Tag Archives: Religion and Evolution

The theory of evolution is compatible with religion

March 21, 2024- Seeing Human Happiness Through Teilhard’s ‘lens’

How can seeing reality through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ lead to experiencing it ‘joyfully’?

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from addressing the many aspects of religion which combine to not only aid us in our continuing journey to the future but can enrich us on our way.  We have seen how three ‘Theological Virtues’ represent attitudes, stances that we can take along this journey which open us up to a clearer, and therefore more meaningful, and ultimately fuller life.

Thus far, we have outlined the insights of Teilhard, Rohr, Rogers and Haught as we have followed the trail of increasing complexity as it flows through human life.  These thinkers all contribute unique and profound insights into the ‘human psyche’, as well as signposts to a future in which human evolution can continue to unfold.

Such ‘survival’ is clearly important to our future as a species, and the part we play, as outlined by these thinkers, is indeed critical to it.  But, as we have seen many times on our journey, our personal confidence in the future, our accepting of, even our embracing of our lives is also critical.  All this evolution, if it is to be authentic, must somehow be compatible with satisfaction with life: our ‘happiness’.

The Slippery Subject of Happiness

A common term for accepting and embracing life is ‘happiness’.  Like the term ‘love’, the term ‘happiness’ is somewhat overused in Western society today.  This overuse belies a clear understanding of what it consists of and how it can be found in our lives.  The aspect of ‘happiness’ in the human person, while much to be desired, is both difficult to quantify, and if common belief would have it, difficult to attain.

This week we will look at this slippery subject through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, to see how Teilhard’s practice of placing a subject into the context of universal evolution, as has been done for other ‘slippery’ subjects, will help us to see it more clearly as well.

This approach to ‘happiness’ will address it in five facets.

This week we will address the ‘material’ facet: how human happiness is commonly addressed.

We will then address it from an ‘evolutionary’ perspective, in terms of how humans ‘fit into’ the universal evolutionary flow that Teilhard tracks from the ‘big bang’ to the current day.

In the ‘spiritual’ facet, we will then address how Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ opens the door to a more intimate mode of satisfaction with life.

From the ‘psychological’ facet, we will then look at how psychology understands a person whose approach to life is mature, and hence better aligned with reality.

In the last facet we will explore religion’s approach to happiness and how it can be seen to align with the other facets.

What Is Happiness?

Not that happiness gives up its secrets willingly.  Teilhard takes note of our difficulty in finding a vantage point from which to address it.

“What, in fact, is happiness?  For centuries this has been the subject of endless books, investigations, individual and collective experiments, one after another; and, sad to relate, there has been complete failure to reach unanimity. For many of us, in the end, the only practical conclusion to be drawn from the whole discussion is that it is useless to continue the search. Either the problem is insoluble; there is no true happiness in this world or there can be only an infinite number of particular solutions: the problem itself defies solution. Being happy is a matter of personal taste. You, for your part, like wine and good living. I prefer cars, poetry, or helping others. “Liking is as unaccountable as luck.””

   He goes on to suggest a basic impediment to human happiness.

“Like all other animate beings, man, it is true, has an essential craving for happiness. In man, however, this fundamental demand assumes a new and complicated form for he is not simply a living being with greater sensibility and greater vibratory power than other living beings. By virtue of his “hominization” he has become a reflective and critical living being and his gift of reflection brings with it two other formidable properties, the power to perceive what may be possible, and the power to foresee the future. The emergence of this dual power is sufficient to disturb and confuse the hitherto serene and consistent ascent of life. Perception of the possible, and awareness of the future- when these two combine, they not only open up for us an inexhaustible store of hopes and fears, but they also allow those hopes and fears to range far afield in every direction. Where the animal seems to find no difficulties to obstruct its infallible progress towards what will bring it satisfaction, man, on the other hand, cannot take a single step in any direction without meeting a problem for which, ever since he became man, he has constantly and unsuccessfully been trying to find a final and universal solution.”

   Thus, to Teilhard, in seeming agreement with Juval Harari (“Sapiens”), the evolutionary emergence of the human interjects what Teilhard saw as “disturb(ing) and confuse(ing) the hitherto serene and consistent ascent of life”.  This disturbance brings about an inability in us to “bring satisfaction”.

The long current of human thinking in our literature, philosophies and religions presents us with a wide spectrum of stances that we can take in response to Shakespeare’s “slings and outrages” as inflicted by life.  At one end of this wide spectrum lies a simple acceptance and endurance of endless rounds of ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’, as the Easterners would have it.   At the far other end lies the ‘joyous embrace’ of the phases of life, which may well recur, but also tend to ‘raise’ us over time, as envisioned in the West.  Not surprisingly, most of us (and our literature, philosophy and religion) occupy the terrain closer to the center.  Most approaches to happiness contain a combination of some level of acceptance (or denial) of those things over which we have no power, mixed with some level of confidence (or despair) that whatever our lot, it is amenable to some improvement.

Happiness, to some extent, is related to the degree of acceptance with which we respond to these cycles mixed with some degree of expectation that the future can be better.

Thus, happiness is difficult to pin down.  Circumstances which would depress one person might be tolerated by another.  Personal welfare that would cause satisfaction in one might not be enough to satisfy others.  Our news is filled daily with stories of people who remain un-consoled by their good fortune, as well as those that manage some degree of life satisfaction without significant material welfare.

In other words, not only is the concept of happiness slippery but recognition of it in reality is highly subjective.

