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Diaphany of the Divine Milieu or the Epiphany of Divine Glory? – The Revelation of the Natural World in Teilhard de Chardin and Hans Urs von Balthasar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Is the world the site of diaphany where one encounters the ‘transparency of God in the universe’ in a Teilhardian fashion, or should one give credit to von Balthasar's insistence that the cosmos can never serve as the final meaning of revelation since divine revelation is best conceived as God's unsurpassable work of art, the epiphany of divine glory over against the cosmos and human history? This paper seeks to explore the contours of two different conceptions of the natural world as God's creation and as the site of revelation. While, in passing remarks throughout his treatment of the form of divine glory, von Balthasar is repeatedly dismissive of the Teilhardian vision, he seems to overlook entirely the real significance of the Teilhardian endeavour, which is directed towards seeing a different and yet essentially similar form, that of the Christiform cosmos. Far from representing a kind of naive ‘new naturalism’ (as von Balthasar contends), Teilhard de Chardin's theology ultimately gets very near the same via tertia heralded by his Swiss confrère.
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References
1 See the entire poem translated by Peter Zollman in Dávidházi, Péter, Ferenc, Gyözö, Kúnos, László, Várady, Szabolcs, Szirtes, George (eds.), The Lost Rider: A bilingual anthology: The Corvina Book of Hungarian Verse (Budapest: Corvina, 1997), pp. 166–169Google Scholar.
2 On several occasions Balthasar has claimed that doing theology for him is not an essential activity. See for example his confession in Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Még egy évtized’ [Noch ein Jahrzehnt] in Balthasar, Hans Urs von, Számvetés (Budapest: Sík Sándor kiadó, 2004), pp. 79–81Google Scholar; translation of the German edition Balthasar, Hans Urs von, Zu seinem Werk (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 2000)Google Scholar. On Teilhard's stance see Lubac, Henri de, The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (London, New York: Desclee, 1967), p. 18Google Scholar, and the entire chapter entitled ‘The Essential Core’, pp. 11–19.
3 In the epilogue to his trilogy, on giving an overview of his overall theological project, Balthasar likens his theological edifice to a cathedral. See Balthasar, Hans Urs von, Epilogue (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004)Google Scholar.
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8 See ‘The Cosmological Method’ in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone, pp. 11–24.
9 See Balthasar's account of the ancient Greek cosmic view in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. IV.: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), pp. 21–24. Another formulation of the same idea: “[…] in Antiquity God and man met one another in the mediating concept of the (macro-) cosmos–in which God expresses himself and of which man is a small, all-embracing instance–Christianity for more than a millennium became cosmology”. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. IV., p. 319.
10 See ‘The Anthropological Method’ in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone, pp. 25–42.
11 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone, p. 55.
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17 The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. IV.: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, p. 320.
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19 ‘Soloviev’ in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. III.: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, pp. 287–288.
20 “If Christianity, failing to preserve a theology of glory, does not itself wish to fall victim to the new naturalism (of which there are terrible signs in the triumph of Teilhard de Chardin), then it must make Heidegger's inheritance its own […]” The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. V.: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, p. 450.
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24 The English translation keeps the foreign-sounding word milieu because no English equivalent can render the twofold meaning of the French word as both environment (setting etc.) and centre.
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27 The Divine Milieu, p. 130.
28 The Divine Milieu, p. 131.
29 As David Grumett has observed, Teilhard's early dictionary entry on ‘L'Homme’, written during the years spent in the theologate in Hastings, already contains a key element of his evolutionary theory: “…evolution is not simply an outcome of the play of immanent natural processes within the world, as a purely scientific account might maintain, but is given to the world from outside in an act of completion, transformation, and revelation”. Grumett, David, ‘Teilhard at Ore Place, Hastings, 1908–1912’ New Blackfriars 90 (2009), p. 695CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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