Philosophy of Religion

The Divine Milieu

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

1957

The Divine Milieu is Teilhard de Chardin's spiritual masterwork: a guide to Christian life written for those who feel torn between their engagement with the world and their devotion to God. Teilhard argues that this tension is false — that all genuine human activity, even the most mundane labour, participates in the building-up of the Body of Christ and the divinisation of the cosmos. The key concept is the divine milieu itself: the sacred environment in which all activity takes place, the medium in which God is present in and through all things rather than apart from them. Teilhard addresses both the activities of life (what we do) and the passivities (what is done to us, including suffering and death), showing how both can be transformed into acts of union with God. The result is a mysticism of action — a spirituality in which the world is not escaped but consecrated.