Teilhard de Chardin - Work of perfecting our souls contributes to redemption of the world

The masters of the spiritual life incessantly repeat that God wants only souls. To give those words their true value, we must not forget that the human soul, however independently created our philosophy represents it as being, is inseparable, in its birth and in its growth, from the universe into which it is born. In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way. But this summing-up, this welding, are not given to us ready-made and complete with the first awakening of consciousness. It is we who, through our own activity, must industriously assemble the widely scattered elements . . .

Thus every man, in the course of his life, must not only show himself obedient and docile. By his fidelity he must build—starting with the most natural territory of his own self—a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world. For in presenting the christian [sic] doctrine of salvation, it must not be forgotten that the world, taken as a whole, that is to say in so far as it consists in a hierarchy of souls—which appear only successively, develop only collectively and will be completed only in union—the world, too, undergoes a sort of vast 'ontogenesis' (a vast becoming what it is) in which the development of each soul, assisted by the perceptible realities on which it depends, is but a diminished harmonic. Beneath our efforts to put spiritual form into our own lives, the world slowly accumulates, starting with the whole of matter, that which will make of it the Heavenly Jerusalem or the New Earth.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1957) p. 60-61

Teilhard de Chardin - Natural faculties transformed to adore God in Heaven

We hardly know in what proportions and under what guise our natural faculties will pass over into the final act of the vision of God. But it can hardly be doubted that, with God's help, it is here below that we give ourselves the eyes and the heart which a final transfiguration will make the organs of a power of adoration, and of a capacity for beatification, particular to each individual man and woman among us.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1957) p. 60

De Lubac - Teilhard and the divine presence (3)

Pere Teilhard might, again, have said with St John of the Cross, "the centre proper to each of us, the centre of the soul, is God".* His own words, indeed, are better and more accurate, "The centre of centres", and, again, "Centrum super centra". Such was for him, "at the heart of the world, the heart of a God". No doubt he was more familiar with The Book of St Angela of Foligno, which he had read before 1916, since he quotes it freely in La Vie Cosmique and refers to it again in the Milieu mystique. He was later to quote it again in the Milieu Divin, probably after re-reading it in the translation his friend Pere Paul Doncoeur† brought out in 1926. "I saw", says St Angela, "that every creature was filled with him"; and again, "I see him who is being, and I see how he is the being of all creatures." He translated this classic doctrine into his own words when he spoke of the "transparency of the universe", to the eye of faith—which is for him the "milieu divin". He placed it, of course, in its proper perspective, too, when he explained that it is impossible to set God "as a focus at the summit of the Universe without, in doing so, simultaneously impregnating with his presence even the most insignificant evolutionary movement "; it is impossible, therefore, to see in this "supreme consciousness" a "higher pole of synthesis" without at the same time asserting its "omnipresence" and "omni-action".‡ This means that the immanence of God is seen as deriving from his transcendence, and is thus the exact contrary of immanentism. 

Elsewhere Teilhard adds, "God the eternal being in himself, is everywhere, we might say, in process of formation for us". Here, every word should be weighed. One should not concentrate only on the second half of the sentence, and, above all, the words "for us" should not be overlooked. It will be noted, too, that, in the correlative assertion of a dynamic immanence, the idea of divine transcendence is in no way over-shadowed. "The majesty of the Universe" does not obscure for him "the primacy of God." While Pere Teilhard, in the hope of rousing the Christian of today from a lethargy he believes hostile to the spread and even the maintenance of his faith, urges him to "discern, below God, the values of the world, at the same time he is careful to urge the humanist of today to "discern, above the world, the place held by a God ".§ And it is with the same care to maintain the correct relation between immanence and transcendence that he speaks of Christ: "The risen Christ of the Gospel can never hold, in the consciousness of the faithful, his primacy over the created world that, by definition, he is to consummate, except by incorporating in himself the evolution that some people seek to oppose to him."

Here his teaching echoes his prayer: "Lord, grant that I may see, that I may see You, that I may see and feel You present in all things and animating all things." "If so many souls have been touched by his message", writes Jean Lacroix, "it is perhaps primarily because he knew how again to make of the universe a Temple."||

If man, as Teilhard understands him, is to fulfil his destiny, he must add the voice of his consciousness and, throughout all his activity, of his freely given homage, to the hymn that rises up to God from all creation. That is why we may speak of "Pere Teilhard's cosmic liturgy": and why, too, The Hymn of the Universe was a happy choice of title for a miscellany of prayers and meditations selected from his writings.¶

* The Living Flame, I, 3. 

