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that Men does not claim any direct influence from Teilhard , and that Men’s
general interest in the relation between science and religion developed much
earlier than his initial acquaintance with the French Catholic. 10
Men discusses Teilhard’s work in some detail in Appendix 10 to Origins
of Religion and he also considers his legacy in Bibliological Dictionary. First of all,
we shall consider the principal elements of Teilhard’s system, and then Men’s
critical assessment of it.
Teilhard sets out in The Phenomenon of Man to unite scientific and
spiritual understandings of the world. As far as Teilhard is concerned, ‘both
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fight on different planes and do not meet’. This goal is achieved by
considering the ‘within’ of things: a reference to consciousness, which although
primarily observable in man, is actually an aspect or dimension in the stuff of
the universe. This ‘within’ is co-extensive with the ‘without’, although there is a
degree of interplay between the two modes. The unity of science and
spirituality is to be discovered in ‘the universal hidden beneath the
exceptional’. 12
Progression in time results in a tendency towards greater complexity of
material (without) and more developed consciousness (within). Initially the
particles of the universe grow in complexity, and then at one point in time, life
is formed and the biosphere begins. Life then progresses through evolution, to
form progressively higher forms of consciousness. Humans are the highest
form of consciousness, the first kind able to reflect and assess its position in
the universe. Evolution then continues on a spiritual level (noosphere). ‘By this
individualisation of himself in the depths of himself, the living element, which
heretofore had been spread out and divided over a diffuse circle of perceptions
and activities, was constituted for the first time as a centre in the form of a
point at which all the impressions and experiences knit themselves together
13
and fuse into a unity that is conscious of its own organisation’. From a
material point of view, the genetic difference between humans and the higher
primates is insignificant, but from a spiritual point of view, the capacity of

9 which is not true in the case of Henri Bergson – Shukman/Roberts, p20. (Roberts, Elizabeth and
Shukman, Ann (eds.) Christianity for the Twenty-First Century: The Prophetic Writings of Alexander Men.
[Continuum, New York. 1996.])
10 In Men’s childhood, Boris Vasiliev, ‘took a personal interest in him and encouraged him in his ambition to
find a reconciliation between science and theology’ Shukman/Roberts, p8
11 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man, p53. [HarperCollins. New York. 2008]
12 Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man, p55
13 Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man, p165

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