At a glance
- Age
- 73
- Born
- May 1, 1881
- From
- château of Sarcenat
- Lives in
- France
- Nationality
- France
Biography
Readers usually meet him through a line about human striving or the direction of life, and then discover that the man behind it spent his working days digging through rock in China. He was a Jesuit priest and a palaeontologist at once, and he refused to keep the two occupations in separate rooms.
Born on 1 May 1881 at the château of Sarcenat in France, he built a scientific career in field palaeontology, much of it carried out in China. He was among those involved in the discovery of the Peking Man fossils at the Zhoukoudian cave complex near Beijing — a find that mattered to mainstream science regardless of what anyone made of his other writing.
That other writing is what keeps him quoted. He took up the theory of evolution and read it through a lens shaped by the philosopher Henri Bergson and by Christian mysticism, producing a body of work that was part scientific and part religious. He was also described as a teacher and a mystic, and the labels tend to be applied together rather than separately, because his output does not sort neatly into one column or the other.
He died on 10 April 1955.
Born on 1 May 1881 at the château of Sarcenat in France, he built a scientific career in field palaeontology, much of it carried out in China. He was among those involved in the discovery of the Peking Man fossils at the Zhoukoudian cave complex near Beijing — a find that mattered to mainstream science regardless of what anyone made of his other writing.
That other writing is what keeps him quoted. He took up the theory of evolution and read it through a lens shaped by the philosopher Henri Bergson and by Christian mysticism, producing a body of work that was part scientific and part religious. He was also described as a teacher and a mystic, and the labels tend to be applied together rather than separately, because his output does not sort neatly into one column or the other.
He died on 10 April 1955.
