Life and work

Jean Guenolé Marie Daniélou was born on 14 May 1905 into a cultured family closely linked to the elites of early twentieth century France. His father, Charles, a politician of the Centre Left, several times achieved ministerial office in the administrations of Aristide Briand. The elder Daniélou's Republicanism and disapproval of clerical interventions in politics made him, for the period, an unlikely believer. Daniélou's mother, Madeleine, a more traditional Catholic, was a professional educationalist, much involved in projects to secure the entry of women into higher learning. Daniélou deemed her religious faith, which was both intelligent and deeply spiritual, the chief formative influence on his own.Footnote ¹ The attraction to her of Ignatian spirituality heralded her eldest son's eventual entry into the Society of Jesus.Footnote ²

His childhood was divided between homes in Paris and Brittany. To the latter, with its wild Atlantic coastline, he ascribed his love of nature, and sense of the disclosure of God through the cosmos. Also owed to the Breton contribution to his upbringing was his respect for popular Catholicism. A ‘militant’ Gospel – the reference might be to ‘Catholic Action’, or, later, ‘political theology’– was not, he thought, the only way of embodying the evangelical impulse. Christianity ‘expressed in the sacralisation of the chief moments of existence’– the traditional way of life of Breton fisherfolk and farmers – was equally valid.Footnote ³

In his University years, spent in Paris, Daniélou was caught up in the literary renaissance, both general and more specifically Catholic, of the 1920s, an ‘epoch of détente and cultural enchantment’ after the sufferings of the First World War.Footnote ⁴ In this period he acquired his extremely rich literary culture, as well as his principal orientations in the intellectual life at large. At the Sorbonne, his love affair with the Hellenic world began. This would bear fruit in his studies of not only the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher PhiloFootnote ⁵ but also – and more importantly for theology – the Greek Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, notably Gregory of NyssaFootnote ⁶ and Origen of Alexandria,Footnote ⁷ much of whose approach to mystical theology and biblical exegesis he retained. He was deeply influenced by the writings of the poet and critic Charles Péguy, who confirmed him in his primarily symbolic rather than conceptual approach to the expression of faith.Footnote ⁸ He ascribed to Péguy his continuing confidence in the value of the historic Western culture,Footnote ⁹ as well as a distrust of appeals to ‘progress’, and, more positively, the notion of hope as ‘surmounted despair’.Footnote ¹⁰ A still closer spiritual affinity linked him, he considered, to the novelist François Mauriac, whose principal theological emphasis lay not, as with Péguy, on the virtues (whether natural or supernatural), but on the dialectic of sin and grace.

In this formative period of his life, Daniélou also admired the Neo-Thomist layman Jacques Maritain for his refined spiritual-intellectual personality, which found expression in such programmatic statements for Catholic life as Art et Scolastique, an essay on the revival of, especially, the visual arts, and La Primauté du spirituel, a counter-blast to the rallying cry, ‘Politics first!’, of the nationalist-monarchist movement Action française. (In the ultra-activist years immediately following the Second Vatican Council Daniélou looked back on this work as a plea for putting contemplation prior to action.Footnote ¹¹) But he could not stomach the systematic quality of Maritain's Thomism – or indeed any thorough-going Thomism for that matter. All systematisations, he considered, distorted the real. Unfortunately, he failed to notice that the role of Aristoteleanism in Aquinas is to concentrate attention on the native intelligibility precisely of the real, rather than to stimulate construction of conceptual systems.

In point of fact, Daniélou would maintain, despite himself, some clear emphases from the Thomist tradition. In epistemology, he treated – as did the Thomists – the conformity of mind with being as a sine qua non for the validity of thought.Footnote ¹² In theology, he accepted Thomas's account of the inter-relation of the via affirmativa and the via negativa in the knowledge of God – and indeed much else besides.Footnote ¹³ His argument for divine being as infinite personality was sheer Maritain.Footnote ¹⁴ But his opposition to any notion of Thomism as the Catholic philosophy and theology to the effective exclusion of all others would play a major part in the Church conflict over ‘la nouvelle théologie’ in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.Footnote ¹⁵ Daniélou considered his personal philosophical sympathies to lie as much or more with the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson and the phenomenologist Max Scheler. He certainly profited from Bergson's reflections on memory and time, and Scheler's notions of love and sympathy. More broadly, he appealed to these figures to license the intuitive element in his thinking.

