505 - Teilhard De Chardin on Creation and the Christian Life

Teilhard De Chardin on Creation and the Christian Life
By Robert L. Faricy

"The Christian is caught by forces that seem to be pulling him in two directions. His religion, with its stress on renunciation of the world and the vanity and the transiency of things here below, and with its emphasis on the transcendence of God and the primacy of laying up a treasure in heaven, pulls him up. The modern spirit, the spirit of involvement in the world, of science and technology, of social progress, of building the earth, pulls him forward. The Christian is torn in two directions ...the great majority ...spend their lives not wholly Christian and not wholly human, divided in their loyalties and wavering in their inner direction, half given to the things of God and half given to the things of the world..."

"From the very beginning, in his first war-time essay, Teilhard is struggling to express his conviction that the work we do, our daily human activity, somehow contributes something permanent to the plenitude of Christ."

IN one of his early essays, Written while serving with the French forces during the First World War, the Jesuit priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin states the problem of the twentieth century Christian as he himself understands it.¹ Far more than an

Robert L. Faricy, S.J., teaches theology in the Religious Education Department of Tile Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C. He is the author of a forthcoming volume to be published by Sheed & Ward, Teilhard de Chardin's Theology of the Christian in the World.

¹ P. Teilhard de Chardin, "Mon univers," 1918, Ecrits du temps de la guerre (1916-1919) (Paris, 1965) 278. This volume of essays is cited hereafter as Ecrits. Unless otherwise indicated, all works referred to in this study are by Teilhard de Chardin. In the case of his essays, the year in which each was written is given immediately after the essay title. The theology of Teilhard de Chardin was under a cloud until recently. During his life he was forbidden by his Jesuit superiors to speak publicly or to write on religious matters, and he was severely criticized by Catholic theologians when his works began to be published after his death. Teilhard still has many critics, but the cloud has lifted. Many of his ideas were incorporated into the documents of the Second Vatican Council, particularly in the first art of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. He has been praised by such men as rope John XXIII and the new Jesuit superior general Father Pedro Arrupe. And his influence among theologians is growing steadily.

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abstract problem for the theologians, it is a problem at the center of everyday Christian living. It is the problem of the Christian's unification of effort. At the heart of the practical life of today's Christian there is an appearance of duality. The Christian who wants to really live his religion comes up against a dualism of effort: how can he reconcile the renunciation of the world (necessary to living as a Christian) and interest in the affairs of the world (an interest that is indispensable for the activation of human effort)? In The Divine Milieu Teilhard describes this duality in terms of the "Christian problem of the sanctification of action."²

I

It is quite certain from the constant teaching of the church beginning With the New Testament that human effort and action can be sanctified; the church has always taught that the totality of life should be holy, should be a life "in Christ," including all that is most "natural." "The general influence and practice of the church has always been to dignify, ennoble and transfigure in God the duties inherent in one's station in life, the search for natural truth, and the development of human action."³ The church's teaching is a fact; but the logical coherence of this teaching with the general perspectives of Christianity is not immediately evident, and the problem remains.

The Christian is caught by forces that seem to be pulling him in two directions. His religion, with its stress on renunciation of the World and the vanity and the transiency of things here below, and with its emphasis on the transcendence of God and the primacy of

² The Divine Milieu, tr. B. Wall et al. (New York, 1960) 50-3, cited hereafter as DM.
³ Ibid., 50-1. From Teilhard's very statement of the problem it is clear that he does not want to set modern secular attitudes within the context of some "theology of terrestrial realities" that would bring up to date the medieval synthesis. Nor does he wish modern secularism assimilated directly into Christianity. The contemporary "religion of the world" is, for Teilhard, not something contrary to a Christian understanding of the world and so to be overcome by Christianity. The contemporary and secular "religion of the world" is, on the contrary, an integral element of a complete Christian perspective. On this whole problem see J. Metz, "A Believer's Look at the World," tr. H. Wansbrough, O.S.B., The Christian and the World (New York, 1965) 68-100. For a consideration of Teilhard's attitude toward secularism, see M. Murray, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin (New York, 1966) 114-22.

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laying tip a treasure in heaven, pulls him up. The modern spirit, the spirit of involvement in the world, of science and technology, of social progress, of building the earth, pulls him forward. The Christian is torn in two directions; both seem good and right and deserving of all his effort, but they seem to be two different directions. So some Christians follow chiefly the "upward" direction of prayer and mortification and living only for God and the hereafter. Others put their main energies into the "forward" direction of human progress, of the daily human task. But the great majority, despairing of ever really working out a solution, a synthesis of "the Upward" and "the Forward," make a kind of compromise and spend their lives not wholly Christian and not wholly human, divided in their loyalties and wavering in their inner direction, half given to the things of God and half given to the things of the world.

