Teilhard'o de Chardino idėjos ir diskusijos apie jas išeivijoje ir Lietuvoje : monografija

Abstract

This book is part of the research project “The Dissemination of Teilhard de Chardin’s Ideas in the Diaspora and Lithuania,” which was conceived in order to explore the ideas of this French palaeontologist, theologian, and philosopher, who significantly influenced not only the worldview of the intellectuals of the Lithuanian diaspora, but also those within Lithuania itself. Ramūnas Labanauskas has already prepared and published an article introducing readers to the personality and ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. Therefore, this book does not repeat these discussions, but instead immediately analyses the reception of de Chardin’s ideas in the diaspora within the first chapter by considering reports, articles, series of articles, and smaller notes, as well as the three books that specifically discussed interpretations his ideas. In the first part of the chapter, the author, Rūta Marija Vabalaitė, traces the chronology of reception and introduces the main authors and the periodicals that have paid the most attention to this topic. In the second part of the chapter, the author analyses the most controversial aspects of Teilhard de Chardin’s theory, as well as the opinions of authors in exile on these ideas and their attempts to argue for their own interpretations. The chapter concludes with a bibliography of works published in the diaspora that mention or analyse Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas in greater depth, and a list of the archival data used. The second chapter, authored by Ramūnas Labanauskas, analyses the reception of Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas and the few, but significant, evaluations of them by authors in exile that reached Lithuania and met both the traditions of Lithuanian philosophical thinking and the heterogeneous Catholic worldview. Due to the abundance and significance of documents testifying to the reception of these ideas, this book presents a brief analysis of them, and the results of the detailed research carried out will be published in a separate publication. This chapter is divided into four parts. First, a panorama of the worldview of Lithuanian society in the second half of the twentieth century is provided. The second part describes the sources of research on the reception of Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas, discussing chronology and channels of reception. The third and fourth parts analyse this reception separately in Lithuanian Catholic society and professional philosophy. The second chapter, like the first, concludes with a list of the archival documents used and a bibliography of the most important works published by Lithuanian professional philosophers and Catholic clergy that mention or analyse Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas in a broader way. An important part of the book is a translation of Teilhard de Chardin’s own work, Le coeur de la matière, which he himself considers to be the best representation of the totality of his philosophical thought. The author of the translation, Povilas Aleksandravičius, accompanies the very complex, multidimensional and unique concepts and notions of the work with commentaries that help to understand the meaning and significance of the text. This translation allows us to appreciate all of the nuances of the debates on Teilhard de Chardin’s thought, both in the diaspora and in Lithuania, and at the same time expands the boundaries of current Lithuanian cultural discourse.