L’ÉTOFFE GÉOGRAPHIQUE IN PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Abstract

Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit French paleontologist and geologist, was not a geographer either for education or profession. Yet he proved to do geography, even though unconsciously. The deepest geographical themes were always present inside him. They were the carpet of all his days and all his thoughts. He presents himself as the founder of a geographic kèrygma. That means he proposes for our world the spiritualization of the psychological and the historical sides. The Earth is formed by physical spheres in perpetual evolution to become nobler and nobler up to the spiritual one, that one of the thought (Noosphere). This one belongs to the man, the greatest terrestrial phenomenon. Teilhard in his travel vertigo observes the environment and the places where the man practices his historical and cultural role. There his future and his destiny are fulfilled. Each description Teilhard left us in his several travel letters highlights his ability to propose geographical syntheses. His compliance with the most recent trends of the discipline, such as perceptive, cultural and emotional geography, is surprising. But he is also close to the great geography of human geography founders, Carl Ritter in particular. That is testifies by him when he focuses on concepts such as evolution in spiritual and teleological sense and the principles of organic totality and spatial coordination.