The Divine Milieu

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 show more 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. show less

"In the divine milieu all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them. There they concentrate, little by little, all that is purest and most attractive in them without loss and without danger of subsequent corruption. There they shed, in their meeting, the mutual externality and the incoherences which form the basic pain of human relationships.... Let us leave the surface, and, without leaving the world, plunge into God."

Teilhard is clearly a poet as well as a theologian. The Divine Milieu is about the spiritual growth of the world toward God, who is both the beginning and endpoint for creation's destiny. It's mystical and idealistic, in the best sort of 'dedicated dreamer' sense, to show more see the universe being shaped and shaping itself according to the divine. And it's even more amazing that Teilhard believes so steadfastly in the goodness of the world: he saw and was involved in the horrors of WWI, not naive by any stretch of the imagination, yet he can faithfully affirm that the world is good and God is participating in its fullness. His theology for his time is progressive, affirming the growth and mutability of God, which paves the way for process theology later. It's very readable and very uplifting for readers seeking God within rather than apart from the world. show less

I wasn�Ûªt sure what to expect from this. Very overtly Christian observation of the meaning of earthly life, fraternity, and one‰Ûªs life‰Ûªs work in the grand scheme of religious meaning. There is a poetry to the language, but most of the meaning will only work if one already has a Christian perception of the world.

A wordy "omnia Deus", God in All things. This the first work of the redoubtable PTC. He lived his religion and passion and combined the two. Not really discovered by the greater world until after his death his deep thinking on his Jesuit Catholicism tried to explain modern cosmic science within Catholic themes. A lot of words trying to describe the indescribable but still an interesting read with some Jesuit gems within.

"The heavens declare the glory of God," wrote the Psalmist (Psalm 19:1 ESV). Or to use Paul's language, "For [God's] invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20 ESV). The Divine Milieu explains, in mid-20th century philosophical language, just what those verses mean.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit Priest/geologist/paleontologist who saw the glory of God shining through every part of the natural world he studied. In this slim-yet-deep volume, he describes how we can understand this without lapsing into pantheism. The Divine Milieu is something we are encompassed by, and drawn into. This is show more mystical reflection at its best.

I would try to summarize his arguments here, but honestly, I'm ill-equipped for such a task. This is a book that will take several readings to digest fully. That said, the meal's well worth the effort. show less

Teilhard's anthropology in which he explicates his conclusion that humanity is simply (but in the most complex form) the highest branch on the tree of life, and that Christianity is "nothing more nor less than a phylum of love" within nature." Part I describes the divination of human activities to realize "Jesus Christ in the world. Part II describes the divination of our passivities, that is, our struggles with evil and our struggles with attachment and detachment, as humans live out the way of the Cross to reach, by God's grace, a Christian asceticism, which is ultimately the milieu or context for life on earth as God intended it.

Impressive. He attempts to reconcile faith and science.