“A Christ without historical personification would not be capable (either in fact or reason) of emerging from metaphysical abstractions or hypotheses.  The success of the Christ of Christianity is due to the association of his birth (which gives him the value of a fact or a concrete element in the world) and his resurrection (which lets us grant him superhuman and, as it were, cosmic attributes). . . Christ must be endowed with certain physical properties — theandric as theology puts it — radically different from those of a simple prophet — who is a vehicle of truth without being in the least a center which organizes the universe.  Christ must always be far greater than our greatest conceptions of the world, but for two or three centuries we have allowed him to appear hardly equal to them, or even smaller.  That is why Christianity is so anemic at the present moment.” (emphasis added).

— Letter to Pierre Lamare, January 1, 1930 (quoted in Robert Speaight, “The Life of Teilhard de Chardin“)