We are interested here in Teilhard's theological solution of the problem; the problem is a practical one, but its roots are in theology. Teilhard's earliest theological essays were read by his close friends, mostly fellow Jesuit priests. The ideas of Teilhard, he himself reports in 1918, gave rise among some who read his essays to "astonishment and a certain inquietude."⁴ As a result, he wrote another paper in the effort to explain and clarify what he had previously written. Teilhard's religious and theological ideas, he writes, come from a fundamental experience that is the support of my whole religious life, and that can be translated by the desire-a desire that expresses the most general condition of my equilibrium and my interior joy: to be able to admit a certain co-extension of Christ with the universe, such that:

(1) Christ takes on the grandeur and the enveloping power of the universe, and

(2) meritorious action can be performed with the consciousness of acting in union with the whole universe.

Only to this, among all my ideas, do I attach the very greatest importance.⁵

Teilhard's lifetime work was to rethink certain aspects or parts of Christian theology so as to formulate this "experience" and "general condition." A large part of this work touches directly the relation between Christianity and human effort.

⁴ "Mon univers," 1918, Ecrits, 267. The essays that caused astonishment were written in 1916, 1917, and early 1919. They certainly include "La vie cosmique," 1916, Ecrits, 1-61, and "La lutte contre la multitude," 1916, Ecrits, 108-32.
⁵ "Mon univers," 1918, Ecrits, 272-3.

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In this study we will outline Teilhard's theology of human activity as sharing in God's creative action of bringing all things to the fullness of Christ; before we do this, however, we will describe in summary form Teilhard's conception of creation.

II

With regard to a Christian theology of creation, Teilhard's purpose, as always, is to construct a theory that will have a maximum of coherence, of meaningfulness, that will make as much sense as possible in the light of all the data available. What is more, Teilhard, again as always, wants a theory, a coherent understanding of creation, that will provide a maximum of interest and motivation for human effort. For Teilhard, the criterion of truth for any understanding or theory of creation is precisely this: to what extent does the theory give us a coherent and meaningful vision of creation and at the same time somehow activate us. In particular, any understanding of creation that would undermine human effort must be re-examined.

Teilhard's objection to the theology of creation that has been dominant since the Middle Ages is that it seems to discourage human effort. The problem of any theology of creation, and the problem that medieval scholastic theology tried to solve, is this: it would seem that God cannot be thought of except pantheistically, as himself constituting all being; thus either the world would be only a mirage or else it would be a part or an aspect or a phase of God. To solve the problem, scholastic metaphysics developed the notion of "participated being," an inferior or secondary form of being gratuitously drawn out of nothing by a special act of God's transcendent causality, the "creatio ex nihilo" or "creation out of nothing." The ontological distinction between the Creator and the creature is of course absolutely necessary, and Teilhard finds no fault with scholasticism on this point; on the contrary, he strongly reaffirms the distinction. But from the point of view of human action and effort, Teilhard finds difficulty with the scholastic theology of creation. An understanding of creation that insists on the complete self-sufficiency of God and consequently on the utter contingency and even arbitrariness of his creation risks making the Christian lose all his taste for and his interest in the world; it risks conveying a strong depreciation of God's creation, and it tends to discourage the necessary human effort to work and to contribute to the world's progress. A theology

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of creation that stresses God's goodness and the goodness and lovableness of his creation is all right as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. And if that theology seems to detract from the value of man's effort of progress in the world and even to make that effort despised, then the theology is positively dangerous.⁶ So, in reaction to the theology of creation that he learned as a seminarian, in reaction to a scholasticism perhaps more rigid and "closed" than the teaching of many Thomist theologians today, Teilhard tries to rethink the idea of creation in terms of his own system of thought.

In his first essay devoted to creation, written in 1917, Teilhard states a principle of his thinking that many of his critics might not accept and that all of them seem to overlook. "It is very much better to present tentatively a mixture of truth and error than to mutilate reality in trying to separate before the proper time the wheat from the chaff. I have followed without hesitation this Gospel rule which is the rule of every intellectual endeavor and of all scientific progress."⁷ Teilhard's ideas are tentative, and his theological reflections consist of proposed theological hypotheses, quite open to further development and refinement or, for that matter, rejection. This is true of nothing so much as of his theology of creation. Teilhard is proposing a way of considering, of looking at creation; he is not at all setting up an opinion baptized as a dogma.

