Inherited and Incipient Ideas of Race, 1905–1919

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born into a moderately wealthy family in central France in the late nineteenth century, replete with a governess, servants, and land.Footnote ¹⁵ As such, before he even began doctoral scientific work, it seems clear that he was raised on a colonialist, paternalist racism that would have been expected of anyone from his pedigree. This approach can be seen throughout his early letters, especially during his time in Egypt. There is a clear distance between Teilhard and the “natives” that he frequently mentions in Letters from Egypt, whom he describes often in delightful, cheerful, and inquisitive tones, such as:

There seems to be no malice in Teilhard’s words, but simply an assumed otherness and superiority.

After his time in Egypt, Teilhard spent four years studying to become a Jesuit in England, and he was ordained a priest in August 1911. He wrote mostly of his budding and active faith life in these years, but once again revealed an implicit racism and colonialist tendencies in a few encounters with Americans.

This quote is a study of separation and curiosity from Teilhard. He makes no judgment as to whether he considers the men animals, nor does he judge the crowd for considering them as animals. He merely notes it and finds it significant enough to include in a letter. The very next line states how little this affected him, noting that “all these little things rarely distracted me from things more important in themselves, like the war in Tripoli.”Footnote ¹⁹

A few months later, Teilhard has an encounter with an American from New Orleans who is distraught over the treatment of Black Americans in the United States. Teilhard commiserates but then offers a glimpse into his patriarchal racism and racial superiority.

The two emphasized sentences are the first recorded instances of Teilhard voicing explicitly what was implicit throughout his earlier letters from Egypt: a colonialist superiority and paternalist racism. He concludes the section with a reference to his friend, Olivier, asking whether he has some “insight into the negro question.” This paragraph ends with a seemingly innocent inquisitiveness but betrays an alarming but not unexpected lack of self-awareness on the part of Teilhard, his parents, and probably his classmates as to their assumptions of superiority and race.

Between 1912 and 1922, Teilhard pursued advanced studies in paleontology, which would culminate in his doctoral thesis in 1922. His studies were interrupted for several years by the First World War, in which Teilhard served as a decorated stretcher-bearer between 1914 and 1919. During this ten-year period, Teilhard wrote regularly and with more precision. His scientific ideas matured, and he began to articulate mystical experiences into theological and philosophical language. His scientific studies at this time largely assumed the aforementioned cultural progressivism and racist anthropological science, and these studies would have confirmed many of Teilhard’s early colonialist attitudes.Footnote ²¹ Teilhard’s learned colonialist racism becomes better articulated and begins to filter into his scientific and philosophical work.

First, we see his colonialist racism in several writings from 1916 in the trenches of war. In the essay “Cosmic Life,” he talks of a “universal effort” that leads to all beings “united in totality,” but is careful to note that this does not mean “egalitarian fusion” but a “segregation that allows a chosen elite to emerge,” which he notes is “mankind” itself.

A few months later, however, similar reflections on the enduring spirit of humanity reveal that his penchant for a “chosen elite” refers not just to humanity itself, but to a subset of humanity. One result of war, he writes:

In two letters from 1918, he reiterates this point, arguing in one letter that one of the lessons from the war is that “it illustrates the grave danger of large racial agglomerations” while teaching “the impossibility of preventing ‘natural’ combinations.”Footnote ²⁴ In another, he muses on the importance of an “élite” within humanity and calls it “one of the most decisive and permanent convictions I’ve acquired from my experience in recent years.” He states:

Even very early in his writing career, the ideas expressed in letters and essays are quite close to similar ideas expressed by popular eugenicists at the time. For example, from Charles Davenport, the director of the Department of Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor: “Since the weak and the criminal will not be guided in their matings by patriotism or family pride, more powerful influences or restraints must be exerted as the case requires.”Footnote ²⁶ Even more extreme, with perhaps even greater impact, are David Starr Jordan’s chilling words from 1907, “Indiscriminate charity has been a fruitful cause of the survival of the unfit. To kill the strong and to feed the weak is to provide for a progeny of weakness.”Footnote ²⁷

First Articulations of Evolutionary Racism, 1920–1923

In addition to his casual observations and early philosophical writings, Teilhard’s colonialist racism also appears quite clearly in his scientific work beginning in the 1920s. As noted previously, this scientific racism is far from unique to Teilhard, instead reaching back to the seventeenth century, a tradition that Teilhard would have been expected to learn, critique, and demonstrate mastery of in order to earn his degrees and widespread scientific acclaim.