Still, the search for its dimensions continues.  Psychologists conduct surveys, biologists explore chemicals, and religionists look to faith.  Does this level of often contradictory activities mean that there’s nothing that can be said?  Let’s look at a few aspects:

  • Surveys: For decades, psychologists have been searching for a process for conducting surveys free of cultural, economic, gender, religious and racial bias.  Not only do the continuing waves of surveys show a wider range of reported states of happiness than statistics suggest, but many of them are contradictory.
  • Biology: Many biologists suggest that happiness results directly from our chemistry.  They can measure that chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin in the brain are direct causes of the sensation of happiness but minimize the influence of those experiences that lead to their secretion in the brain.  Thus, in the ‘nature vs nurture’ spectrum, in their view nurture is clearly a secondary influence.
  • Genetics: All of us know persons who are generally cheerful, even under difficult circumstances. We also know those whose ‘glass is always half empty’.  From this view, we are all predisposed by our generic heritage toward some fundamental level of happiness or unhappiness.  The ‘wiring of our brains’ is always complicit in our emotional reaction to reality.
  • Religion: The religions of the world all aim at some level of accommodation with reality, from (as above) acceptance to embrace.  Their beliefs and practices are clearly myriad, and often very contradictory.

For all this, neither religion nor science can be seen to have an unequivocal grasp of happiness, contentment, or any of the ‘states’ of well-being.

A more nuanced approach to happiness falls into the realm of relative measures.  For example, if a very poor person comes into a large sum of money, the impact on their happiness is directly related to the improvement in their situation that the money enables.  They can be safely said to have increased the level of their happiness by a large amount.

For a wealthier person, even a large amount of money will have much less impact as it did in the case of the one less well off.  In the first case, the impact will likely be longer lasting as well, as the money can also be put to use in caring for family and assuring a comfortable future.  In the second case, the money will most likely have little effect on the person’s sense of well-being, much less that of the family.

The ‘Satisfaction Paradox’

A curious take on this subject, as reported by the Economist in the issue of July 11, 2019, involves generally comfortable people who nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human evolution, breaking a long-sensed bond between ‘comfort’ and ‘happiness’.  This new ‘dualism’ occurs in the evolutionarily recent group of individuals who are relatively well-off and well-educated: the ‘middle class’.  This ‘satisfaction paradox’ can be seen when seemingly comfortable people vote for political parties which would upend a status quo which had previously supported a high level of life satisfaction.

This involves the dissociation between two longtime political partners: personal well-being and incumbent political parties.  As the Economist relates, the re-election of an incumbent party has historically been the result of a general feeling of ‘well-being’ among the population.   Today, we are seeing a surge in ‘developed’ countries of angry ‘Populist’ and ‘Nationalist’ parties elected by populations who consider themselves as ‘well off’.

The Economist article traces one possible cause of this phenomenon, prevalent in the ‘developed’ world, as the result of aging populations.  Certainly, this demographic feels uncomfortable being caught up in the rapid changes precipitated by the swift advances of technology.  As an example, many of us ‘old folks’ were taught by our parents, just as we taught our children, how to use a dial phone.  This same group, in many cases, are now being taught the often-bewildering complexities of ‘smartphones’ by their grandchildren.

The reliance on ‘habits’, those learned since birth to enable us to smoothly function, can become a liability, as the necessity for a rapid learning curve seems to be increasingly prevalent.  The ‘fruits of our labor’, pensions, investments and assets built up over a lifetime of cultivating productive ‘habits’, may well have provided us with much quality of life, but do not necessarily constitute a comfortable emotional bulwark against today’s turbulence.

This certainly leads to an increase in indignation, a level of personal life satisfaction which is nonetheless deeply critical of others.  We have seen how indignation can induce pleasant feelings, but this phenomenon also brings us back to the insights of Yuval Harari (‘Sapiens’) concerning the ‘fit’ between the human person and his environment.

Harari notes that in the human person, consciousness such as ours, aware as it is of itself, speeds up evolution in an environment which becomes increasingly subject to our influence.  This recursive spiral of ‘upset,’ is not unlike that found in weather, where a stable air mass becomes unstable, leading to the emergence of patterns unforeseen in the stable state.  Can the tension between a changing environment caused by humans who are themselves rapidly changing have such a future?  Harari questions the possibility that the incessant but more frequently recurring cycles of harmony and disharmony that we see today can result in a future plateau of harmony.

And, on top of this, what is the forecast for a level of accommodation, even happiness, for the human person caught up in such a dynamic milieu?  Is the very increasing speed of our evolution a material impediment to our happiness?

If Teilhard understood it correctly, and the energy which unites human persons is no more (but no less, as he would say) than the current manifestation of the fourteen billion years of energy by which the cosmos has risen to its current complex state, then how can we fail to recognize the potential for fulfillment, both at the personal level as well as the level of society?

More germane to the topic of happiness, how can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ be used as a signpost to happiness?   If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal manifestation) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?  What is the appropriate niche for the human person in this grand process of universal evolution?

The Next Post

This week saw a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and its vagueness, and began to place it into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution.  If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal appearance) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?

Next week we will begin to explore such ‘universal accommodation’ and attempt to locate the appropriate niche for the human person is this grand process of universal evolution.

March 14, 2024 – Living the “Theological Virtues”

How can living the Theological Virtues lead to finding joy in the noosphere?

Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our look through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ at the three so-called “Theological Virtues”- Faith, Hope and Love- by seeing how Cynthia Bourgeault’s reinterpretation of Paul encapsulated the workings of these virtues in our most intimate relationships.

This week we will conclude our look at Values, Morals and Sacraments as ‘articulations of the noosphere’ and see how the ‘Theological Virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Love serve as attitudes, stances that we can take not only in living them out, but in experience the joy of existence.

The Articulation of the Spheres

Two things on which nearly everyone can agree are the intelligibility of reality and the human’s ability to comprehend it.  Science depends on them, and religion offers a long history of human inquiry into the nature of existence and our response to it.  Both require a belief that whatever the universe is, we can make sense of it.

The current state of religion is a many faceted, often contradictory, but fervently felt set of beliefs about the world and our place in it.