Teilhard calls his theory of creation the theory of "creative union" (l'union créatrice). "'Creative union' is not exactly a metaphysical doctrine. It is much better described as a sort of empirical and pragmatic explanation of the universe."⁸ It is important to keep in mind that Teilhard's theology of creation is not metaphysical, particularly since many authors insist on thinking that it is.⁹

⁶ See "Action et activation," 1945, Science et Christ, vol. 9 of the Oeuvres de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Paris, 1965) 227-8, referred to hereafter as OE 9. In an unpublished essay written in 1953, "Contingence de l'univers et goût humain de survivre," Teilhard writes: "Rigorously deduced from a specific metaphysics of act and potency, this thesis of the complete gratuity of a static universe where the creature would have nothing other to do but to accept himself and save himself-this thesis remains inoffensive within the framework of Thomism. However, it becomes dangerous and virulent (because discouraging) in a system of cosmogenesis when the 'participated being' that each of us is begins to ask himself if the radically contingent condition to which the theologians have reduced him really justifies the effort it takes him to evolve. How could a revelation that is said to be made to man, the revelation of his radical usefulness, fail to create in that man a disgust for action?"
⁷ "L'union créatrice," 1917, Ecrits, 175-6.
⁸"Mon univers," 1924, OE 9, 72. On creation and evolution in Teilhard, see M. Barthélemy-Madaule, Bergson et Teilhard de Chardin (Paris, 1963) 45-61; 599-618. See also the long review of this book by P. Grenet in L'ami du clergé 76 (1966) 38-42, especially 40-42.
⁹ See H. de Lubac, S.J., La pensée religieuse du Pére Teilhard de Chardin, tr. R. Hague (Paris, 1962) 281; Father de Lubac thinks that Teilhard deliberately invaded the area of metaphysics in his reflections on creation. See also M. Guérard des Lauriers, O.P., "La démarche du P. Teilhard de Chardin, réflexions d'ordre épistomologique," Divinitas 3 (1959) 227-8; R. North, S.J., "Teilliard de Chardin and the Problem of Creation," Theological Studies 24 (1963) 557-601. Father North thinks that Teilhard was an implicit metaphysical emanationist.

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Teilhard does not consider creation strictly in terms of being, as would be the case if his approach were traditionally metaphysical. Rather, he describes being in terms of 'Union. For Teilhard, being in its active sense means "to unite oneself or to unite others"; in its passive sense, being means "to be united or unified by another."¹⁰ As we shall see, "to create" means "to unite," and "to be created" means "to be united." It seems well to point out too that Teilhard does not think of creation "as an instantaneous act, but in the manner of a process or synthesizing action."¹¹ This will become clearer as we proceed through the four steps of Teilhard's theory of creative union."¹²

In a first step, Teilhard supposes as accepted the existence of a divine and self-sufficient First Being. The second step is the recognition according to the revelation of God as Trinity that the existence of this First Being, of this divine Center, consists in the act of opposing and uniting himself in a Trinitarian manner. It is in the third and fourth steps that Teilhard describes creative union. In the third step, God, in the very act by which he opposes and unifies himself in his unique existence,

ipso facto causes another type of opposition to arise, not within Himself but at His antipodes... There is a self-subsistent unity at the pole of being and, as a necessary consequence, there is a multiplicity all around at the periphery; be it well understood that this is a pure multiplicity, a "creatible void" which is nothing, and which nevertheless, by its passive potency for arrangement, for union, is a possibility and an appeal for being. And it is here, at these depths, that our intelligence is quite definitely incapable of distinguishing su-

¹⁰ "Comment je vois," 1948, unpublished essay, 17. In a footnote he writes: "More clearly, in Latin: plus esse-plus plura unire (active form). Plus esse-plus a pluribus uniri (passive form)." See "Mon univers," 1924, OE 9, 73.
¹¹ "Christologie et évolution," 1933, unpublished essay, 6.
¹² We will follow Teilhard's most important text on creation, the only fairly complete consideration of creation among his mature writings. The text is in "Comment je vois," 1948, unpublished essay, 17-21. The reflections on creation that are found in Teilhard's early writings, especially in "La lutte contre la multitude," 1917, Ecrits, 109-32; "L'union créatrice," 1917, Ecrits, 169-97; "Les noms de la matiére," 1919, Ecrits, 415-32, are not only difficult and somewhat obscure, but they are filled with Teilhard's confusing early gropings for an adequate vocabulary. The ideas in these early essays are sometimes as inadequate as the vocabulary. For example, the section on the "Positive Void" in "L'union créatrice" (Ecrits, 184-6) is explicitly admitted to be a modest and inadequate attempt to explain tile notion of infinite multiplicity. But its inadequacies are large, and the explanatory footnotes only make matters worse. It would be unfair to take this sort of reflection, written in the unlikely circumstances of army service during World War I and in which the wheat and chaff seem to be in almost equal proportions, as Teilhard's theory of creation and to ignore his more developed and much clearer and more acceptable later thought on creative union.

