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Divine Lives BEDE BIDLACK DIVINE LIVES Christ, Community, and Divine Embodiment Introduction Christian approaches to divine embodiment have two presuppositions: 1) divine embodiment was a unique, historical event in the person of Jesus Christ 2) the body of the incarnation was numerically singular and isolated. At the same time, Christian anthropology presents human persons not only as solitary individuals, but also as social beings inseparable from the rest of humanity. The singular nature is attributed to the body because the body, unlike the soul, is definable in time and space. Thus the boundaries on the embodiment of God in the person of Jesus Christ are set as a singular occurrence of about two thou- sand years ago in the country surrounding Jerusalem. The soul is less marked by time and space and therefore the more obvious choice as the locale for the social capacity of the human. The soul as the site of psychic processes can more readily join other minds in forming a community of shared ways of thinking, belief, and social mores. The body outwardly ex- presses these interior dispositions such as standards of clothing or customs of behavior.1 But, what happens when the social and communal capacity of the human person is expanded to the body? How is divine embodiment recon- sidered if the body itself is viewed as a community of beings? And if the body is a community, what forces hold it together and give it coherence? Reconsid- ering the body will change how one envisions divine embodiment. A com- parative reading of French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and Daoist Xiao Yingsou (fl. 1226) inspire these questions. More than any other theologian up to the twentieth century––with the possible exception of Irenaeus––Teilhard wrote his theology from the understanding of a changing, evolving cosmos. The conventional reading of the creation story in Genesis led Christian thinkers to see the world as God’s completed work on 1 Rahner takes a Pauline anthropology––people are body, soul, and spirit––and places the body as the concrete existence of spirit in time and space. See Rahner 1981: 84 and 1966: 245-52. 134 DIVINE LIVES the sixth day followed by a day of rest on the seventh (Genesis 1:31; 2:2). The realm of earth changed, but the heavens did not. Teilhard, being a paleontol- ogist and geologist by training, knew that the cosmos changed a great deal over a vast ocean of time. Even though Teilhard never explicitly defined the body in any detail, a close reading of his work reveals an implicit theory of the body. Xiao provides categories that make this implicit body in Teilhard more clear. Xiao was a Daoist alchemical and ritual master and advisor to the emperor, Song Lizong (宋理宗 r. 1225-1264). Xiao, too, viewed the world as constantly changing. Ultimate Reality––the Dao––is a fluctuating, self-sustaining ground of all things. Heaven, Earth, and humankind are all manifestations of the Dao and are therefore intimately interconnected in a dynamic relationship. To ex- press the interpenetration of all things while contemplating the human, Xiao chose the image of a mountain to represent the body of a person in sitting med- itation, rather than an image with any obvious human characteristics, like a head or limbs. Xiao and Teilhard shared a vision of the affinity of the divine, cosmos, and the human. Xiao communicated this intimacy through a potent image; Teilhard explained it with vivid words. The Body According to Teilhard de Chardin From his extant writings, scholars know that Teilhard speculated on the theological significance of the body, but by 1920 he dropped the question in favor of developing a theological account of human beings within an evolu- tionary understanding of creation.2 He summarized his ideas in the posthu- mously published The Divine Milieu and The Human Phenomenon. From these and his other works, one can derive a view of the body with its theological sig- nificance, even though it was unclear to Teilhard himself. Furthermore, the importance of Teilhard’s body for divine embodiment only emerges after a comparative study with Xiao. In The Human Phenomenon, Teilhard begins with the fully developed human being as it has been for about the last 20,000 years. Then he makes two moves. First, he looks back to the beginning of time and considers how the human being could have evolved from the initial dust of creation. Second, he looks to 2 His last exclusive treatment of the body was in an essay entitled, “What Exactly is the Human Body?” possibly written in October 1916. Teilhard would expand this three-page essay to eight pages and sent it to his friend August Valensin. In September 1919, Teilhard mentioned the longer essay in a letter to his cousin Marguerite Teilhard- Chambon, and related: “Valensin was delighted with what I wrote and wants to send it to Blondel.” This longer essay is not extant, however. See Teilhard 1965: 306, 1968a: 13, and de Lubac 1967: 10, note 17. 