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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
AN EXTENDED ESSAY WHICH PROVIDES INSIGHT INTO TEILHARD'S THOUGHT,
By
This review is from: The Divine Milieu (Paperback)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a French theologian, Jesuit priest, and paleontologist/geologist who took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and was later unjustly accused by Stephen Jay Gould of participating in the Peking Man fraud (see Gould's book The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History, and see Charles Blinderman's book The Piltdown Inquest for a refutation). Teilhard was forbidden to publish his writings during his lifetime, the 1950 encyclical 'Humani Generis' condemned several of his opinions, and in 1962, the Holy Office issued a 'Monitum' or warning that his books contained ambiguities' and 'serious errors,' that offended Catholic doctrine. But more recently, Pope John Paul II cited Teilhard approvingly, as has Benedict XVI.
This edition begins with a 30-page essay by Pierre Leroy, S.J., that provides useful historical, biographical, and theological background. Teilhard explains in the Preface, "This book is not specifically addressed to Christians who are firmly established in their faith and have nothing more to learn about its beliefs. It is written for the waverers, both inside and outside; that is to say for those who, instead of giving themselves wholly to the Church, either hesitate on its threshold or turn away in the hope of going beyond it... So the purpose of this essay ... is to prove by a sort of tangible confirmation that ... the most traditional Christianity, expressed in Baptism, the Cross and the Eucharist, can be interpreted so as to embrace all that is best in the aspirations peculiar to our times." Here are some representative quotations from the book: "In virtue of his very perfections, God cannot ordain that the elements of a world in the course of growth ... should avoid shocks and diminishments, even moral ones... But God will make it good---he will take his revenge, if one may use the expression---by making evil serve a higher good of his faithful, the very evil which the present state of creation does not allow him to suppress immediately." "The man with a passionate sense of the divine milieu cannot bear to find things about him obscure, tepid, and empty which should be full and vibrant with God." "You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to hold with absolute certainty that any single man has been damned. I shall therefore make no attempt to consider the damned here, nor even to discover... whether there are any." "The temptations of too large a world, the seductions of too beautiful a world---where are these now? They do not exist... her enchantments can no longer do me harm, since she has become for me, over and above herself, the body of him who is and of him who is coming."
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lord, teach us how to see!,
By Donner C. S. Tan (Singapore) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Divine Milieu (Paperback)
"This little book does no more than recapitulate the eternal lesson of the church in the words of a man who, because he believes himself to feel deeply in tune with his own times, has sought to teach how to see God everywhere, to see him in all that is most hidden, most solid, and most ultimate in the world. These pages - put forward no more than a practical attitude - or more exactly perhaps, a way of teaching how to see." writes Teilhard de Chardin in his introduction.
I have not read enough of this eminent scientist-theologian to judge if he is a pantheist, a panentheist or a true blue monotheist at heart (though in this book alone, he explicitly distances himself from the first). But this book articulates a vision of reality through the lens of Creation-Incarnation-Resurrection-Parousia that one is hard pressed not to take his Christian orientation seriously. He writes expressly to the 'waverer' who may be shaken by the modern cosmological discoveries that the gospel of Jesus gets relegated to a narrow, archaic piece of relic that has no room for the wider universe. Presenting the universe instead as the divine milieu, that is, the whole world as a God's creation invaded, penetrated, shot through, indwelt by the presence of God by virtue of the Incarnation of Christ, he invites us to see the world anew not as an extension of the divine (as in the 'false trails of Pantheism' pg 129-130), or an evil product to be eventually destroyed (as in 'Manichean dualism' pg 105) but as the very realm in which Christ will take up his residence and fill it with his fullness (pleroma). If so, the whole life of the Christian and of the whole Church is to be bound up with the divine movement that will bring all things under the unity of Christ. Nothing therefore falls outside the divine milieu - our active endeavour to work for good and resist evil as well as our passive diminishments by misfortunes, setbacks, sufferings and death. God can use the 'two halves of our existence' (active and passive) to bring about the fullness that he intends. The cross stands as a central symbol of this vision where the climb to Calvary exemplifies the human endeavour and fidelity