The Divine Milieu
I first learned of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—whom I’ll mostly to Teilhard in this blog, for simplicity’s sake—in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Perennial Philosophy, which I’ve mentioned before on this blog as also providing me with an entrée into the ideas of Meister Eckhart and Francois Fénélon. I saw him referenced in other books, too, including May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, which finally inspired me to purchase a copy of The Divine Milieu, as that is the book Sarton quotes from. To wit: “The human soul…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.” Sarton was compelled to copy those words—and others of Teilhard’s—in her journal, and thanks to her doing so, I have now read the source from whence they came.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born on May 1st, 1881, in the Auvergne region of France. He was the fourth of eleven children. His father was a librarian and his mother was a great-grandniece of Voltaire, an Enlightenment-era philosopher who, interestingly enough, was a critic of the Roman Catholic Church—a church that would come to be a censorious critic of Teilhard. At twelve, Teilhard matriculated at the Jesuit College of Mongré, where he eventually received a degree in philosophy and math. In case you’re not familiar, Jesuits are also known as the Society of Jesus, and they are a religious order of the Catholic Church headquartered in Rome and founded in 1540. Members of “the Society” are expected to accept orders to go anywhere in the world, where they might be required to live in extreme conditions. This was so because Ignatius of Loyola, its leading founder, was a nobleman who had a military background. The opening lines of the Jesuits’ founding document declared that the society had been created for "whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God, to strive especially for the defence and propagation of the faith, and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine.” Jesuits are thus sometimes referred to colloquially as "God's soldiers,” "God's marines,” or "the Company.” Based on the writing I’ve read by two other Jesuit priests—Anthony de Mello and Bernard Bassett—and now Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—I never would’ve guessed that their religious order had this militaristic element to it. Then again, both de Mello and Teilhard were frequently viewed by their order as renegades—bordering on heretics.
In 1899, at the age of 18, Teilhard entered the Jesuit novitiate in Aix-en-Provence. The novitiate, by the way, is the period of training and preparation that a Christian novice (or prospective) monastic, apostolic, or member of a religious order undergoes prior to taking vows in order to discern whether they are truly called to a vowed religious life. In 1901, Pierre took his first vows. In 1902, he completed a licentiate in literature at the University of Caen. So by the age of 21, he’d formally studied philosophy, religion, math, and literature. He continued studying philosophy on the island-country of Jersey, near the coast of northwest France, from 1902 to 1905, having been exiled there, along with other Jesuits and religious figures, due to the anti-clerical agenda of the Emile Combes premiership. In Jersey, he also gave considerable time to studying geology. Apparently he never went for a walk without his geologist’s hammer and naturalist’s magnifying glass.
From Jersey, Teilhard was dispatched to teach Physics in Cairo for three years, where he also found time to deepen his knowledge of geology and paleontology. Regarding physics, Teilhard wrote at the time that he found “in the world of electrons, nuclei, and waves…a sense of fulfillment, ease, and of being at home.” He said, “If we wish to escape the inexorable fragility of the manifold, why not take refuge deeper, why not get beneath it? Thus we may gain the world by renouncing it, by passively losing self in the heart of what has neither form nor dimension.”
From Cairo he moved to East Sussex, England, where he lived for four years and synthesized his scientific, philosophical and theological knowledge in the light of theories of evolution. French philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1907 book, Creative Evolution, was a huge influence on Teilhard. In it, Bergson proposed a version of orthogenesis in place of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, suggesting that evolution is motivated by the élan vital, a "vital impetus" that can also be understood as humanity's natural creative impulse. While still in England, in August of 1911, Teilhard was ordained a priest.
He went on to study paleontology in the laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History in France, to serve as a stretcher-bearer in World War I (his valor earning him multiple medals and the like), to earn a science doctorate in 1922 and teach (as an assistant professor) at the Catholic Institute of Paris. In 1923 he traveled to northern China to conduct scientific research in Tianjin. He returned to China in 1926 and called it home base for twenty years, making many other voyages from there, throughout the world. During his first two years as a resident of China, he wrote The Divine Milieu and prepared the first pages of what would come to be considered his most important work, The Phenomenon of Man, wherein he set forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity, to ultimately a reunion with Christ. In 1927, The Divine Milieu was denied an Imprimatur, or official license by the Roman Catholic Church to print an ecclesiastical or religious book. Six years later, Rome ordered him to give up his post in Paris. Rome banned his book Human Energy in 1939. In 1947, Rome forbade him to write or teach on philosophical subjects, and the following year, he was called to Rome by the Superior General of the Jesuits who hoped to acquire permission from the Holy See for the publication of The Phenomenon of Man. But the prohibition to publish it—previously issued in 1944—was renewed. Teilhard was also forbidden to take a teaching post in the Collège de France, and another setback came in 1949, when he was refused permission to publish Man’s Place in Nature.
Due to such unrelenting censorship, all of Teilhard’s books weren’t published until after he died. I guess the powers that be did not approve of how he went about reconciling, in writing, his duties to Christ and to the world, the latter of which he wanted to actively participate in. His vision of “a positive confluence of Christian life with the natural sap of the universe” was inherently difficult to articulate, as was his “profound ‘feeling’ for the organic realness of the World,” which Teilhard said had dominated his spiritual life since childhood. According to his friend Pierre Leroy, S.J. (that stands for Society of Jesus), who wrote the biographical introduction to The Divine Milieu, Teilhard once said, “If I didn’t write, I would be a traitor.” He felt it was his duty to speak out and share with others the fruits of his own experience. Leroy said that Teilhard’s frank and unaffectedly simple way of expressing himself was doubtlessly the reason he met with so much opposition from scientists and theologians alike, both of whom, it seems, thought him to be a traitor to their respective systems. But Teilhard was more concerned about being a traitor to himself, and therefore to God.
