TEILHARD DE CHARDIN (SJ)- The man and his meaning - by Henri de Lubac SJ 1965

The material is taken fom the booklet that "de Lubac" wrote in 1965 and the section taken from it is called "The divine presence". Even the preceding note is of importance!  
[posted because of the interest shown by Robert Shaffer]     [emphasis is mine. GCS]

26 It was with this conviction that in 1940, writing to Pere Schurmans, Vicar-general of the Society of Jesus, Teilhard expressed his desire to engage wholeheartedly in "The battle for a personal God." We should read again the final sentence of his Reflexions sur le Progres, written at Peking on 30 March 1941. It brings out the continuity of his plan, and the strength of the conviction that inspired it. "Ultimately we must seek the generative principle of our unification not simply in the contemplation of one and the same Truth, nor simply in the desire aroused by Something, but in the attraction, common to all, exercised by one and the same Somebody." In the first essay he wrote, La Vie Cosmique, he had said, our term is "a living, loving Being, in whom our consciousnesses, when once they are lost in him, are finally enabled to attain their fullest degree of accentuation and illumination, right up to the extreme potentialities of their personality." 21

21 "Pascal indeed said that the Jesuits tried to combine God and the world but he never foresaw that a Jesuit would try to merge the world in God." That choice remark is quoted from M. Andre Therive, Ecrits de Paris (1964), p. 100. According to one writer, Teilhard argued for "a cosmic God, and therefore de-personalized" (the last two words in bold type); according to another, "Teilhard's teaching . . . divinizes sacred Matter . what, then, remains of a personal God?" See also Mgr Andre Combes, Teilhardogenese? (Ephemerides Carmeliticae, 14, 1963, P. 180): "But would not Pere Teilhard, maybe, divinize this very earth itself, and does that not explain why, as he says, `its enchantments are powerless to do him harm'?" Such, we are asked to believe, is the "obvious meaning" of the Milieu Divin.

27 4 The Divine Presence

PERE Teilhard was far from divinizing the Cosmos, the world known to us by experience, "this very earth," nor did he in any way bury the Divinity in it, or dilute the Divinity with it, as some critics have persisted in accusing him. Such accusations have been based on occasional expressions that have been misunderstood, and are made in spite of very many passages, written at all periods of his life, in the most explicit terms, passages, too, that are the most central and integral to his thought. In fact, Teilhard protests against those who endow the Universe with "divine attributes." In his view, on the contrary, "far from pointing to the discovery of a new God, Science will only be able to show us the Matter which is the sheath of Divinity"; once again in our own day Nature is revealed to us (as it was to St Augustine) not as divine and to be adored, but as humble and suppliant.[??? GCS] He rejects "a `naturalist' cult of the world" and recognizes a "love of the earth" as legitimate only when it is based on

God-the-Creator.¹ The whole of creation is seen by him as answering to the attraction of the Creator, with whom there can be no final rejoining except through a sort of inversion, of turning back, of excentration.² In apologetics his aim is to win the admission that, "In the final reckoning, above Man's rediscovered grandeur, above the newly discovered grandeur of Humanity, there reappears - not doing violence to but preserving the integrity of Science - in our universe seen through the most modern eyes, the face of God." ³ And the progress of Teilhard's dialectic, in its final stage, consists in the passage from the "Noosphere" to the "Theosphere," so that man can adore and love God "not only with his whole body and with his whole soul, but with the whole universe." ⁴ As he wrote in one of his first essays, he seeks to direct "the whole life-sap of the world into an effort towards the divine Trinity." 5

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," ⁸ [we now indicate as pan-en-theism GCS]

1 Les fondements et le fond de l'idde d'Evolution (1926); Euvres, 111, p. 76. The Making of a Mind, pp. 62, 235-6. On the "unique grandeur of God" see Letters from a Traveller, p. 83.

2 La Messe sur le Monde (Hymne de l'Univers, pp. 19 and 30); cf. p. 30: "The task of the world consists not in engendering within itself some supreme Reality, but in consummating itself through union with a pre-existing Being."

3 La Place de lHomme dans l'Univers (1942); Euvres, III, p. 324.

4 L'Energie humaine (1937), conclusion; Euvres, VI, pp. 194-8. For a fuller treatment of Teilhard's concept of the cosmos, see the second essay in this volume.

5 La Conquete du Monde et le Regne de Dieu, ch. 3: "Who then will finally be the ideal Christian, the Christian at once new and old, who will solve in his soul the problem of the vital equilibrium by directing all the life-sap, etc.?"

6 Cf. Mgr. Lucien Cerfaux, Le Chretien dans la Theologie paulinienne (1962), p. 212, on i Cor. 15. 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 Haulotte, S.J., L'Esprit de Yahwe Bans l'Ancien Testament (in the symposium L'Homme devant Dieu, 1964, I, p. 28) on Acts 18. 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." Cf. Jacques Dupont, Gnosis (1949), pp. 431-5, Pierre Benoit, Exegese et Theologie (1961), H, pp. 138-53.