Among other luminaries of the French Catholic revival who played a part in Daniélou's life and education as a layman, he met at the Maritains’ the Egyptian-born Dominican Orientalist Jean de Menasce.Footnote ¹⁶ Contact with this learned contemplative opened his mind to ‘the Jewish world and that of the East’.Footnote ¹⁷ Daniélou became deeply interested in the ancient religions of the Near and Middle East; his most original scholarly contributions, which place early Jewish Christianity in a wider setting, bear witness to this lasting passion.Footnote ¹⁸

It was, then, an unusually well-formed young Catholic with an exceptional religious culture who in 1929 entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Laval (north-west France). His basic orientation to the Church Fathers was already in place, as was his concept of his mission as an intellectual-spiritual apostolate. Not that the lengthy Jesuit training left no mark. To his years as a Jesuit ordinand on Jersey (in the Channel Islands) he ascribed the acquisition of a discipline of prayer and, through the reading of Emmanuel Mounier's journal Esprit, a higher estimate of the importance of economic, social and political issues than of speculatively philosophical ones.Footnote ¹⁹ The period 1936 to 1939, which included his priesting in 1938, were spent at Fourvières, the house erected in Lyons to give young French Jesuits closer contact with contemporary currents of thought. He was in full sympathy with this project. An earlier generation of Francophone Jesuit stars – Pierre Rousselot, Joseph Maréchal – by dancing pirouettes, however brilliant, on the Neo-Scholastic stage had left their secular contemporaries unmoved. Daniélou had a tendency to be over-impressed at first by the positive elements in innovatory thinking, and only subsequently discover the negative accompaniments (examples from the history of his mind are Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Marx). So he was delighted to be in close proximity to such fellow-Jesuits as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was seeking a natural scientific version of the Christian narrative, from the origins to the Eschaton, and Gaston Fessard, who was investigating the usefulness to theology of a Hegelian analysis of history.

It is notable that both of these examples concern giving a greater place than had Scholasticism to the dimension of temporality – for this would be the key to Daniélou's own most distinctive theologising. As he wrote, ‘For me, the theology of history is the most important aspect of contemporary theology’Footnote ²⁰. However, neither Teilhard nor Fessard but Henri de Lubac was his real master. De Lubac consolidated Daniélou's conviction that patristic ressourcement should be Catholic theology's most important form. De Lubac also gave him the idea that the theology of history should be its most important content. In an encomium of de Lubac in his posthumously published Mémoires Daniélou declared:

That is what made de Lubac's thought for Catholics the most ‘important’ of the twentieth century, the most potent for the formation of a truly ‘actual’ theological synthesis.Footnote ²²

The pupil praised the master for the revival of the fourfold sense of Scripture in de Lubac's Exégèse mediévale,Footnote ²³ a crucial confirmation of Daniélou's own intuition of the importance of typology. He shared de Lubac's emphasis on the need to understand modern thought, as represented (for de Lubac) by the trio of Nietzsche, Marx and Kierkegaard. Of those three, the frequent recurrence of the term ‘existence’, or ‘mystery of existence’, in Daniélou's theological work strongly suggests that the influence of Kierkegaard had touched him, in part no doubt indirectly through the Catholic Existentialist Gabriel Marcel.Footnote ²⁴ He admired de Lubac's studies of Eastern religion – chiefly Buddhism, whereas Daniélou was more interested in Hinduism. He was not in the least troubled by de Lubac's (as Daniélou judged) total lack of any systematic impulse. Quite rightly, de Lubac preferred to disengage, rather, the most genial insights of past and present.Footnote ²⁵ Far in the future, in the conflictual situation of the post-Conciliar Church, another ground for rejoicing came to be de Lubac's alignment with Hans Urs von Balthasar's journal Communio – which possessed, so Daniélou would comment, ‘all that is solid in present-day theology in a common line’ joining de Lubac, Louis Bouyer, and Daniélou himself.Footnote ²⁶