Science, coming into play much later, also offers an approach to understanding existence, although coming at the enterprise from an entirely different perspective.  While religion relies on the intuitions developed, passed down and modified in many ways into metaphors, practices and expectations, science, at least nominally, constrains itself to a collegially empirical approach, with heavy dependence on objective data, which is itself a product of independently verifiable observations.

Both of these two spheres of thought have developed significant ‘articulations’ of their respective spheres of thought.  Physics, the mainstay of the science of matter, has laboriously effected its ‘Standard Model’, which underpins many of the modern discoveries of, and applications to, the reality which surrounds us.  Biology, the investigation of living things, through development of the theory of Natural Selection, has brought a profoundly deep understanding of living things, and more importantly, how we and they interact.

The Duality of the Spheres

As is commonly known, while these two profound modes of thought both address the single reality in which we all live, they are frequently seen to be in conflict.  Like nearly every human enterprise, they fall into different sides of an underlying ‘duality’, a dichotomy demarked by a deeply conflicting understanding of the human person.

Physics, with its ‘Standard Model’ can be seen to have developed an ‘articulation of the lithosphere’, and Biology with its theory of Natural Selection an ‘articulation of the biosphere’.  Psychology steps in as the first attempt at a secular ‘articulation of the noosphere’.   But, as discussed in our look at psychology, it seems no more united in addressing the human person than are science and religion.  Science would seem, in its empiricism, to be in competition with religion in its basis of intuition, for a comprehensive ‘articulation of the noosphere’.

The Unity of the Spheres

As Teilhard sees it, it is not the evolutionary perspective that provides the wedge that is evident not only between science and religion, but also among the various ways these beliefs play out within their respective spheres.  He sees these dualities as due to the lack of a comprehensive and universal understanding of evolution itself.  Such an integrative and universal approach to evolution would afford the possibility of bringing these cornerstones of belief into a coherence that begins to erase the dualities that plague them, leading to greater relevance to human life.

From this unique insight Teilhard sees any attempt to articulate the noosphere as requiring a perspective in which matter, life and the person can all be seen in a single context.  Such an integrated perspective will provide the light on reality that we need to successfully manage our habitation of it.  He understands this ‘sphere’ of human existence as needing our grasp of its structure, expressed in our beliefs of its ‘nature’ and the calls to action that such beliefs require.   In his words

 “The organization of personal human energies represents the supreme (thus far) stage of cosmic evolution on earth; and morality (the articulation of the noosphere) is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology.  The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.” (Parentheses mine)

   More to the point, he goes on to say

“,,,to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making it.”

  with the goal, as identified by Jesus, for us to

“.. have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

Navigating the Noosphere

In a frequently seen quote, Teilhard remarks that

“Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea.”

  As we saw in our treatment of ‘grace’, Teilhard sees the ‘abundant life’ to which Jesus refers as requiring us to develop the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller.   As he sees it:

“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.

   In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”

Understanding how his three facets of life are reflected in the three aspects of Paul’s Theological Virtues is a starting place for learning how to ‘trim our sails’.

Paraphrasing Teilhard, this ‘trimming our sails to the winds of life’, is nothing more (and as he would add, ‘nothing less’) than aligning our lives with the axis of evolution.  This alignment is where the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been addressing come in.

The Joy of the Noosphere

As we addressed the virtue of “Hope”, the wonderful facets of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ promised by Paul resonate strongly with Carl Rogers’ empirical insights into personal growth.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ they are not ‘rewards from God’ for following ‘His laws’, but the direct result of first understanding the ‘noospheric articulations’ and then orienting our lives (living the Theological Virtues) to living them out.  While Teilhard’s metaphor of sailing is a poetic way to contemplate the journey of life, it is significant to see his critical point that when we are employing such ‘sailing skills’, it is ‘alignment to the winds’ that makes it possible to be ‘borne by the current’.  The articulations that we humans are developing (thus far still early in the construction stage) are necessary for undertaking the journey of life, but it is the quality of the life, the abundance of it, the richness of it which is enhanced by the attitudes and stances that we have seen in the ‘Theological Virtues’.

The Next Post

In the last several weeks we have been addressing the structure of the noosphere, looking at its ‘articulations’ from the perspective of sacraments, morals, and values, and from the additional perspective of how it is that we can orient ourselves to navigate it.  The goal is not only navigating it successfully, but abundantly: not only are we to manage our lives, but fully partake of the joy that is possible in life.

But there is yet another aspect to these articulations and attitudes, and next week we will begin to explore it by looking at where evolution is taking us.

March 7, 2024 – A Final Look at Love, From Paul

   How do Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution echo Paul’s insights on love?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked more closely at Teilhard’s recognition of how Love is active in our personal lives as the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution.  We saw that when we decide to act, we bridge the gap between what we believe we can do and what we hope will ensue by cooperating with the flow of energy that we now recognize as love.

This week we will take a final look at Love from Paul’s perspective, seeing a familiar passage in a new way.  In doing so this illustrates how familiar things can take on a new light when we look at them differently.  As T. S. Eliot sees it

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Reinterpreting Paul

Now that we have looked at the ‘Theological Virtues’ from several secular perspectives, we can return to Paul, the first theologian, who recognized that Love was primary in the teachings of Jesus.

Cynthia Bourgeault is a faculty member of Richard Rohr’s ‘Center for Action and Contemplation’.  In her book, “Love Is Stronger than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls” she beautifully uses a well-known passage from Paul to describe growth in “conscious love”:

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7)

Bourgeault interprets Paul’s four assertions into secular terms which not only expand our treatment of the ‘Theological Virtues’, but weave Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the universe’ into the fabric of our relationships.

Love bears all things  “This does not mean a dreary sort of putting-up-with or victimization. There are two meanings of the word bear, and they both apply. The first means “to hold up, to sustain”—like a bearing wall, which carries the weight of the house. . . . To bear [also] means “to give birth, to be fruitful.” So love is that which in any situation is the most life-giving and fruitful.”