In February of 1955, at 73, he wrote, “The joy and strength of my life will have lain in the realization that when God and the world were brought together they set up an endless mutual reaction, producing a sudden blaze of such intense brilliance that all the depths of the world were lit up for me.” One month later, on March 15th, he told his friends that he hoped he would die on Easter Sunday. And almost one month after that, on Easter Sunday, he did indeed die of a heart attack. His last words, upon briefly coming to after a sudden stroke and collapse, were, “This time, I feel it’s terrible.” He was living in New York City, in residence at the Jesuit Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, Park Avenue, and he was buried on a gray, rainy Easter Tuesday in the cemetery for the New York Province of the Jesuits at the Jesuit novitiate in Hyde Park. Ten of his friends were present, including the aforementioned Pierre Leroy, who said “[the funeral’s] only distinction was its poverty.”
In a decree dated November 15th, 1957, over two years after Teilhard’s death, The Supreme Authority of the Holy Office forbade his works to be retained in libraries, including those of religious institutes. His books were not to be sold in Catholic bookshops and were not to be translated into other languages. On June 30th, 1962, a decree of the Holy Office under the authority of Pope John XXIII, warned that Teilhard’s philosophical and theological works were “replete with ambiguities or rather with serious errors which offend Catholic doctrine,” and in 1963 the Diocese of Rome required Catholic booksellers there to withdraw his works as well as any other works that supported his views. Shortly thereafter, however, prominent clerics mounted a strong theological defense of Teilhard's works. Henri de Lubac (later a Cardinal) wrote three comprehensive books on his theology in the 1960s. "We need not concern ourselves,” he said, “with a number of detractors of Teilhard, in whom emotion has blunted intelligence.” Later that decade Joseph Ratzinger, a German theologian who became Pope Benedict XVI—the same guy who would later condemn the works of Anthony de Mello—spoke glowingly in his Introduction to Christianity of Teilhard's Christology, and in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ratzinger incorporates Teilhard's vision as a touchstone of the Catholic Mass.
Other examples of Teilhard’s legacy include an auto mechanic character quoting him in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly; he plays a major role in Annie Dillard’s book For the Time Being; the title of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge refers to Teilhard’s Omega Point theory (the idea of a supposed future when everything in the universe spirals toward a final point of unification), as does Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega, and Salvador Dali’s 1959 painting “The Ecumenical Council,” which is said to represent the "interconnectedness" of the Omega Point. The Most Reverend Michael Curry also quoted Teilhard during the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018. Regarding his influence on the New Age movement, Teilhard has been described as "perhaps the man most responsible for the spiritualization of evolution in a global and cosmic context,” and Brian Swimme, Professor of Evolutionary Cosmology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, wrote that “Teilhard was one of the first scientists to realize that the human and the universe are inseparable.”
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The Divine Milieu begins with a dedication. Teilhard says the book is written for “the waverers,” meaning the people who are not firmly established in the Christian faith, who “either hesitate on its threshold or turn away in the hope of going beyond it.” It’s for the people who fear that by simply following the Gospel path they would somehow diminish themselves or be false to themselves, and in writing the book for them, Teilhard claims to do “no more than recapitulate the eternal lesson of the Church in the words of a man who…has sought to teach how to see God everywhere.” Like J. Krishnamurti, of whom I’m regularly reminded when reading Teilhard even though Krishnamurti eschewed all organized religions, Teilhard taught people how to see. Or he tried to, anyway.
Commencing Part One of The Divine Milieu, called “The Divinisation of Our Activities,” Teilhard presents what he sees as an inherently human conundrum: which of the two “rival stars”—God or the world—should we love the most? The question, of course, implies that we must love—or “nobly adore”—one more than the other. But Teilhard asserts that in truly loving one, we love the other with equal passion. Equating a love of God with a “striving towards detachment” and a healthy love of the world with a “striving towards the enrichment of our human lives,” he says that we can, “with a thirst for greater perfection,” reconcile the two. He illustrates the path toward this reconciling of supposed opposites with a syllogism, or a form of reasoning in which a conclusion is drawn (whether validly or not) from two given or assumed propositions, each of which shares a term with the conclusion, and shares a common or middle term not present in the conclusion. For example, all dogs are animals; all animals have four legs; therefore all dogs have four legs. Of course, all animals don’t have four legs, but you get the point. Teilhard’s syllogism goes as follows: “At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord. But all reality, even material reality, around each one of us, exists for our souls. Hence, all sensible reality, around each one of us, exists, through our souls, for God in our Lord.”
