."
Teilhard also was willing to abase himself to his superiors in a desperate effort to prevent his work from being placed on the list of banned writings called "the Index."
A certain elegant irony lies just beneath the surface of Aczel's superb story. Teilhard took pleasure in scientific trips to Spain and France to view cave paintings -- the first stirrings of religious imagination that are regarded as a line of demarcation between prehistoric hominids, essentially apes that walked upright, and the early human beings we must recognize as our direct ancestors.
Tens of thousands of years later, the worst features of organized religion distorted and delimited the life and work of this visionary whom the inheritors of the Inquisition saw as a dangerous heretic. Only after Teilhard's death were his most important works printed, and only because he put the manuscripts beyond church control by bequeathing them to one of the women who had befriended him. On Easter Sunday in 1955, he died of a heart attack in New York. Later that year, "The Phenomenon of Man," the first of his many books, at last was published, despite every effort of the church to prevent it. *