The influences of childhood, precocious young manhood, and de Lubac's powerful example furnished Daniélou with the principal convictions he took to the Parisian Institut Catholique when at the young age of 37 he was presented to the chair of the History of Christianity, thus following in the footsteps of the great historian of the early Church, Louis Duchesne, his predecessor but one. Daniélou's patristic monographs, and the massive ‘History of Christian Doctrine before the Council of Nicaea’, as well as his panoramic study of the early Church co-authored with the historian of ancient philosophy and culture Henri Marrou,Footnote ²⁷ would fully justify his selection to this prestigious post. The fine Festschrift entitled Epektasis bore witness to the esteem in which other patristic scholars held him.Footnote ²⁸

Outside of his professional remit he also gave a great deal of time to dialogue with representatives of other religions (and none), through such means as the ecumenical review Dieu Vivant and the missiologically oriented ‘Cercle Saint Jean-Baptiste’ (both in Paris),Footnote ²⁹ as well as, internationally, the high-powered ‘Rencontres de Florence’,Footnote ³⁰ and the Eranos colloquia organised by an admirer of C. G. Jung's in Canton Ticino (Switzerland).Footnote ³¹ These in no way diminished his sense of the uniqueness of Christianity, and the claims of Catholic orthodoxy. But they served to expand his sense of the variety of idioms in which Gospel and doctrine can be expressed, as well as the possibility of acquiring nuggets of real gold from cultures beyond the Church's limits.

He would remain at the Institut Catholique for twenty-five years – with intervals of enforced absence through his dangerous work for the French Resistance during World War Two, as well as, on a very different note, Roman sojourns for the sessions of the Second Vatican Council, 1962–5 where he acted as a peritus or theological expert. His influence on the Conciliar texts may be found in the doctrine of revelation in Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, in the overall caste of Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, and in the eschatological emphases which sit in somewhat uneasy tension with the ‘theology of earthly realities’ in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes.

Only his appointment as a cardinal by Pope Paul VI in 1969 brought his University-level teaching to an end – whereupon his encounters with others became more irregular but not necessarily less frequent. He developed a surprising talent – and popularity – in television interviews and debates, at a time when the foundations of both Church and State in France were shaking. And he continued to animate groups of students, declaring to critics of his acceptance of Episcopal orders that, indeed, despite their denials, he had ‘a church’: not a diocese (as they would have preferred) but something equally important –‘les jeunes’: the Parisian young. Much of the last period of his writing was concerned to reinstate credal and ethical certainties, and a proper sense of the rightful authority of the Church, in a French Catholicism profoundly troubled by the post-Conciliar crisis.Footnote ³² As he insisted:

Such forthright statements of allegiance did not prevent Daniélou's election to membership of the Académie Française – for the ‘immortals’ of high culture in France – in November 1972.

Jean Daniélou died on 20 May 1974 – in the unlikely setting of a brothel which the septuagenarian was visiting in the course of his priestly ministrations. It was a supreme monument to the total freedom of movement Paul VI had given him as a cardinal. It was also an indication of a certain lack of prudence. He had always said and done what he thought right, regardless of reactions. The following year, a ‘Société des Amis du Cardinal Jean Daniélou’ was founded in Paris, with an annual bulletin, to ‘promote the study of his writings and the continuance of his influence’.Footnote ³⁴

Daniélou's theological method: epochs, correspondences, and the orders of the real