Now, I can usually get down with God-talk by applying my own conceptualization of God to whatever someone happens to be saying about it. But Lord-talk I have a harder time with. I don’t even know what it means for something to exist “for God in our Lord.” Could we just leave the “in our Lord” part out? Not if you’re Pierre Teilhard de Chardin! For him, and here I’m quoting Louis Savary, author of The Divine Milieu Explained, “Christ was not just Jesus of Nazareth risen from the dead, but rather a huge, continually evolving Being as big as the universe. In this colossal, almost unimaginable Being each of us lives and develops in consciousness, like living cells in a huge organism. At various times, theologians have described this great Being as the Total Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Whole Christ, the Universal Christ or the Mystical Body of Christ.” Given this perspective, the first, or major, part of Teilhard’s syllogism makes sense: “Each soul exists for God in our Lord,” which Teilhard says “does no more than express the fundamental Catholic dogma which all other dogmas merely explain or define.” He later says that “God wants only souls,” reminding me of fourteenth century German Dominican priest and mystic, Meister Eckhart, who said that we must empty ourselves of identity, essentially whittling ourselves down to pure soul, so that God can then fill us. Eckhart also said that “the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one in the same,” a concept that Teilhard would articulate some 600 years later by saying that “the human soul…is inseparable…from the universe into which it is born.” Now I am reminded of the Zen Buddhism notion of Magnanimous Mind, or Big Mind, which says that we aren’t even born into the universe, but that we create the universe—a universe unique to our own one-of-a-kind perception—by being born.
Regarding the second, or minor, part of the syllogism—all reality exists for our souls— Teilhard says that “it does no more than express an incontrovertible natural fact—which is that our spiritual being is continually nourished by the countless energies of the perceptible world.” He says that if we can stop protecting ourselves from the simultaneous closeness and vastness of the world, and instead let ourselves be sensitive to it, “we shall be astonished at the extent and the intimacy of our relationship with the universe.” We are intimate with the universe inasmuch as we are a partial reflection of it. Our soul is “indebted to an inheritance worked upon from all sides—before ever it came into being—by the totality of the energies of the earth.” It isn’t a mere portion of the earth’s energies that comprises the human soul, but all of those energies. I do love that idea. And then it would make sense that all of those energies continue to inform the soul and its development across the life span. Teilhard asserts that the body is not nourished independently of the soul. Therefore everything we perceive of—and in—the world “floods us with its riches,” and we must ask ourselves what role we want those riches to play within us. Teilhard says that they “will merge into the most intimate life of our soul and either develop it or poison it.” The good part is, we get to choose. And in choosing—via our awareness and the power of our intention—we “make our own soul,” thereby collaborating with the world in its own “vast ontogenesis (a vast becoming what it is) in which the development of each soul…is but a diminished harmonic.”
How beautiful is that?
Finally, in regards to the third, conclusion part of his syllogism (all reality exists for God in our Lord), Teilhard says, quite simply, that “everything forms a single whole.” He goes on to point out the error in thinking that creation was finished long ago. “It continues,” he says, “still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world.” We participate in this creation through our works—including the humblest work of our hands. Through any given labor, we help build the Pleroma.
If you’re like me, who never encountered the word “Pleroma” before reading The Divine Milieu, I will enlighten you to the meaning of this oh-so-beautiful lexical item. “Pleroma” literally means “fullness,” and it generally refers to the totality of divine powers. It’s used 17 times in the New Testament. Teilhard says that in building the Pleroma through our works, “we bring to Christ a little fulfillment.” This touches on a key tenet of Teilhard’s religious philosophy, which is that human action can be sanctified, or made holy or divine, by doing it in the name of something greater or higher than oneself. We can call it God, or the Universe, or the Absolute, or, I guess, Jesus Christ. Whatever we call it, we can see everything we do in the material plane as an offering to that Greater Something, as our contribution to the world becoming more of itself.
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It’s hard to talk about The Divine Milieu without repeatedly quoting from it at length because the writing is so strange and lovely, lending the ideas it expresses those same qualities. But when I strip away the poetics, I see that the first part of the book, called “The Divinisation of Our Activities,” is in large part saying that when we work—when we engage in activity that has some purpose or end goal—we are essentially creating something. As Edward Espe Brown would say, we’re making something happen. And in that making, we are like God. As Teilhard says, “In action I adhere to the creative power of God… I become not only its instrument, but its living extension.” See, I can’t stop quoting him. But basically, he says that work of any kind is an opportunity for divine union. If we give ourselves completely to it, such union will result. It’s very Zen, really. The notion of Joyous Mind and shikan-taza, giving your full attention to an activity. Teilhard calls it “doing it in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” but what else could that really mean than doing it whole-heartedly and mindfully, with reverent gratitude for being able to do it all? You gonna do a half-assed job for Jesus, or be distracted or just going through the motions? As Teilhard says, “God is inexhaustibly attainable in the totality of our actions…in the exact fulfillment of the least of our tasks.” And by “exact” I’m sure Teilhard doesn’t mean perfect or flawless. I might prepare a meal, for instance, that is too spicy or too mushy or too crunchy or greasy or whatever, but if in preparing I made, as Dogen Zenji says in his “Instructions for the Zen Cook," a sincere and honest effort, then I have fulfilled my task exactly. And the next time I make that recipe I’ll adjust some things. I just realized the difference between perfectionism and wanting to perfect something: the former keeps us from engaging in a given activity, while the latter inspires us to engage with it again and again, with our full selves. And that very engagement, according to Teilhard, is perfection. It is contact with the Divine.
Teilhard allows that prayer and meditation are essential to sustaining one’s relationship with God. But he also offers consolation to those who feel that any other responsibility is a distraction from God, or an obstacle to the divine union they seek. Not so, he says. We need not “depart from God” for even the most trivial or absorbing of tasks. He asserts that nothing on this earth is profane and that everything is sacred, so every interaction we have with the world is therefore holy. He exhorts the reader to try and “perceive the connection which binds your labor with the building of the kingdom of heaven; try to realize that heaven itself smiles upon you, and, through your work, draws you to itself.” I mean, it’s just so beautiful.
