Does the natural world matter for theology? Should one consider the acute sense of fascinating beauty it apparently creates in the spectator to be a figment of a fevered poetic imagination which has nothing to do with serious theological talk on the revelatory power of the Incarnation and the Cross? Or more accurately, is the question of the mysterious meaning conveyed by the universe only preliminary to proper theological reflection, a kind of first step and a ‘natural’ and universal starting point that one necessarily leaves behind on approaching the specifically Christian content of revelation? Does the beauty of the natural world fade away when compared to the magnificence of supreme human works of art? What is a better paradigm to account for the unique otherness of God's revelation: the Teilhardian paradigm of an evolving cosmos animated from within and directed from without by God's loving attraction; or the Balthasarian one of the cultural environment of human history where God, like a divine artist, freely and in no way coercively shapes the form of revelation? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Hans Urs von Balthasar propose two–at first sight diametrically opposing–visions of how one's awareness of the universe (and the natural world as part of it) determines the way one seeks God. While Teilhard speaks in terms of the transparency of God in the universe, Balthasar keenly distinguishes the site of his theological aesthetics from a cosmological framework and portrays God's epiphany as principally taking place within the cultural setting of human history. However, one may wonder whether Teilhard's ‘diaphany of the divine milieu’ in the universe (the way he coins God's manifestation through the cosmos) is completely antithetical to Balthasar's famous key idea of the ‘epiphany of divine glory’, which takes place as a fundamentally ‘aesthetic’ event within human culture? Does the natural world have no serious role to play in a culturally-centred vision of revelation? Conversely, is culture ultimately insignificant for a cosmos-centred account of the specifically Christian message? While both thinkers claim to do phenomenology in the broad sense, that is they set out to teach readers how to perceive God in the world with new and watchful eyes, what they actually see are two different aspects of the same reality and, on a closer look, their respective visions are complementary rather than antithetical.
The differences in their perspectives are obvious: Balthasar is enchanted almost exclusively by culture and cultural creativity, whereas Teilhard is primarily fascinated by the wonderful workings of a creative-evolutive process in the natural world. The respective projects of these two twentieth-century Jesuit confrères are the products of two widely different mindsets: one of a man of letters and a literary critic at heart, the other of a natural scientist and a strange kind of mystic poet at the same time. However, beyond the clear differences, one also notices telling similarities even on a first approach. Neither is a professional theologian and both regard their theologising as but the felicitous side-effect of more important (and more practical) projects: in Balthasar's case, the foundation and spiritual direction of a religious lay community intended for the furthering of Church renewal in our time; and in Teilhard's case, the scientific work of a palaeontologist who is concerned with problems surrounding the origins of life and the human race. And while Balthasar somewhat nonchalantly claims that his theological writing comes second to his real job of serving his cherished Johannesgemeinschaft and that his life would be fully complete were he ever compelled to stop doing theology (a strange claim if one considers his enormous theological output!), Teilhard is more realistic in admitting a pressing need to think over the theological consequences of his scientific findings as a deeply devoted Christian scientist, even if he never considers the outcome as theology in the strict technical sense of the word. He would rather classify his theological essays as spiritual writings which, in the words of Henri de Lubac, author of a perceptive study of Teilhard's religious thought, are “more concerned to define an interior attitude than to lay bare the dogmatic foundations”.Footnote 2
Here we touch upon an important point since clearly in comparing Balthasar's and Teilhard's works one is not comparing like with like. In his great trilogy and throughout his other writings Balthasar is deeply concerned precisely with the job of laying bare the dogmatic foundations of faith and working out a new edifice of fundamental and dogmatic theology. Teilhard's thought, on the other hand, is less systematic and has a more modest aim, namely, to develop a new way of seeing God in the universe without, however, intending to touch the dogmatic framework in which the traditional idea of God's presence in the created world is embedded. It is on these grounds that de Lubac considers Teilhard a mystic rather than a theologian or a philosopher since what Teilhard seeks is not the dogmatic foundations for his theory of universal evolution, but the spiritual interiorisation in faith of what appears to him as an afterthought arising from a scientific study of the universe. It is as if he were carrying out an in-depth interior meditation in the light of the traditional dogmas of Creation and the Incarnation and the Pauline idea of the cosmic Christ without wanting to reorganise the inner cohesion of these dogmas, unlike Balthasar who sets out to construct a magnificent new cathedral from old stones carved by the traditional masters of theology.Footnote 3
With respect to their attitudes to the theological tradition, and this is our second point of comparison, neither Balthasar nor Teilhard are revolutionaries. As we shall see, both can be viewed as adhering to the mainline tradition of the Church and working faithfully with the givens of that tradition. The novelty of their respective visions does not lie in a haste to overthrow traditional doctrine; both seek to clear the ground for a new spirituality and a new theological style strictly within the confines set by authoritative voices of the theological tradition and faithful to the interpretative force of Scripture. Both embrace wholeheartedly the distinctive Ignatian spirituality of the Jesuit order. The one single difference one may note is their contrasting orientations: Balthasar's interest is mainly in the cultural historical achievements of the past and so for the most part he tries to draw trajectories of the intriguing historical development of various theological ideas; Teilhard, by contrast, turns primarily towards the eschatological future of the universe in God – despite his scientific stance which necessarily orientates him towards the past – and openly admits that the past has no real appeal for him in this respect.