135 STUDIES IN INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE 22 (2012) 2 the future and speculates on where the universe is going. The first move de- velops within a Neoplatonic metaphysics that states there is nothing new in the universe.3 Anything present today has always been present in some way (Teil- hard 2003: 36). What makes the human––biologically, psychically, socially, and spiritually––has been present since the beginning of the universe fourteen and a half billion years ago. At the dawn of time, matter––by itself nothing–– received some spark of spirit: creation ex nihilo. This initial, gigantic blob of matter could have remained homogenous, but it did not. It turned in on itself to form atoms. The atoms likewise could have simply bounced around, but did not. They joined to form molecules. Molecules formed more complex mole- cules until life emerged three point eight billion years ago.4 Life grew in complexity to form more sophisticated groups of cells that joined to become bone, muscle, and importantly the nervous system that would allow for a network of neural connections. When the network of nerve cells became complex enough, these cells formed a brain that performed sophisticated neur- ological tasks called consciousness. The brain continued to become more complex until something remarkable happened with the emergence of human beings: reflective consciousness. From the brain’s material structure, reflective mind emerges in the human. Teilhard concludes that if self-awareness and reflective consciousness are pres- ent in the human, it must have been latently present from the very beginning. Matter, even in its most primeval form, must have within it consciousness of some sort. Consciousness is capable of relationship with itself and other be- ings; it is subjective. Thus, one can agree with Thomas Berry, drawing from Teilhard: people are not surrounded by objects, but live in a community of subjects (Swimme and Berry 1992: 199). Drawing upon Teilhard, Berry insists that the fundamental view of the world should not be that it is primarily dead matter, but that it is pregnant with conscious subjects in relationship with each other. Turning the lens of this idea to the body, one can say that the matter that constitutes the body is a community of subjects that share a common bond that give it coherence as a community. The power of the community bond is pro- vided by the soul. The soul is the site of what Gottfried Leibniz called the substantial bond (vin- culum substantiale; Grumett 2005: 105; Blondel 1930). For Leibniz, the uni- 3 He gives the image of an hourglass with the sands flowing upwards. Everything above comes from what is below, see Teilhard 1967: 33. Elsewhere he presents the idea as a cone, see Teilhard 1968a: 48. On Teilhard’s Neoplatonic metaphysics, see Grumett 2005: 220-23. 4 Ilya Prigogine, a chemist, won the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his work presenting the self-arrangement of matter. 136 DIVINE LIVES verse was composed of monads each held together by a unifying energy of the substantial bond. Where Teilhard, and previously Maurice Blondel, split from Leibniz is in the view that the substantial bond does not have its own energy. Whereas, Leibniz proposed that each monad holds itself together, Teilhard de- scribes things as having the source of their bonding power from somewhere beyond themselves. A thing cannot hold itself together. The soul provides the substantial bond for the community of subjects that forms the body, but the power of the soul to function as the substantial bond ultimately comes from God. What this amounts to is that there is really only one Bond, the Perfect Bond, and one Monad, Jesus Christ (TB 26), who holds the universe together and draws it to himself in his love. The universe will reach its ultimate ful- fillment at the end of time when Christ will draw everything into his Being and God will be “all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28). By itself the connection between this body derived from Teilhard’s work and the topic of divine embodiment is not clear. Daoist Xiao Yingsou more explic- itly presents the body as a site for divine embodiment. However, the body is not a single site for a single incarnation, but a divine community possible for every human being. The Body According to Xiao Yingsou Little biographical material remains of the life of Xiao Yingsou. Scholars know him primarily through his commentary on the Scripture of Salvation (Duren jing 度人經 DZ 1) called Inner Meaning of the Scripture of Salvation (Duren jing neiyi 度人經內義 DZ 90, dated 1226).
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