  • Here we can see a tangible reminder of the facet of Love that Teilhard refers to as ‘ontological’. Above the biological ‘fruitfulness’ of love there exists the power of love by which we ourselves are born and reborn.

Love believes all things  “. . . .  [This] does not mean to be gullible, to refuse to face up to the truth. Rather, it means that in every possible circumstance of life, there is . . . a way of perceiving that leads to cynicism and divisiveness, a closing off of possibility; and there is a way that leads to higher faith and love, to a higher and more fruitful outcome. To “believe all things” means always to orient yourselves toward the highest possible outcome in any situation and strive for its actualization.”

–    Here we can see the interpolation of Faith being carried into the extrapolation of Hope

Love hopes all things   ”. . . In the practice of conscious love you begin to discover . . . a hope that is related not to outcome but to a wellspring . . . a source of strength that wells up from deep within you independent of all outcomes. . . . It is a hope that can never be taken away from you because it is love itself working in you, conferring the strength to stay present to that “highest possible outcome” that can be believed and aspired to. “

–    Here we can see that the recognition of the flow of energy that we now recognize as Love is not only a foundation for Faith and a basis for Hope, but the very ‘wellspring’ of the agency by which we act.

Finally, Love endures all things   .” . . . Everything that is tough and brittle shatters; everything that is cynical rots. The only way to endure is to forgive, over and over, to give back that openness and possibility for new beginning which is the very essence of love itself. And in such a way love comes full circle and can fully “sustain and make fruitful,” and the cycle begins again, at a deeper place. And conscious love deepens and becomes more and more rooted. . . .”

–    Here Bourgeault restates Teilhard’s vision of the recursive act in which centration and excentration can work to effect our continued ‘compexification’: the continuation of the agency of cosmic evolution through our individual lives.

The Next Post

This week we took a final look at Love, this time by returning to a familiar text of Paul but seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.  Next week we will overview our travel from ‘the Sacraments’, through Teilhard’s ‘Articulation of the Noosphere’, in Values, Morals and Sacraments and finally in the attitudes captured in Paul’s so-called “Theological Virtues’.

Next week we will; conclude by summing up the process of ‘articulating the noosphere’ and living the ‘Theological Virtues’.

February 29, 2024- Love As the Intersection Between Faith and Hope

   How can seeing love through Teilhard’s lens help us to use faith to become more hopeful?

Today’s Post

In the past several weeks we have addressed the three so-called “Theological Virtues”, Faith, Hope and Love, from the perspective of the evolutionary ‘lens’ of Teilhard de Chardin.  We have seen them as ‘attitudes’ or ‘stances’ that we can take as we ‘articulate the noosphere’, a mapping of the implicit laws of humanity that move our species forward in the increase of complexity that Teilhard saw as the key metric of continuing evolution.

We saw Faith as the confidence that we build in our capacity to act based on extrapolation of experience of the past.  Looking at Hope in a similar manner, we saw how Hope is manifested in an extrapolation of this experience to a hoped-for result of the act that we undertake.

This week we will take a final look at Love, this time seeing it as the hinge on which the belief afforded by Faith becomes an act whose outcome is anticipated by Hope. 

Present, Past and Future

What does it mean to say that we “live in the present”?  To neurologists, what we know about what we sense is by definition ‘the past’.  Considering that it takes between forty and eighty milliseconds for any sensory information to be introduced to the brain, anything that we’re aware of is by definition, ‘the past’; it has already occurred.  Considering the additional time it takes to make a decision to act on the sensed information, the neurological activation of a physical response (‘acting’) requires an additional delay, and our ultimate response to any external stimulus falls ‘in the past’ of the stimulus itself.  So, neurologically speaking, we cannot live ‘in the present’.  By this reckoning, the ‘present’ is an ephemeral concept which is already in the past by the time we are aware of it.

Yet there is a distinct transition between the past and the future that we perceive, either validly or invalidly, as the ‘present’, and it is in this transition that we act.

So, then, what does it mean when we say that we ‘act’?  What is involved in gathering sufficient motivation to act, to ‘decide’ to act, and then to engage our psychomotor system to carry out the decision?

From Past Faith to Future Hope By Way Of Present Love

Seeing the “Theological Virtues” through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we saw Faith as an extrapolation of our past which provides us with the confidence, the ‘push’, to act on the one hand, and Hope as a ‘pull’ from the future as we envision a successful outcome of the act on the other.  But what gets us across the divide?

This idea of an ‘energy of activation’, by which we make this transition, is echoed in Teilhard’s collection, “Activation of Energy”.  This collection of articles focuses on the universal energy potential that over time effects increasing complexity in its products, but the application to human life is inescapable.  Each human act carries the potential of raising our ‘human complexity’ to a higher level.  And no human act, as we have seen in the last few weeks, carries more potential for our fulfillment than the act of love.  But this act requires a previous step, and that is, as we have seen, the decision to love.  Such a decision may well indeed be stimulated by sexual attraction, a need for companionship, or a response to a moral imperative, but whatever the source a decision is ultimately required.

Those of us that are engaged in deep commitments are no doubt fully aware of those times in the relationship in which one does not feel ‘in love’.  Early in any relationship, when this occurs there may be a panic that one is no longer “in love”, and that the relationship has thus failed.  The recognition that this emotional reaction may be premature, and that honest self-assessment, open communication with the other, and faith in the relationship is required, is a dramatic and often painful.  It is, however, always a necessary step not only toward strengthening the relationship but in increasing one’s personal maturity as well.  Such a recognition can only come from a ‘decision’, an action of the human neocortex to modulate the instinctive stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains which may shout, “Danger!  Run!” or “Pain!  Hide!”.  As we have discussed frequently, it is a skill most essential for our personal evolution.

