They were intellectuals, artists, writers, activists—the feminists of their day. He was a priest and a scientist. A century ago, their paths crossed. By the time they parted, he had given birth to a new vision of the earth.

Would that vision have come had those paths not crossed? Late in his life Teilhard de Chardin said only that the warmth and charm of women had been "absorbed, drop by drop, into the life-blood of my most cherished ideas... I have experienced no form of self-development without some feminine eye turned on me, some feminine influence at work."

How that influence came to Teilhard, and how it was absorbed, is the subject of the seven portraits in this book. Each is illustrated with images from Teilhard: Visionary Scientist and a variety of Creative Commons sources. Links in the eBook take you to letters open to the very page from which a quotation comes.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Spark
2. Present at the Creation
3. Evenings on the Balcony
4. Atheist and Communist
5. Wild Birds
6. There at the End
7. Out of the Darkness

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Excerpt

From Chapter 5

Wild Birds

"One day, as I was going to the French hospital in Legations Road, I saw to my surprise a couple coming toward me—a man and a woman walking side by side in silent thought. It was Teilhard and an American lady whom he had not mentioned to me. She was about the same age as he, a striking figure, though quiet in her bearing and dignified in the simplicity of her dress."

Pierre Leroy, a close Jesuit friend and housemate of Teilhard's, knew nothing of what lay between him and that woman when he met them on the streets of Beijing in 1938. Nor, for nearly forty years after Teilhard's death, did any of his biographers.

They knew the woman's name, Lucile Swan. They knew she was an accomplished artist, a sculptor in fact. They knew the two spent much of their time in Beijing together. But they did not know the pair until 1993, when their correspondence was published.

Lucile had saved both sides of it, not only Teilhard's letters but copies of many of her own. Some she destroyed before her death. The rest lifted a veil that other women had kept in place.

What lay behind that veil was a drama of love and hurt that explored a single question. All his life Teilhard wanted to spiritualize the love that existed between a man and a woman. Faithful priest that he was, that meant keeping the flesh out of it. But why—even in harmony with his vision—could not spiritualizing mean keeping the flesh in? This Lucile could not understand.

Early in their relationship Teilhard wrote:

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