† La Vie Cosmique, p. 57; "God is everywhere, God is everywhere (St Angela of Foligno)." Le Milieu Divin, p. 116; "The Creator and, more specifically, the Redeemer have steeped themselves in all things and penetrated all things to such a degree that, as St Angela of Foligno said, 'The world is full of God'." Cf. The Making of a Mind, p. 130. 

‡ L'Atomisme de l'Esprit (1941); Oeuvres, VII, p. 61. Cf. Robert Bellarmine, De ascensions mentis in Deum, gradus 2: "Were another world to be created, God would fill that, too; and if there were to be more worlds, or even an infinite number of worlds, God would fill them all. . . . with his omnipotence and wisdom, he is present everywhere" (Montpellier ed. 1823, pp. 40-1). 

§ Quelques reflexions sur la conversion du monde (1936), p.2. L'Energie humaine (1937); "... above creation ..." (VI, p. 10). In 1952, a San Francisco newspaper printed a report from a French newsagency [sic] to the effect that "the God of Pere Teilhard was becoming a God immanent in the evolution of the world". On 3 Aug., Teilhard wrote from New York to Pere Andre Ravier, "What annoys me in this business is the offhanded way it makes me jettison a divine 'transcendence' that I have, on the contrary, spent all my life in defending—though seeking at the same time, it is true (like everyone, but by using the new properties of a universe in process of cosmogenesis) to reconcile it with an immanence which everyone agrees must be given a progressively more important and more explicit place in our philosophy and religion." 

|| Le Sens de l'atheisme modern (1958), p. 28. Cf. letter of 7 Aug. 1923: "With himself, Man brings back to God the lower beings of the world. Sin consists in falling back among them;—virtue in carrying them along with him." 

¶ Some hasty readers have referred to this as "Hymn to the Universe", a mistake that points to a serious misunderstanding of Teilhard's thought. I have also seen it called "Hymns to the Universe". A similar mis-reading is referred to later (pp. 95,188). 

Henri de Lubac - Teilhard: the man and his meaning (1965), p. 26-28  

The penultimate paragraph and its accompanying footnote remind of something Bishop Barron has said about God's intention that humanity have a priestly role in offering the natural world to Him as sacrifice. I'll try to find the video where he talked abut that and reference it here.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

De Lubac - Teilhard and the divine presence (2)

Pere Teilhard de Chardin lived, with great intensity, this prime truth, constantly recalled in Scripture and Christian tradition, by the Fathers of the Church and the great scholastic theologians, no less than by the mystics. With all these, he held that God is both "further than everything and deeper than everything". His master St Ignatius Loyola, in particular, had taught him to "contemplate God as existing in every one of his creatures. He 'venerated an omni-presence', resting on and losing itself in the peace a deep intimate union." St Teresa would have been delighted to meet him on her road, to save her from the "half-baked doctors, always so ready to take exception" who would not leave her in peace, as she entered into her mystical life, to believe that God is present in all beings; Teilhard could have set her mind at rest by assuring her that God's intimate presence is not an impossibility but a solid fact. He could have told her, in the words of St Thomas Aquinas, that "God must be present in all things, and that in an intimate manner". Here, again, is what a Thomist theologian has to say, whose only concern is to state the most fully traditional teaching: 

Many of the objections and difficulties we meet in connection with our relationship to God, arise from our considering God as a stranger, as someone other than ourselves. This, to put it plainly, is simply untrue. Our habitual concepts tell us only about personalities exterior to and therefore foreign or strange to our own. When we are concerned with God, we must realize that we are concerned with a being who is certainly distinct from us, but who is at the same time the reason for our own being. ... If I take myself, suppressing all my imperfections and magnifying to infinity my own poor perfections, even those most personal and peculiar to myself, the most incommunicable, then I have God. That is why theologians can say, "God is not another, he is virtually and eminently myself, he is an infinite myself, pure act." Deus est virtualiter ego ipso, as John of St Thomas puts it. It is thus that, while completely rejecting pantheism, we retain anything legitimate that may be contained in its tendencies."*

If this is indeed bold doctrine, which of the two writers expresses it the more boldly? However, St Thomas, too, was already accused of pantheism,† and for this same reason. Some contemporary critics of Teilhard's thought accuse him of a "deception", on the ground that beneath his repeated affirmations of the personality of God there lies an "unacknowledged pantheism"; without realizing it, they are continuing to bring forward last century's accusation against scholasticism in general and St Thomas in particular of an "implicit pantheism", the reason behind which was an inability to envisage any true personal monotheism except in the position of a God who is "cut off from the world". The only difference is that the earlier critics did not put forward their objection in the name of orthodox Catholicism; they maintained, on the contrary, that such a "cosmic pantheism", the fruit of all "metaphysical theology", was "essential to consistent Catholicism".‡ Their unconscious disciples might well bear that in mind. 