So now we see another role for love in the triad of the ‘Theological Virtues’.  Love may well be, as Teilhard asserts, the only energy that can “unite while differentiating”, bringing us together in such a way in which we become more complete.  But, as the energy of evolution become manifest in our personal lives, it is also the energy that makes it possible for us to make such risky decisions as ‘excentration’ so that we can reap the rewards of our resultant ‘centration’.

We certainly may be able to understand our past well enough to have confidence in ourselves and foresee the future well enough to be enticed by it, but until we engage this flow of universal energy within us, nothing will happen.  Love is indeed the hinge on which Faith results in the outcome promised by Hope.   It is the precise moment of ‘the present’ in which the potential of ‘the past’ can become actualized in the fruit of the ‘future’ in which, as Karen Anderson puts it, “We are in greater possession of ourselves”.

The Next Post

This week we have looked at Love from another perspective, seeing it as the hinge on which the door of Faith is opened to the promises of Hope.  Next week we will take a final look at love, returning to Paul for insight into the works of love in our lives.

February 22, 2024 –  How Evolution Becomes Conscious of Itself Through Love

  How does Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ show love as the the flow of evolution through us?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how, in Teilhard’s insights into evolution as a truly universal process, he understood each step of evolution as resulting from a union which produced something new.  He refers to this critical step (without which the universe would be static, unchanging, and effectively ‘still born’) as ‘complexification’.  From such an interpolation of the past, he extrapolates to the future of human love as ‘nothing more’ (and he would add, ‘nothing less’) than the continuation of such a universal dynamic in each human life.

This week we will continue our exploration of this dynamic, seeing how, while such a process indeed continues in our lives, it nonetheless becomes more complex in itself.

Excentration and Centration As The Continuation of Evolution in the Human Person

Teilhard’s insight into love’s excentration-centration recursive activity is drawn from two of his other insights.

First, in many of his works he identifies ‘centration’ as a key aspect of ‘complexification’.  In other words, in evolution the more ‘centered’ an entity is, the higher it can be seen in the order of complexity and the later it appears in the history of evolution.  He offers examples such as nuclei in atoms, atoms in molecules, molecules in cells, central nervous systems in animals, and brains in higher animals.

Second, he notes that

“. .in a converging Universe each element achieves completeness ..  by a sort of inward turn towards the Other (as) its growth culminates in an act of giving and in excentration”.

   Effectively, increase in centration is the essential characteristic of evolved products, but this changes in the human when entities not only unite to produce more complex products, but to increase their own complexity as well. In the human person, morphological evolution is no longer necessary to produce increased complexity: it now emerges within the entity in addition to among entities.   Paraphrasing Confucius, Teilhard and Karen Armstrong, with love we are now brought into a more complete possession of ourselves when we engage into deeper relations with each other.

Teilhard wasn’t the first thinker to understand such reciprocal forces at work in human relationships, but he seems to be the first to understand our uniue human activity of ‘relationship’ in the context of the upsweep of evolution in the universe.

For this spiral to take place, in which human growth results from relationships which enrich growth, we must become conscious of it.  This requires us to be able to see the energy of evolution as it rises within us to be able to fully cooperate with it.

But, It Ain’t Easy

That said, if the current state of the world offers any clue, this is not a trivial undertaking.  As many of our popular love songs suggest, ‘if it were easy they’d be more of it; if there ain’t more of it, it must not be easy’.

Love as understood by Teilhard does not come without work: it requires a conscious decision to rise above the comforting scaffolding of ego, as nearly all religious beliefs express.  As the Marriage Encounter movement stresses, “Love is a decision”, and such decision requires trust that the energy of love will carry us forward to more completeness.  As we have suggested previously, one of the principle mechanisms of our personal ‘complexification’ is development of the skill of using our neocortex brains to moderate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains, Such skill in ‘decision making’ is a critical facet of this evolutionary skill.

As we only need to look into our own lives to verify, these dynamics of excentration and centration are not without cost.  The process of excentration, traditionally of “loss of one’s self”, “transcendence of egoism”, or even more descriptive of the difficulty, “dying to self”, does not come easy.  As Khalil Gibran says, “The pain you feel is the breaking of the shell which encloses your understanding”.  One aspect of a secular approach to sin can be seen in the resistance, even the avoidance that we offer to such a painful undertaking.

The acknowledgement of the difficulty of such an undertaking better delineates the domains of the ‘Theological Virtues” that we addressed in recent weeks.  In order to take the risks that Love requires, we must have Faith in our power to do so and Hope in the ensuing outcome before we can take the necessary and potentially dangerous leap that Love requires.

So, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the mechanisms of the energy of Love by which we are both ‘united’ (become closer) and the same time ‘differentiated’ (become more complete), the energies of cosmic evolution work in the human person just as they were at work in the first ‘atomicization’ of electrons.   However, there are, in the human, two significant exceptions.

The first can be seen in that, while primitive particles could unify in such a way as to increase the complexity of their products, human ‘particles’ can unify in such a way as to increase the complexity of themselves.

The second, which is much more important, is that these human entities must first understand, then trust and finally consciously cooperate with this complex energy to effect such complexity.  The three ‘Theological Virtues’ offer ‘signposts’ for navigating these three activities.

Enter the ‘Theological Virtues’

As we have seen, the ‘Theological Virtues’ have an importance that goes far beyond the conventional religious goal of qualification for the next life. Now seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, they represent the stances, the attitudes that are necessary for us to take on our continued evolution both as persons and as a species.

Teilhard stresses the need for Faith in this process of understanding and cooperating in the excentration/centration interplay: belief that the self will not be lost in this journey from past to future; it will be enhanced.  The true, underlying, core nature of the human person that results from the long rise of consciousness mapped by our knowledge of the past continues to follow the thread of cosmic evolution which leads to the Hope of greater possession of ourselves, fuller being, in the future.  This thread of complexity has manifested itself in the current which runs through life, awareness, and consciousness.  It now continues in us as the Love which powers the engine of our becoming.  While the ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ as mapped by the concepts of sacraments, values and morals, can be seen as the early markers of the pathway of the axis of evolution as it rises in our lives, the ‘Theological Virtues’ offer an increased understanding of how these articulations can be ‘lived out’ in our personal ‘complexification’.

