When we turn to Rāmānuja, we are entering another world altogether from the one inhabited by Teilhard de Chardin. Rāmānuja lived in India during the eleventh century CE, and the influences upon his thought were derived from the spiritual traditions he valued and incorporated within the authoritative lineage of Śrīvaisnavism.

Rāmānuja was a Vedāntin: he worked within the long-established oral tradition of providing expository commentaries on those religious texts believed to be part of Vedic knowledge or śruti (literally ‘that which is heard’). He would have been trained in the knowledge of the Upanisads, and one of his major works was a commentary on the Brahma-sūtras (or Vedānta-sūtras, as they are sometimes called). All his work was based on the teachings of earlier spiritual teachers, so that in one sense it was purely traditional. Ramakrishnananda, a biographer of Rāmānuja, makes the point very strongly:

In this chapter I intend to consider in more detail the second function of the divine body in Teilhard de Chardin and Rāmānuja (see p. 87 above), namely, the divine body as a theological concept. In particular I shall explore how the divine body metaphor, when articulated conceptually, provides a key to understanding each thinker's theological worldview.

In this context it is appropriate to refer to the divine body as a ‘model’, in that it represents connections made between things in order to help us structure and interpret what we see. Like metaphors, models are intrinsic to our thought-processes: we look on things in terms of other things and act upon their perceived connections. Models are thus maps of inner processes. Stephen Katz explains:

Teilhard de Chardin's vision of the body of Christ is communicated to us in his writings. However, his Christological insights are not presented systematically; they are to be found in a variety of contexts, amidst ideas on a wide range of subjects. It could be argued that if we were to extrapolate all these reflections and put them together we would find Teilhard's vision. But it is not that simple. You cannot reconstruct visions like jigsaws; they come entire and complete. One of the ways in which such completeness is communicated to us is through metaphorical language. Teilhard drew upon an ancient Christian metaphor to communicate his vision: that of ‘Christ's body’. As a way of approaching Teilhard's vision I shall look, first of all, at the origins of this metaphor, and at some of the ideas which helped Teilhard revision the ‘body of Christ’ for the twentieth century.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

The major source for Teilhard de Chardin's Christology is the New Testament, and in particular, St Paul. One of the most commonly cited references in the New Testament quoted by Teilhard is Colossians 1:17b, ‘in him all things hold together’, and the one he stated to be his ‘fundamental article’ of belief.

When Teilhard de Chardin refers to the body of Christ, it is clear that for him the term has very specific meaning. The body of Christ is not just a theological concept to Teilhard, or a spiritual reality experienced only in times of prayer and at Mass. He speaks expressively of Christ's body as a kind of aura radiating out from everything, and clearly it is an integral part of his own perception of the world. But how does this relate to the findings of his scientific research? How does Teilhard integrate his faith and commitment to science in his vision of the world? In this chapter I want to explore the relationship between Teilhard's understanding of the body of Christ and his worldview as a whole.

Teilhard did not write systematically about theological issues, but there are threads running through his works which intertwine to produce a consistent theological description of his vision. And the body of Christ has great significance in his vision — and in its theological representation. In a short, undated paper (probably written in 1919) entitled ‘What Exactly is the Human Body?’, Teilhard gives us a useful definition:

This book is about worldmaking. It is concerned with two very different men who sought, in their own ways, to create new worlds, new ways of seeing things. They were both deeply committed to their respective religious traditions and worked within the frameworks of those existing worldviews to revision their sense of the divine in relation to the cosmos. Rāmānuja (c. 1017–1137) was a religious teacher in the Śrīvaisnava community in South India. Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a French Jesuit priest, who, as a palaeontologist, travelled extensively throughout his life. Both men drew upon symbols to model their worldmaking, symbols which have a rich heritage in their respective traditions. The symbols they chose, however, were fundamentally similar. For both of them the worlds they perceived were symbolised by ‘the body of the divine’.

The question arises, ‘What did Rāmānuja and Teilhard de Chardin understand by “the body of the divine”?’ And in order to begin looking for answers to this question I spend more time at the beginning of the book ‘locating’ the divine body symbol in the specific religious contexts of Rāmānuja and Teilhard.

For Teilhard, the Mass is a deeply symbolic ritual in which the individual offers him or herself, through the sacramental elements, to become part of the consecrated body of Christ. He believes that she or he participates through this act in the very life and spirit (which, of course, he refers to in terms of consciousness) of the Lord. His cosmic understanding of the process of the Mass is most clearly set forth in his ‘La Messe sur le monde’, but he refers to it at intervals throughout his writings. One passage in ‘Mon univers’ clearly explains how he views the relationship between the consecration of the host and the consecration of the world:

I have shown in the previous chapters how the divine body symbol functions in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin and Rāmānuja. It serves, for both, as a metaphor to disclose an apprehension of reality in terms of the divine Person (Christ/the Highest Person). It also becomes an analogical model of an integrated worldview. In other words, the term ‘body’ is extended in its usage to apply to all aspects of reality which together constitute a mode or part of the divine. And since the divine is understood, in both cases, in terms of consciousness, the whole of the material world is presented as being alive and conscious.

The term ‘divine body’ acts as a root-metaphor for both writers to disclose this non-dualistic vision. The world is perceived as part of a divine totality. Rāmānuja and Teilhard both describe how it is to ‘see’ the world in the ‘light’ of the Lord's presence. Clearly, for them this sacred knowledge is experienced as a transformed perception. The symbolic language they employ communicates something of this transformed state of being.

As a model representing a theological ‘map’, the divine body reveals a way of viewing things in terms of relationships: it refers to the inter-related unity of the divine and the cosmos at every conceivable level.

Composition and publication dates of papers by Teilhard de Chardin cited in this work

In this chapter I shall begin to explore Rāmānuja's use of the term śarīra-śarīrin (body—self) to refer to the relationship between all conscious and non-conscious beings (which for simplicity's sake, I shall henceforth refer to as ‘the world’) and Brahman. There is one definition of ‘body’ (śarīra) in his Śrībhāsya (his main commentary on the Brahma-sūtras) which can assist in this enquiry:

Thus, a body (i) belongs to a conscious being; (ii) is controlled and supported by that being; (iii) serves to further that being's purpose in all circumstances; and (iv) its proper or essential form is accessory to that being.

These four points will serve as guidelines for our enquiry, since Rāmānuja's argument develops from this definition into a claim that the world (i.e. all conscious and non-conscious beings) comprises the body of Brahman: ‘Since everything [is] in all circumstances controlled and supported by the Supreme Person, and always has the nature of being his subordinate, then all conscious and non-conscious beings [are] his body.'

I have shown how Rāmānuja and Teilhard de Chardin, in presenting their visions of the world, have drawn upon rich symbolic understandings inherent in their respective traditions. Representations of the Lord whose body is the world date back to the earliest recorded literature associated with Vedic and early Christian traditions. Whether we accept theories of universal symbols or archetypes or not, clearly this notion is deeply imprinted in both eastern and western consciousness.

One reason why certain symbols reappear in different times and cultures is quite simply their ‘workability’. If a religious symbol is prevalent, it works well for people. By this I mean that it has transformative power. Patrick Sherry claims that religious concepts often involve reference to spiritual transformation; but it is symbols that can provide the means to attain that transformation. Even if we have a map of where we are, showing us where we want to go (in other words, a model), we still need the means to get there. Symbols provide such means of transport; they are vehicles for transformation.

Perhaps the symbol of the divine body is of key significance in the works of both Teilhard and Rāmānuja because for them it has been proved to work.