“From the Palaeolithic,” he argues in 1921, “there were White, Black and Yellow races, and they already occupied, by and large, the place in which we find them today.”Footnote ²⁸ The differences among human races are “fixed in their fundamental distribution” based upon Teilhard’s reading of the fossil record.Footnote ²⁹ In 1923, he continues and expands upon this argument. All non-European races, like Australian Aborigines, are races “which have diverged from ours” at some earlier point in time and “have become fixed…. The Australian aborigines and Neanderthalers represent types of men perfectly successful in their line of development. Only for us they are ‘marginal’ types.”Footnote ³⁰ These inferior human groups are not a recession, but the pinnacle of their own evolutionary tree, and yet merely draft “sketches” of the pinnacle of humanity, Teilhard’s own race, European humans, which is the only race of humanity he calls “Homo sapiens.” He says:

This and related arguments concerning the existence of multiple, distinct, inferior human races, can be found throughout Teilhard’s paleontological works in the 1920s.Footnote ³² Based upon these writings, Teilhard’s vision of progressive racial evolution can be described as twofold. First, he believes that three main human races succeeded Neanderthals, races that he calls “the Blacks, the Yellows, and the Whites.”Footnote ³³ These represent most of a “complicated bundle of modern humanity”Footnote ³⁴ and, of these, the whites are the most progressive. Second, further back on the evolutionary timescale, Teilhard postulates that Indigenous populations of Australia and North America—which he called “Bushmen” and “Eskimos”—represent “the oldest human layers” that are being supplanted by “more progressive races.”Footnote ³⁵ As noted previously, he believes that these races are not malformations or “fallen races” but are each, instead, the fixed pinnacles of their own weaker and imperfect evolutionary lines.

Before moving on, it is helpful to reiterate some contextual points. First, in these discussions, Teilhard is explicitly in conversation with the general paleontological and anthropological communities who largely agreed with his racial theories.Footnote ³⁶ While he would arguably become peerless in his synthetic work of later years, his early scientific papers were always written in conversation with other scholars.

Encountering China and Chinese People, 1923–1929

Teilhard’s first trip to China in 1923 began a decade of frustrations for Teilhard, including forced capitulations on evolution and refusals by the Vatican of permissions to publish on the basis of his acceptance of human evolution.Footnote ³⁷ Although explicit mention of eugenics is scarce during this time period, the impact of eugenics and its related philosophies can be seen through the continuation of aforementioned themes and the addition of a few more.

“Sleep on, ancient Asia; your people are as weary as your soil is ravaged,” remarks Teilhard, continuing his racial progressivism in one of his first essays upon arrival in China. “By now your night has fallen and the light has passed into other hands. If we want to understand the Far East … we must look at it at dusk when the sun, bearing the spoils of Asia with it in its glory, rises in triumph over the skies of Europe.”Footnote ³⁸ Reflections on the primitive and inferior nature of various peoples in Asia would be a constant theme in his letters throughout the 1920s.

He writes in 1924, for example, “I have thus been able to verify what I had already been told, that the greatest trial for a missionary in China is to find that he is lost in a sea of primitive beings, kind and affectionate, no doubt, but as inquisitive, persistent and tactless as savages.”Footnote ³⁹ Later in 1926 he comments on the vast deforestation project by European rubber companies in Vietnam as a positive development, commenting that “it would be absurd” to regret the disappearance of old forms of life, which includes “the deer, the elephants, and the peacocks, but also these poor MoisFootnote ⁴⁰ [Indigenous peoples in Vietnam] who are so picturesque but who belong to a bygone age.”Footnote ⁴¹ In 1927, he develops such a low opinion of Chinese potential that he argues that Chinese people belong with other Indigenous people, and not Homo sapiens, in his evolutionary tree. Chinese people, he argues, seem most likely to be “arrested primitives, victims of retarded development whose anthropological substance is inferior to ours.”Footnote ⁴²

Later in the same essay, Teilhard makes an argument that he will repeat many times over the next three decades: Christian love does not erase biological inferiority:

He repeats this definition of Christian love in a letter from 1929, when he asks: “Do the yellows [the Chinese] have the same human value as the whites?” He notes that others say their inferiority “is due to their long history of Paganism,” but Teilhard disagrees. “The cause seems to be the natural racial foundation. And this has nothing to do with Christian love … which overcomes all inequalities, but does not deny them.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Embracing Postmillennialism in the 1920s

The 1920s is where one can also see clear expressions of Teilhard’s postmillennialism, the idea that humans can work with God toward a more perfect world, or to help bring about the eschaton. Nonbiological theories of eschatological postmillennialism have a long history within Christian theology, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a biological postmillennialism became a standard way that some Christian theologians engaged with evolution, contributing to the acceptance of eugenics by many Christian postmillennialists.Footnote ⁴⁵ Now that Darwin had laid open the mysteries of evolutionary creation, pro-evolution Christians could assist God in perfecting creation by perfecting humans biologically through self-directed evolution.