And would that we could all have this attitude about the work we do! I for one am extremely grateful to have a job that’s relatively easy to approach in this way. It’s easy to divinise the task of listening to people talk about themselves and responding authentically, with the objective being to help them in some way (and there are infinite iterations of help). Other jobs, though, don’t come with sacredness baked right in. Quite on the contrary. There are lots of really awful jobs out there. I just want to acknowledge that. And some professions that do have sacredness baked right in are severely compromised by grueling hours and/or conditions. Nurses, for instance, work twelve-hour shifts. It’s bad enough that so many people have 8-hour workdays, but we’re gonna make nurses work twelve? They should have shorter-than-average shifts, given how demanding and stressful their jobs are. I would not expect a sleep-deprived nurse to give her full self to her work at the literal eleventh hour.
But to the vast majority of the tasks that most people must do—like household chores—I think Teilhard’s ideas on the divinisation of our activities can be applied, and we can give ourselves to that work, as Teilhard says, “with the clear vision that [it] is received and put to good use by the Centre of the universe.”
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The last concept that Teilhard explores in the first part of The Divine Milieu is detachment. While many people probably more readily associate detachment with Buddhism, it is also a significant aspect of Catholicism. Teilhard says that people who devote themselves to their work so as to sanctify it, are people of great detachment. Such devotion entails far less concern for the fruits or results of one’s labor than for the labor itself. I must say I was reminded of my own relationship with producing this radio show every week when Teilhard said, “To pause, so as to bask in or possess results, would be a betrayal of action. Over and over again he must go beyond himself, tear himself away from himself, leaving behind him his most cherished beginnings.” I mostly identify with the “over and over again” part, but I also know what Teilhard means about “going beyond oneself.” I interpret it as not doing what you did the last time. Not repeating the same story, so to speak.
Though every blog post I write has a similar pattern and rhythm to it, each one is its own beast and has required different things of me. New parts of myself have had to emerge to create another post’s worth of content, which means that “myself” gradually becomes more expansive and diffuse, less attached, if you will, to whatever I was in preceding posts. And because I’ve committed myself to producing posts on a regular basis, I don’t have time to linger on those already written, what Teilhard would call “my most cherished beginnings.” There is only what I must create now. Through this kind of process, Teilhard says that, gradually, “the worker no longer belongs to himself.” Mm, that reminds me of the Rumi poem I quoted a couple weeks ago: “Do you think I know what I am doing? / That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself? / As much as a pen knows what it’s writing, / or the ball can guess where it’s going next.” Rumi would no doubt agree with Teilhard that “the breath of the universe has insinuated itself into him through the fissure of his humble but faithful action.” Why belong to ourselves, after all, when we can belong to something greater? Or to paraphrase Teilhard, why identify with the atom, when we can identify with the universe within in it?
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Parts Two and Three of The Divine Milieu are called “The Divinisation of our Passivities” and “The Divine Milieu.” In the former, Teilhard addresses the aspect of human existence that we have no control over—which he says comprises at least half of said existence. This is the part of life in which things happen to us, as opposed to our making things happen. And if your brain is anything like mine, you probably just went straight to thinking of the “bad” things that happen to us. But Teilhard, while acknowledging the many difficult, sometimes agonizing things we must undergo as humans, acknowledges that good things happen to us, too. He calls these events “the passivities of growth… [They] uphold our endeavor and point the way to success.” The hostile powers that hamper our progress are called “the passivities of diminishment.”
Teilhard asserts that we undergo life just as much as—if not more than—we undergo death, meaning that the good, positive aspects of our lives simply happen to us, to the same degree—if not higher—that the bad stuff simply happens to us. We take our own growth, progress, advancement, etc. for granted, meaning that we either hardly notice it, or we assume it was all mostly our doing, the result of actions we took. But Teilhard asks us to consider “the forces which nourish that action or the circumstances which favor its success.”
This idea, funnily enough, reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld. I can’t remember which episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee this comes from, but he says something like, “Can’t I take credit for anything I do?” I forget what his guest for that episode had been saying, but it was probably something like, “It’s all in God’s hands.” And part of me wanted to agree with Seinfeld and say, “Yes, you can absolutely take credit for a lot of what you do!” Another part, though, believed that he couldn’t. Of course it took a lot of work for Seinfeld to become such a successful comedian, but did he give himself the ability to work like that? Did he give himself the persistent passion for comedy that fueled his work? Did he give himself that talent? Of course he practiced, but Seinfeld himself has said that one cannot learn how to be a comedian. You can’t teach this stuff. One can practice in order to perfect an already-existing talent, but that foundation’s gotta be there. And then there’s what Teilhard called “the circumstances which favor success.” Jerry Seinfeld might not be so successful today if, say, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis Dreyfus, and Michael Richards hadn’t also been kicking around the planet when he was looking to make a TV show, or if he’d had some sort of chronic illness, or a predilection for heroin or booze, or if he was in some sort of accident that left him paralyzed or something. But none of those circumstances befell him, and he had nothing to do with any of it.
