Thomas Aquinas and Teilhard de Chardin. By Donald J.Goergen. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2022. Pp. 298. $40.00.

Sub-titled ‘Christian Humanism in an Age of Unbelief’, this book explores the contribution of two major figures in Catholic thought to the development of a renewed Christian humanism, one that is fit to meet the challenges of a secular age and which serves as a component of a revitalised evangelisation. If humanism is concerned to answer the question, ‘what does it mean to be a human being?’, Christianity seeks to answer the question: ‘what does it mean to live in Christ?’ Goergen and his two interlocutors set out to show that the answers to these questions converge; the answer to the second question turns out to be the most authentic answer to the first. ‘The search for God, as revealed in Christ and the search for the human is one search’ (p. 212); they should be connected. In the face of the objection sometimes brought against Christianity, as noted by Teilhard de Chardin, ‘the suspicion that our religion makes its adherents inhuman’, Goergen cogently argues that Aquinas and Teilhard de Chardin provide strong evidence, from the distant and from the more recent past, respectively, that Christian faith points the way to an authentic and life-enhancing understanding of humanity. Furthermore, a renewal of Christian humanism, as called for by Pope Francis (Laudato si’ §141 and Fratelli tutti §86), offers resources and motivation for a harmonious combination of love of God and love of all God's creation. After providing brief timelines of key events in the lives of Aquinas and Teilhard, the book is divided into two parts. Part one, in eight chapters, compares the thought of each with regard to their theology of creation, their theological anthropology, and their Christology. Each figure's thought is laid out clearly, with multiple references to their writings. These chapters are very well organised and they offer a model of succinctness, compression, and synthesis. Despite being soaked in scholarship, at all times the author is fully in command of the material and manages to deploy it in service of his coherent and cogent argument. We learn about many of the major sources for and influences on Aquinas and Teilhard, as well as how their works were received—at first with considerable suspicion and resistance, even condemnation, but later with increasing acceptance. The much shorter part two has only two chapters. The first has its focus on humanism in an age of unbelief. It relates Aquinas and Teilhard to contemporary thinkers on theology, culture, and dialogue, and to calls (for example, from Pope Francis) for a renewal of Christian humanism and for a world-affirming, socially engaged mysticism. The second explores several disputed questions: atonement, hell, human sexuality, before then returning to the theme of Christian humanism. The author is committed to exploring the wisdom to be found in Christian tradition (via two major exponents, one from the thirteenth century, and the other from the twentieth) with the knowledge and questions of today. Early on, he identifies several points in common between Aquinas and Teilhard. They were ‘open to new insights as well as grounded in a tradition they would help to develop’ (p. 3). Both drew upon major currents of thought of their own time (or earlier) which were outside the tradition. In the case of Aquinas, these included Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes, all highly suspect in the eyes of some gatekeepers of orthodoxy. Teilhard engaged constructively with evolutionary biology, even though in the eyes of some it seemed to contradict traditional Christian teaching. Thus, it can be said that both were intellectual risk-takers in their creative appropriation of tradition and engagement with sources beyond it. Both the Dominican philosophical theologian, Aquinas, and the Jesuit natural scientist, Teilhard, had a ‘tremendous appreciation for the natural world’: Teilhard's ‘cosmic sense’ and Aquinas's theology of creation. Although both believed that human beings were spiritual creatures, with a capacity to enter into a relationship with God, they did not see humanity as disconnected from the material world or from the rest of nature. Thus both adopted an anti-Manichean stance: matter was not the enemy but something to be appreciated, embraced, and lifted up. This theme was conveyed more enthusiastically (and perhaps less cautiously) by Teilhard, who wrote in his major spiritual treatise, The Divine Milieu, that ‘nothing is profane for the one who knows how to see’. The vision of both men displayed a symphonic quality that brought out the interconnectedness of all creation. Each had a feel for what ancient theology labelled ‘theandric’, seeing the divine present in the human world: Teilhard's ‘divinization’, and Aquinas's’ concept of a deifying grace’ (p. 3). Both had a strong belief that Christ is the pivot of creation, the coming together of the divine, the human, and the material world. Both were fully committed to Christ's vital role in human salvation. Aquinas gives more attention to humanity's fundamental dependency on God, in creation, in Christ, and in grace. Teilhard tends to emphasise more the continuing transformative action of God. He considers Christ as a new stage in God's way of creating evolutively, one who not only saves us through the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus—an event in the past—but also calls us from the future as the cosmic Christ invites us to lift up all creation towards God. ‘It is the christification of the individual and of the whole universe that is pivotal for Teilhard’ (p. 157). In showing many similarities, Goergen does not minimise differences between the two thinkers. Aquinas's scholastic philosophical theology was precise, analytical, meticulous, and highly systematic. Teilhard's writing was much less precise, often poetic, lyrical and