Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Spirituality of the United Nations

* Article: "Building the Earth": Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Science, and the Spirituality of the United Nations. By Sarah Shortall. Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 85, Number 4, October 2024

URL = https://muse.jhu.edu/article/944587

Description

"Teilhard had recognized, the Secretary-General explained, that "humanity is undergoing a metamorphosis, a transformation toward a planetary society that is united in its roots and more and more diversified in its component parts and individual lives." And this insight made him "the French philosopher who has had the greatest influence on the metaphysical and planetary evolution of the United Nations." Pérez de Cuéllar was by no means alone in his thinking. No less than five Secretaries-General have invoked Teilhard de Chardin as a key influence on their own thought and on the mission of the UN.

Why were so many leaders of this ostensibly secular international organization taken with the work of an idiosyncratic Catholic priest-scientist, and what can his story tell us about the role religion has played in postwar projects of global governance more broadly? As its charter makes clear, the United Nations is a secular institution. But in recent years, historians have begun to probe the crucial contributions that religious actors made to the drafting of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948."