Teilhard begins to articulate his version of this popular philosophy alongside his racist and progressivist ideas in the early 1920s, although he does not yet weave the arguments together.Footnote ⁴⁶ These beginnings of postmillennialist perfection represent a stark difference from Teilhard’s essays on progress from the late 1930s and 1940s, which are explicitly intertwined with racially charged eugenic ideas.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1927, Teilhard completed The Divine Milieu, one of his best-known works, where he developed his mystical approaches to the intersection of science and faith and presented an incipient version of his larger philosophical system. Although there are no explicit references to eugenics and racist anthropologies in this text, it is perhaps Teilhard’s clearest work on postmillennialism.Footnote ⁴⁸

Even without the explicit racist or eugenic language of his later years, The Divine Milieu would have been read very favorably by many in the eugenics conversation in the 1920s. Such a declaration, however, should not be necessarily read as a condemnation of postmillennialism broadly, but of the past and continued dangers of biological postmillennialism.Footnote ⁴⁹ This connection among biological postmillennialism, evolution, and eugenics in the early twentieth century offers yet another point of evidence as to why Teilhard could so easily incorporate explicit eugenic ideas a decade later.

Emergence of Eugenic Ideas, 1930–1937

If the 1920s were times of initial articulations, the 1930s represented a time of clarifications on race and the first emergence of an explicit eugenics. One might call this a natural maturation process as Teilhard analyzes, expands, and defines his previously assumed ideas, beginning to weave them into a greater systematic whole. This weaving is true of his racial, progressivist, and colonialist ideas, as well as his postmillennialist and general theological ones.

The decade begins with Teilhard developing a more specific articulation of the history of human races in several texts, including in “The Phenomenon of Man” (1930) and “Man’s Place in Nature” (1932). Here, he reiterates, clarifies, and builds off his earlier scientifically racist argument that Homo sapiens comprise three major races—“Whites, Yellows, and Blacks”—and that Indigenous peoples not fitting these categories are from previous evolutionary forms of humans.Footnote ⁵⁰ Alongside this declaration, Teilhard continues to discuss his postmillennialist desire to merge all peoples into one, beyond race and nation, to progress the work of God.Footnote ⁵¹ But in this merging, not all races or nations are equal to Teilhard.

In a 1932 essay entitled “The Road of the West,” Teilhard offers his most expansive articulation of Western supremacy and thus cultural progressivism. The entire essay is a diatribe against Eastern ideas, religions, and cultures in favor of the superior ideas, religions, and cultures of the West. After fifteen pages of arguments why Western Christian ideas are superior to Eastern ideas, he concludes:

This essay represents the clearest articulation of cultural progressivism to date in Teilhard’s corpus. It is both a reflection of a lifetime of racist, colonialist superiority and an exemplar of a scholar expanding and systematizing previously implicit thoughts.

A few years later, in 1936, Teilhard begins to sharpen his racist ideas. This is first found in two letters in which he describes perhaps his first difficult encounter with people of faith who disagree with his ideas of racial inequality. He says:

He continues his frustration against the Missiologues in a letter written just five days later. “There could be nothing more dangerous for ‘humanitarians’ … than to shut their eyes to the fact of the complexity (or heterogeneity) of the human mass.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In a somewhat startling turn, Teilhard goes on to declare support for some of Mussolini’s ideas as preferable to ideas of racial equality:

Teilhard seems attracted to Mussolini’s notions of returning to a grand vision of the ancient Roman empire and affirms his support for war as a force of “constructing” the new earth. Teilhard knows he has detractors in this view but, given his history of rejection from the church over his views of evolution, it is not surprising that contrasting views do not sway Teilhard easily. He concludes the letter by once again reaffirming racial inequality, arguing that the natural order of different ethnic groups means that some groups “must be dominated,” although, he points out, “This does not mean they must be despised,” emphasizing his dislike of hateful racism while holding on closely to colonialist and scientific racism.Footnote ⁵⁶ Finally, just in case she is still confused, he reaffirms this once again in the postscript:

In these two letters, Teilhard merges his racist anthropology (inequality of humans) with both his cultural progressivism (superiority of white humans) and his postmillennialist eschatology (the human-driven future of humanity for God). It should be no surprise, then, that he explicitly mentions eugenics just one year later.