However, despite the obvious affinities in their attitudes towards professional theology and the theological tradition, their differences seem to overshadow the likenesses. This is at least what emerges from Balthasar's repeated passing remarks and more discursive passages on Teilhard de Chardin's theological project. Balthasar stands deeply perplexed about the scientist's endeavour to see God first and foremost in the evolutive process of the universe. He suspects his older confrère of endorsing a certain evolutionist naturalism and a dangerous theological immanentism that ultimately seem to level the difference between God and the world and may lead to the reduction of the wholly Other to a function of the cosmos, threatening eventually an insidious pantheism. Can we ever set these two theologies in a constructive dialogue with one another?
In this essay I shall try to investigate hidden points of contacts between the two differing visions in an effort to seek an answer to the question of the significance of the natural world for theological inquiry. The two key texts I shall take as a basis of comparison are Balthasar's programmatic essay Love Alone (Glaubhaft ist nur Liebe, 1963) (written as a methodological accompaniment to his theological aesthetics The Glory of the Lord, 1961–65) and Teilhard's key theological text, which he also considers as the unchanging basis of his later thought, The Divine Milieu (Le Milieu Divin, written in 1926–27 and published posthumously in 1957).Footnote 4 No matter how different they may look on the surface, their deeper concerns show considerable similarities at the level of their inherent phenomenology. Naturally, one needs to consider these two key texts in the light of the broader projects of the two thinkers and one must also be attentive to the one-way communication between the two theological worlds, namely, Balthasar's own distinctive interpretation of Teilhard's– to his mind– radically different vision.
1 Balthasar's ‘Third’ Way – Culture Without Nature?
In retrospect, Balthasar defined the aim of Love Alone as being to synthesise earlier attempts to outline the proper framework and content of theology which for him lies in the right manner of perceiving God's revelation as the epiphany of divine glory in the world.Footnote 5 What is at stake is the proper perception of the phenomenon of revelation and its careful distinction from the rest of phenomena visible in the world. As a phenomenologist of Christian revelation, Balthasar sets out to teach his readers how to see God as the wholly Other, that is, the source of unfathomable and freely imparted love, whose appearance occurs as an event of absolute gratuitousness and binding necessity at the same time, and who also appears in a manner that transcends and infinitely supersedes human categories derived from a knowledge of the cosmos or the nature of the human being. Obviously, what Balthasar is doing in this programmatic essay is paving the way for the ‘third way’ of his specifically theological aesthetics where the perception of God's beautiful love marks out the only practicable path over against the cosmological and the anthropological ways which are seen as dead ends, or at least, tiresome deviations. In this vision, between the ‘Scylla of extrinsicism’ (the cosmological way) and the ‘Charybdis of immanentism’ (the anthropological way) there is but one arduous path leading to the heights where God can be truly perceived: the peak of aesthetically sensitive perception which alone enables one to sense and make sense of the ‘total otherness of the appearance of the love of God’, in other words, ‘the central phenomenon of revelation’ which is nothing else but the manifestation of divine love’. Balthasar holds that both other ways–the cosmic and the anthropological–are methodologically mistaken because neither a framework offered by the world, nor one provided by the human person may be an adequate means for grasping what is truly unique in Christian revelation: “the framework of God's message to man in Christ cannot be tied to the world in general, nor to man in particular […] It is an act of God on man […] credible only as love”.Footnote 6
In what, then, does the originality of the third (aesthetic) way of love consist and why do the two other ways (of recognising God by way of the cosmos or by way of an understanding of the mystery of the human being) prove ultimately insufficient according to Balthasar? What is the special worth of the theological-aesthetic framework which the other two methods are seen to lack? I suggest that Balthasar's ultimate dismissal of what he terms ‘the cosmic’ and the ‘anthropological reduction’ is the direct outcome of his understanding of revelation in terms of love. In other words, an implicit threefold conception of love can be detected as governing his entire discussion of the three ways and it is such an underlying conception that makes him portray cosmological approaches to revelation as slightly inferior even to anthropological standpoints. One might interpret Balthasar's underlying logic in the following manner. His central insight that revelation may only be adequately perceived and understood as love is coupled with the equally central idea that love is analogous to beauty in the sense that it becomes visible both under the same circumstances and showing the same characteristics as beauty. Love, like beauty in nature or art is disinterested and strikes one with the ‘freedom of its gratuitousness’. Love and beauty both appear like a miracle, with overpowering force and without any human constraint. The experience cannot be mastered by the person having it. Therefore, neither love nor beauty is a mere human product and so neither of them can be reduced to the level of pure need or may be explained away into some ‘truth’ that could replace it. Although he also speaks about the beauty of nature, Balthasar seems to find the realm of interpersonal relationships and culture much more illuminating with respect to a description of the workings of the aesthetic sphere. He prefers to liken the gratuitous appearance of beauty and love to the encounter with the other person as irreducibly other where love and beauty are experienced as coming ‘from outside’ and are not mere functions of the experiencing subject. Yet, in his view, even this personalistic-anthropological level of interpretation must be left behind and the real ‘aesthetic sphere’ of divine revelation has to be sought where the single hermeneutic framework is given by God's word which shows itself and interprets itself at the same time as love. Balthasar insists that between the human being and God there is no common language unless God takes the initiative to speak. However, divine speech would be incomprehensible if it did not provide its own interpretation, and in words that express the pivotal elements of his vision, Balthasar says the inner logic of Christian revelation entails that “the divine Logos descends to manifest and interpret himself as love, as agape, and therein as the Glory”.Footnote 7 The third way of glory and love, moving within the aesthetic sphere of faith, then sheds new light on the human love of interpersonal relationships and the subhuman natural roots of love in the cosmos. To the threefold distinction of the natural, the interpersonal and the divine correspond three levels of love in Balthasar's scheme and the threefold distinction he implicitly works with is obviously heir to a long tradition that marks off three different aspects of love: the cosmic forces of eros, interpersonal love and divine agape. On a closer look, Love Alone can be seen as portraying the three ways of revelation, the cosmological method, the anthropological reduction and the third way of love along the lines of this implicit threefold division.