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preme necessity from supreme freedom. What happens to this pure multiplicity happens as though God were not able to resist.¹³

Teilhard is saying that correlative to God's existence is a void. He describes or pictures this void as an infinite multiplicity with the possibility of being united. And in the fourth step he will describe creation as union. There is a problem here: Teilhard's statement that there is necessarily an infinite multiplicity antecedent to any creative act. Teilhard is in no way denying creation from nothing; he is affirming it, but he is picturing that "nothing" as an infinite multiplicity.¹⁴

Here is step four of the theory of creative union:

In classical philosophy or theology, creation or participation ...always tends to be presented as an almost arbitrary gesture of the First Cause, executed by a causality that is analogous to efficient causality, and executed according to a mechanism that is completely indeterminate, truly an "act of God" in the pejorative sense of the expression. In a metaphysics of union, on the contrary, even though the self-sufficiency and self-determination of the Absolute Being remain inviolate-because, I insist, pure antipodal multiplicity is nothing other than purely passive potentiality-the creative act takes on a significance and a structure that are very well defined. [Creation is now seen to be] the result, in a manner of speaking, of a reflection of God, although this reflection is outside Himself instead of within Himself. [Creation is seen to be] "pleromization," as St. Paul might have said, a giving of reality to participated being by arrangement and totalization; it appears as a sort of replica or symmetry of Trinitization. Creation somehow fills a void. It finds a place for itself. And, at the same time, it becomes expressible in the very terms that we used to define being. To create means to unite.¹⁵

To create means to unite, to bring together previously disunited elements, and creation itself is a process the expression of which is evolution. "Evolution ...is the expression in space and time of

¹³ "Comment je vois," 1948, unpublished essay, 19.
¹⁴ See H. de Lubac, La pensée religieuse du Pére Teilhard de Chardin, op. cit., 282-9. The reader is referred to Father de Lubac's thorough and enlightening discussion of creative union, much fuller than anything we could attempt in this short outline of Teilhard's theory. It is a serious misunderstanding of Teilhard's hypothesis of creation to say, as does C. Tresmontant, that Teilhard falls into a well-known mythology according to which "God engages in a struggle with the Many (the ancient chaos) in order to find Himself again, richer and pacified, at the terminus of this work. This is an old gnostic idea which is found in Boehme, Hegel, and Schelling." (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, tr. S. Attanasio, Baltimore, 1959, 94.) On the contrary, Teilhard's idea of creation is strictly within the traditional Christian doctrine that God creates out of nothing.
¹⁵ "Comment je vois," 1948, unpublished essay, 18-19.

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creation."¹⁶ Evolution has a direction; evolution follows an axis of increasing complexity-consciousness. According to the law of complexity-consciousness, the degree of consciousness of a material being varies according to that being's complexity of structure, and this law is valid universally, even in cases that we cannot verify by observation. To say that evolution proceeds along an axis of increasing complexity-consciousness means that the universe is evolving not only in the direction of greater spirituality or consciousness, but, at the same time and correlatively, in the direction of greater unity. In the light of this we can say that evolution is the expression of God's continuous creation by which he more and more unifies the world. "God creates by uniting."¹⁷ Teilhard habitually considers creation in its result, creation "taken passively," and -considering it this way-he understands creation as a process.

Creation has never ceased. Its act is a great continuous movement spread out over the totality of time. It is still going on; incessantly but imperceptibly the world emerges more and more from nothingness. The operation that creation gives rise to and that it forms is infinitely refracted in creatures in which the work of creation is materialized and accumulated."¹⁸

The creative act of God, of course, is not split up; it is one indivisible act. But the term of that creative act is the entire universe in all its extension and in all its duration. Creation began, then, with an infinite multiplicity of elements, and by a gradual process of unification of elements it is approaching a point of maximum unity. This point, of course, is the Parousia, the point of maximum union of the universe with Christ.

III

God creates by uniting. The process of creation is expressed in the evolution of the universe, and this process of creation by unification is pointed toward Christ. The key to Teilhard's theory of creation is the relationship of the whole creative process to Christ.