Daniélou assisted students of his thought by directing them for its essentials to his first book, Le signe du Temple, written as early as 1941.Footnote ³⁵ All his other books, he opined, were no more than commentaries on this opusculum.Footnote ³⁶ Given the ambitious character of the dossiers that make up his history of Christian doctrine until the Council of Nicaea,Footnote ³⁷ it is hard to take this judgment literally. But nonetheless, for what concerns the great lines of his own thinking – and that would include his instinctive manner of organising the content of the texts left by ancient authorities in the Church, the comment is fair enough. As he himself (again) remarked, his patristic monographs, which are, so far as bulk is concerned, his chief output, were not written merely as ‘scientific’ analysis – though they are also that – but in order to express his own concerns.Footnote ³⁸ In this, as in all his theological writing, he took it for granted that Scripture and Tradition constitute what he called the ‘regulative basis to which the theologian must always refer, on pain of making arbitrary constructions’.Footnote ³⁹

Le signe du Temple identifies itself as a theology of history which considers a succession of religious epochs, each of which is characterised by a distinct modality of divine presence. To some degree, these epochal modes of presence overlap yet they also constitute a narrative which runs from God the Alpha to God the Omega. The divine ‘temple’ is in turn cosmic (in nature); Jewish (in Jerusalem); ‘Christic’ (in the Word incarnate); ecclesial (in the Church, and most notably in the Holy Eucharist), and eschatological (at the End). In some versions of this list Daniélou will also include – in connexion with the ecclesial ‘temple’– a mystical condition of the polyvalent divine indwelling. This is the temple of God in the hearts of redeemed human beings, justified and sanctified by the blood of the Lamb.Footnote ⁴⁰

Two key presuppositions help explain Daniélou's presentation of the God-world relationship in the various modes of its realisation. The first concerns what he liked to call correspondances, ‘correspondences’. In symbolic thinking, by a poetic grasp of the real, certain affinities declare themselves for the purpose of articulating the sacred. Granted Daniélou's literary sensitivity, one can detect here an influence from the Symbolist aesthetic influential among late nineteenth and early twentieth century French poets. ‘The only universe where I can breathe is the sort where I can cross from one level to another. It is a universe of correspondences.’Footnote ⁴¹

But how was that cosmic aesthetic set to use theologically? At one level, these correspondences concern the harmony which governs the inter-relations of the economy of creation with that of salvation. Some features of the cosmos, constitute natural epiphanies which provide a ‘vocabulary’– both ontic and, through the mediation of human interpreters, linguistic – for the saving events of the divine redemptive plan. Obvious examples are the meteoreological phenomena associated with the Sinai revelation in the book of Exodus where a storm expresses the concentrated intensity of God's existence, or, in the same book, the vagaries of the flood-waters at the Red Sea which entail death by drowning for oppressors, a way of escape for victims. At another level, these ‘correspondences’ concern the inter-relations of events within the divine plan to secure creation definitively through redeeming it in Jesus Christ and by his Spirit. That can be so because the same Saviour God – gradually revealed as Trinity – is at work at all the stages of the economy, in both Old and New Testaments. As a close student of Jewish Christianity it was the latter which especially concerned Daniélou though, to be sure, the principles of biblical typology are common to writers in the non-Semitic traditions of Greek East and Latin West as well.

Daniélou was convinced that the typological exegesis of Scripture was no mere patristic (and mediaeval) curiosity, which subsequently, with the advent of the historical-critical method, the Church, heaving a sigh of relief, could lay aside. On the contrary: whatever gains the historical-critical method might bring, the Church's fundamental way of reading the Scriptures must remain that of the Fathers. Only the typological method allows the unity of the Testaments to be concretely affirmed: this Daniélou would seek to show in his study of that subject, Sacramentum futuri.Footnote ⁴² Only that same method can validate the use of Scripture in the traditional Liturgies: this was the burden of his Bible et Liturgie,Footnote ⁴³ a work so appreciated by the Eastern Orthodox as to be translated into modern Greek.Footnote ⁴⁴ Only an openness to typology, again, enables twentieth scholars, and a wider public, to rediscover the earliest ‘reception’ of the Gospel which took place in the world of early Jewish Christianity, long lost to consciousness in the Great Church but thanks to the energy of researchers and sometimes their good luck, now available again through the meticulous re-composition of a jigsaw. Thus the theology of highly condensed symbols – the palm and the crown, living water, Elijah's chariot, the star of Jacob and the like – he explored in Les Symboles chrétiens primitifs. Footnote ⁴⁵ Only typology – this was his conviction – allows Scripture to interpret Scripture through the hermeneutical complementarity of distinct but ‘corresponding’ events and texts.Footnote ⁴⁶ Where typology is suppressed, the art of the Church ceases to be legible, and the capacity to write theology in the spirit of the Fathers withers away. From his standpoint, Daniélou can pay the Fathers no greater compliment than when he writes, ‘They had an extraordinary perception of the sacred symphony’.Footnote ⁴⁷