If the third way is the only one well-equipped for the perception of the fullness of divine love and the reception of a true vision of divine glory, what is missing from the two other approaches, and in particular from the cosmological way to which, as we shall see, Balthasar squarely assigns Teilhard's project? In Balthasar's panoramic overview of the evolution of the cosmological method over long centuries of Christian reflection, this method originates in the ancient idea of God as the meaningful centre and fulfilment of an already existing yet fragmented understanding of the universe.Footnote 8 It traditionally relies on classical ancient cosmologies where the cosmos is not godless, but is ‘suffused with the divine’; what it lacks, therefore, is nothing less than a clearer logos, the true Logos in fact, who puts the fragmented intuitions concerning the universe in a new and definitively illuminating light. This is what Balthasar calls the ‘Christian World-Logos view’, or in other terms, reason's way of revelation in a world where theology and philosophy do not clearly separate and where a philosophical view of the universe may seamlessly be completed in the theological mode of Christian cosmological-Christological reflection. This is a time when the world is interpreted as the epiphany of the divine to the human being and later the ‘ordering’ of the cosmos epitomises for man the divine epiphany.Footnote 9 With the gradual separation of philosophical and theological visions of the universe, the inner balance of the cosmological approach is eventually lost, and a completely godless universe and a purely ‘natural’ sphere of cosmic processes are set against the ‘supernatural’ sphere of revelation. At the same time, the framework in which revelation becomes meaningful is shifted from the universe to man; the outlines of a modern existential-anthropological approach start to emerge on the basis of classical ideas of man as microcosm and mediator between the world and God. The locus of the perception of divine glory is removed from the cosmos and is transposed to the human being and later to the existential level of interpersonal relations where the model of communication between loving human subjects proves illuminating for a renewed understanding of the complete otherness of revelation and God's loving action for humans’ sake. In a nutshell, and in very rough terms, this is Balthasar's narrative of the evolution of the two traditional and yet, in his view, unsatisfactory ways of revelation.Footnote 10
In my view, implicit in Balthasar's narrative is the tacit assumption that within the framework of the cosmological approach, love may be understood exclusively in cosmic terms and is consequently seen as comprising the natural forces of classical eros within creation; it is equated with the ancient conception of a natural law of fundamental attraction of like to like within the universe. Love conceived as a cosmic force of attraction and universal cohesion, then, necessarily lacks the aesthetic element that alone would account for the missing dimension of divine agape. A conception of love as a universal law of the cosmos is one-sided since it is unable to account for the ultimate freedom and gratuitness of love. Divine love is obviously more than an inbuilt cosmic process and it cannot be portrayed exclusively in mechanical terms; it is a free and unforeseen gift which occurs much like the surplus of surprising beauty that cannot be tied down by cosmic laws. And although he allows for the occurrence of occasional expressions of wonder about the beauty of nature as an aesthetic element, nonetheless Balthasar seems to assume that the admiration of natural beauty is not an essential component within the cosmological method. Nature as a source of radiant beauty and as a pointer to unfathomable divine love does not form a central insight in his portrayal of the followers of the cosmological way.