The Next Post

This week we continued to follow Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal perspective in which Love can be seen as the energy by which we become ‘fuller’ and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a fifth look at the Theological Virtues by seeing how Love can be seen as the hinge on which the belief afforded by Faith becomes an act whose outcome is anticipated by Hope.

February 15, 2024- Reorienting Love From Attracting to Becoming

   How does seeing love through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to see it as an aspect of evolutional energy?

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from seeing love as depicted in popular culture (as well as traditional religion) as emotionally based, to seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as ontologically based.  To Teilhard, love is much more than an emotional stimulus to procreation, the stability of society, or an act that qualifies us for the next life.  To him, Love was nothing more (and as he would add, “nothing less”) than the current manifestation of the universal energy of evolution as it rises in the human person.   Without denying the significance of love as an ‘act’, Teilhard asserts that it must be understood as an ‘energy’ with which we can cooperate to increase our wholeness, and recognizes it in the context of the wellspring of cosmic evolution.

This week we will move on to address how such an energy can be seen to work among humans to energize our increasing ‘complexification’, both as a species as well as in our individual lives.

 Love as A Force of Evolution

   In Teilhard’s unique ‘lens of universal evolution’, he notes that each step of evolution results from an action and a consequence which effects the increase of complexity in a product. He understands such increase as the primary metric of evolution.  Without this metric, as he points out, universal evolution would have been still born, stagnant, and static.  Everything that we can see around us came into existence from such a process.

The action in each evolutive step going back to the Big Bang is simply the joining of two products of like complexity in a way which results in the consequence of a new product of increased complexity.  John Haught sees this as

“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature”

Effectively, in this process, two ‘parent’ entities join on a ‘two dimensional’ plane of common complexity, but the result occurs ‘vertically’, in a third dimension of increased complexity, turning what started out as a two-dimensional activity into three dimensions.  Teilhard sees this simple but profound process underlying the appearance of everything that we can see in the universe.

He notes, however, that science is unable to account for this vertical aspect, even though without it, as he notes, the universe remains static.  Next to the “vast material energies” studied by science, this agent of complexity “adds absolutely nothing that can be weighed or measured”.  Hence there is no branch of science that acknowledges it, much less addresses it.  Again, from Haught

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the ‘person) has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

   Teilhard devotes a significant amount of his writing to address this aspect of cosmology.  In doing so he notes that this dyadic activity, two entities joining in such a way as to produce a product of higher complexity, occurs at the very basis of cosmic becoming, as described in the fundamental scientific treatment of the Big Bang, and continues unabated all the way to the present day.  Therefore, he sees this simple but profound activity as still at work in human relationships and their resultant contribution to human evolution.  Our love relationships aren’t unique to humans, they are simply the latest echo of the rise of this dyadic activity through each wave of evolution.

How did Teilhard understand how love between humans can be seen to reflect such activity?

 Excentration and Centration

We have frequently adverted to John’s classic assertion that “God is Love and he who abides in Love abides in God and God in him,” to address the nature of love as an ontological effector rather than just an emotion.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, this statement by John speaks volumes about God, about us and about our ongoing genesis as humans.

As we saw last week, Teilhard’s less metaphorical (and more empirically correct) understanding of John is that God is the ground of being which manifests itself in the energy of love, and that when we love we are participating in our individual current of this universal flow of energy.  To Teilhard, as we saw, God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, ‘He’ is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the evolutionary product of the ‘person’.

    Teilhard articulates this dynamic further, seeing it in the light of cosmic evolution and particularly in its continuation in the human person.  In relationships between persons, Teilhard sees the workings of love coming about through the dynamics which he refers to as “excentration” and “centration”.

“Excentration” occurs when we are able to grow beyond our biases, assumptions and thought structures and become aware of different and more meaningful aspects of life: the “aha” moments in which we realize the limitation that incomplete presumptions or positions are imposing on us.

“Centration” occurs when this scaffolding of ego gradually falls away and excentration naturally leads to increased transparency, openness, and honesty.   Thus as we, in Jesus’ metaphor, ‘die to ourself’ we become more authentically ourself.  In this new state, our capacity for relationship is also increased, as we saw when we addressed ‘Psychology as Secular Meditation’, as quantified by Carl Rogers.

Engaging in a deep relationship, or deepening the relationship that already exists, enhances not only our self but also our relationships, and contributes to the ability of those that we love to “excentrate”, and thus increase their own maturity and capacity for love.  As their level of person is enhanced and the love returned, this results in an increased level of self-understanding in both persons.

Seen ‘ontologically’, love is a way of making ourselves by making others.  As we have seen, Confucius seems to be the first to have discovered this ontological essence, when he said

“If you would enlarge yourself, you must first enlarge others.  When you enlarge others, you are enlarging yourself.”

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ by following Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal

perspective in which love can be seen as the energy of universal evolution become manifest in the energy by which we become persons, and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a fourth look at Love, going a little deeper into how Teilhard’s mapping of ‘excentration’ and ‘centration’ as the principle actions of the dynamic of Love can contribute to our personal ‘complexification’.

February 8, 2024 – Love As The Continuing Energy of Evolution

How can seeing love through Teilhard’s lens refocus it as an aspect of energy which moves us forward?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at the so-called ‘Theological Virtue’ of love by seeing it in the context of an emotion-based ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  This week we will take a second look informed by Teilhard’s understanding of it as the universal energy of evolution become manifest in human life by which we continue the fourteen billion years of evolution’s process of increase in complexity.

We will see Love through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, as less emotional than ontological. 

The Ontological Side of Love

Maurice Blondel articulated what had long been experienced by the great mystics when he asserted that:

“It is impossible to think of myself…over here, and then of God as over against us.”

