The Divinisation of Activities

Teilhard diagnoses a persistent false dilemma in Christian spirituality: the sense that love of God and love of the world are in competition, that engagement with human affairs is a distraction from the spiritual life, that the saint must diminish her involvement with temporal things in order to increase her union with God. This dilemma, he argues, is based on a faulty cosmology — the assumption that matter and spirit are opposed rather than the teaching that the Word became flesh and that all things are to be recapitulated in Christ.

When a Christian acts with full intention and skill in the world — whether in science, art, farming, or politics — that action is incorporated into the growing Body of Christ, the Pleroma (the fullness of all things in God). The task is not to spiritualise by withdrawing from matter but to act in matter with the full force of one's humanity, trusting that God transforms what is offered with genuine effort. The condition is intention: work done in and for God, not merely competently performed.

This yields a spirituality Teilhard calls the mysticism of action: a mode of union with God achieved not in withdrawal from the world but in the fullest engagement with it. The contemplative and the active life are not alternatives but phases of a single movement. The soul that acts fully in the world and offers that action to God does not thereby lose interiority; rather, it discovers that the world in which it acts is itself the divine milieu — the sacred environment saturated with divine presence.

The divinisation of activities occupies Part One of The Divine Milieu (1957). Its companion doctrine — the divinisation of passivities, which addresses suffering — appears in Part Two.