If the cosmological method is taken to task for lacking the aesthetic element (of gift and beauty), the anthropological method in turn is characterised as in need of a hermeneutic element, one that would enable it to interpret the human phenomenon of love in the light of divine agape. Human love, in Balthasar's words, when “regarded as created only, is a strange hieroglyph: grammatically speaking, it is an inchoative which cannot translate itself adequately into an indicative”.Footnote 11 The aesthetic element of wonder and surprising otherness inherent in the human experience of interpersonal love therefore requires the divine supplement of interpretation because it cannot deliver the full phenomenon of free and gratuitous unfathomable love on its own. In sum, while the cosmological reduction almost entirely lacks the aesthetic aspect, the anthropological way lacks the hermeneutic key to the aesthetic component and this is what Balthasar's third way is meant to complement and phenomenalise: the divine hermeneutic of the human aesthetic perception of love. On the whole, there is little space left for nature in Balthasar's account, since his paradigm for the phenomenon of revelation is primarily culture, art, the human sphere of relationships and linguistic communication. For him, to see the real form of revelation is to interpret it as a divine work of art since “[t]he quality of being simultaneously in motion and definitively fixed of a limited form […] gives the biblical revelation the stamp of a work of art by God that can never be equalled by men”.Footnote 12
2 Balthasar's Critique of Teilhard's ‘Cosmological’ Way
No wonder, then, that Balthasar is less than enthusiastic when he tries to come to terms with what he sees as Teilhard's reductively ‘cosmological’ approach. He suspects Teilhard of being insensitive to the third way of aesthetically perceived divine revelation. For how could a mechanistic view of the universal evolution of the cosmos make sufficient space for the gratuitous and totally free aesthetic element? How could a cosmic conception of the universal law of eros account for the fullness of divine love? And how could a science-inspired framework grasp the miraculous beauty of revelation? After all is not Teilhard promoting a vision of nature without culture? Is he not collapsing the infinite distance between God and the world? Is he not doing away with the pivotal element of freedom which may only be grasped through an analogy with artistic creation? Balthasar is firmly convinced that it is only from the vantage of theological-aesthetic perception that the essence of God's divinity may be adequately glimpsed; he has absolutely no doubts about the fact that the only possible stance that does not dim the glory of God before one could even perceive it is precisely his third way, because it is the only one that does not tie the epiphany of God's glory either to the unfulfilled cosmos or to fallen man, but lets it shine in its grandeur as it truly appears.Footnote 13 He argues that the cosmological and anthropological ‘deductions’ – although clearly present as indispensable elements in traditional first-rate theological thought – function at best like a monstrance designed to accentuate and hold up “the Eucharistic heart to our view”. However, they immediately lose their significance once the one absolute centre of revelation, that is, the “scandal of the Cross is blurred in the slightest degree”.Footnote 14 The cosmological way is then a necessary and indispensable step within the theological tradition which, however, is unable to lead all the way to the full recognition of the richness of God's glory and it remains but a function of the central third way which alone is able to see the true form of revelation. Balthasar returns repeatedly to this pivotal insight which also reveals the roots of his reservations about Teilhard's project:
The heart of the revelation of God in Christ can be seen only by one who neither takes the cosmos as the final meaning of revelation […] nor takes man as the final meaning […]; the final meaning must be left ‘disinterestedly’ to the love of God as this shows itself in its devotion and self-emptying. Such a man ‘gives the glory’ for this love to God alone and understands himself and the world as a function of this love. […] Everything else that can be said about the world and man, every ‘finality’ and ‘evolution’ of the individual, the society and the cosmos as a whole on all its levels – from the level of life to the religious level – must take second place, in a subordinate position to this first principle, if it is to be understood as, in the last analysis meaningful.Footnote 15
