The Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

First published:Le Milieu divin, 1957 (English translation, 1960)

Edition(s) used:The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life, translated by Bernard Wall. New York: Harper, 1960

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Meditation and contemplation

Core issue(s):Asceticism; attachment and detachment; awakening; church; Communion; the divine; Jesus Christ; psychology; soul; union with God

Overview

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s well-known book Le Phénomène humain (1955; The Phenomenon of Man, 1955) contains the core of his scientific thought. The Divine Milieu is its counterpart on the spiritual level. It is a meditation book for intellectuals and is addressed primarily to those who waver rather than to Christians who are firmly established in their beliefs. However, as the author writes in the preface, there is not much in this book on moral evil and sin. Teilhard de Chardin assumes that he is dealing here with souls who have already turned away from such errors. The subject to be treated in these pages is actual, supernaturalized human beings, seen in the restricted realm of conscious psychology.

Humankind is involved in a collective awakening, Teilhard de Chardin notes in his introduction. This will inevitably have a profound religious influence on humanity. Teilhard de Chardin sets out to consider human beings in the double aspect of their experience: active and passive—that which the person does and that which is undergone.

Part 1, “The Divinization of Our Activities,” begins with a note that what is most divine in God is that “we are nothing apart from him.” All persons are impelled by the will to be and to grow; the particular problem that Christians face is to sanctify their actions. How is one to make important contributions to the world, though, when one is constantly warned by spiritual writers to preserve an attitude of detachment toward the world? There are three responses, traditionally, to this dilemma, according to Teilhard de Chardin. One is to center oneself on specifically religious acts; another is to devote oneself to strictly secular pursuits; finally, and usually, one merely throws up one’s hands at the inability to understand the problem and makes a weak compromise that results in one’s belonging neither wholly to God nor wholly to things.

All three responses are dangerous, Teilhard de Chardin writes, but there is a fourth way to resolve the situation that will provide mutual nourishment for love of God and a healthy love for the world. This will combine a striving for detachment with a striving for development. There are two solutions that can be employed when facing this Christian problem of the divinization of human activity. The first is an incomplete solution and is based on the concept that our actions have no value except in the intentions that motivate them. However, this solution is not fully satisfactory because it does not give hope for the resurrection of our bodies. The more satisfactory solution is found in this: that all work, all striving, cooperates to complete the world in Christ Jesus. Teilhard de Chardin illustrates this point by use of a syllogism. At the heart of the universe, every soul exists for God, but all reality exists for our souls; therefore, all reality exists, through our souls, for God. God’s creation, after all, was not completed long ago; it is a continuing process and we serve to complete it by what we do. The task is no less than bringing Christ to fulfillment.

The divine so permeates our every energy that our action is the most appropriate milieu for embracing it. In action we cleave to God’s creative power; we coincide with it and prolong it. There is a specifically Christian perfection to human endeavor. We cripple our lives if we see work as only an encumbrance. Because of the incarnation of Christ, nothing on this earth is profane for those who see properly. Too many Christians are not conscious enough of the responsibilities to God that we have for our lives.

There is, of course, the need for detachment through action, Teilhard de Chardin adds. By its very nature, work may be seen as an important factor in detachment. First, work indicates an effort beyond inertia. Then, too, it is always accompanied by painful birth pangs. The worker becomes more avid in his or her efforts, wanting to blaze new paths, to create more widely. Thus one belongs no longer exclusively to oneself, but the spirit of the universe gradually insinuates itself in the person. The Christian, as described in this section, is at once the most detached and the most attached of human beings.

“The Divinisation of Our Passivities” is the title and content of part 2. In the encounter between humanity and God, Teilhard de Chardin writes, humanity—because it is the lesser—must receive rather than give. Our passivities comprise half of our existence, as has been said earlier, but it is important to realize that the passive parts of our lives are immeasurably wider and deeper than the active.

Growth itself is essentially passive, is undergone. Teilhard de Chardin writes that we probably undergo life more than we undergo death. All of our desires to realize ourselves are charged with God’s influence. However, the forces of diminishment are our true passivities, and we should recognize their twofold origins: those passivities whose origin lies within us and those whose origin is found outside ourselves. The passage of time is an important diminishment. Death is the consummation of all our diminishments, but we can overcome death by finding God in it. We must ask ourselves how our deaths may be integrated into God’s milieu.

One of the most difficult of all mysteries is found in the problem of attempting to reconcile our failures with creative goodness, Teilhard de Chardin argues. Providence may be seen as turning evil into good in three main ways. Occasionally one of our failures will divert our energies into another channel that will be a more virtuous one. Sometimes the loss we experience will cause us to turn, out of frustration, to less material areas. The third and most common way, because we see diminishment all around us, almost continually, is by uniting with God and transfiguring our sufferings within the context of a loving annihilation and union. God carves out a hollowness in us in order to make room for his entrance into our innermost being. Thus everything can be taken up again to be recast in God, even our failures.

In a separate section, “Some General Remarks on Christian Asceticism,” Teilhard de Chardin appends a conclusion to the first two parts of his treatise. He thinks that the question very often facing people is not well put when dichotomies are implied. For example, when someone asks if activity or passivity is better for the Christian, the question is unfair because misleading. Other contrasts are set up as well: growth or diminishment; development or curtailment; possession or renunciation. Why, Teilhard de Chardin responds, should we separate what should be recognized as two natural phases of a single effort? We must develop ourselves and take possession of the world in order to be; he advises us that once that is achieved, the time to think about renunciation has come, as well as the time to begin diminishment for the sake of being in God. This is the way to complete Christian asceticism, Teilhard de Chardin contends.