* Pierre-Thomas Dehau, O.P., Divine intimite et Oraison, in La Vie Spirituelle, May 1942, pp. 412-13. Sec also J. J. Surin, Guide Spirituelle (ed. M. de Certeau, 1963), pp. 138-9. 

† The half-truth that explains, though it does not justify, this accusation has been pointed out by M. Etienne Gilson (La Philosophie au moyen age, 1922, II, p. 144; 1925 and 1930, p. 302): "In Thomism itself there is a sort of virtual pantheism that a mere relaxation of strict doctrine would allow to come out into the open but that would thence cease to be Thomism. On the other hand in Eckhart, we find, if not a deliberate, avowed, pantheism, at any rate what is in fact, though disavowed and denied, pantheism". (In the 1944 edition, pp. 698-9, this view is less forcibly expressed). 

‡ Charles Renouvier, De l'idee de Dieu (L'annee philosophique, 1897, pp. 3-15); Philosophie analytique de l'histoire, vol. 3 passim; Histoire et solution des problemes metaphysiqus, p. 166; Correspondance avec Charles Secretan, p. 11. Cf. Marcel Mery, La critique du Christianisme chez Renouvier (1952), I, pp. 308, 361, 399; II, pp. 218, 226-8, 380, 405. 

Henri de Lubac - Teilhard: the man and his meaning (1965), p. 24-26 

I had no idea that there was an historical Catholic/Protestant controversy connected to this, although it makes sense if the Incarnation is at the foundation of the Catholic (in this this case Thomistic) position. I included that last convoluted footnote so I could follow up and see if I can find any of the documents related to that discussion.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

De Lubac - Teilhard and the divine presence (1)

We know that in his formulation of the Christian faith Pere Teilhard, seeking for greater fidelity to the thought, the tactical sense, and the very words of St Paul, would have liked to win acceptance for the expression "Christian pantheism",* as opposed to all the "false pantheisms", whether new or old, Eastern or Western, crude or subtle. Sometimes he risked using the words, explaining them, however, in a way that made any wrong interpretation impossible. Occasionally one feels that it went against the grain to have to refrain from doing so. There are other passages in which he simply contrasts the Christian or the "guest of the divine milieu" with pantheist. In any case, quite apart from the actual terminology, there can be no doubt that of all contemporary thinkers it was Teilhard who was the most outspoken opponent of pantheistic concepts of Godhead. He vigorously rejected every type of "pantheist bliss". In every doctrine, whatever might be said for it in other respects, that describes the "final state" as "a faceless organism, a diffuse humanity,—an Impersonal" he denounced its "betrayal of the Spirit". On one occasion he spoke of the "triumphant joy", retained even in his "worst hours", that he drew from his faith in the transcendence of God. At the same time he held that "we must love the World greatly if we are to feel a passionate desire to leave the World behind"... He knew also that "the false trails of pantheism bear witness to our immense need for some revealing word to come from the mouth of Him who is"... He sought, too, to do more than reject or refute pantheism: by establishing the "differentiating and communicating action of love",† he neutralized its temptation.

What perhaps introduces some confusion into this subject is that too many people in our modern West, even including some who are extremely firm in their faith and heedful of the spiritual life, are apt to forget the divine Presence and the divine Action in all things—even indeed at the natural level. It is here that a superficial cult of the spiritual has done a great deal of damage. Just as many, when they have to consider their final end, can only oscillate "between the concept of an individual survival that leaves beings isolated from one another, and a reflection that absorbs them into the one", so the divine transcendence is too often conceived, or rather imagined as itself, too, being purely exteriorized. As Pere Abel Jeanniere has said, "Among many who are opposed to the thought of Teilhard we find an underlying mental attitude which allows no possibility of distinction except in separation and mutual exteriority." It was of these people that the author of the Milieu Divin was thinking when he said: "Of those who hear me, more than one will shake his head and accuse me of worshipping Nature." In fact, "however absolute the distinction between God and the world (since everything in the world—and the world itself—exists, even at this present moment, only by divine creation), God is present in the world and nothing is more present in it than the God who creates it: for 'it is in him that we live, and move, and have our being'". Deus non creavit, et abiit (St Augustine.) 