It is on these grounds that he takes Teilhard to task for being oblivious of the first principle of ‘seeing God's love for man in terms of its purpose’, that is, ‘the proclamation of his own glory’ and he also implicitly accuses him of joining those who have lost sight of the true appearance of the beauty of such glory. Teilhard's way is thus but one of the five compromises that aim to recover the lost form of glory at the cost of false equations.Footnote 16 Teilhard, like many others (all in their own distinctive ways) even shows a tendency ‘towards the destruction of form’; his evolutionist theology is so univocal in equating God and the evolutive process that the form of Christian revelation ultimately dissolves in his cosmic vision. This is at least, what he infers from Balthasar's rather vague formulation of the Teilhardian compromise. At best, he views Teilhard's endeavour as a revival of the ancient idea of divine cosmos (theios kosmos) together with the ancient enthusiasm for it.Footnote 17 And, although he credits Teilhard, the natural scientist, with a certain ‘sensorium for the Glory of Creation’, he is quick to add that such sensibility for the beauty of the created world is just the tattered remnant of a former integral feeling for the glory of God which – with the disappearance of the real feel for the aesthetics of Revelation – has been passed on to survive in the sensibility of poets, artists and natural scientists.Footnote 18 On briefly comparing Teilhard to the Russian Orthodox philosopher Soloviev, he concludes that Soloviev's project shows intriguing similarities with Teilhard's vision on several important points, without, however, Teilhard's shortcomings and with a much stronger speculative force.Footnote 19 By and large, Teilhard's thought is portrayed as moving along a mistaken track and working entirely against the preservation of a theology of glory, and as representing a kind of ‘new naturalism’ instead which is deeply threatening in Balthasar's eyes.Footnote 20
This is at least what emerges from scattered statements throughout Balthasar's writings. The picture gets even dimmer if one looks at his evaluation of the German edition of Teilhard's The Divine Milieu in 1963, the year his own Glaubhaft ist nur Liebe appeared.Footnote 21 Although he welcomes the book as a wonderful work of spirituality, he soon voices some serious doubts concerning its methodology which he sees as affecting both Teilhard's concept of God and his concept of Christ. The gist of his argument is that since one's spirituality and one's world view cannot be separated completely, consequently Teilhard's evolutionist stance puts a clear stamp on his conception of the relation of God and the world (setting the two in conjunction rather than in a wholesome relationship of analogy) and also on his view of the cosmic Christ (making Christ the strange Omega point of universal evolution with an altogether arbitrary move). Interestingly, Balthasar does not reflect on the meaning of the pivotal concept of divine milieu and he takes no great pains to unravel the real intent of the book. Instead, his criticism reaches much further than the actual content of The Divine Milieu. Although many of his critical remarks are justified, the overall picture he gives of Teilhard's supposed evolutionism is a caricature rather than a correct account of Teilhard's key idea of universal evolution. In essence, the essay turns out to be a diatribe against technocratic society and a certain science-dominated mentality where there is no place for the gratuitous gift of culture, the freedom of art, the uniqueness of the person, the spontaneity of true interpersonal love, and where people become miserable robots who can only love because the mechanistic process of the ‘amorisation’ of the world (a phrase taken from Teilhard) determines them to do so. Balthasar stands perplexed at the idea of God's ‘diaphany’ in the world, which he sees as profoundly unbiblical, and he watches with no less concern Teilhard's construction of what he terms the Tower of Babel of evolutionist thought erected to reach God right away from below. With Balthasar's bitter attack against a rather distorted image of Teilhard, the time has come to let Teilhard lift up his own voice.