The second key presupposition which throws light on Daniélou's rich account of divine modes of presence in the world does not concern this organic inter-relating of distinguishable economies (creation and salvation) or differing phases of saving time (whether the time of ‘holy pagans’,Footnote ⁴⁸ or the times of the Old Covenant and the New) by the invocation of such instructive ‘correspondences’. The second key presupposition entails a contrasting insistence on maintaining due distinctions where levels of reality and manners of investigation are concerned. This is vital for his theological method: ‘the principle of method is the distinction of orders.’Footnote ⁴⁹ The irreducibility of orders one to another is as important as the correspondences to be found between them – and is, moreover, what makes those correspondences so interesting and potentially fruitful for both intelligence and life.

Daniélou was very taken by the seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal's plural ‘orders’ of the real and of appropriate enquiry therein. In the Pensées, Pascal had applied to physical, rational and cordial understanding – senses, reason, heart – a notion he had earlier worked out in his mathematical writings. In mathematics, lines, squares and cubes cannot be added together, since – so Pascal explained – they belong to different orders.Footnote ⁵⁰ Pascal himself made different applications of the orders doctrine.Footnote ⁵¹ Similarly, Daniélou's concern with multi-dimensionality is constant in emphasis but flexible in application. The scheme Daniélou most characteristically offers is a triple one which takes the form: cosmos, interiority, revelation – each irreducible and with approaches suited to itself.Footnote ⁵²

The scientific exploration of the cosmos discloses the real – stupendously so – in the organisation of matter. Art, literature and philosophy, by contrast, show us the ‘inner man’– another world of inexhaustible richness, though sadly impoverished by those who measure the human through quantitative analysis. And finally there is revelation: the order of ‘charity and prophecy, the universe of the divine dimension of man and history as that is in its essence revealed in Christ’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Here too there are riches beyond words. In his philosophical essay collection Scandaleuse Vérité Daniélou compares these three orders to Teilhard's biosphere, noosphere and Christosphere, while insisting – presumably against Teilhard – that there is ‘no passing from one to another of these’, since each is an ‘irreducible universe’.Footnote ⁵⁵ No process of evolution joins them, but rather passages to different planes. On the level of the noosphere, personalist humanism can be as much a prison as is materialism on the level of the biosphere. Here too man must go beyond himself to discover the divine Spirit who not only energises one's existence in creation but raises it above itself in salvation and theosis.

The Pascalian doctrine of the multiple orders of the real, and their cognitive instruments, enabled Daniélou to distinguish between various strata in the realm of being. So far as the interpretation of the Bible is concerned, the natural-scientific, historical-humane, and revelatory-salvific orders and the intellectual disciplines which appropriate these are simply not identical. Theologically synthetic thinking can respect natural scientific considerations and humane historiography as aids in its enquiry, but it need not be confined to their methods. Nor indeed should it, since the disclosure of the real represented by the cosmic and human orders can and does serve revelation as Hilfsmittel: auxiliaries to the unique self-disclosure of the Uncreated. Daniélou found this principle of the distinction of orders helpful more widely in the making of Catholic theology. It served above all to differentiate the various modes of divine presence to human understanding. And that interest in the modalities of God's presence to humanity, as Le signe du Temple and all Daniélou's subsequent writing bears witness, constitutes the heart of his theological sensibility and thought.