in moving towards the light of God (not swooning/slumbering under its shadow, as is sometimes misconstrued) and the surrender to God's power of resurrection. To appropriate this vision, the virtues of purity, faith, fidelity and charity are indispensable for both the individuals and for the body of Christ. There is a warning throughout the book against passively resigning to what is - the evil, injustice, misfortune - and mindlessly attributing that to God's will. Instead, no true Christian detachment is exercised unless one has given his maximum strength to work with God in struggling against evil. Leaving aside the mystery and origin of suffering (nowhere does he suggest evil to be a necessary part of God's plan or that God is in any way responsible for it), he makes clear that our unrelenting and sustained resistance against evil belongs intimately to God's redemptive work. The true Christian attitude never loses sight of the fact that God's grace is ultimately what works through us, furnishing us with the sustained impulse to do his will and utilizing even the 'waste matter' of our existence, namely our failures, sufferings, weaknesses for his good purpose. Interspersed with prayers, and written in a passionate, lyrical style, this inspiring classic helps us capture a larger vision of the gospel story. Instead of narrowing down our scope to only the private 'spiritual' and 'religious' compartments, he broadens our vision of the world as one in which God acts powerfully to save, renew and indwell with his all-pervasive presence. This book gives us an integrated Christian worldview that makes sense of the seemingly disparate elements and spheres of life and give us a powerful impetus to dive deep into the full business of human life, if only to lose ourselves completely in the divine milieu. This is thoughtful, soul-stirring and life-changing literature as the introductory quote makes clear: it's a book that teaches us to see...God in all things. As this book basically engages at the world-view level and is therefore unabashedly philosophical, I reckon that the reader must be primed by some familiarity with this level/sort of thinking to make the best of it.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A clear and concise introduction to Teilhard,
By
This review is from: The Divine Milieu (Paperback)
Welcome to the world of pantheism and mysticism, where God is in everything and everything is good. According to Teilhard, "nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred to the men who can distinguish that portion of chosen being which is subject to Christ's drawing power" (p.66). Of course the problem with this type of pantheism is that God has to get blamed for everything bad that happens. "Can God also be found in and through every death?" (p.80). Maybe the solution is that bad things are not as bad as we thought they were. This is what Teilhard wants to believe.
So how can we come to terms with death, find God in every death, and restore our harmonious vision of the universe where everything is good (mysticism)? According to Teilhard, "the function of death is to provide the necessary entrance into our inmost selves" (p.89). This is the key to re-harmonizing death in a mystic-Christian vision of the universe. Death, according to Teilhard, has an ontological benefit in terms of creating conscious being (via our awareness of fintude, doubt, and death-anxiety complexes) and propelling the evolution of higher consciousness. The end result is the preservation of individualism after the evolution of higher consciousness in response to death-anxiety. In this process, "God... pushes to its furthest possible limit the differentiation among the creatures he concentrates within himself" (p.116). This preservation of the other creates an environment where conscious being can be established via self-identity in contradistinction to the other (being-toward-others). This is the key to primordial consciousness. Only then can we be introduced to awareness of finitude. Teilhard is brilliant in explaining this entire ontological process where we go from confrontation with the other > awareness of finitude > our evolution into an other > our new role as an other for somebody else to perpetuate the cycle of consciousness. This is what Teilhard is all about. When we realize the effect of death in preserving higher consciousness, we have made the critical breakthrough into radical acceptance/ mysticism/ pantheism (God in everything), allowing us to unify God and Christ with everything and remove the evil from everything. According to Teilhard, "the effort of mankind, even in realms inaccurately called profane, must, in the Christian life, assume the role of a holy and unifying operation" (p.97). This is the final step in achieving harmony - accepting everything as sacred. This book is an excellent introduction to Teilhard, although his best work is "Christianity and Evolution". It should be categorized as natural theology, mysticism, and pantheism, but because of the idea of pan-christism, it is actually more evangelical than evangelical theology. In this sense it is not at all a threat to orthodox Christianity, and should be embraced as a harmonious and true vision of God in the world.
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