America's Teilhard: Christ and Hope in the 1960s by Susan Kassman Sack (review)

When French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died in New York City in 1955, the nearly two hundred essays he wrote between 1916 and his death became the property of his long-time secretary and archivist Jeanne Mortier. Since she had already organized an international committee to oversee their publication, Le Phénomène humaine rolled off French presses later that year. Its translation into English (The Phenomenon of Man) appeared in the U.S. in 1959, beginning the availability of Teilhard's long-suppressed work in the country that was his home during his final exile. Twelve more volumes of Teilhard's essays followed, as did volumes of his correspondence with family and friends. In America's Teilhard: Christ and Hope in the 1960s, Susan Kassman Sack tells the story of the American reception of his work during the turbulent 1960s.

A short introduction acquaints the reader with Teilhard and summarizes the Christological core of his thought. The rest of the book unfolds along a timeline between Teilhard's death in 1955 during the post-World-War-II consensus and the 1970s' increasing disillusionment with the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. This timeline is divided into four subintervals: "The Threshold of Change, 1955−1960," "The Early Years, 1961−1964," "The Years of Hope, 1965−1967," and "The Bitter Years, 1968−1970." Sack follows American Catholics through their economic, educational, political, and social ascendancy, the elections and untimely deaths of Pope John XXIII and President John F. Kennedy, their reception of Vatican II, their inspiration by Civil Rights and the counterculture, their disillusionment following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and their rebellion against capitalistic values, the Vietnam conflict, and Humanae Vitae.

The American sense that knowledge of science would liberate humanity created an atmosphere of optimism just as Teilhard's writing was hitting American shores, and Teilhard's affirmation of the secular world and his positive stance toward scientific progress quickly made him popular. Conferences and symposia on his thought sprung up across the country, and the American Teilhard Association was founded. The number of worldwide publications about Teilhard grew steadily until 1968. Then the reception of his work was swept into society's turn away from secularism and mainstream churches and toward New Age religions and mysticism. Because most of his readers had never grasped the Christological grounding of Teilhard's thought, doubt about his optimistic worldview ensued. Publications about Teilhard steadily fell.

Most of the works detailing how Teilhard was initially received were concerned with either Teilhard's context or his thought, and Sack surveys these with skill. After 1970, concern for his thought in context gradually increased, but by the time such projects became commonplace, Teilhard had moved into relative obscurity. As a reception history, Sack's project considers the subjectivity of the first U.S. audience to encounter his work in English. As good reception histories do, it makes the reader aware that what someone writes may well be different from how it is understood. The most substantial contribution of Sack's book is her linking of the missed Christological teleology of Teilhard's thought with his rise and fall in popularity in the U.S. As theologians tack back and forth between historical theology and reception history to fill in the picture of the Church in the modern era, Sack's book makes a valuable contribution to understanding the peculiar place America has in the broader historical and ecclesiological narrative.

Two things weigh down this book. First, there are many errors. Some, like the misspelling of names (Marguerite Teillard-Chambon, Paul Troussard, and Henri Bergson) are irritating; others, like mixing up the names of Popes Pius and Paul, and incorrect years for Teilhard's ordination, the finishing of his doctorate, and the end of the Cold War, diminish its value as a source of accurate historical information. Second, the titles and...