  He goes on to explain why he asserts this:

“This is impossible because I…have come to be who I am through a process in which God is involved.”

   This process by which we “come to be who we are” is part of Teilhard’s essential insight: love is the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution as it rises through the human person.  He compares love to the phenomenon of gravity which pulls the grains of matter together to effect higher forms of reality when he asks:

“Can we not say quite simply that in its (love’s) essence it is the attraction exercised on each unit of consciousness by the center of the universe in course of taking shape?”

   This process by which we “come to be who we are” is part of Teilhard’s essential insight: love is the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution as it rises through the human.  He saw a distinctive facet of this energy of evolution at work in every step of the universe’s emergence, such as the forces which forge atoms from particulate electrons, electro-chemical forces forging millions of types of molecules from a few hundred types of atoms, the energies escorting molecules across seemingly impenetrable thresholds to cellular formation and so on to those forces which unite us in such a way that we are ‘differentiated’ into distinct but highly ‘connectable’ persons.  Every change of state that can be seen to have occurred in cosmic evolution has been powered by a more complex facet of the single integrated energy by which the universe unfolds.  In the case of the ‘change of state’ that saw conscious entities (the higher mammals) evolving into entities that were not only conscious, but conscious of their consciousness, the aspect of the universal evolutionary force that we know as love was necessary for the transition to this new mode of being.

This brings us back to Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  The entire history of science can be seen as the quest for (and the success of) understanding both the entities produced by evolution (such as molecules) and the energies by which their component parts are united in such a way as to increase the resultant complexity (such as the electro-chemical forces).  Teilhard simply extrapolates this past history into a future in which the process of evolution continues to effect more complex entities through more comprehensive energies.

In scientific parlance, the amount of ‘information’ contained in an emergent product of evolution is not only substantially larger than that present in the entities whose interconnection produced it, the potential of the new entity to parent offspring of similarly increased complexity is itself increased.

Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’ simply recognizes that, just as there are electro-chemical ‘laws’ by which atoms are combined into molecules, expressed in terms of descriptions of matter and rules of combination (‘information’), humanity is in the early stages of understanding our nature as human persons and the energies of both individual and collective human ontology.   As we saw in recent weeks, these ‘human laws’ can be expressed in terms of sacraments and morals.

Simply put, just like the electrons, atoms, molecules, and cells before us, we are simply the latest products of evolution, and are therefore capable of moving forward in complexity by cooperation with the energies which Teilhard insists can be found in these ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

Just as Teilhard expands evolution both rearward and forward from ‘natural selection’ to ‘universal complexification’, he expands ‘love’ from ‘emotion’ to ‘ontological energy’.

”So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

  We have seen how Christianity has reduced John’s assertion that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him” from a highly intimate expression of the relationship between God and man to a belief that we need to love as God loves us if we are to merit the afterlife.  Teilhard restores John’s astounding assertion to its ontological and non-metaphorical truth: among the multifaceted manifestations of the energy by which the universe evolves is a principle by which its increasing complexity eventually manifests itself in the personal.

The less metaphorical understanding of John proposed by Teilhard is that God is the ground of being which manifests itself in the energy of love, and that when we love we are participating in our individual current of this universal flow of energy.  To Teilhard, expanding John, God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, ‘He’ is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the ‘person’.

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ by following Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal perspective in which it can be seen as the energy by which we become persons and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a third look at Love as a force of continuing evolution by seeing how Teilhard understands its action in assuring our continuing ‘complexification’.

February 1, 2024 – Love as Cooperation With the Energy of Evolution

   How can human love be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as the key structural link in human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the Theological Virtues of faith and hope intersect in an ‘extrapolation/interpolation’ dynamic that extends our knowledge of the past to build confidence in the future.

This week we will continue with a look at the third Theological Virtue, ‘love’ as it is a manifestation of the universal energy of evolution.

The Traditional Approach to Love

Paul, who first delineated the three ‘attitudes’ of the ‘Theological Virtues’, saw love as the primary of the three, mainly because it was most essential to Jesus’s message.  While he saw faith and hope as necessary to fullness of being, he understood that love was that which brings the whole picture together.  Paul goes into some detail in his description of Love in 1 Corinthians 13:4:

“Love is patient and kind, Love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.  Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

As is commonly understood in contemporary society, the traditional theological approach treats love as an ‘act’.  We are to “love one another” as one of the many criteria for eternal life after death.  As Jesus taught, we are to love God, love ourselves and love our neighbors as ourselves, restating and building upon Confucius’ statement of the Golden Rule from some 500 years earlier.

As Teilhard insists, however, even though humanity may be only in the early stages of such ‘articulations of the noosphere’, at least in the West the values of the uniqueness of the person and the necessity of relationships that enhance this uniqueness are paramount.  Any approach to regulation or enhancement of this relationship that impedes this understanding of personal growth also impedes the continuation of the evolution of the human species.

Nearly all the ancient thinkers recognized that a key to human maturity lay in the person’s rise above “egoism” both as a building block for personal growth and as a necessary component of relationship.  The concept of “losing” oneself, overcoming ‘ego’, as a step toward spiritual fulfillment is common in many venerable systems of thought.  The actual practice in which these results occur varies significantly among the religions and philosophies in which they are critical, but all the thinkers of the “Axial Age” recognized that you needed other people to elicit your full humanity; self-cultivation was a reciprocal process. As Confucius put it:

  “In order to establish oneself, one should try to establish others.  In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others.”

   Karen Armstrong sees this perspective as common to the thinkers of the Axial Age.

“In one way or the other, their programs were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence, and promoted the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule.  They understood that this reciprocal process required that we treat others as we would be treated.  This requires us to be able to rise above the limitations of our self, to become less focused inward and more open to “the other”: the overcoming of egoism.”

   Gregory Baum rephrases Blondel on this process.