3 Teilhard's Third Way: Nature Without Culture?
Teilhard's voice is more tentative and less self-assured, more that of the visionary scientist at meditation. His discourse is often interrupted by lyrical passages of devoted prayer. In The Divine Milieu – rightly considered by Henri de Lubac as the key text to understanding the ‘full significance and orientation’ of his entire projectFootnote 22 – he sets out to outline a ‘practical attitude’, no more than a ‘way of teaching how to see’. And although he is aware that his meditation is built upon ‘the solid platform’ of ‘two thousand years of Christian experience’, he does not engage with that tradition in a direct manner, but stays within the confines of his nascent intuitions which beg for a proper articulation. As a new way of seeing, Teilhard's phenomenology is fundamentally one of nature; he is fascinated by our rootedness in the cosmos and he aims to develop a ‘Christian cosmic sense’ that perceives God primarily through the universe. His ‘third’ way does not lead between the cosmos and man like Balthasar's, but runs between God and the world in terms of the practical question whether one should love the world or God first. It is not so much a middle way or a compromise, but is rather one that integrates the two options: the Scylla of exclusive ‘communion with earth’ and the Charybdis of a closed-up ‘communion with God’ are avoided through the narrow path of ‘communion with God through Earth’.Footnote 23 In front of his inquisitive eyes, the ‘two rival stars’ of God and the universe reconcile in a new pattern (one might say new ‘form’ in a Balthasarian manner) where the world, without being changed, appears as being mysteriously and beautifully transparent to God. The central phenomenon to be seen is therefore not described in terms of divine glory but in terms of the divine ‘milieu’, understood as both a divine centre and an all-encompassing divine environment or setting, a new quality, a new dimension of the world.Footnote 24 The divine milieu, the key idea of Teilhard's vision, is a complex notion, no less difficult to grasp and no less invisible to the profane eye than God's glory. In essence, it is God's divine omnipresence within the universe. The imagery used to describe it is taken from the realm of optical perception and the natural world, unlike Balthasar's analogy of artistic form. The divine milieu ‘penetrates the world as a ray of light does a crystal’, or rather, it does not come from outside but shines up from within the very substance of existing things: it is the radiance of the centre of the universe, it is an ‘inward light’ which is not just an ephemeral ‘superficial glimmer’ or a destructive ‘violent flash’ but is the lasting and serenely ‘powerful radiance’ that comes about as the result of the ‘incandescence of the inward layers of being’. In this vision, the omnipresence of the divine is universally perceptible and active in the universe as an all-encompassing environment where the network of all created things is ‘penetrated’ and ‘moulded’ by such a mysterious divine force since ‘God reveals himself everywhere’ and is present in every corner of the world. Teilhard is well aware of the potential pantheistic overtones of his vision and he therefore rebuts the charge of pantheism by emphasising the distance between God and the universe: there is no talk here of the identification of God and the world, but on the contrary, the worth of differentiation and independent existence is stressed. With an eye for the omnipresence of the divine milieu one sees each element of the world as being most truly itself and discovers the true nature of existing things. While Teilhard does not provide one with a philosophically well-reasoned argument against pantheistic interpretations of his central insight, nevertheless he is quite clear on its fundamental orientation, the general thrust of which is the ‘phenomenological’ perception of the cosmic Christ as the ultimate centre of the universe and not the identification of the world with God. His overall concern is primarily spiritual and practical, he elaborates on the spiritual thesis that ‘God is to be sought not by rejecting created beings but through them’ and everything he says must be seen as being in the service of this one single goal. And here we touch upon the second pivotal aspect of the idea of the divine milieu.
