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.