Applying the ‘method’: Daniélou on the mystery of God in Jesus Christ

How did Daniélou's theological vision and method lead him to treat the central theological themes? The lode-star of Christian theology is the mystery of God in Jesus Christ as revealed in the history of salvation. Daniélou's awareness of the wider world of human religion in its cosmic setting in creation prevented him from treating this great subject in a spirit of revelational positivism. Yet at the same time, he insisted that only a theology of history can do full justice to a revelation expressed in saving events.

Daniélou's de Deo, entitled Dieu et nous, proposes three basic ways of knowing God: via ‘the religions’, via philosophy and via faith – though to do justice to the last of these he finds he must add a trio of supplementary essays, which take as their subject the different manners in which, for faith, God makes himself known in Christ, in the Church Christ founded, and in the mystical witnesses to Christian living. Among these various modalities Daniélou is concerned to establish order: to show how religions and philosophies, Old and New Testaments, theology and mysticism, have a proper relation to the knowledge of God and so to each other.Footnote ⁵⁶

On the religions: he treats a general disclosure of God through creation and human conscience as furnishing the valid elements in the world-religions beyond Israel and the Church. Though in the post-lapsarian situation cosmic religion tends to be vitiated by three profound errors – polytheism, pantheism, and dualism – the Letter to the Romans (1: 20) expects a genuine knowledge of God to issue from what Daniélou terms, with the Rumanian anthropologist of religion Mircea Eliade, ‘hierophanies’ in the natural order.Footnote ⁵⁷ Cosmic religions possess ‘theologies’ in the form of myths, most of which are cosmogonic in object: they bear on the primal origin of all the essential realities of life, and of the world as a whole. Their natural mysticism may be considered the interior manifestation of cosmic process. The symbolism in which they convey their sense of the sacred can serve the historic revelation, but the grave misconceptions about the God-world relation into which paganism falls shows the need for a new divine initiative in saving history.

Daniélou detected a similar ambivalence in philosophy. Rational argument about God's existence and nature is necessary: without it, man falls prey to obscurantism and superstition. But both Gregory of Nyssa in the East and Thomas Aquinas in the West insist on the limitations of a purely rational approach to the mystery of God: philosophy can affirm God's existence but it transgresses its own limits if it claims a complete grasp of the intelligibility of his being.Footnote ⁵⁸ Appeal to analogy-thinking is in place here – but it does not suppress the character of this issue as a ‘limit-problem’. Such ‘problems’ (other examples of this kind of aporia are freedom, and suffering) compel man toward conversion, since they engage his existence. Daniélou stresses the importance of a philosophical opening towards the idea of divine personality, and thus communicativity and self-giving in God. Without that, there can be no existential encounter such as biblical revelation posits.

The God of faith is the same God yet known now not as a transcendent principle behind the world but as actively involved in it through unique interventions in its course the sum-total of which constitutes a ‘plan’: the design of ‘sacred history’, the ‘history of salvation’. Insofar as these events are, on their empirical side, humanly chronicled, they can be investigated by the historical method. But their divine character is known only through revelation to intelligence in its supernaturally elevated prophetic mode, as the mind rests on the self-evidence – Daniélou emphasises the rock-like nature of this, signalled by the Hebrew term for truth, emeth – of the Word of God. In a series of covenants – Daniélou accepts from the Protestant exegete Walter Eichrodt the importance of this concept for the Old (and indeed the New) Testament,Footnote ⁵⁹ but emphasises, with the Catholic doctors and mystics, its nuptial quality – that Word discloses not only what is, the divine being, but also what shall be, the future realisation of the promises of God to his beloved corporate human partner. The Word received in faith invites human persons to draw near to the sovereign reality which is God's holiness, at once his beauty and his ethical demandingness.