¹⁶ "La place de l'homme dans l'univers," 1942, La vision du passe, vol. 3 of the Oeuvres de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Paris, 1957) 323-4. This is one point in which the theory of creative union differs from Bergson's "creative evolution." For Teilhard, evolution is not creative, but the expression of God's Creative activity. When we say that creation is a process, we are referring to creation "taken passively," as seen in its result. The creative act of God. of course, is not a process, but one indivisible act. "The creative act is not split up…. Its term is the universe taken in all its extension and in all its duration." ("Mon univers," 1924. OE 9,107.)
¹⁷ "Mon univers," 1924, OE 9, 72.
¹⁸ "Le milieu mystique," 1917, Ecrits, 149.

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Now we can see that Teilhard's theory of creation, far from being a merely rational speculation, depends on revelation and is intrinsically theological. Teilhard's theology of creation does not prescind from the fact of the Incarnation; it is constructed with the Incarnation in mind. More exactly, it is built around a keystone, and that keystone is Christ. The whole theology of creative union is thought out in the light of the fact that Christ is the Head of creation. "The incarnation is the renewal and the restoral of all the forces and the powers of the universe; Christ is the instrument, the Center, the Term of all creation ...: by Him, everything is created, sanctified, vivified."¹⁹

Teilhard's theology of creative union is not a theology of some possible world, not an abstract reconstruction of the metaphysical mechanics of what God's creative act is "in itself." Teilhard is concerned with this world, the world that God has created; and this world is created in Christ; it is a world in which God has concretely involved himself. Teilhard wants not only to reaffirm the primacy of Christ over all creation; he also wants to dispel the notion of the arbitrariness of the creation of this world. He stresses instead the mutual complementarity of the Creator and his creation. "Truly it is not the notion of the contingency of the created, but the sense of the mutual completion of God and the world that makes Christianity live."²⁰ "God is entirely self-sufficient, and nevertheless creation brings to Him something vitally necessary."²¹ The object of God's creative act can be understood as "a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute Being Himself."²²

Teilhard is saying that, in the concrete and for God as well as for us, creation is creation in Christ. God, therefore, should not be thought of as personally independent of the present world that he has created in Christ.

On the one hand, in virtue of the Incarnation, God cannot-at least in the present order and from now on-do without the Many in which he has immersed Himself. And on the other hand, the real-

¹⁹ "La vie cosmique," 1916, Ecrits, 48.
²⁰"Contingence de Funivers et goût humain de survivre," 1953, unpublished essay, 4. Teilhard adds to this, "If the Aristotelian ontology is incapable of expressing this complementarity, then let us do as physicists do when their mathematics is found inadequate: let us change our geometry! ...Let us substitute for a metaphysics of being a metaphysics of union" (4-5).
²¹ "Christianisme et évolution," 1945, unpublished essay, 4. See "Action et activation," 1945, OE 9, 229.
²² "Le coeur de la matière," 1950, unpublished essay, 30.

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ity of "God plus the Many" in Jesus Christ seems, in Christian practice and in Pauline spirituality, to represent a perfection which-no matter how qualified it is as extrinsic to God-carries with it a real completion in the balance of universal Being."²³

The present world with its supernatural order is not something that God can just do without. It is not an utterly contingent world and its creation is not an arbitrary act. The world is not superfluous to God. God is not indifferent to the world that he has created; He is personally involved in it.²⁴

Teilhard, then, understands God's continuous creation as a process of unification, of building up the universe in the direction of increasing unity. The entire process of creation is directed to Christ. The term of this continuous creation in Christ is the Pleroma, the final state of the world, the consummation of all things in Christ. God's continuous creation is directed to "the quantitative repletion and the qualitative consummation of all things... the mysterious Pleroma in which the substantial One and the created many fuse without confusion into a whole which, without adding anything essential to God, will nevertheless be a sort of triumph and generalization of Being."²⁵ The final result of God's creation will be the Pleroma. Teilhard's idea of the Pleroma is the traditional one: not an absorption of creatures into God that involves a loss of identity for the creatures, but an absorption of creatures that is a maximum union with God. Since "union differentiates" the individualities of the elements united, the Pleroma-while being the state of minimum separation between God and his creatures-will be the state of maximum union and so without any confusion of identities. Creative union is a continuous process whose expression is the converging evolution of the world and whose term is the fullness of the Pleroma.

The Pleroma, "the mysterious synthesis of the Uncreated and the created, the great fulfillment-both quantitative and qualitative-of the universe in God ...finds its physical principle, its expression, and its stability in the figure of Christ-Omega, the Universal Christ."²⁶ Creative union is the gradual formation of the Pleroma; this "pleromization" is directed toward Christ-Omega, toward "Je-

²³ "La route de l'ouest," 1932, unpublished essay, 20.
²⁴ See C. Mooney, S.J., Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ (New York, 1966) 174-6.
²⁵ DM, 122.
²⁶ "La parole attendue," 1940, Cahiers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 4, La parole attendue (Paris, 1963), 26-7.

