The Divine Milieu, Teilhard de Chardin. Harper Perennial Modern Classics (ISBN: 9780060937256) 2001 (first published in 1957).

Summary: How we grow into godlikeness in our active work and our passive diminishment, toward the uniting of all things in Christ.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit Priest, geologist, and paleontologist, living between 1881 and 1955. He participated in the discovery of the remains Peking Man and wrote dozens of scientific papers, filling eleven volumes collected. He was also a theologian. His best known works were The Divine Milieu and The Phenomenon of Man. He wrote The Divine Milieu in 1926 and 1927 during a trip to China. Church authorities withheld its publication until 1957, two years after his death.

The basic idea behind The Divine Milieu is that all creation is moving toward a cosmic union with God through Christ’s redemptive work (cf. Colossians 1:15-17). This telos addresses a fundamental challenge and tension in Christian spirituality. For many, holiness involves detachment from the world, viewing secular work of no lasting value. For a scientist-priest like de Chardin, this was untenable.

Rather, he argued that both our activities and our passivities may participate in our “divinisation,” our growth in holiness and union with God in Christ, along with all creation. Part One of the book contends that all our active endeavors co-operate to complete the world in Christ. He writes:

“God, in all that is most living and incarnate in him, is not far away from us, altogether apart from the world we see, touch, hear, smell and taste about us. Rather, he awaits us every instant in our action, in the work of the moment. There is a sense in which he is at the tip of my pen, my spade, my brush, my needle – of my heart and my thought.”

Yet, though we value the material world, we may experience detachment from it because it has no value to us in itself but only in God.

The second part of the book explores how we grow toward holy union with God through our passivities–the things we experience in our lives that are not done by us. Examples of these include both the passivities of growth and diminishment. Not only do we grow bodily but in our experiences. Likewise, we diminish through aging, illness, and finally death. As we offer all of these to God, including our death, we grow in our communion with God. De Chardin prays, “Teach me to treat my death as an act of communion..”

The final part of the book addresses the attributes of what de Chardin calls “the divine milieu” He addresses how it arises and how we progress individually and collectively within this. Finally, though, it is Christ who accomplishes all of this:

“In a real sense only one man will be saved: Christ, the head and living summary of humanity. Each one of the elect is called to see God face to face. But his act of vision will be vitally inseparable from the elevating and illuminating action of Christ. In heaven we ourselves shall contemplate God, but, as it were, through the eyes of Christ.”

There are questions about the orthodoxy of his ideas. To some, the idea of cosmic union with God sounded like pantheistic monism, a denial of distinction between God and creation. Yet there is never a sense that I could find of dissolving the Creator-created distinction in this union. One of the most common expressions used by Paul is “in Christ.” In Part Three, he differentiates his own ideas from pantheistic monism.

De Chardin has also been challenged on the evolutionary element in the world’s progress toward God, both by Christians and evolutionary scientists. These ideas are developed more in The Phenomenon of Man where he develops the idea of orthogenesis. This is the progress of the cosmos to union with God, also referred to as the Omega Point. Evolutionary scientists deny a purpose driving evolution. Christians may object both to the idea of evolution and a force working within the world apart from Christ toward the consummation of all things. However, these ideas are not explicit in this book.

Positively, de Chardin articulates a spirituality of all of life. He encompasses our active work in every field of human endeavor. And he recognizes the passive dimension of life. There is no divorce of sacred and secular. Likewise there is no divorce of individual and corporate. Finally, for de Chardin, science and faith are not at war.

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