This divine self-revelation climaxes in Jesus Christ as the disclosure of God the Holy Trinity. Daniélou takes as axiomatic a principle proposed by St Gregory Nazianzen in his fifth Theological Oration: revelation of the Persons is by stages. In the Old Testament, revelation is primarily of the Father: appropriately, since the literature of Israel deals chiefly with origination (the origin of creation, of election, of mission). That is so even if there is also in its pages a ‘dark’ disclosure of the Word and the Spirit who theophanise mysteriously in the events of creation and salvation. In that manner – here it is Irenaeus of Lyons who is key for Daniélou – the way is prepared by mutual ‘accommodation’ of God and man as they ‘get used to’ one another, for the manifestation of the Son in the New Testament and of the Spirit as that Testament gives way to the time of the Church.

In the remainder of Dieu et nous Daniélou asks how, in the Church, which is the fruit of the Ascension, harvested at Pentecost, the theologian and, equally or more importantly, the ordinary believer – can be aware of this, the sole veridical, interpretation of the biblical data. His answer is: through the Church's Tradition which was responsible for the written deposit of the biblical witness in the first place. And here discerning the truth expressed in the documents is one thing; articulating it in a variety of idioms is another. Thus Daniélou justifies his writing a history of Christian doctrine in its Semitic, Hellenic and Latin phases – to which he hopes to see added at some future date of Catholicism's story an Indian, and a Chinese. With his debt to such mystical theologians as Gregory of Nyssa, he does not hold, however, that Christian God-talk is limited to learned forms of retrieval of a past revelation. By sheer faith, beyond all concepts, the individual soul can seize the mysterious divine reality through the communication God makes of himself hic et nunc in the new creation of baptismal grace, which is a sharing in the triune life on the basis of the death and Resurrection of Christ. Here, at the true heart of the order of charity, Trinitarianism confirms what high points in natural experience may lead us to suspect:

If Daniélou's Christology in Dieu et nous turns out really to be a Triadology, that is because he planned to write a more explicit and ample De Christo in the form of a companion volume, which indeed appeared in 1961 as Approches du Christ. The titles of the English translations – God and Us, Christ and Us – neatly bring out the binary character of the overall result.

In Approches du Christ, Daniélou affirms the real, but limited, value of the historical-critical approach to Jesus of Nazareth. He places it at the head of his account, arguing ingeniously that, since the entry of the Word into the empirical order by birth as Jesus in a Palestinian-Jewish environment at the time of the Roman principate was also the beginning of his salvific manifestation, mentioning first the order of investigative historical knowing suits likewise the order – in the temporal rather than epistemological (and ultimately ontological) sense of the word ‘order’– of the saving events. For Daniélou, as for Pascal, we cannot appropriately grasp the greatness of Jesus Christ unless we are introduced into the order of charity by the spirit of prophecy: namely, though an understanding of the sacred history in the light of the Holy Spirit who is its Author.

Nonetheless our account can begin more modestly. In the Gospels, just as the Infancy Narratives use Jewish literary techniques to pattern their materials by reference to Old Testament examples,Footnote ⁶¹ so the rest of the text stylises, possibly through liturgical use,Footnote ⁶² the common tradition of the primitive community going back to the apostles. ‘The Gospels are the outward expression of what for the apostles Jesus was’.Footnote ⁶³ This is why they are necessarily testimony and not dispassionate biography. In entering his historical milieu in all its particularity, Jesus also overflowed it, surpassing the limits of his period and country in such a way as to fulfil the image of God in man. Ecce homo! People of every sort identify with him and his message. Modern ideologies of freedom and the person are, remarks Daniélou in a fashion that looks ahead to the late twentieth century Anglo-Saxon movement ‘Radical Orthodoxy’, merely ‘secularized “left-overs”’ of the Sermon on the Mount.Footnote ⁶⁴

