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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the brilliant and controversial Jesuit scientist-theologian who blazed through the spirituality of the mid-twentieth century, now sometimes seems nearly forgotten, although his evolutionary theology echoed throughout the Second Vatican Council and was recently even evoked in Pope Francis’s Laudato si.’ In this context, Susan Kassman Sack’s book is a welcome exposition of the breadth and depth of Teilhard’s influence in the United States during the heyday of his popularity in the 1960s.

Despite a brief and helpful introductory overview of Teilhard’s “Christological vision,” Sack stays away from extensive discussion of Teilhard’s works themselves, a task undertaken, instead, by the people she chronicles. As such, the book becomes a kind of institutional history of Teilhardism. Much of the first two chapters are devoted to a blow-by-blow account of how Teilhard’s earliest American admirers, notably then-seminarian Robert Francoeur, discovered his work and struggled to get it into print in English and disseminated through reviews and discussions in Catholic magazines. Some of Sack’s stories vividly illustrate the difficulties here: Thomas Merton’s review of The Divine Milieu, written in 1960, was suppressed by his abbot and not published until 1979. Meanwhile, seesawing ecclesiastical politics in both Europe and the United States meant that early commentators like de Lubac and Francoeur had their work first published, then restricted, then published again. The middle of the book engages happier years for Teilhardians, and Sack’s assessment of the nearly 400 publications on Teilhard in 1967 alone (!) plus dozens of symposia, study days, lectures, etc., suggests the extent of his reach. But the enthusiasm did not last, and the last part of the book turns to what Sack terms “the bitter years” of 1968–1970, when she follows standard periodization and sees a coincidence of a decline in Teilhardian interest with a loss of optimism for human unity in society more generally.

Sack’s method shuttles back and forth between contextual chapters on developments in American society and chapters on developments in Teilhardian reception. For her assessments of “what mattered” in the American sixties, she depends heavily on sweeping and rather well-worn histories by Mark Silk, Robert Ellwood, and even Sidney Ahlstrom. This is somewhat unfortunate, since these books were written substantially before a new generation of careful and provocative writing on race and gender in the various sixties “movements” became available, attention to which might have raised different questions about Teilhard’s reception. That said, if the context chapters are extremely broad and primarily focused on the era’s most famous figures, I appreciated the extent to which the “reception” chapters did not, instead bringing to life a series of utterly forgotten academics and teachers who together help us understand the mechanisms through which Teilhard became so influential in the culture at large. Those who wrote on Teilhard in these years, if still a privileged group of clergy and professors, nevertheless provide extensive evidence for American Catholics’ (and others’) excitement about Teilhard’s ideas concerning the nexus of evolution, the next level of consciousness, world peace, and societal transformation. While Sack’s contention throughout that various readers of Teilhard’s misunderstood or ignored the Christocentric nature of his thought will likely be of most interest to theologians, her survey does more than hint at the extent to which Teilhard’s thought shaped the American 1960s well beyond Catholic precincts. Its careful attention to this varied milieu makes it a valuable addition to our understanding of how the “Catholic Sixties” participated in, rather than merely existed alongside, this most American decade of the American century.