Pere Teilhard might, again, have said with St John of the Cross, "the centre proper to each of us, the centre of the soul, is God".* His own words, indeed, are better and more accurate, "The centre of centres", and, again, "Centrum super centra". Such was for him, "at the heart of the world, the heart of a God". No doubt he was more familiar with The Book of St Angela of Foligno, which he had read before 1916, since he quotes it freely in La Vie Cosmique and refers to it again in the Milieu mystique. He was later to quote it again in the Milieu Divin, probably after re-reading it in the translation his friend Pere Paul Doncoeur† brought out in 1926. "I saw", says St Angela, "that every creature was filled with him"; and again, "I see him who is being, and I see how he is the being of all creatures." He translated this classic doctrine into his own words when he spoke of the "transparency of the universe", to the eye of faith—which is for him the "milieu divin". He placed it, of course, in its proper perspective, too, when he explained that it is impossible to set God "as a focus at the summit of the Universe without, in doing so, simultaneously impregnating with his presence even the most insignificant evolutionary movement "; it is impossible, therefore, to see in this "supreme consciousness" a "higher pole of synthesis" without at the same time asserting its "omnipresence" and "omni-action".‡ This means that the immanence of God is seen as deriving from his transcendence, and is thus the exact contrary of immanentism.
Elsewhere Teilhard adds, "God the eternal being in himself, is everywhere, we might say, in process of formation for us". Here, every word should be weighed. One should not concentrate only on the second half of the sentence, and, above all, the words "for us" should not be overlooked. It will be noted, too, that, in the correlative assertion of a dynamic immanence, the idea of divine transcendence is in no way over-shadowed. "The majesty of the Universe" does not obscure for him "the primacy of God." While Pere Teilhard, in the hope of rousing the Christian of today from a lethargy he believes hostile to the spread and even the maintenance of his faith, urges him to "discern, below God, the values of the world, at the same time he is careful to urge the humanist of today to "discern, above the world, the place held by a God ".§ And it is with the same care to maintain the correct relation between immanence and transcendence that he speaks of Christ: "The risen Christ of the Gospel can never hold, in the consciousness of the faithful, his primacy over the created world that, by definition, he is to consummate, except by incorporating in himself the evolution that some people seek to oppose to him."
Here his teaching echoes his prayer: "Lord, grant that I may see, that I may see You, that I may see and feel You present in all things and animating all things." "If so many souls have been touched by his message", writes Jean Lacroix, "it is perhaps primarily because he knew how again to make of the universe a Temple."||
If man, as Teilhard understands him, is to fulfil his destiny, he must add the voice of his consciousness and, throughout all his activity, of his freely given homage, to the hymn that rises up to God from all creation. That is why we may speak of "Pere Teilhard's cosmic liturgy": and why, too, The Hymn of the Universe was a happy choice of title for a miscellany of prayers and meditations selected from his writings.¶
* The Living Flame, I, 3.
† La Vie Cosmique, p. 57; "God is everywhere, God is everywhere (St Angela of Foligno)." Le Milieu Divin, p. 116; "The Creator and, more specifically, the Redeemer have steeped themselves in all things and penetrated all things to such a degree that, as St Angela of Foligno said, 'The world is full of God'." Cf. The Making of a Mind, p. 130.‡ L'Atomisme de l'Esprit (1941); Oeuvres, VII, p. 61. Cf. Robert Bellarmine, De ascensions mentis in Deum, gradus 2: "Were another world to be created, God would fill that, too; and if there were to be more worlds, or even an infinite number of worlds, God would fill them all. . . . with his omnipotence and wisdom, he is present everywhere" (Montpellier ed. 1823, pp. 40-1).§ Quelques reflexions sur la conversion du monde (1936), p.2. L'Energie humaine (1937); "... above creation ..." (VI, p. 10). In 1952, a San Francisco newspaper printed a report from a French newsagency [sic] to the effect that "the God of Pere Teilhard was becoming a God immanent in the evolution of the world". On 3 Aug., Teilhard wrote from New York to Pere Andre Ravier, "What annoys me in this business is the offhanded way it makes me jettison a divine 'transcendence' that I have, on the contrary, spent all my life in defending—though seeking at the same time, it is true (like everyone, but by using the new properties of a universe in process of cosmogenesis) to reconcile it with an immanence which everyone agrees must be given a progressively more important and more explicit place in our philosophy and religion."|| Le Sens de l'atheisme modern (1958), p. 28. Cf. letter of 7 Aug. 1923: "With himself, Man brings back to God the lower beings of the world. Sin consists in falling back among them;—virtue in carrying them along with him."¶ Some hasty readers have referred to this as "Hymn to the Universe", a mistake that points to a serious misunderstanding of Teilhard's thought. I have also seen it called "Hymns to the Universe". A similar mis-reading is referred to later (pp. 95,188).
Henri de Lubac - Teilhard: the man and his meaning (1965), p. 26-28
The penultimate paragraph and its accompanying footnote remind of something Bishop Barron has said about God's intention that humanity have a priestly role in offering the natural world to Him as sacrifice. I'll try to find the video where he talked abut that and reference it here.