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." ⁸ 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.⁹ 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." 10 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." 11 He sought, too, to do more than reject or refute pantheism: by establishing the "differentiating and communicating action of love," ¹² he neutralized its temptation.13 

7 Le Milieu Divin, p. 116, etc. In L'Element universe! (1919) the "Christian solution" is openly contrasted with the "pantheist solution."

8 L'Energie humaine (1937); Euvres, VI, pp. 187-8.

9The Making of a Mind, p. 98.

10 Forma Christi (1918).

11 Le Milieu Divin, pp. 129-30.

12 The Phenomenon of Man, p. 309, etc. In La Vie Cosmique (1916) we already find "the cosmic temptation" (p. 3), "the temptation of pagan, naturalist pantheism" (p. 19), etc.

13 Cf. La Pensee religieuse, pp. 219-27. 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 Matiire, 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." Cf. 11 July 1904, writing to J. Wehrle: "The problem of the simultaneity, and of their relation in him (= in Christ), of human knowledge and divine science is linked with the problem, is an aspect of, is the key to the problem, of the co-existence of the infinite Creator and the finite created world" (in Rene Marle, Au ceur de la crise moderniste, 1960, p. 235). On Blondel's "panchristism" see his letter to Pere Valensin, 5 Dec. 1919, with the note (Archives de Philosophie, 1961, pp. 127-33).

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. [?? GCS] 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," 14 so the divine transcendence is too often conceived, or rather imagined as itself, too, being purely exteriorized. As Pere Abel Jeanniere has said,¹⁵ "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

14 Cf. Henri de Lubac, Catholicisme (1938), p. 266.

15 Approches christologiques, in Essais sur Teilhard de Chardin (Recherches et Debats, Oct. 1962, p. 93).

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.' " ¹⁶ (Deus non creavit, et abiit St Augustine).

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." ¹⁷ 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." ¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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." ²⁰

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

16 Mgr Bruno de Solages, Initiation metaphysique (1962), p.253, quoting Acts 17, 28 (St Paul's speech to the Areopagus).

17 Le Pretre (1918).

18 The Making of a Mind, p. 300.

19 St. Teresa, Interior Castle, 5, Ch. I, Autobiography, Ch. 18. ²⁰ Summa Theologica, I, q. 8, art. 1: "Oportet quod Deus sit in omnibus rebus, et intime"; III, q. 6, art. 1, ad primum.

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 ipse, 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 21

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,²² 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

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

22 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.)

consistent Catholicism." ²³ Their unconscious disciples might well bear that in mind.

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." ²⁴ His own words, indeed, are better and more accurate, "The centre of centres," and, again, "Centrum super centra." ²⁵ 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 ²⁶ 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." ²⁷ 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"; 28 it is impossible, therefore, to see in this "supreme consciousness" a "higher pole of synthesis" without at the

23 Charles Renouvier, De 1'idEe de Dieu (L'annge philosophique, 1897, pp. 3-15); Philosophie analytique de Phistoire, vol. 3 passim; Histoire et solution des problemes metaphysiques, p. 166; Correspondance avec Charles Secretan, p. 11. Cf. Marcel Wry, La critique du Christianisme chez Renouvier (1952), I, pp. 308, 361, 399; II, pp. 218, 226-8, 380, 405.

24 The Living Flame, I, 3.

25 La Centrologie (1944), no. 26, (Euvres, VII, p. 120.

26 La Vie Cosmique, p. 57; "God is everywhere, 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.

27 "Et tunic videbam quod omnis creatura erat plena Ipso." Similar passages will be found in Henri de Lubac, Sur les chemins de Dieu (1956), particularly in ch. IV.

28 L'Energie humaine (1937); tEuvres, VI, p. 183.

same time asserting its "omnipresence" and "omni-action." 29 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." 30 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 overshadowed. "The majesty of the Universe" does not obscure for him "the primacy of God." ³¹ 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." ³² 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

29 L'Atomisme de 1'Esprit (1941) ; iEuvres, VII, p. 61. Cf. Robert Bellarmine, De ascensione 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).

30Trois histoires comme Benson, La Custode (14 Oct. 1916), etc.

31 _g. Esquisse dune dialectique de I'Esprit. (1946); tEuvres, VII, p. 158.

32 Quelques rEflexions sur la conversion du monde (1936), p. 2. L'Energie humaine (1937); ". . . above creation . . ." (VI, p. 196). In 1952, a San Francisco newspaper printed a report from a French newsagency 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 Andr6 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."

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." 33

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." ³⁴ "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." 35

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": ³⁶ 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.37

33 L'Energie humaine (1937); CEuvres, VI, pp. 196-7.

34 Peking, 20 Oct. 1945.

35 "Le Sens de l'athdisme moderne (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."

36 M.-D. Chenu, O.P., La Foi daps 1'intelligence (1964), p.288).

37 Some hasty readers have referred to this as "Hymn to the Universe," a mistake that points to a serious misunderstanding of Teilhard' thought. I have also seen it called "Hymns to the Universe." A similar mis-reading is referred to later (pp. 95, 177).