I had no intention of sitting down to read Teilhard de Chardin's The Divine Milieu
that night. My plan had been to spend some time at the new Birdland
down on 44th St. The Charles Mingus Big Band was on the bill. The
jumbled Mingus sound is not one of my favorites, but I thought its
atonal bluster might suit my mood. Actually, it didn't matter too much
who was playing; I liked to sit at the dark circular bar at Birdland,
staring out at the tables of tourists and aging jazz buffs nodding to
the beat in front of the bandstand. It never mattered if they liked the
sound; they always applauded the solos enthusiastically. They were out
to make a point.
Before I left for Birdland I decided to spend an hour or so with the
copy of The Divine Milieu Helen Bergeron had given me. I
thought it might impress her if I could talk about the book the next
time we met. No question, the guys I worked with on the floor of the
Stock Exchange would get a kick out of seeing me wrestling with a book
on theology. Stock futures and puts and calls are more up my alley. The
things we do for love. . .
I opened my window a crack to let in the breeze
coming off the Hudson, lit a cigarette and stretched out on my couch
and began paging through the book. I knew what Helen wanted me to
look for: Was Teilhard trying to communicate a new understanding of
Christianity, a completely secular vision of a world without a personal
God and a risen Son? Was this book a way of cushioning the fall
for Catholics who prayed to a loving Father and the Word made Flesh in
the person of Jesus? A book written to convince Catholics that
Christianity could still be something noble and worthwhile, even if all
it offered was a way of making this world a better place through the
application of Christ's message of love?
I
didn't expect to be able to understand everything in the book. I had
always heard it was difficult reading. But I wanted to be able to
assure Helen that I had tried. I knew she was married, but the thought
of her was not going to leave me easily. I pondered whether she would
be a constant presence in my reveries, even if the day ever came that I
settled down and tied the knot with one of the unfairly divorced,
thirty-something former debutantes that my bosses‚ wives were always
trying to set me up with. (They tell me the fact that I know Monet from
Manet and dress like old money makes up for the fact that I smoke and
never went to college. That and my net worth. It bet mainly my net
worth.)
I worked my way through the early pages of the book.
"Nothing is more certain,
dogmatically, than that human action can be sanctified; the actions of
life, of which we are speaking, should not be understood solely in the
sense of religious and devotional works (prayer, fasting, almsgiving)."
Christians should "dignify, ennoble and
transfigure in God the duties inherent to one's station in life, the
search for natural truth, and the development of human action."
Okay. But why should we do that? Should we
focus less on prayer and fasting -- and more on human action -- because
God made the world and it is good? In order to "remake all things in
Christ," in St. Paul's words? Or because prayer and fasting make no
sense when there is no loving Creator who will grant us a life in the
hereafter with him in return for such sacrifices?
"Beneath our individual strivings
towards spiritualization, the world slowly accumulates, starting with
the whole of matter, that which will make of it the Heavenly Jerusalem
or the New Earth."
The New Jerusalem? Is that what the Washington
Square Marxists mean by the perfection of the human community, when the
state withers away and we all become selfless little comrades? Or
is Teilhard describing a world remade in Christ and awaiting his Second
Coming?
"The Incarnation will be complete only when the
part of chosen substance contained in every object -- spiritualized
first of all in our souls and a second time with our souls in Jesus --
has rejoined the final Centre of its completion. Quid est ascendit,
nisi quod prius descendit, ut repleret omnia."
Everything that rises converges. But into what?
"To begin with, in action I cleave
to the creative power of God; I co-incide with it; I become not only
its instrument but its living prolongation. I merge myself, in a sense,
through my heart, with the very heart of God."
Merge with the very heart of God? How? By
becoming a servant of His Peace, by living Ad Maiorem Dei
Gloriam? Or by becoming one with the physical world beyond which
there is nothing?
Was I reading the words of a priest who wanted to
deepen my religious beliefs? Or one who wanted to help me feel better
about losing them? The minutes flew by as I reached for another
cigarette and moved deeper into the book. The Mingus Band would
have to wait for another night.
"We may imagine that the Creation was finished
long ago. But that would be quite wrong. It continues still
more magnificently, and in the highest zones of the world. We serve to
complete it, even by the humblest work of our hands. . . with each one
of our works, we labour -- atomically, but not less really -- to build
the Pleroma; that is to say, we bring to Christ a little fulfillment."
There is was: what they say is his central idea --
his vision of evolution proceeding under human direction; of a new
world constructed by the application of human energy and creativity,
with humans, made in the image and likeness of God, now the co-creators
with God.
But what did he mean by Jesus's "fulfillment?" Why would Jesus
need to be fulfilled if he is true God as well as true man? Is the
fulfillment that Teilhard describes the remaking of the world through
the love that Christ preached? Is the doctor doing research to find a
cure for childhood cancer engaged in a spiritual act? The carpenter
volunteering with Habitat for Humanity to construct housing for the
poor? Are those actions prayers? Does thinking that thought disparage
traditional prayers said on one's knees in a quiet chapel, the life of
the contemplative religious orders? Was it Teilhard's goal to coax us
along to that very disparagement? To replace the older notions of
prayer with something solely worldly and secular? Or was he looking to
expand traditional concepts of prayer into something new and more
mature, without in any way demeaning the older understanding?
"Our work appears to us in the main as a way of earning our daily
bread. But its essential virtue is of a higher order: through it we
complete in ourselves the subject of the divine union; and through it
again we augment in some sense, in relation to ourselves, the divine
end of that union, Our Lord Jesus Christ."