mystical, sometimes ecstatic and evocative, but also elusive. Of course, the biggest difference between them was the world they inhabited: the type of social institutions, culture, knowledge available, the role of the Church, the opportunities and threats they experienced and shared with others living in their times. For example, Aquinas lived in an environment where the Church was a major power providing the rationale for personal and social life, while Teilhard faced a situation where the Church found herself under increasing attack from a variety of directions and where her hold on the population seemed to be ebbing away. Goergen notes another important difference between their contexts and ours. While people in most societies in the past displayed a participating consciousness, a sense that they owed their identity, purpose, and role to their belonging to a community, our contemporary society tends to induct us into a radical individualist way of thinking of ourselves, in which our identity is self-constructed. ‘The sense of separateness in modern individualism prevents us from the deeper awareness of our entanglement with each other’ (p. 85). This makes it harder to appreciate what it means to be ‘one in Adam’ and ‘one in Christ’, and to acknowledge the real limitations on our individualism and how much we owe to and need from each other. Among other changes mentioned here (and which separate the world of both Aquinas and Teilhard from today's world) are ‘an emphasis on choice, a youth culture, new gender roles, homosexuality as a legitimate option … affluence, consumerism, geographic mobility, new family patterns, suburbanization, television and more recent technologies’ (p. 217). The author identifies a lacuna in the syntheses of both Aquinas and Teilhard: ‘an inability at times to be as attentive to the existentiality of human life … the individuality of human experience’, and he suggests that their thought would benefit from being complemented by reading Christian existentialists (p. 209). I am not sure this is entirely fair to either Aquinas or to Teilhard. Aquinas has given us penetrating insights into the virtues (including love), the emotions, and friendship; and Teilhard casts much light both on the interior life and on our engagement with the world. On the evidence of this book, a major emphasis in both thinkers was on the affective energies, friendship, and love. There are numerous occasions where their existential concerns and attention appear. In particular, Teilhard was a powerful advocate of how love unites people without assimilating them to one another: union differentiates was a constant theme in his writings. As Goergen puts this: ‘Love is the glue that binds us together while at the same time respecting our differences’ (p. 271). Friendship, research, and democratic life, for Teilhard, were all influenced by a combination of spiritual, affective, intellectual, and volitional dimensions. The Divine Milieu is a masterpiece that links human activities and the experiences we more passively undergo with the work of God in us in a way that is deeply existential as well as spiritual. In one of his essays, he says: ‘Charity is the force that stops beings from shutting themselves up in a self-centred folding-in of their energies, and makes them “unbutton”, open themselves and surrender themselves to one another’ (quoted on p. 122). In one sense, it is hard to make comparisons between the two major figures of this book. ‘Aquinas's philosophical theology has had centuries for refinement, refutation, reformulation, revision, and contemplation’ (p. 205). It has been examined, sifted, and developed by countless commentators, taught to generations of students in multiple contexts, and applied to more and more areas of discourse and activity. It has been upheld as the model of Catholic thinking by the highest level of church authority as a reliable foundation and framework on which to build. During his lifetime, Teilhard was prevented from publishing most of his writing. Then there was a flurry of rapidly published works (some of which have had to be revised in more accurate translations) and much enthusiasm followed, as well as suspicion and warning signs from church authorities (as was the case at first with Aquinas). However, given that it is less than seventy years since his death and, despite the fact that there have been considerable scientific developments in that period that Teilhard could not have foreseen, it is too soon for any final judgement to be made on the long-term significance of his work. Despite the imbalance of attention to and treatment of the work of each, given the much longer period of time in which to respond to Aquinas compared to the relatively brief period since Teilhard's death, Goergen has done a splendid job in presenting an overview of the key elements of the thought of both Aquinas and Teilhard in a way that is accessible, rigorous, sympathetic, based on a close familiarity with the whole corpus of each, and that shows how both contribute to the renewal of Christian humanism. Goergen proposes eight features of such a humanism to which both Aquinas and Teilhard have a contribution to make. It needs to be ‘(1) a moral vision, (2) with a solid philosophical and scientific basis, (3) that values this world, (4) and yet is open to the transcendent realm that is invisible, (5) personalist, in affirming the dignity and value of every human person and his or her relational structure, (6) social, appreciating the relationship between an individual and society with an emphasis on the common good, (7) theistic, grounded in a personal Beyond, and (8) cosmic or cosmological in scope’ (pp. 254-5). Both established scholars and those new to the thought of Aquinas and Teilhard will find this book a worthwhile read, and it offers some important building blocks for renewed attention to Christian humanism as a necessary and fertile resource for addressing the challenges of our time.