I really am starting to think we’re all just vehicles for consciousness to get around in. We don’t choose our personalities, or how our minds work, or even, a lot of the time, the thoughts our brains think. We don’t choose our childhoods, or what memories stick or what memories vanish, we don’t choose our dreams at night, or our tastes in music, art, and literature, or any of our inherent abilities, be they physical, intellectual, or social. I could go on. As Teilhard says, quoting Corinthians, “What dost thou possess that thou hast not previously received?” He says, “My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.” Geneen Roth, whom I’ve quoted before on this blog, said that “your body is a piece of the universe you’ve been given.” And I’ll add: so is your mind. Looking at human existence from this perspective, it seems you’ve had no say over any of what you call “you.”
But at the same time I also very much like the idea that we've chosen all of this. We chose our parents so that we could learn exactly what we needed to learn as young humans, and we’ve chosen everything since then for the same reason: each person and experience is the exact teacher we need in order for us to develop as we’re meant to develop, which is totally unique to us. Our lives unfold according to the lessons we need to learn in order to progress toward what Teilhard called “heightened being.” I’m reminded of Meister Eckhart, who, in his Book of Divine Consolation, quoted Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca, who said, “A man [should] accept everything as if he had wished for it.”
To be clear, though: very much liking an idea is not the same as believing it’s true. I want to believe that we all choose our parents and everything else that we undergo, but I happen to have awesome parents. A lot of people don’t. There are some really bad parents out there who cause major suffering for their children. And if one is lucky enough to have a decent upbringing, there’s a ghastly spectrum of other hostile circumstances that can befall them in adulthood. I recently read a personal essay in The Sun magazine, wherein the writer’s brother died at the age of nine while helping his father shovel snow in the driveway. Having just come from sledding, the boy was cold and took a break from shoveling to warm up in the car, whose engine was running. No one was aware that ice and snow were clogging the exhaust pipe. When the dad checked on his son, it looked like he was sleeping. But he’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Can you imagine? Loving a child for nine years and then…that? I wouldn’t expect that boy’s mother to take solace in the notion that she’d chosen such excruciating pain in order to achieve heightened being. I am so often amazed by the passivities of diminishment that people can endure without dying of grief or suicide.
In The Divine Milieu, Teilhard puts these negative passivities into two categories: internal and external. He does the same for the passivities of growth, an internal one of which would be one’s intelligence or basic good health. An external passivity of growth would be meeting the right person at the right time, or not getting in a car accident that you probably would have been in if you’d left the house thirty seconds later or earlier. An external passivity of diminishment would be the tragic loss of a loved one, or having one’s home destroyed in a storm or fire, while an internal one would be an illness, or any number of aging processes. Time itself, Teilhard says, is a passivity of diminishment. He might agree with Joni Mitchell, that it’s a thief, in that it ultimately condemns us all to death, thereby stealing our very lives away.
But he says that we can “transfigure” all diminishments—including death—by engaging in two distinct processes. The first is characterized by struggle or resistance, the second by surrender or defeat.
Say you’re given a cancer diagnosis. You would not, according to Teilhard, divinise or sanctify this passivity of diminishment by throwing up your hands and saying that it’s all in God’s hands—unless, I guess, your belief system precludes pursuing any kind of cancer treatment. Rather, you would do everything in your power to eliminate the cancer so that you might regain physical health and longevity. Teilhard says that in such situations, the intensity of our fight against suffering is equal to our connection with God. Upon reading this I had the thought, “But isn’t God the one who gave you the cancer? So isn’t fighting the cancer essentially fighting God, and therefore not, as Teilhard says, ‘Closely cleaving to the heart and action of God’?” I guess the idea is that just because God or the Universe or Whatever gives you cancer, it doesn’t mean they want you to die from it. It’s just another of Life’s challenges that you must engage with—which in this case means fight against, resist—and in such engaging, you connect with the Divine.
In a footnote to the section, Teilhard clarifies that we must “repel suffering…without bitterness and without revolt…but with an anticipatory tendency to acceptance and final resignation.” So our attitude should be one of “Okay, I’ll do my best to overcome this hardship, but if my efforts ultimately fail, I can accept that as God’s will.” But any failure that results from laziness or some twisted form of rebellion is not something we can see as being God’s will—or at least not his immediate will. True Christian resignation, Teilhard says, is not, as some critics regard it to be, the “dangerous and soporific element” of what Karl Marx called “the opium of the people” (referring to religion). It doesn’t mean we never act to help ourselves or others. True resignation only comes after we have spent all of our strength and are repeatedly met by overwhelming opposition. Only then can we rest assured that our diminishment is God’s will.
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Teilhard peppers The Divine Milieu with different kinds of prayers, which he separates from the rest of the text by writing them in italicized font. Reading them feels like reading his diary. The one he writes in regards to true resignation is especially intense and personal-feeling. He prays that he can recognize, when his hour comes, that it’s God or Christ himself “under the species of each alien or hostile force that seems bent upon destroying or uprooting me… The more deeply and incurably the evil is encrusted in my flesh, the more it will be you that I am harbouring—you as a loving, active principle of purification and detachment.” I find this perspective deeply comforting. Like Teilhard, if my flesh is ever “evil-encrusted,” I hope I can trust that it is ultimately in my best interest, crazy as that might sound. Because without that trust, there’d just be pure terror. I fear my own fear, I think, more than anything else. Not because, as FDR so famously suggested, it might deter me from effective action—although that is an unfortunate side effect of fear—but because it’s such a terrible thing to feel.