The question ultimately raised by Jesus's personality and behaviour is whether his transcendence of his time and place does not also indicate, over and above such universal human appeal, a unique identification with the creative Word, the archetypal Image of God. Jesus's re-working of the Torah, including the Sabbath, which for Jews, was inscribed in the very structure of creation,Footnote ⁶⁵ his assumption of the divine prerogative of forgiveness, his self-identification with the Temple, the place of the Shekinah, his Lordship over death as shown in the raising of Lazarus, and his emphasis on a unique I – different from the modes of ‘normal’ prophetic utterance and coming to its climax in the ‘I Am’ sayings of St John's Gospel: all these amount convergently to a claim to divinity which can only be explained by saying he was mad, bad, or God.Footnote ⁶⁶

In retrospect, the Pauline literature – emphasised by Daniélou partly because he treats Johannine thought as an echo of the ipsissima vox of Jesus himself and not as theological reflection – finds in the mission, the sacrificial death and the Resurrection of Jesus the Word the final irrevocable fulfilment of the divine promises. As the One ‘to whom the world belongs [Christ] re-takes possession of it … in such a way as to establish the world in its final condition, thus fulfilling the divine design’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In a theology of the mysteries of the life of Christ indebted to the Fathers and the Liturgy, the Incarnation and Baptism of the Lord are essential to this, as are his Passion, death, and descent into Hell. Above all, it is the Resurrection, the consummation of the Incarnation, the outcome of the Cross – it means the ending of man's slavery to death and sin, and the communication to him of an endless share in divine life – that is the central moment of human history.Footnote ⁶⁸ Here there can be absolutely no comparison with other religious founders or thinkers, a claim the Pascalian distinction of orders helps to articulate. Daniélou contrasts the ‘order of wisdom’, to which, say, Gautama and Socrates, belong, with the ‘order of holiness’ where Christ is situated. He ‘is not primarily a great religious personality, He is primarily an act of God among men’.Footnote ⁶⁹

The events in which that divine act was manifested are not only world-changing. They are also world-fulfilling. Thus the Ascension, towards which the Resurrection leads, is the climax of cosmic process: ‘not only does the glorified Christ become the Head of the Church which is his Body, but he becomes the Lord of all creation’.Footnote ⁷⁰ There can be – here we have Daniélou's eschatological emphasis –‘nothing beyond’ this. This is, after all, the new and eternal Covenant. To these events, and to this goal, the Old Testament points forward by means of its ‘prophecies and types’. Within the specific order of the revelation to Israel, something, however, could not be foreseen. It was not to be predicted that the fulfilment of the expected divine act of deliverance and consummation, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the coming of a human Messiah to be its instrument, would coincide. Jesus Christ is God now turned towards man, and man now turned towards God, and these two movements are one.

In post-Resurrection time the contents and power of these events are unfolded by the development of the Conciliar dogmas, which for Daniélou have at their heart the reconciliation of two freedoms, God's and man's, in the person of the incarnate Word; by the Church's preaching; by her celebration of the sacramental mysteries, and by her mission which Daniélou portrays in studiedly unfashionable terms: it is first and foremost a mandate to make known the message of salvation, in view of the Judgment to come. More gently, the work of the Word in history is also continued through the progress of individuals in spiritual life with Christ as their ‘interior Master’. That is a reminiscence of the writings of St Augustine, though Daniélou draws into his account of Christ in the life of the soul Greeks – Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa, mediaeval Latins – Bernard and Tauler, Counter-Reformation saints – Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola, and to represent the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jean-Marie Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, and Abbot Columba Marmion who a quarter of a century after Daniélou's death would be declared ‘blessed’ by Pope John Paul II.Footnote ⁷¹

In their richness, the post-Paschal unfoldings in Christ and Us suggest how all time is now the ‘deployment of [Christ's] spaces, espaces, until the Church, which is his body, has attained his plenitude’.Footnote ⁷² No ‘revolution’– watchword of marxisant Christianity in France before as well as after the Second Vatican Council – can compare with this. What shows Catholic ‘progressivism’ to be false is that, with Christ, the Eschaton has already begun.Footnote ⁷³