As has become clear, the divine milieu is not simply the overall environment of God's omnipresence in the world, but is also the personal focus point, source and centre of the cosmos identified with Christ. At the centre, namely in Christ, all the elements of the universe ‘touch each other’ and everything is ultimately linked to Him. It is the Pauline and Johannine cosmic Christ who reunites and consummates all things in Himself as the unfailing and powerful source of ‘the omnipresence of Christification’: “the divine omnipresence translates itself within our universe by the network of the organising forces of the total Christ”.Footnote 25 Therefore, in perceiving the divine milieu one does not simply perceive divine omnipresence dispersed formlessly within the universe but the manifestation of Christ's personal divinity in the cosmos. Moreover, the ‘diaphany’ (transparence) of Christ/God in the divine milieu is not independent of biblical revelation but presupposes the epiphany (appearance) of the historical Jesus; it is nothing else but the transformation of this original epiphany into universal cosmic dimensions. Clearly, beyond the historical epiphany of revelation Teilhard's interest lies in the cosmic significance of Christ's redeeming work; he sets out to investigate the repercussions of the event of the Incarnation and the Cross for the entire universe, adopting a high Christological stance. In his understanding the epiphany of Jesus is but a first step towards the consummation of the process of manifestation as the diaphany of Jesus within the cosmos. Diaphany is in this sense the completion and the perfection of the first epiphany. While he sees epiphany as a ray of light that ‘strikes the surface’, he views diaphany as light that ‘penetrates’ the inner depths of the world. This has important consequences for the understanding of the totality of the Christian message: “If we may slightly alter a hallowed expression, we could say that the great mystery of Christianity is not exactly the appearance, but the transparence of God in the universe”.Footnote 26
What does one actually see and what are the conditions of the perception of God's cosmic diaphany? Just like the form of Balthasar's divine glory, the diaphany of the divine milieu does not offer anything particular to be seen unless one develops a feel or a taste for it, and unless one receives intuition as a gift which does not depend on any human effort or a strict process of human reasoning. Such a free divine gift transforms one's perception of being and makes one capable of seeing ‘the beauty, the consistency and the final unity of being’, and while the relation between the elements of the world ‘remains exactly the same’, the inward light radiating from the divine centre intensifies the ‘relief’, ‘structure’ and ‘depth’ of created things. As a consequence of such a divine gift, one becomes perceptive of “the calm and powerful radiance engendered by the synthesis of all the elements of the world in Jesus”.Footnote 27 Teilhard, just like Balthasar, insists upon the lasting nature of such a vision and on the fact that it depends neither on the will nor on the perfection of the recipient. It cannot be tied to a function of the experiencing subject since it comes as it were from outside: God alone guarantees the persistence of the divine gift of diaphany. In very Balthasarian terms, Teilhard too stresses the importance of God's sovereign action on us: “God tends, by the logic of his creative effort, to make himself sought and perceived by us”.Footnote 28 God's action, however, is not portrayed here in terms of dramatic action between Creator and creature on the theatrical stage of the world, but is pictured as God's universal transformative action on the universe which is freely attracted towards its final completion and ‘unitive transformation’ in the ‘Pleroma’ of the Christic centre. And it is here that the idea of universal evolution enters the picture of Teilhard's account of the divine milieu: cosmic evolution as ‘God's creative action within the universe’ is not to be taken as a univocal mechanical process governed by ruthless deterministic laws in a naturalistic fashion.Footnote 29 Far from being identical with the sum of scientifically posited processes, evolution is rather the central paradigm, the key analogy (much like Balthasar's idea of drama) designed to account for the dynamic reality of sovereign divine love which acts upon the universe as a ‘foundational attraction’, an ‘ascending force’ and a ‘mutual internal affinity’ in all freedom and gratuitous generosity. Balthasar is right: what one has here is the cosmic idea of eros as the universal attraction of