Now I’m reminded of Teilhard’s final words, which he uttered upon coming to after a stroke and right before dying of a heart attack on Easter Sunday, 1955. They were: “This time, I feel it’s terrible.” So it would seem, alas, that he wasn’t able to recognize the Divine in his own demise. “This time, I feel it’s terrible” are not the words of a man who believed, as he himself wrote, that “the function of death is to provide the necessary entrance into our inmost selves.” Sadly, this makes me question his outlook on the divinisation of our diminishments. I wish his last words had been devoid of fear, so that I might believe myself capable of such equanimity when my hour comes. But I guess I can still cling to the hope that, in the seconds that unfolded like eternities after he spoke those words, Teilhard was able to recognize the “loving, active principle of purification and detachment” that was at work within him, and able to see, in accordance with his own beliefs, that in losing his body he was actually contributing to Christ’s body, because after all he did say that “it is Christ whom we make or whom we undergo in all things.”
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I tend to get a little squirrelly when it comes to Christ talk, but I’m getting a better sense of what Teilhard meant when he referred to JC. Of course my conception might be totally wrong, but I think he saw Christ as not only the human man who was born of a virgin and eventually crucified, but as the exact perfect manifestation, in a cosmological sense, of goodness and love. So I can totally get on board with the notion that each of us is helping to create Christ in everything we do, and in everything that is done to us—in our activities and in our passivities. It reminds me of the idea that it takes all kinds to make the world go ’round—all kinds of people and all kinds of experiences. You could also reframe Teilhard’s notion our creating Christ to say that each of us contributes to human evolution—to the intellectual, spiritual, and even physical advancement of our species—by doing what only we as individuals can do. For some people, like Marc-André Leclerc, star of the documentary The Alpinist, which I highly, highly recommend and have been telling everyone I know to watch—this means free-soloing mountain faces; for others it means world travel; for others it means cooking, writing, reading, gardening, figure skating, painting, singing, dancing, teaching, meditating… The list of potential human endeavor—and human suffering—is endless. But it’s all contributing to something bigger, and to that Something Bigger realizing its full potential.
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Before proceeding to my reflections on the third, eponymous part of The Divine Milieu, I’ll address just a couple ideas that Teilhard emphasizes in a mezzanine type of section that serves as a conclusion to Parts One and Two—ideas that one could appreciate without having read either part. He subtitles this conclusion section “Some General Remarks on Christian Asceticism,” which he then, in true Teilhard fashion, divides into three sub-sections, which he numbers. Section #1 is titled “Attachment and Detachment,” and it even has three sub-sections within it, labeled A, B, and C. (Teilhard was obviously a big fan of outlines and felt no need to drop the format in his final drafts.) These subsections have complete sentences for their titles. Section A is called “First, develop yourself, Christianity says to the Christian.” And this is one of the ideas I wanted to touch on. Teilhard says that in order to be united with God—which is, according to him and Christianity in general, our “essential duty”—one must first be. Meaning one must be oneself as completely as possible. Recalling Part One of The Divine Milieu—“The Divinisation of Our Activities”—I’d say one aspect of such self-actualization is putting our greatest effort into everything we do. Which isn’t to say that we’re straining and exhausting ourselves, but that we’re giving our full attention to a given activity or chosen pursuit.
And of course, being oneself as completely as possible also means being honest with others about what we think and feel. It means laughing when we think something is funny, and not laughing when we don’t. It means saying no to things we don’t want to do, and also sometimes doing those things because we know they’re in service of our values or goals. I could say more about living authentically, but Teilhard’s main point is that before we can renounce the self (ego) and “plunge into God,” we must first know the self. And such knowledge isn’t acquired through contemplative self-study alone; it is an active thing. We must interface with the world in order to see what we’re really made of—and I mean that literally: what are the thoughts, feelings, fears, beliefs, desires, strengths and weaknesses that comprise your being? And what are those made of?
Section B of “Attachment and Detachment” is called “And if you possess something, Christ says in the Gospel, leave it and follow me.” This goes back to the notion of renunciation, which for Teilhard, is inextricably linked to one’s worldly work. So he’s not taking this injunction literally, as I myself have been wont to do, because Christ himself left his actual possessions and potential for more—like a house, a spouse and some kids, maybe a dog—in order to follow God. But walking around preaching the gospel and performing miracles was his human life’s purpose. And as I mentioned earlier, we all have different life purposes. And people certainly can’t be expected to be like Jesus in that they never pair-bond and have sex and make children, and they can’t then abandon those children in order to follow God. I guess some of them can do that, but somebody’s gotta raise the children! And grow the food and build the shelter and do all the other things that species survival necessitates. So surely Jesus wasn’t suggesting we actually leave all of our literal possessions and responsibilities behind. Could be he was essentially talking about ego. Teilhard says that the person who leaves his possessions in this sense is someone who “rejects mere enjoyment, the line of least resistance, the easy possession of things and ideas, and sets out courageously on the path of work, inward renewal and the ceaseless broadening and purification of his ideal.” For some people, this could be the work of raising children, for others, like some hardcore nuns, the work of ceaseless prayer. For the aforementioned alpinist, Marc-André Leclerc, it was scaling enormous mountains all alone without any ropes—which I am thoroughly convinced he wasn’t doing for fame or any other egoic reasons. He did it because, in doing it, he felt most alive and most himself. And he was a Christ-like figure in that he didn’t have many actual possessions, either. He possessed himself so thoroughly that he didn’t need much else.
Section C of “Attachment and Detachment” is called “Thus, in the general rhythm of christian life, development and renunciation, attachment and detachment, are not mutually exclusive.” In developing our true selves, we renounce ego and the shallow trappings of life. As Teilhard says, one “grows for Christ and diminishes in him.” He touches on the necessity of balance here, saying that each one of us has an optimum degree of growth and an optimal degree of renunciation, of attachment and detachment, and that it’s “just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it.”