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sus, the Center toward whom all moves."²⁷ Creation, for Teilhard, is accomplished not "from behind" by a causality analogous to efficient causality, but "from up ahead" by the unifying influence of Christ. "All energies hold together, are welded deep down into a single whole, and what the humanity of Our Lord does is to take them up again and re-weld them in a transcendent and personal unity."²⁸ "Christ gives Himself to us through a world which is to reach completion even on a natural level by reason of its relationship to Him."²⁹

A central theme of The Divine Milieu is the universal presence and influence of Christ; it is developed explicitly near the end of the book in terms of the divine milieu and the Universal Christ.³⁰ Teilhard identifies Christ's omnipresence and the divine milieu:

Let us examine step by step how we can validate to ourselves this prodigious identification of the Son of Man and the divine milieu.

A first step, unquestionably, is to see the divine omnipresence in which we find ourselves plunged as an omnipresence of action. God enfloods us and penetrates us by creating and preserving us.

Now let us go a little further. Under what form, and with what end in view, has the Creator given us, and still preserves in us, the gift of participated being? Under the form of an essential aspiration towards Him-and with a view to the unhoped-for cleaving which is to make us one and the same complex thing with Him. The action by which God maintains us in the field of His presence is a unitive transformation.

Let us go further still. What is the supreme and complex reality for which the divine operation molds us? It is revealed to us by St. Paul and St. John. It is the quantitative repletion and the qualitative consummation of all things: it is the mysterious Pleroma, in which the substantial one and the created many fuse without confusion in a whole which, without adding anything essential to God, will nevertheless be a sort of triumph and generalization of being.

At last we are nearing our goal. What is the active center, the living link, the organizing soul of the Pleroma? St. Paul, again, proclaims it with all his resounding voice: it is He in whom everything is reunited, and in whom all things are consummated-through whom the whole created edifice receives its consistence-Christ dead and risen qui replet omnia, in quo omnia constant.

And now let us link the first and last terms of this long series of identities. We shaIl then see with a wave of joy that the divine om-

²⁷ "La vie cosmique," 1916, Ecrits, 60.
²⁸ Letter of February 2, 1916, The Making of a Mind, tr. R. Hague (New York, 1965) 93.
²⁹ Letter of December 12, 1919, quoted in de Lubac, "Maurice Blondel ...," op. cit., 154.
³⁰ DM, 121-32.

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nipresence translates itself within our universe by the network of the organising forces of the total Christ. God exerts pressure, in us and upon us-through the intermediary of all the powers of heaven, earth and hell-only in the act of forming and consummating Christ who saves and sur-animates the world. And-since, in the course of this operation, Christ himself does not act as a dead or passive point of convergence, but as a center of radiation for the energies which lead the universe back to God through His humanity, the layers of divine action finally come to us impregnated with His organic energies.³¹

The Universal Christ is Christ in his cosmic role as Omega. Teilhard sometimes uses as synonyms for "Universal Christ" the expressions "total Christ" and "cosmic Christ." These expressions designate Christ in his cosmic role, not some ideal or archetypal image of humanity or of the world, but the same Jesus of Nazareth who by His resurrection "has become co-extensive with the physical immensities of duration and space without losing the preciseness of His humanity."³² The point is worth making that "Universal Christ," "cosmic Christ," and "total Christ," are expressions that refer to the individual Incarnate Person of Christ insofar as he has the role and function of Omega, the focal point of universal evolution. These expressions refer to the Body-Person of Christ in His role of uniting mankind and all the universe to Himself by his creative and redemptive power.³³

Teilhard's aim has been to reformulate the theology of creation in terms of a genesis, a "becoming" of the universe, in Christ. The word he finally makes up after years of reflection is "Christogenesis," an awkward word perhaps, but a word that sums up the evolutive structure of the universe as Teilhard sees it: a dynamic movement directed to the final unity of all things in Christ, directed to Christ in the fullness of the Pleroma.

IV

Creative union is directed to the Pleroma, and it finds its expression in time and space in the process of the world's evolution, an

³¹ Ibid., 122-3.
³² "Esquisse d'un univers personnel," 1936, L'énergie humaine, vol. 6 of the Oeuvres de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Paris, 1962) 113.
³³ See C. Mooney, S.J., Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ, op. cit., 178. Teilbard's language in speaking of Christ in his cosmic role can be confusing and, to the careless reader, misleading. Some expressions, even when accompanied by explanations, are unfortunate; "Super-Christ," "the Universal Element," and "the Soul of the World," are used infrequently to designate the Universal Christ, but they might well have been omitted altogether. Of all these expressions, "Universal Christ" is by far the most common.

