In Good Company: Divinization in Pierre Teilhard De Char-Din, Sj and Daoist Xiao Yingsou by Bede Benjamin Bidlack, and: Longing and Letting Go: Christian and Hindu Practices of Passionate Non-Attachment by Holly Gillgardner (review)

These two very learned (revised) doctoral theses (Bidlack: Boston College, 2011; and Hillgardner: Drew University, 2014) deserve their own reviews. Yet with confidence that, not least because of their high quality, such can be found elsewhere, and given my own interests, our efforts in what follows will be a comparative review of two comparative theologies. We proceed with brief summaries of each volume on its own terms first, and then consider them together.

Bidlack's argument is bookended by an introduction and a conclusion, and followed by two appendices—first, his own translation of Xiao Yingsou's thirteenth-century Inner Meaning of the Wondrous Scripture of the Highest, Limitless Salvation, and second, analysis of the Inner Meaning's accompanying Diagram of the Body as Ying and Yang Ascending and Descending, which is depicted as a mountain (thus also: Mountain Diagram). Yet albeit contributing therein to historical studies of the Daoist tradition (the Inner Meaning has not until now been available in English), Bidlack's explicit theological purpose is to bring Xiao into dialogue with the ideas of French Jesuit scholar and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), in particular to clarify that the latter's cosmic Christology that anticipated all things to be summed up in Christ via a process of evolutionary development, did not need to leave behind the material or creaturely body, certainly not also that of the resurrection body of the historical Jesus. This is because, as Xiao's Daoist vision unfolds, pictorially and imaginatively in the Mountain Diagram and also discursively and enigmatically in the Inner Meaning, the human body is a microcosm of heaven above and earth below—not to mention hell as well (thus, the bi-directional movement of "ascent" and "descent" imaged by the mountain)—and has the capacity and potentiality to transfigure itself internally, and also to transform the external world in all of its interrelated materiality-and-spirituality in the quest for salvific immortality. As a Catholic theologian teaching at a Catholic (St. Anselm) college, Bidlock in his In Good Company represents a fairly straightforward unfolding of the comparative theological enterprise, one that reads the religious texts of other (non-Christian) traditions not in order to be suggestive of how they might otherwise be understood in light of Christian perspectives, but precisely in order to return to the home tradition—in this case, Roman Catholicism—with new theological insights, implications, and applications.

The five core chapters of the book thus move toward the stated objective in five steps. Bidlack begins by situating the broader discussion of body-soul dualism in the Christian theological tradition, particularly in the Thomist lineage and its reception in modern French Catholic theology, and then proceeds to an exegesis of Teilhard's anthropology-cosmology, his theory of divinization, and Christological Omega vision that lures the cosmic or communal "body" beyond its material constitutionality. The next two chapters then turn, initially, to discussions of the broader Daoist tradition, in particular focused on models of the body and of its alchemical transformation (or immortalization or transcendentalization, of the limitations of finitude and decay, more particularly) in the centuries leading up to Xiao, and then to elaboration of Xiao's Inner Meaning and Mountain Diagram against the broader backdrop of Daoist thought. The fifth and concluding chapter returns to Teilhard in light of considerations of Daoism and Xiao's ideas more specifically in order to argue that the resurrection of Jesus's historical body can be more robustly integrated into Teilhard's cosmic Omega-point Christology so that the Teilhardian cosmology and eschatology not just include but retain the creaturely materiality declared...