Previous writings on spiritual perfection usually fail to emphasize enough the need for self-development first. This is a serious flaw, Teilhard de Chardin believes. The effort of humanity, even in what are incorrectly felt to be solely secular areas, must assume a holy and unifying function. In the Gospel, Christ says that we should leave our possessions and follow him. We must do penance as a way of organizing and of liberating the baser forces within ourselves. We have no right, however, to diminish ourselves solely for the sake of self-diminishment. The general rhythm of the life of a Christian indicates that development and renunciation, attachment and detachment, are not mutually exclusive. They are, rather, harmonized, like inhalation and exhalation.

What is true of individuals is true of the Church, as well, which goes through phases in its existence. At times it projects a great care in the duties of its earthly tasks; at other periods it emphasizes the transcendental nature of its activities.

The section on asceticism ends with the typically Teilhardian view of the spiritual power of matter. To despise matter, as the Manichaean heretics did, is to err gravely, he contends. Matter can represent a continual aspiration toward failure, but by its nature, and particularly by Christ’s incarnation (wherein he took on a physical, material existence), matter can be a partner in the quest for spiritual perfection. Just like humanity, the world has a path to follow to reach its final goal.

“The Divine Milieu” is the heading for part 3, implying as it does that it is toward this point that what has gone before has prepared us. This may be seen as Teilhard de Chardin’s major mystical statement. According to his account, all created things are penetrated by the divine. The world is, in truth, a holy place. The basic attribute of the divine milieu is the ease with which it is able to gather into harmony within itself various qualities that appear to be contradictory. God shows himself everywhere as a universal milieu, Teilhard de Chardin argues, because God is the ultimate point toward which all realities tend or, to use an important word for Teilhard de Chardin, “converge.” Regardless of the tremendous size of this divine milieu, it is in fact a center in which all for which we strive is reunited. We should, therefore, attempt to establish ourselves in that divine milieu. Moreover, the French theologian insists, one who travels in this center is not a pantheist. Our God, he assures us, preserves the individuality of things in their fulfillment, whereas in pantheism they would lose their differentiation.

This true spiritual milieu is formed by the divine omnipresence, Teilhard de Chardin writes. It is charged with sanctifying grace, the fundamental sap of the world. The great communion is found in the universal Christ; there is a profound identification of the Son of man and the divine Eucharist. Teilhard de Chardin suggests that not only are all the communions of a lifetime one single communion and all the communions of all now living a single communion, but all the communions of all who have lived and who will live are but one single act of adoration.

When we come to realize that the divine milieu has been revealed to us, it is possible to make a pair of important observations, Teilhard de Chardin suggests. First, the manifestation of the divine causes no apparent changes on the outward nature of things as perceived by our senses—though their meanings may be accentuated. Second, the persistence of the revelation is guaranteed by Christ himself. No power can keep us from the accompanying joys.

Individual growth in the divine milieu stems from purity, faith, and fidelity. Purity is not merely a negative, an abstention, but an impulse introduced by the love of God. One’s purity is measured by the intensity of the attraction pulling one to the divine center. Faith is not a mere intellectual exercise but rather a belief in God that is charged with total trust in goodness. If one believes, then everything is illuminated with the light of understanding. What we thought was chance is seen as order, and suffering is recognized as the caress of God. Through fidelity, one situates and maintains oneself in God. If a person has this quality, greater desire follows lesser ones, and eventually self-denial will gain ascendancy over pleasure.

Teilhard de Chardin argues in closing that it is through love that the divine milieu will be intensified. Christian charity is the conscious cohesion of souls engendered by their convergence, communally in Jesus Christ. There is a tendency toward fusion among the good, and in this association their ardor increases. In fact, Teilhard de Chardin concludes, the history of God’s kingdom is a history of reunion.

In the epilogue, “In Expectation of the Parousia,” Teilhard de Chardin writes of segregation (of the evil elements) and aggregation (of the good). There will come a time, the Gospels promise, when the tensions that are accumulating between humanity and God “will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world, and then will come the end.” Such, he says, will be the consummation of the divine milieu. The enchantments of the earth, we thus see, will not harm us because we can see, in truth, it is the body of Jesus who is and who is coming.

Christian Themes

In The Divine Milieu, Teilhard de Chardin expresses his fundamental Christian beliefs that (1) the earth is Christ’s body; (2) the human endeavor is to be sanctified through embracing rather than rejecting the world; (3) both our activities and our passivities can be sanctified; (4) attachment and detachment are not adversarial experiences; and (5) the divine milieu is in the communion of Christians in the Universal Christ.

Sources for Further Study

Cuénot, Claude. Teilhard de Chardin: A Biographical Study. Translated by Vincent Colimore, edited by René Hague. Baltimore: Helicon, 1965. One of the best biographical studies of Teilhard de Chardin.

Deane-Drummond, Celia, ed. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on People and Planet. Oakville, Conn.: Equinox, 2006. A diverse collection of essays covering Teilhard de Chardin’s theology as it relates to human relations (feminism, diplomacy, mysticism) and the planet’s environment.

Faricy, Robert L. Teilhard de Chardin’s Theology of the Christian in the World. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967. Faricy speaks directly to the issues presented in The Divine Milieu as he explores Teilhard de Chardin’s theology.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Future of Man. Translated by Norman Denny. New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 2004. Teilhard de Chardin’s reflections on the direction and goal of the world.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. Translated by Bernard Wall, with an introduction by Julian Huxley. New York: Harper & Bros., 1959. A scientific and philosophical inquiry into the spiritual meaning of evolution.