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evolution that converges on Christ-Omega. Since evolution has, so to speak, become conscious of itself in man, man can help the progress of evolution toward the Pleroma. Man himself is called upon to cooperate with God, to adhere to God's creative action in the gradual formation of the Pleroma. The world takes on a new significance to the man "who gives himself to the tasks of his daily life not egotistically but religiously, with the consciousness of pursuing, in God and for God, the great work of creation and sanctification."³⁴ "The creative operation of God does not simply mold us like soft clay. It is a Fire that animates all it touches, a spirit that gives life. So it is in living that we should give ourselves to that creative action, imitate it, identify with it"; the Christian who is actively obedient to God's creative will "becomes a more perfect instrument the more he steeps himself in God's creative action,"³⁵ the more he unites his "freedom to the creative and unifying action of God."³⁶ These quotations are an example of the beginnings of Teilhard's reflection on the Christian's adhesion to God's creative action.

This reflection reaches its most developed formulation in 1927 in The Divine Milieu. In his action the Christian adheres to the creative power of God so that one may say he "coincides" with that creative power; he becomes "not only its instrument, but its living extension." The Christian is caught up in and Joined to God's creative operation; "the will to succeed" in what he does and "a certain enthusiastic delight in the work to be done" form an integral part of his creaturely fidelity. What we do, therefore, is important; it is a cooperation with God creating. "God does not deflect our gaze prematurely from the work He Himself has given us, since He presents Himself to us as attainable through that very work."³⁷ In The Divine Milieu the idea of man's union with God's creative action has become well integrated with the idea of building the Pleroma.

It is through the collaboration which he stimulates in us that Christ, starting from all created things, is consummated and attains his plenitude... We may, perhaps, imagine that the creation was finished long ago. But that would be quite wrong. It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world...

³⁴ "La nostalgic du front," 1917, Ecrits, 213.
³⁵ "Le milieu mystique," 1917, Ecrits, 152-4.
³⁶ "Forma Christi," 1918, Ecrits, 342.
³⁷ DM, 64.

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And we serve to complete it, even by the humblest work of our hands. That is, ultimately, the meaning and value of our acts. Owing to the interrelation between matter, soul and Christ, we bring part of the being which he desires back to God in whatever we do. With each one of our works, we labour-in individual separation, but no less really-to build the Pleroma; that is to say, we bring to Christ a little fulfillment .³⁸

From 1927 on, the two ideas of the Christian's union with God-creating and the Christian's endeavor as a contribution to the Pleroma are treated as one single idea. "My whole spiritual life," Teilhard Writes in 1941, "consists more and more in abandoning myself (actively) to the presence and action of God. To be in communion with Becoming has become the formula of my whole life."³⁹ But as Teilhard develops more and more the idea of creation, unification, taking place by the attractive influence of Christ-Omega, an influence that comes "from up ahead," he puts more emphasis on human endeavor as contributing to the Pleroma, to the plenitude of Christ.

From the very beginning, in his first war-time essay, Teilhard is struggling to express his conviction that the work we do, our daily human activity, Somehow contributes something permanent to the plenitude of Christ.⁴⁰ In a short paper written in 1919, Teilhard reviews his thinking during the preceding years. He was led to search some "universal element" that would sum up the meaning of the universe and the value of human activity in their relation to God. He was led from a consideration of "the will of God" to a view that the creative action of God was this universal element. Still unsatisfied, he reflected further and at last succeeded in giving an adequate name to the universal element that he had already been conscious of for a long time: "the cosmic influence of Christ." Teilhard speaks of what he has referred to before as "the cosmic Body of Christ" as being a way of describing "all things insofar as they converge toward Christ, under His attraction, to be fulfilled in Him in the Pleroma."⁴¹ About the same time he writes in a letter directed to Maurice Blondel that "it is not only by fidelity to obedience but also by the work being done that we are building up to the full-

³⁸ DM, 62.
³⁹ Letter of May 19, 1941, Letters from a Traveller, tr. B. Wall et al. (New York, 1962), 283
⁴⁰ See "La vie cosmique," 1916, Ecrits, 47, 51, 42, 54.
⁴¹ "L'élément universel," 1919, Ecrits, 405-8.

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ness of Christ by preparing the more or less proximate matter of the Pleroma."⁴²

Teilhard's theological reflection on the importance of man's earthly activity continues during the next decade. In 1924, he formulates the basic theology that lies behind the beautiful treatment of human endeavor in The Divine Milieu of 1927.