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We "complete in ourselves" in Jesus Christ? We become Jesus
Christ? How? Does he mean that the human community, perfected through
human action, becomes Jesus Christ? Literally? That there is no
personal risen Jesus beyond the human community inspired by his message
of love?
"To repeat: by virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the
Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to
see."
No problem. Except if he means that nothing
"here below" is profane because there is nothing sacred "above."
Is he saying that? That there is no heaven? No place where a personal
risen Jesus oversees the efforts of his followers to perfect the
creation of the Father?
"It is part of the essential Catholic vision to look upon the world
as maturing -- not only in each individual or in each nation, but in
the whole human race -- a specific power of knowing and loving whose
transfigured term is charity, but whose roots and elemental sap lie in
the discovery and delectation of everything that is true and beautiful
in creation."
"The Kingdom of God is within us. When Christ
appears in the clouds He will simply be manifesting a metamorphosis
that has been slowly accomplished under His influence in the heart of
the mass of mankind."
The plot thickens. Is he playing games with us?
Christ appearing in the clouds? The Second Coming? The Parousia?
Does he mean that Jesus, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, will
come again -- as an individual, as Lord of History? Or is the
"metamorphosis" of the human community inspired by Christ's message of
love the only "Christ" the world will ever see again? Is
Teilhard's Christ on the clouds nothing more than a metaphor for that
perfected humanity? Is Teilhard striving to show us that there is
something noble about seeing through the metaphor of a personal Christ
coming again? That this is the next essential step in the evolutionary
process?
Hell, an atheist could buy into the notion that
there is something uplifting about describing the worldly pursuit of
scientific and medical progress and social justice as "divine"--
if by that you mean the highest expression of human life. An atheist
wouldn't even object to someone opting to make Jesus's words the
inspiration for his humanitarian concerns. Jesus for some, Buddha for
others, John Dewey for still others. Is that the deal?
Would a priest committed to that notion write:
"We have gone deeply into these new perspectives:
the progress of the universe, and in particular of the human universe,
does not take place in competition with God, nor does it squander
energies that we rightly owe to Him. The greater man becomes, the
more humanity becomes united, with consciousness of, and mastery of,
its potentialities, the more beautiful creation will be, the more
perfect adoration will become, and the more Christ will find, for
mystical extensions, a body worthy of resurrection. The world can no
more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres.
The star for which the world is waiting, without yet being able to give
it a name, or rightly appreciate its true transcendence, or even
recognise the most spiritual and divine of its rays, is, necessarily,
Christ himself, in whom we hope. To desire the Parousia, all we
have to do is to let the very heart of the earth, as we Christianize
it, beat within us."
The "star?" By that does he mean Christ the
resurrected Nazarene carpenter, the Word made flesh? Or Christ
the human spiritual leader whose message of love will perfect our
communal lives? Will the Parousia be his personal return in
glory? Or something akin to the hopes for the future you would
hear from the slicks in the United Nations lounge while waiting for
their drivers to take them to lunch at Nobu or Lespinasse.
"God does not offer Himself to our finite beings
as a thing all complete and ready to be embraced. For us He is eternal
discovery and eternal growth."
What is "not complete"? God himself, or our
perception of him? As humans discover and grow, do we move closer
to God, or do we create God -- become God, a God who exists nowhere
else -- in our perfected human communities?
"That I may not succumb to the temptation to
curse the universe and Him who made it, teach me to adore it by seeing
You concealed within it. O Lord, repeat to me the great liberating
words, the words which at once reveal and operate: Hoc est Corpus meum."
Brother. . .What is there to say? "Hoc est Corpus
meum," the words of the Consecration, the words that Catholics believe
transform the bread into the body of Christ. Was Teilhard subtly
deriding the notion that anything uniquely sacred takes place at Mass,
insinuating that all of the stuff of the universe is as sacred as the
consecrated host? Or was he trying to inspire us to see the beauty and
dignity in all of God's creation by comparing it to the highest
expression in the Catholic world of Christ's love for mankind, the
consecrated Host?
I closed the book and stared at the ceiling. I
didn't expect to be the one to come up with the definitive explanation
of Teilhard's vision, but neither did I expect to be as perplexed as I
was. If this French Jesuit was a con artist he was a good one. I
could see why Helen Bergeron believed that he was orthodox and a
believer in the risen Christ. His words could easily be interpreted as
a prayerful ode to the wonders of creation and the Creator and to the
transforming power of the risen Son.
But they could just as easily be interpreted as a
cunning ruse meant to disparage the very notion of the supernatural
that has been at the core of Christianity from its beginnings; they
could be a secular humanist subversion of the Catholic Church.
There were disciples of Teilhard in both camps. I knew that.
It
was getting too late to bother with Birdland. Moreover, reading the
book had altered my mood. Whatever Teilhard's intentions,
blotting out my consciousness with nicotine and Jack Daniels seemed
suddenly base and vulgar, the antithesis of "mastering one's
potentialities" for the purpose of "Christianizing the heart of the
earth and co-inciding with the very heart of God." Whatever that
meant. I hit the sack and slept like a puppy.
James
Fitzpatrick is a graduate of Fordham University in the Bronx. He is the
author of five books and numerous articles and reviews in publications
such as The Wanderer, New Oxford Review, and Homeschooling Today. His columns appear regularly on Catholic E xchange. He currently resides in Connecticut. The Dead Sea Conspiracy can be ordered from Aquinas and More.
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