like to like, though at the same time he is wrong to suppose that Teilhard's account therefore falls short of the interpersonal and the agapaic element of love. As de Lubac remarks, Teilhard thinks much like Thomas Aquinas who regards natural love as not simply the basis but also the analogue of charity.Footnote 30 Indeed, Teilhard makes clear that the fundamental ‘energy’ of life, the central driving force of evolution, the key process of the ‘amorisation’ of the universe is the global context which encompasses the phenomenon of interpersonal love and which is also a pointer to the reality of divine charity. It naturally follows from his cosmic framework that the human world is embedded in the universe and is determined by cosmic influences. In this vision, “[i]n each of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected”.Footnote 31 Therefore, personal love is not a superior form but an instantiation of such universal affinity which is itself personal in the final resort, originating in the personalising and ‘amorising’ divine centre in Christ. Personal love must be adapted to the universal flow of cosmic love, it must be cleansed of all egotistic stability and be made open to join the sweeping drift and latent energy of the ‘amorisation of the universe’ which comes about as a consequence of the gentle and yet not coercive attraction of God's personalised love. Such a cosmic sense of love does not exclude human freedom and the spontaneity of human creativity; culture and history are not simply ‘naturalised’. What is at stake here is the analogical relationship between nature and culture, natural love and interpersonal love, through which, and beyond all egotistic cravings, one can glimpse the magnificence of God's universal love manifested in the cosmos. There is no easy equation here of God with the natural evolutive process either, since evolution is also viewed in terms of history where free human action plays a crucial role in the actualisation and fulfilment of the dynamic growth of the divine milieu.Footnote 32
All things considered, far from destroying the unique form of divine glory, Teilhard's spiritual theology illuminates a different aspect of the same form and teaches one how to see God's manifestation in the cosmos, grounded in the epiphany of the Christ-event, as the never-failing eschatological diaphany of the glory of the divine milieu. In contrast to Balthasar, Teilhard's aim is not to distinguish the unique phenomenon of revelation from the rest of phenomena within the world, but is rather to perceive the form of revelation deep at the heart of every existing being, the totality of the natural world and human culture in their transparency to the divine centre and source. His theology is a constant reminder of the inseparable link between human culture and the cosmic network of influences and therefore it can serve as an antidote for the hubris of a too narrowly cultural conception of revelation. On second thoughts, not only does the cosmological way have a subordinate position over against the final meaning of revelation, the aesthetic way, in the final resort, likewise proves to be no more than a function of the one absolute centre: the glory of divine and always totally other love. And here we can agree with N. D. O'Donoghue who, in commenting on Balthasar's third volume of theological aesthetics, finally asks: “Is this where God's beauty dwells? Surely the answer is ‘yes’. But when one asks: does it dwell only here? the answer may be less simple. The divine beauty and glory breaks through the limits of every man-made theological aesthetics”.Footnote 33 Indeed, it appears equally as diaphany and epiphany in the natural world and in human culture as a miracle that cannot be tied to one single interpretative scheme. Teilhard's mystical prayer (a meditation on the theme of Romans 8:38) sums up masterfully the gist of an alternative stance which, however, does not lack an equally acute sense of the divine beauty and glory:
Because you ascended into heaven after having descended into hell, you have so filled the universe in every direction, Jesus, that henceforth it is blessedly impossible for us to escape you. […] Neither life […] nor death […] nor the good or evil spiritual powers […] nor the energies of matter into which you have plunged; nor the irreversible stream of duration whose rhythm and flow you control without appeal; nor the unfathomable abysses of space which are the measure of your greatness […]–none of these things will be able to separate me from your substantial love, because they are only the veil, the ‘species’, under which you take hold of me in order that I may take hold of you.Footnote 34