Around us Christ acts physically... He animates all the movements of the world continuously, but without disturbing them. And, reciprocally, He benefits-physically-from all of them. Everything that is good in the universe-everything, that is, that goes into the effort of unification-is received by the Incarnate Word as a contribution that He assimilates, transforms, divinizes. In the consciousness of this two-fold movement, ascending to Christ and descending from Him, by which the formation of the Pleroma-that is, the growth of the universe-takes place, the believer can find unbelievable light and strength to direct and to nourish his effort.⁴³

If Christ is Omega, nothing is foreign to His universal Body... No matter how humble and hidden the action, if it is done in the direction of unification it adds something to reality, and what is best in this is immediately and forever assimilated by the total Christ. In the universe, every movement of material growth is ultimately in the direction of spirit, and every movement of spiritual growth is ultimately for Christ ...Christ waits for the result of my work... not only for the intention of my action, but also for the tangible result of my work.⁴⁴

Teilhard's most extensive discussion of the importance and the worth of human activity is found in The Divine Milieu. The world and man's labor in it have a highly religious value. "By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see."⁴⁵ The Christian's faith

⁴² Letter of December 12, 1919, quoted in de Lubac, "Maurice Blondel ..." op. cit., 140.
⁴³ "Mon univers," 1924, OE 9, 87-8. Just precisely what Teilhard means here by "physically" is somewhat vague. He often refers to Christ as physical center of the universe and to Christ's influence as physical. The French "physique" is a much broader term than the English "physical" that is used to translate "physique." The French word does not mean "material"; it often has the sense of "really existing," and this is probably the best understanding of Teilhard's use of the word. Teilhard was strongly opposed to any language that would seem to make the relation of the universe to Christ merely moral or juridical. "Physique," as used by Teilhard, is never opposed to "metaphysical" or to "supernatural." See Lubac, S.J., Teilhard de Chardin, the Man and His Meaning, tr. R. Hague (New York, 1965) 35, footnote. See especially C. Mooney, S.J., Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ (New York, 1966) 77-84; Father Mooney has a thorough discussion of Teilhard's idea of Christ as physical center of the universe.
⁴⁴ Ibid., 96. For a less theological reflection of about the same time, see "L'hominisation," 1926, La vision du passé, vol. 3 of the Oeuvres de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Paris, 1957) 110; and in the same volume, "Les fondements et le fond de l'idée d'évolution,` 1926, 191-2.
⁴⁵ DM, 66.

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imposes on him the "right and the duty" to throw himself "into the things of the earth."⁴⁶

In his writings after The Divine Milieu Teilhard often emphasizes that God is served and adored actively through creatures, in and through man's earthly activity itself. "Up until now, to adore has meant to prefer God to things by referring them to Him and by sacrificing them to Him. Now adoration means the giving of our body and soul to creative activity, joining that activity to Him to bring the world to fulfillment by effort and research."⁴⁷ In a last essay just before his death, Teilhard puts man's earthly activity in the context of Christogenesis. The Christian "finds himself more and more consciously identified With a Christogenesis, with the rising progress ...of a certain universal Presence that is both immortalizing and unifying."⁴⁸ And he speaks of a "third way" of union with God. In the diverse religions of the world man has heretofore sought union with the Divinity either in flight from the things of earth or in a pantheistic immersion in things so as to be lost in union with the "all," But the Christian religion contains a "third way." "With a Christified universe-or, what comes to the same thing, a universalized Christ-an evolutive super-milieu appears; I have called it the divine milieu." In this divine milieu that has Christ as its center and is filled with his presence, every activity, whether rising from man or descending from Christ, is ultimately both pan-humanizing and pan-christifying."⁴⁹

⁴⁶ Ibid., 69.
⁴⁷ "Christologie et évolution," 1933, unpublished essay, 12. See "Quelques réflexions la conversion du monde," 1936, OE 9, 162; "Recherche, travail CL adoration," OE 9, 289.
⁴⁸ "Le Christique," 1955, unpublished essay, 6.
⁴⁹ Ibid., 9. See the excellent pages on "Labor and Man's Final Fulfillment" in P. Schoonenberg, S.J., God's World in the Making (Pittsburgh, 1964) 179-84. Father Schoonenberg writes, for example, that labor "is not a pastime but a fulfillment of life. It is even the building of our life in relation to the final fulfillment. We cooperate in the construction of the final community of love by the work we are doing now. And then we shall behold what we are now in the process of building" (184). See also M. van Caster, S.J., "Human and Christian Meaning of Work," Luman Vitae 22 (1965) 283-306. For a perceptive analysis of the development of Teilhard's ideas on the significance of human action, see M. Barthélemy-Madaule, "La perspective teilhardienne et l'action," Europe 43, no. 431-2 (1965) 70-88.