Zooming back out, Section Two of Teilhard’s conclusion to Parts One and Two of The Divine Milieu is called "The Meaning of the Cross.” I’m going to skip over this part because I think it’s enough to have covered his ideas on the divinisation of our passivities, and the passivities of diminishment in particular.
Section Three is called “The Spiritual Power of Matter.” When Teilhard talks about matter, I interpret it to mean what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; [and] (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mast, especially as distinct from energy; an affair or situation; [and] the reason for distress, or a problem,” as in “What’s the matter?” I love that the OED explicitly distinguishes matter from spirit, and Teilhard imbues it with spiritual power. He does this by reframing matter as something that we can use for our own spiritual growth. He says it is “the slope on which we can go up just as well as go down, the medium that can uphold or give way, the wind that can overthrow or lift up.”
And in a metaphor that is made all the more beautiful for me when thinking, again, of mountain climber Marc-André Leclerc, Teilhard writes that, from whatever starting point we are dealt in life, “the task assigned to us is to climb towards the light, passing through, so as to attain God, a given series of created things which are not exactly obstacles but rather foot-holds, intermediaries to be made use of, nourishment to be taken, sap to be purified and elements to be associated with us and borne along with us.” I mean, it’s basically just a poetic way of saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” but all that talk of foot-holds, intermediaries, nourishment and sap—he loved the word sap! and there really is something about that word!—this language gives the sentiment so much more meaning. And also, he’s not saying that we should “make” something positive out of something negative; that’s really an annoying, Pollyanna-ish thing to say. He’s just saying, “Stay the course. And try to see that whatever happens to you is in service of your staying the course.”
At one extremely tense moment of The Alpinist documentary, Leclerc tests as a finger-hold a part of whatever crazy rock face he’s scaling, and it breaks off, falling thousands of feet to the ground below him. And his voice-over narration says something like, “In moments like this, I have a choice. I can fall apart and have a melt-down, or I can stay calm and keep going.” That guy always stayed the course. Knowing that the mountain was going to do what it was going to do, he focused on what he was doing. And we more risk-averse souls down here on solid ground can do the same with our various versions of mountains. For most of us, those mountains are probably other people. Other people are going to do what they’re going to do. What are you doing? To quote Marcus Aurelius, “Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don’t let anything distract you.” And Teilhard would say that our nature demands we “climb towards the light.” Whether or not others are climbing toward the light in their way is none of our business. Mere distraction.
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I’ve made my way up to the book’s third, eponymous section, wherein Teilhard asserts that this world, “this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place.” Being able to see this sacredness in everything is, essentially, realizing the divine milieu. And this ability necessitates sincere, consistent effort on our part. He says that the divine milieu “draws at the inaccessible depth of each creature,” bearing us along toward the Parousia, or second coming, or what he also calls “the common centre of all consummation.” I myself don’t know about all that, but I certainly like the idea of some divine force drawing at my inaccessible depth and guiding me toward something higher, ever higher. I also like the idea of causing “the marrow of the universe to vibrate.” Who says that? Who but Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has ever talked about marrow of any kind vibrating, let alone the marrow of the universe? And he says this is what can happen when we recognize the holy in all matter and experience—when we fully inhabit the divine milieu—where “the least of our desires and efforts is harvested and tended and can at any moment cause the marrow of the universe to vibrate.”
Teilhard also characterizes inhabitants of the divine milieu as people who have learned from experience that they have need of everything to the same extent that they have need of nothing. He elaborates on this idea in ways I don’t quite understand, but what comes to mind for me when I think about needing everything and nothing to equal degree, is, regarding the former, the interconnectedness of all life. I need everything in the sense that I need all the bugs to do their thing, and all the birds to do their thing, and the mushrooms and algae and God knows what else—everything that makes this planet this planet—in order to keep surviving myself. I need nothing, though, because I am everything and nothing already, and because I know that anything I am denied is bringing me closer to the Ultimate Reality.
But how, exactly, do we come to perceive the divine milieu, or what you could also call the omnipresence of God? It is not so much a skill to be learned, or something we can acquire through reasoning or any clever devices. Teilhard says it is, rather, a taste, a type of intuition. When I read the word “taste” used in that context, I was reminded of a talk recently given by Zen priest and chef—and author of the Tassajara Bread Book—Edward Espe Brown. As I mentioned in a blog post I did about Brown, he offers a morning meditation and dharma talk on Zoom every Sunday through Thursday at ten A.M. Eastern Standard Time (he’s in California, so it’s seven A.M. for him and his real-life audience at a place called The Land, in a town called Philo). The other morning when I attended, Brown talked about the many cooking classes he’s taught over the years, and how he regularly encourages students to taste things as they go. And he’s regularly heard them ask some version of the question, “What am I s’posed to be tasting?” I laughed out loud when he said it, as I instantly saw its correlation to life at large. It’s like asking, “What am I s’posed to be experiencing? What am I s’posed to be thinking and feeling?” Brown’s answer to his cooking class students is, “Taste what’s in your mouth. That is what you’re supposed to be tasting.” He encourages students to drop their desire to make food taste a certain way. “Is this what it’s supposed to taste like?” they say. It tastes like it tastes, Brown says. Now what do you do with the information acquired by tasting it? In the case of cooking, how do you proceed in helping that food be its best self? In the case of relationships, how do you proceed in helping other people be their best selves? In the case of Teilhard’s Christianity, how do you proceed in helping Christ be his best self, having tasted what you’ve tasted of the divine milieu?