In an essay called “Human Energy” from 1937, Teilhard argues that there are many types of human energy that must be harnessed for future progress, including love, but also including organic energy. In a section entitled “The Conscious Organization of Human Energy,” Teilhard writes at length about what might be needed to perfect the human condition, describing the eugenic project without mentioning its name. Humanity holds “an immense task” to not only research the “conquest of disease and the phenomena of counter-evolution (sterility, physical deterioration) which undermine the advances of the noosphere,” but to search for “a higher human type” by “various methods” such as “selection, balance of the sexes, action of hormones, hygiene, etc.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Teilhard is not naïve. He says plainly that this is a controversial stance. “For a complex of obscure reasons, our generation still regards with distrust all efforts proposed by science for controlling the machinery of heredity, of sex-determination and development of the nervous system. It is as if man had the right and power to interfere with all the channels in the world except those which make him himself.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Despite such reservations, Teilhard is clear both on the necessity that “we must try everything to its conclusion” and on the “delicate” nature of the eugenic program that must be “reverently and religiously pursued”:

Despite these and other related paragraphs, Teilhard only uses the word “eugenics” once in this essay, seemingly aware of the power it holds. A few pages after the aforementioned quotes, he shares with his readers a new development in science called “birth control” that is “too often” focused on “individual hardships” but can now open our eyes to the societal “anomaly” that faces humanity.Footnote ⁶¹ Teilhard can now call this transformed field by its proper name, “eugenics.” Softening the blow of using such a word, he quickly notes that “all sorts of questions” are raised by this new idea and proceeds to list a litany:

Halfway through the questions, Teilhard notes that there is truth and beauty in one’s desire to save the life of another individual, but perhaps individuals should “balance” this impulse with “a higher passion” toward “worldwide achievements of our evolution”:

He continues, extrapolating on this eugenic argument:

This section is full of theoretical ideas and provocative questions, but they are dangerous, deadly questions that already had a profound impact on millions of lives between 1900 and 1937. Similar questions will spur the genocide of the Jewish population in Nazi Germany, which began in earnest on Kristallnacht in November 1938, just a year after this essay was written.

A Turning Point: The Phenomenon of Man, 1938

In 1938 Teilhard finished what would become his most popular and enduring text, The Phenomenon of Man. The posthumous publication of this book in 1959 catapulted Teilhard to international fame and caused his vision of evolutionary Christianity to be a foundational vision of a renewed Catholic Church leading up to the Second Vatican Council. One must recall that Teilhard was censured not for his racist, colonialist, or eugenic attitudes, but for his direct support for scientific theories of human evolution. As such, the publication of The Phenomenon of Man in 1959 (and the subsequent publication of many letters and other essays) was a watershed moment for a church that had never allowed a theologian to fully accept human evolution. One must also recall that 1959 was more than a decade after the end of World War II and the common use of the word “eugenics.” Some reviewers openly supported Teilhard’s eugenic and racial arguments, but for most people Teilhard’s use of “eugenics” in this book seems to have gone unnoticed, either disregarded as a passing mention from the pre-war era or simply a minor point with which readers agreed.Footnote ⁶⁵

In Phenomenon Teilhard repeats many of the aforementioned arguments, expanding upon them in bits and pieces, including his support for vague eugenic practices. He first reiterates his racial anthropological belief in multiple unique human races that diverged from the evolutionary tree at different moments in history, with current Aboriginal groups diverging quite early and the main three human races—Black, white, and yellow—emerging simultaneously but with different qualities and characteristics.Footnote ⁶⁶

He then expands upon the superiority of the West over the East, noting explicitly that “we would be allowing sentiment to falsify the facts if we failed to recognize that during historic times the principal axis of anthropogenesis has passed through the West…. Even that which had long been known elsewhere only took on its definitive human value in becoming incorporated in the system of European ideas and activities. It is not in any way naïve to hail as a great event the discovery by Columbus of America.”Footnote ⁶⁷

He also continues previous themes of differentiating colonialist racism from hateful racism, as discussed earlier. Teilhard pushes several times against hateful racist ideas, noting that the future of humanity must be the coming together of all groups:

And yet, a few pages later, Teilhard explicitly ties these reflections to his desires for a eugenic future, one of perfect control over global human evolution:

The Phenomenon of Man is not a book about eugenics any more than any one of Teilhard’s theological constructions are inherently about eugenics. Both this book and Teilhard’s many constructions, however, rely upon a twofold approach to controlled human evolution, spiritual and physical. For Teilhard, the latter is just as important as the former, and only in the combination of the two can we hope to reach human perfection, divinization, and the omega point.

As previously mentioned, Teilhard did not go on a book tour after publishing Phenomenon and have public discussions with leading figures of evolutionary Christianity. This and other texts were circulated among friends and repeatedly rejected by censors not for any racist or eugenic leanings, but simply because of their continued insistence that human evolution was a fact, and a fact that must be considered theologically. As such, Teilhard simply continued writing after Phenomenon was completed. Essay after essay, some longer, some shorter, never diverging from his original theses, always expanding and entrenching deeper.

My decision to break the narrative here is arbitrary because there was no big publication and no public reception until well after Teilhard died, which was well after eugenics had gone out of fashion and largely but not entirely out of practice. But as the combination of “Human Energy” and Phenomenon marks Teilhard’s first use of the word “eugenics,” I felt it important to pause and consider why he continued to use the word. By 1937, eugenics was hotly debated, with some major scientists noting its deficiency in producing accurate results and the general public wary of increasing sterilization programs. Many eugenic organizations still existed, but the open glorification of eugenic language and eugenic practices by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich made the rest of the world uneasy. Even before the nadir of Nazi antisemitism was realized, the existence of violent antisemitism and mass sterilization practices tied to eugenic practices and language was well known in the late 1930s.

