Pere Teilhard de Chardin lived, with great intensity, this prime truth, constantly recalled in Scripture and Christian tradition, by the Fathers of the Church and the great scholastic theologians, no less than by the mystics. With all these, he held that God is both "further than everything and deeper than everything". His master St Ignatius Loyola, in particular, had taught him to "contemplate God as existing in every one of his creatures. He 'venerated an omni-presence', resting on and losing itself in the peace a deep intimate union." St Teresa would have been delighted to meet him on her road, to save her from the "half-baked doctors, always so ready to take exception" who would not leave her in peace, as she entered into her mystical life, to believe that God is present in all beings; Teilhard could have set her mind at rest by assuring her that God's intimate presence is not an impossibility but a solid fact. He could have told her, in the words of St Thomas Aquinas, that "God must be present in all things, and that in an intimate manner". Here, again, is what a Thomist theologian has to say, whose only concern is to state the most fully traditional teaching:
Many of the objections and difficulties we meet in connection with our relationship to God, arise from our considering God as a stranger, as someone other than ourselves. This, to put it plainly, is simply untrue. Our habitual concepts tell us only about personalities exterior to and therefore foreign or strange to our own. When we are concerned with God, we must realize that we are concerned with a being who is certainly distinct from us, but who is at the same time the reason for our own being. ... If I take myself, suppressing all my imperfections and magnifying to infinity my own poor perfections, even those most personal and peculiar to myself, the most incommunicable, then I have God. That is why theologians can say, "God is not another, he is virtually and eminently myself, he is an infinite myself, pure act." Deus est virtualiter ego ipso, as John of St Thomas puts it. It is thus that, while completely rejecting pantheism, we retain anything legitimate that may be contained in its tendencies."*
If this is indeed bold doctrine, which of the two writers expresses it the more boldly? However, St Thomas, too, was already accused of pantheism,† and for this same reason. Some contemporary critics of Teilhard's thought accuse him of a "deception", on the ground that beneath his repeated affirmations of the personality of God there lies an "unacknowledged pantheism"; without realizing it, they are continuing to bring forward last century's accusation against scholasticism in general and St Thomas in particular of an "implicit pantheism", the reason behind which was an inability to envisage any true personal monotheism except in the position of a God who is "cut off from the world". The only difference is that the earlier critics did not put forward their objection in the name of orthodox Catholicism; they maintained, on the contrary, that such a "cosmic pantheism", the fruit of all "metaphysical theology", was "essential to consistent Catholicism".‡ Their unconscious disciples might well bear that in mind.
* Pierre-Thomas Dehau, O.P., Divine intimite et Oraison, in La Vie Spirituelle, May 1942, pp. 412-13. Sec also J. J. Surin, Guide Spirituelle (ed. M. de Certeau, 1963), pp. 138-9.
† The half-truth that explains, though it does not justify, this accusation has been pointed out by M. Etienne Gilson (La Philosophie au moyen age, 1922, II, p. 144; 1925 and 1930, p. 302): "In Thomism itself there is a sort of virtual pantheism that a mere relaxation of strict doctrine would allow to come out into the open but that would thence cease to be Thomism. On the other hand in Eckhart, we find, if not a deliberate, avowed, pantheism, at any rate what is in fact, though disavowed and denied, pantheism". (In the 1944 edition, pp. 698-9, this view is less forcibly expressed).
‡ Charles Renouvier, De l'idee de Dieu (L'annee philosophique, 1897, pp. 3-15); Philosophie analytique de l'histoire, vol. 3 passim; Histoire et solution des problemes metaphysiqus, p. 166; Correspondance avec Charles Secretan, p. 11. Cf. Marcel Mery, La critique du Christianisme chez Renouvier (1952), I, pp. 308, 361, 399; II, pp. 218, 226-8, 380, 405.
Henri de Lubac - Teilhard: the man and his meaning (1965), p. 24-26
I had no idea that there was an historical Catholic/Protestant controversy connected to this, although it makes sense if the Incarnation is at the foundation of the Catholic (in this this case Thomistic) position. I included that last convoluted footnote so I could follow up and see if I can find any of the documents related to that discussion.