* Cf. Mgr. Lucien Cerfaux, Le Chretien dans la Thiologie pauhnienne (1962), p. 212, on 1 Cor. Is. 28: "The ancient Stoic formulas, pantheist in tone, the identity of the one with the whole, God all in all, are Christianized. Personal monotheism asserts itself. ..." Or again, Edgar Haulottc, S. J., L'Lsprit de Yahme dans l'Antsen Testament (in the symposium L'Ilomme ileums Dieu, 1964, I, p. 28) on Acts t 8.24-9: Paul "puts the language of the Bible into words that can be understood by the Epicureans and Stoics to whom he is speaking. ... He relieves 'the whole', 'the one', 'the origin', 'life', 'breath', from the implication they have in Stoic thought with impersonal cosmic forces; instead, he brings these realities into the same circuit, so to speak, as the personal creative force of God." 

† One cannot help seeing here a kinship of thought with Maurice Blondel. In the same year as Pere Teilhard was writing Le Christ dans le Matiere, Blondel was writing to Pere Auguste Valensin: "I can no longer remember very well the arguments you remind me of in connection with the Catholic antidote (through the Eucharist) for the terrible evil of pantheism. I was trying, no doubt, to show the strength of that pernicious doctrine, precisely because of the profound sense it shows of the problem of in some way getting the finite and the infinite to cohere and live together. And it is to escape both a baneful immanentism and a frigid, unintelligible, incommensurable, transcendentalism that one can find (as a Catholic, not spontaneously as a philosopher) an illuminating sweetness in the Verbum Caro, which affirms the distinct absolute reality both of God and of the creature, and their most intimate union" (5 April 1916). Earlier, on 30 Oct. 1915, Blondel wrote: "It is the first and last temptation of all who refuse to receive the word of God."

Henri de Lubac - Teilhard: the man and his meaning (1965), p. 21-23

I'm reading Lubac's book alongside The Divine Milieu to help myself process the harder bits of Teilhard as I go. The very sound of the phrase "Christian pantheism" is shocking, if not actually scandalous, but I find the concept as described by Lubac and Teilhard both uplifting and edifying. The incorporation of the Incarnation into the argument by Blondel in the second footnote is key, I think, since the whole thing must hang on that.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Barron - The Divinization of One’s Passivities (God works through suffering)

As I lay on my back in [the hospital], a phrase kept coming unbidden into my mind: “the divinization of one’s passivities.” This is a line from one of the great spiritual works of the twentieth century, The Divine Milieu by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In that seminal text, Teilhard famously distinguished between the divinization of one’s activities and the divinization of one’s passivities. The former is a noble spiritual move, consisting in the handing over of one’s achievements and accomplishments to the purposes of God. A convinced Jesuit, Teilhard desired to devote all that he did (and he did a lot) ad majorem Dei gloriam (to the greater glory of God).  But this attitude, Teilhard felt, came nowhere near the spiritual power of divinizing one’s passivities. By this he meant the handing over of one’s suffering to God, the surrendering to the Lord of those things that are done to us, those things over which we have no control. We become sick; a loved one dies suddenly; we lose a job; a much-desired position goes to someone else; we are unfairly criticized; we find ourselves, unexpectedly, in the valley of the shadow of death. These experiences lead some people to despair, but the spiritually alert person should see them as a particularly powerful way to come to union with God. A Christian would readily speak here of participating in the cross of Christ. Indeed how strange that the central icon of the Christian faith is not of some great achievement or activity, but rather of something rather horrible being done to a person. The point is that suffering, offered to God, allows the Lord to work his purpose out with unsurpassed power. 

In some ways, Teilhard’s distinction is an echo of St. John of the Cross’s distinction between the “active” and “passive” nights of the soul. For the great Spanish master, the dark night has nothing to do with psychological depression, but rather with a pruning away of attachments that keep one from complete union with God. This pruning can take a conscious and intentional form (the active night) or it can be something endured. In a word, we can rid ourselves of attachments—or God can do it for us. The latter, St. John thinks, is far more powerful and cleansing than the former. 

Bishop Robert Barron, Hospitalland and the Divinization of One's Passivities (blog post May 26, 2015)

The word "passive" is one we try to avoid these days, at least with reference to ourselves. To admit that situations arise where we can simply be acted upon, as opposed to being active (or even better, proactive) is to admit our own limitations in a way that is decidedly anti-modern. But Bishop Barron, citing Teilhard, makes the point here that it is often those very moments of passivity forced upon us by our human condition that God uses to purge us of dross and prepare us to enter the Kingdom.