Although Teilhard was racist in his anthropology and paternalism, he was, as this article has pointed out, ardently against many forms of explicitly hateful racism that existed in the early twentieth century. He insisted, until his death, that some unequal mixture of all the peoples of the world would create the next evolution of humanity. Still, in his private letters and unpublished essays, he betrays himself smitten with the notion of eugenics as a way to better humanity, even after the war is over and the genocide revealed. Teilhard was nothing if not confident in his approach to science, philosophy, theology, and the universe. Why should a bad representation of eugenics sway him to change his perception of a potential way to change humanity for the better? Why should Mussolini’s violence change Teilhard’s liking of his desire to make his race great? Why should the calls for racial equality change Teilhard’s scientific conclusions that human races are inherently unequal?

The final fifteen years of race and eugenics in Teilhard’s writings are the most striking to present because they are the profile of a man in his fifties, sixties, and seventies who never lets go of views that are considered repugnant and dangerous in most places today. During these years Teilhard often found himself heralded in scientific quarters while being rejected by Jesuit and Vatican censors, while at the same time being praised and exalted in the underground Catholic progressive communities who read his unpublished works.Footnote ⁷⁰

Would things have been different if the Catholic Church had acted differently against Teilhard? If other Catholic authors had begun to engage with evolution more directly, would Teilhard have altered his eugenic approach? We will never know, but if we take the example of his commitment to scientific racism, the answer is likely no. It is clear from his writings that he understands the many scientists and nonscientists who disagree with his racial approach and that he disagrees strongly with all of them. The remainder of this article will highlight Teilhard’s commitments, in the face of rising disagreements, both to his racial anthropology and to his views on eugenics. The disagreements are faced head-on and consistently disregarded by Teilhard, even when faced with the Nazi genocide, even when the disagreements reach global proportions in the famous UNESCO statement on equality of the races in 1950. Teilhard remains consistent in his theology, his science, and his certainty until the end.

Teilhard’s Continued Racist Anthropology, 1939–1955

While writing Phenomenon, Teilhard also wrote a piece in 1939 in which he expressed a scientific and theological explanation for the past and future of human racial stratification and evolution called “The Natural Units of Humanity.”Footnote ⁷¹ Portions of the essay seem to be answers to his detractors on race, as he directs his thought to racial equality arguments more than once. First, he addresses the scientists themselves, anthropologists like W. E. B. DuBois, Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and others.

He continues, disparaging geneticists as mistaking the trees for the forest:

This was not an uncommon argument in the 1930s, with many scientists denying racial equality by claiming phenotypical differences (what we see) were more important than anything genetics can offer.

After once again claiming his aforementioned order of racial evolution, he considers why the inequality of races exists and offers a few answers that are meant to salve:

As this quote shows, Teilhard’s love of diversity and his devotion to the human unity bound by Christian love continues to be fully dependent upon his commitment to the divinely ordered “inequalities” of human races, which “become acceptable” when viewed from “their essential complementarity.” Teilhard rejects any proposal to have unity without the inequality.

This commitment to racial inequality remains consistent throughout the next two decades, with many essays written in support of the idea, including “The Question of the Fossil Men” (1942), “The Directions and Conditions of the Future” (1948), “The Human Zoological Group” (1949), “The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group” (1951), and “Africa and Human Origins” (1954).Footnote ⁷⁴ It is enough to examine the last essay, completed less than a year before his death, to see how his racial views did not change despite the scientific currents that flowed toward equity.

After admitting that the majority of anthropological evidence pointed to human origins in the continent of Africa, Teilhard takes great pains to note both how Africa as a continent is ill-fitted for higher forms of life and how more advanced humans quickly left Africa soon after they evolved. He titles this section of the essay “Black Africa” and begins with noting the “contradictory” nature of the continent, how it is vast and diverse but has only the “least progressive living forms”:

He argues that once a version of Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, they quickly left. The emptied land was then filled with less developed versions of humans, in which Teilhard includes the Bantu people, who experienced no resistance in spreading out across an “empty” continent. I quote in length for the sake of being faithful to Teilhard’s own words:

Besides his essays, Teilhard illustrates his continued commitment to this racist anthropology through his letters from this period, the most famous of which is his frustrated rejection of UNESCO’s racial equity statement, “The Equality of the Races,” from 1950.Footnote ⁷⁷ Teilhard wrote a letter to the director of UNESCO over this statement and was one of many scientists demanding a retraction of the famous statement:

