Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a person of many gifts who made a significant contribution at the interface of faith and reason as a Jesuit priest, mystic, theologian and scientist, and as an exile and a seer far into the future. He made a conscious decision to develop a theology using the language of science that links the cosmic, the human and the spiritual.
Born in France on May 1 1881, he was fascinated from childhood by what was real and seemed indestructible - the rocks around him, later going on to study paleontology and geology. He entered the Society of Jesus after secondary school, and after his novitiate and the usual philosophical and theological studies Teilhard was ordained a priest in 1911.
However, his studies were interrupted by World War I when he was drafted into the French Army as a stretcher-bearer. In between battles he used his time to reflect on science and theology - and on suffering. After the War he went to China to do research where he was involved in the discovery of the fossilized bones of ‘Peking Man’ in the 1920s.