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Another of Teilhard’s sentiments that reminds me of Buddhist ways of thinking, concerns the seeker and the sought. He says that “to experience the attraction of God”—in other words, to recognize the divine milieu all around you—is not something you do, but something that is done to you. So this goes back to the notion of passivities of growth. Teilhard says that being “sensible of the beauty, the consistency and the final unity of being” is actually the highest and most complete of such passivities. In this beneficent undergoing, we are the objects upon which God makes himself sought and perceived. Teilhard depicts God as always at the ready to catch our eye and compel us toward our first prayer. In Christian theology this is called “prevenient grace,” meaning divine grace that precedes human decisions. It seems to be the same concept that American meditation teacher in the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism, Cheri Huber, is referring to in the title of her book, That Which You Are Seeking Is Causing You To Seek. I point out these Buddhist connections simply because they please me. I like it when seemingly disparate religions overlap. That’s what the perennial philosophy is all about.
My grandmother actually wrote about the concept of prevenient grace—though she did not use that phrase—in her diaries from the 1970s, when she was in her mid-forties. I was blessed enough to receive a couple boxes of Grammy’s diaries in 2016, a couple years after she died, and I’ve been slowly typing them up ever since. She wrote a lot as teenager and in her early twenties, mostly about her daily activities and interactions with friends and the many other people in her life and her love of nature. Then, just as she’s striking up her first romantic relationship—with the man she’d soon marry and have five children with—the writing stops. There are basically no extant diaries between 1945 and 1970. A mysterious and suspicious twenty-five year gap. And when the diaries do resume, they’ve changed dramatically in their content and voice. Many of the entries just consist of passages copied down verbatim from whatever Christian-themed book she was reading at the time. Many others are her writing about how badly she wants to be a different, “better” person, and the many ways she falls short. More than anything, she wants to “let Christ into her heart”—whatever that means—but she can’t do it. Regarding prevenient grace, she even repeatedly writes about knowing it isn’t up to her, that Christ will let himself in when he sees it’s time, and she must trust him and be patient and just keep trying to focus on other people instead of herself. Her mind knew this to be true, but her heart remained stubborn. And I don’t know if Grammy ever wound up feeling like Christ had truly entered her heart. One can only hope. She sure gave it a helluva lot more thought than most people do, for better and worse. Teilhard would describe my grandmother as a paragon of purity—one of the three virtues which he said were especially effective in infusing our lives with the divine—the other two being faith and fidelity. He defined purity as “not merely abstaining from wrong, nor even chastity…[but also] the impulse introduced into our lives by the love of god sought in and above everything.”
Regarding the virtue of faith—of truly believing and trusting in a beneficent God, and not merely adhering to Christian dogma in an intellectual way—Teilhard shares another prayer, all in italics. In it, he talks about how the world can sometimes seem terrifying—“cold, blind and brutal.” He uses the word “heroically” to describe how human beings have set about creating a “zone” for themselves that seems safer, more hospitable and light-filled, while still surrounded, if you will, by “cold, black waters.” This zone we’ve contrived is terribly precarious, and “At any moment the vast and horrible thing may break in through the cracks—the thing which we try hard to forget is always there, separated from us by a flimsy partition: fire, pestilence, storms, earthquakes, or the unleashing of dark moral forces—these callously sweep away in one moment what we had laboriously built up and beautified with all our intelligence and all our love.” And we have indeed come to know a thing or two—and will surely come to know more in the years to come—about fire, pestilence, storms, and the unleashing of dark moral forces.
Climate scientists warn that the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires fires could increase by up to a third by 2050 and up to 52 percent by 2100. COVID-19 gave us a little taste of pestilence, and no one can predict what else might be coming down the virus pipeline. The UN just released its latest climate science report showing that our chance to limit warming to 1.5°C is slipping away even faster than we thought. I for one don’t think we have such a chance, and that no matter what we do now, due to self-reinforcing feedback loops that are already in motion and impossible to reverse, we will see, among other phenomena, significantly higher sea levels, which will likely increase the strength and destruction of future hurricanes.
But the issue that’s currently causing me the most concern is that pesky “unleashing of dark moral forces." I’m writing this just a few days after Russian troops have withdrawn from the Ukranian capital of Kyiv, leaving behind four hundred-plus civilian bodies, many thrown in a mass grave and some with their hands tied behind their backs. “Investigations into possible war crimes are being made.” There’s nothing to investigate! War. Is. A. Crime. If killing one person is a punishable offense, then killing hundreds of people should be that much more punishable. But because it’s war, any attempts at justice would be met with greater and greater aggression and violence. It makes me hate humanity. And so to dull that hatred some, or to transmute it into something more like resignation—because what the hell am I going to do if a bunch of men decide it’s time for World War III? Honestly!—I’ve started thinking of war as a force of nature. I can prevent or stop a war as much as I can prevent or stop a hurricane.
In thinking of war as a natural phenomenon, it’s easier to conceive of even that being the will of God or the Universe or Whatever. Like Teilhard, I would like to see God concealed in everything, including "the huge and dark thing, the phantom, the storm.” I’d like to see it all as the body of Christ, so to speak—Hoc est Corpus meum—and to hear God saying, as the “dark moral forces” descend, “Ego sum, nolite timere—It is me, do not be afraid.”