Teilhard publicly campaigned against UNESCO’s statement on equality, giving speeches and presentations on the basic inequality of the human race to groups of students, sometimes by himself, and sometimes accompanied by his recently made friend, biologist, and noted eugenicist Julian Huxley.Footnote ⁷⁹ Teilhard’s injunctions, combined with arguments by Huxley and many others, convinced UNESCO to release another racial statement in 1951 attempting to clarify the question.Footnote ⁸⁰

Teilhard’s Continued and Expanded Appreciation of Eugenics, 1939–1953

After first explicitly espousing eugenic ideas in “Human Energy” and Phenomenon, Teilhard would not mention it again until after the war in the late 1940s. In “The Human Rebound of Evolution” (1947), he considers the downfall of the Nazi regime and the aftermath of the war. He seems to struggle with his previous appreciation for the spirit of nationalism and his hatred for how war fragments the earth:

Teilhard, however, moves ever forward in his hopes for humanity because he is convinced there is a way to progress beyond our current state. Less than a year later, he completes an essay entitled “My Fundamental Vision,” where he does not explicitly mention eugenics but fully includes the ideas in his description of humanity’s potential for “self-orientation” toward that “critical point of final convergence”:Footnote ⁸²

These words are vague and hinting, even though well aligned with the eugenic mindset, but his attached footnote is not. All of this progress, Teilhard argues, “presupposes, among other favorable conditions,… effective control, both in quantity and quality, of reproduction in order to avoid over-population of the earth or its invasion by a less satisfactory ethnic group.”Footnote ⁸⁴

In an essay completed around the same time, Teilhard spends several pages reflecting upon the publication of a recent book, Our Plundered Planet, by Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr.Footnote ⁸⁵ Osborn had done much work in eugenics, being the son of Henry Fairfield Osborn Sr., the famous eugenicist and paleontologist. After the fall of eugenics as a proper point of discussion, Osborn Jr. was among several authors who called for a “Malthusian revival” of worldwide population control that was, in fact, eugenics by another name.Footnote ⁸⁶ Teilhard argues that “we must pay serious attention to warnings such as that recently uttered by Mr. Fairfield Osborn” in this book.Footnote ⁸⁷

Osborn is extremely careful to avoid the word “eugenics” in his book, but Teilhard holds no such reluctance, having not felt the same public pressure as the Osborn family. After several pages of support for Osborn’s central thesis, Teilhard presents his clear answer to Osborn’s warnings about population control: individual and racial eugenics, which “come up against apparently insuperable difficulties.”

But these difficulties do not change the fact “that the problem of building a healthy Mankind already stares us in the face and is growing more acute every day. With the help of science, and sustained by a renewed sense of our species, shall we be able to round this dangerous corner?”Footnote ⁸⁹

Several pages later, Teilhard offers his succinct combination of eugenics and postmillennialist theological eschatology in a vision of the future “biological success of Man on Earth”:

Teilhard continues to engage with eugenic questions and ideas in many essays written over the next several years, sometimes obliquely, such as in a published essay from 1949 when he lamented that people “debate endlessly” on ideas of “peace, democracy, the rights of man, the conditions of racial and individual eugenics, the value and morality of scientific research pushed to the uttermost limit.” But “what good does it do to discuss the ripples on the surface,” he concluded, “while the undertow is still uncontrolled?”Footnote ⁹¹

Sometimes he engages with explicit instructions, as in a different unpublished essay from the same year, when he begins to describe the “best arrangement with a view to a maximum hominization of the noosphere.” The first priority, he writes, must be to address “a fundamental concern to ensure (by correct nutrition, by education, and by selection) an ever more advanced eugenics of the human zoological type on the surface of the earth.”Footnote ⁹² And sometimes he comes off sounding like Francis Galton, such as when he calls for racial and individual eugenic practices at the end of “The Convergence of the Universe” from 1951:

It is clear, however, that unlike Francis Galton, Teilhard never quite grasped how the practical aspect of eugenics might happen smoothly; later that year, this “urgent need” leads him to propose a small group of scientific men in order to “lay the foundations of a technics (both biophysical and psychological) of ultra-evolution from a two-fold point of view”:

This continued impulse to further study scientific uses for eugenics in 1951 was echoed in a letter to Pierre Leroy that year, in which he writes:

Two years later he returns to the perceived population problem to which he gave so much energy in 1948 and expands upon the ideas of traveling to the stars. He still believes very much that humans are headed for “asphyxiation which threatens us” and for which there are only two perceived remedies: “either a drastic restriction of reproduction, or … a mass migration of human beings to some uninhabited star.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Instead, we must look for release “not in a eugenic reduction nor in an extra-terrestrial expansion of the human mass, but rather in what one might call ‘an escape into time, through what lies ahead.’”Footnote ⁹⁷ It is unclear exactly what he means, but it seems clear that he thinks a large-scale forced reduction of people (e.g., Nazi practices) is not a great idea, and it would be better for humanity to align their psychic energies and thus relieve the tension by reducing themselves naturally, in full harmony. It is not much of a capitulation, but it stands as the only time Teilhard mentions eugenics as something he does not want to happen.

Teilhard’s final explicit mention of eugenics comes six months later, in a letter written in May of 1953.Footnote ⁹⁸ Teilhard is visibly frustrated and decides to vent his frustrations about people disbelieving him on the matter of eugenics, especially other theologians and Vatican personnel:

After venting, Teilhard becomes surprised at his own level of candor and blames it on the state of the world and the fact that “it’s Sunday and the morning is long”:

It is the last word we receive on eugenics from Teilhard, betraying a combination of commitment to a racialized eugenics, frustration at his deniers, and resignation to a world that refuses, as it has so many times, to heed his advice. Teilhard died less than two years later, on April 10, 1955. The Phenomenon of Man was published in 1959.

Teilhardian Scholarship on Racism and Eugenics

Among contemporary Teilhard scholarship, I find four approaches worth noting with regard to Teilhard’s racist and eugenic comments. First, there is the active engagement with Teilhard’s eugenic and racist statements, such as is exemplified in this article and in my previous work. The few substantial engagements with my work thus far have been discussed above. Beyond my own work, I was only able to identify two others who actively engaged with this aspect of Teilhard. John Cowburn mentions Teilhard’s connection to eugenics in a brief section in a concise biography from 2013.Footnote ¹⁰¹ After reviewing some of Teilhard’s eugenic statements, Cowburn concludes that “we ought not to put him among the main promoters of eugenics but it must be admitted that he was in favour of it.”Footnote ¹⁰² Second and more substantially, Amy Limpitlaw substantially engages both the racist and eugenic statements in her unpublished 2000 dissertation. Limpitlaw discusses both Teilhard’s racism as well as eugenics, placing both in tension with his overall vision for human unity.

Limpitlaw argues that these statements must be understood, though not excused, through his theology of suffering and human unity because “a hierarchical social order in which the sufferings of those at the bottom is necessary for the sake of the overall good was considered by Teilhard to be a perfectly valid state of affairs.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Furthermore, “rather than encouraging action to redress such inequalities and bring those who suffer forward to receive a fuller share of life, Teilhard’s organic vision instead suggests that they should simply accept the necessity of their sacrifice, like good soldiers who willingly give up their own lives for the sake of the battalion’s success.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

At this point, however, Limpitlaw argues that these parts of Teilhard’s theology must be seen as secondary to “his vision of organic unity … which does not threaten personal being, but instead enhances and completes it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By the time she has completed this argument twenty pages later, Teilhard’s racism and eugenics are nowhere to be seen, subsumed within a broader vision for human unity and human growth toward the divine, Christ-Omega, a blending of physical and spiritual evolution.

Limpitlaw borrows this act of folding Teilhard’s account of necessary suffering for evolutionary and spiritual growth explicitly from Philip Hefner’s 1970 The Promise of Teilhard. Hefner does not deal directly with Teilhard’s racism or eugenics, but he does lament Teilhard’s subversion of human suffering for the sake of a divine unity and argues that this maneuver “has in fact been used in the past by some religious groups as a reason to withdraw from active concern for changing the world, as a reason for retreating into contemplation and asceticism that are far removed from the principles of actability and activance.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ One can see a more contemporary version of this approach to Teilhard and suffering in other contemporary scholars such as John Haught, who argues that Teilhard’s evolutionary and emergent vision of suffering offers a welcome counterpoint to theodicies of expiation or antecedent perfection, presenting an emergent vision where all suffering gains meaning “on the cosmic journey into an uncertain future that will ultimately be taken up into the eternal love of God.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Haught’s vision of suffering as redemptive through emergent perfection is perhaps the best version of Teilhard’s own vision, and yet the lack of mention of either Teilhard’s affinity for eugenic measures or his discussions of the potential eradication of inferior human races leaves sizeable gaps in its applicability beyond a personal theology of suffering. How can Teilhard be trusted to proclaim a theology of suffering on behalf of all humans?

A second and much older approach to Teilhard and racism is to accept and agree with his discussion of races or eugenics, casting it as an important part of his theological vision. This was the approach of some of Teilhard’s first biographers, Claude Cuénot and Robert Speaight, and the famous biologist and eugenicist (and close friend of Teilhard), Julian Huxley. Cuénot defends Teilhard on race, noting that “totalization … necessarily entails a particular role for every race, for the various races are not equal, but complementary.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ He continues, noting Teilhard’s arguments against hateful racism while defending his scientific racism as enlightened:

Speaight similarly argues on Teilhard’s behalf:

Despite defending Teilhard strenuously in his racial categories of evolution, neither Cuénot nor Speaight makes mention of Teilhard’s discussion of eugenics. Given the closeness of their own time to the Holocaust and the Nazi eugenics movement, perhaps they felt this affinity should not be touched.

One can liken Cuénot’s and Speaight’s approach to that of Julian Huxley, the famous biologist, eugenicist, and good friend of Teilhard, who wrote introductions to the first English printing of The Phenomenon of Man in 1959 and the 1962 Letters from a Traveller collection.Footnote ¹¹³ Huxley himself carries a complicated legacy of being antifascist and yet strongly in support of scientific colonialist racism and eugenics, including forced sterilization, well into the 1960s.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Teilhard praises Huxley and his works multiple times in his letters, and talks of dinners and conversations with him, especially with regard to Huxley encouraging him to write UNESCO to reverse their position on races.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In a defining moment, Teilhard mocks a reviewer of Huxley’s eugenics:

In turn, Huxley heaps many praises on Teilhard both as man and scholar, referring to a “firm friendship” between them in his introduction to Letters.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In Huxley’s 1964 book, Essays of a Humanist, he waxes eloquently about Teilhard’s vision for the future, including his eugenic ideas, lamenting only that Teilhard “paid insufficient attention to genetics” in The Phenomenon of Man, before noting that “in his Institute for Human Studies he envisaged a section of Eugenics.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Huxley saw a clear alignment between his own vision for humanity and Teilhard’s spiritual vision, fueled as they both were by a nascent type of scientific humanism as well as by a similar affinity for eugenics and scientific racism. While Speaight’s and Huxley’s approaches may have been popular in the 1960s and 1970s, I know of no contemporary Teilhard scholar who follows their approaches in defense of Teilhard’s scientific racism and eugenics.

A third approach to Teilhard and racism is to cast him as an antiracist hero, citing only his statement against hateful racism and positioning him as a defender of a unified world. David Grumett takes this approach in Teilhard de Chardin: Theology, Humanity, and Cosmos from 2005, arguing that “Teilhard is especially critical of the inclusion and exclusion of persons from political community on grounds of race.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ He continues for several pages, analyzing the ways in which Teilhard approaches Marx and how Gustavo Gutiérrez discusses Teilhard’s politics. Grumett fails to take into account Teilhard’s own colonialist racism or penchant for eugenics, both of which should weigh heavily on any discussion of Teilhard’s political motivations and usefulness in discussions of racism today. Susan Kassman Sack also approaches Teilhard this way in her 2019 America’s Teilhard, in which she weaves a compelling narrative of a progressive, antiracist movement from the 1950s to the late 1960s, and the reception of Teilhard’s ideas during that time.Footnote ¹²⁰ Sack considers the many tensions in the United States during this time and analyzes the breath of fresh air that Teilhard’s approach brought into many challenging conversations. Sack’s Teilhard, however, is only progressive, and his approach to eugenics is nowhere to be found, despite the fact that she discusses Huxley’s significant role in Teilhard’s fame.Footnote ¹²¹ As Sack’s account makes clear, this approach to Teilhard is not new, although Sack’s and Grumett’s erasure of his scientific racism and eugenics is new given Cuénot, Speaight, and Huxley all cited Teilhard’s quotes against hateful racism while simultaneously supporting his scientific racism and, in Huxley’s case, his eugenics.

The fourth and final approach, and by far the most popular today, is to avoid discussion of Teilhard’s racism and eugenics entirely, even in books that attempt to capture Teilhard’s entire vision. Examples of this can be seen in Ursula King’s Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin (1998/2015), Ilia Delio’s Christ in Evolution (2008), and the two recent edited volumes Teilhard in the 21st Century (2003) and Rediscovering Teilhard’s Fire (2010).Footnote ¹²² I also found this approach present in a 2023 interaction with a Teilhard scholar in the pages of America Magazine. After Juan V. Fernández de la Gala wrote a moving piece on Teilhard without mentioning his complicated legacy, I wrote a letter that was published, arguing that, at the least, this legacy must be mentioned. The author responded with arguments about a “respectful” and “bloodless” eugenics, echoing Haught’s arguments about speculation, and mentioning Teilhard’s disabled sister. He concludes with the following statement: “I have not found evidence at all of any Teilhardian support of biological eugenics, supremacist ideas or racial discrimination.”Footnote ¹²³

This fourth approach can even be found in transhumanist discussions, where eugenic content is otherwise frequently debated. A recent edited volume on Christian transhumanism, for example, contains more than 150 unique mentions of Teilhard, an entire chapter devoted to Teilhard, and several separate discussions of eugenics, but none of the authors mentions either Teilhard’s own discussions of eugenics or how his racist beliefs might affect this eugenic vision or the idea of transhumanism itself.Footnote ¹²⁴