“At the moment when we shatter our own little system and recognize another person, we become more truly a person ourself.  What takes place here is a conversion away from self-centeredness to the wider reality of life and people.”

Understanding Love – From Relating to Becoming

Of course, even the most emotional treatment of love would acknowledge its effect on our personal development, but the traditional approach tends to emphasize the action itself over the effect.  The evangelist John proposes a more fundamental understanding of Love as both the nature of God and the nature of man in his astounding assertion (1 John 4:16) that:

“God is love; and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”

   As Teilhard asserts and Richard Rohr frequently observes in his Weekly Meditations, this ‘ontological’ aspect of Love has been less stressed in favor of Christianity’s seemingly endless need for the promulgation of rules and society’s need for the stability that it affords.  As a result, it is far more common to see Love treated by religion as an act which gains favor with God than as a natural facet of the evolutionary forces with which we can cooperate to assure our personal growth towards wholeness.      The intimacy asserted by John, even though it has been diluted by Christianity’s love affair with Plato, is nonetheless the perspective which not only fosters a reinterpretation of the venerable religious concept of ‘immanence’ but provides a much more universal context to the idea of Love itself.

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ and explored the historical development of this undeniable but often bewildering aspect of human life.  We saw how the popular concept of love focusses on the ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected by instinct and emotion for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  We also saw how seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ opens it up to be recognized as the most recent manifestation of the energy of evolution.

Next week we will continue our shift from seeing love as simple relationship to follow Teilhard’s expansion of Love as a more universal perspective in which it can be seen as the energy by which we become persons and in doing so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

January 25, 2024 –  Faith and Hope: Orientation From Past to Future

  How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to use faith and hope to build a bridge to the future?

Today’s Post

Last week we continued our look at the ‘Theological Virtues’ by addressing that of hope, which we saw as one of the attitudes that we take when we set about mapping the dimensions of human life as we ‘articulate the noosphere’ in terms of sacraments, values and morals.
We noted that “Faith and Hope intersect in a present which we all too frequently experience as ‘dangerous.’”  At this intersection, drawing on the energies of life which are ‘gifted’ in the flow of evolution, we become able, as Blondel puts it, “.. to leave the paralyzing past behind and enter creatively into our destiny”.

This week we will look further into this significant intersection.

Faith and Hope: From Interpolation to Extrapolation

Faith can be seen as an interpolation of the past.  Looking back on our experience, we begin to better understand what we are capable of, and in doing so we begin to increase our confidence in our capability to act.

Hope can be seen as an extrapolation from this experience to an anticipation of what can be accomplished in the future if we but trust our experience.   Hence faith and hope can be seen in the two recursive stages of our lives: our pasts becoming our futures in the evanescent moment of the present.

We can find examples of this intersection of our “currents of life” from the three great thinkers that we have explored in this blog:  Maurice Blondel, Carl Rogers and of course, Teilhard.
Blondel was one of the first theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of the immensity of the past and the dynamic nature of the universe provided both an opportunity as well as a rationale for reinterpreting legacy Christian teachings into a form not only congruent with the findings of science but offering a greater relevance to human life.  From science’s discovery of a universal unfolding, he recognized that the human species was better understood when seen in the same dynamic light as that of science, and whose individual ‘becoming’ is fueled by the same energy which underpins the entire universe.  In effect, he remapped the empirical insights of science into new spiritual insights, interpolating from science’s view of the past to extrapolating to a religiously optimistic view of the future.  From Blondel’s viewpoint, this was a religious reinterpretation, from science to religion, from science’s impersonal grasp of the distant past to religion’s deeply personal grasp of human life, and hence from past to future.

   Rogers, as we saw when we addressed “Secular Meditation, Finding Self”, also used empirical information to come to his conclusion that the human person was, at the most basic level, good, positive and trustworthy.  This was quite orthogonal to the then common Freudian perspective which saw the basis of personal existence, the id, as a dangerous and decidedly untrustworthy force in the human psyche.  Once again, we see in Rogers an interpolation from past, empirical data (in this case Rogers’ extensive case notes) to an extrapolation to an optimistic, hopeful human future.  We saw last week a list of the characteristics that Rogers observed in his patients as they underwent a process toward healing.   This time, however, Rogers offers a scientific, empirical reinterpretation.
Then of course, we come to Teilhard.  Going well beyond either Blondel or Rogers, Teilhard draws on the same scientific empirical findings, and expands them to the entirety of the life of the universe.  His first step in doing so was to unbind science’s understanding of evolution from the narrow perspective of the theory of Natural Selection and open it up to the immensity of universal evolution.  This unprecedented vision understood the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ as the basic measure to plumb both the universal depths of time as well as the long, slow accretion of ‘fuller being’ which emerged with it.

He begins by articulating the many stages now understood to have emerged during the ten or so billion years preceding biological terrestrial life.  He then shows how they are connected in evolution by a rise in complexity, a steady, reliable force which acts on all the entities in all the stages leading to the cell.  Having established this basis of universal ontological continuity, he goes on to show how it continues through the biosphere, and eventually emerges in the present noosphere.  In doing so, Teilhard offers an extrapolation from scientific findings to an interpolation, which is as valuable to the clarification of science as it is to the reinterpretation of religion.

Teilhard and The Continuity of Past to Future: “Spirituality”              

This insight into the basis of universal ontological continuity, providing as it does an integrated perspective inclusive of spirit and matter, science, and religion, and ultimately the human person and evolution, is Teilhard’s great contribution to a comprehensive perspective of the universe.  In doing so, he departed substantially from science’s materialistic menagerie of pre-life stages disconnected from life stages, and its current schizophrenic approach which inhibits the placing of the human person into a cohesive view of the universe.   To Teilhard, these eras can now be seen in a single, connected context, one in which the human person is no less a product of evolution than the stars that glow in the sky.   He also offered a reorientation of religion’s accumulated closet of dualisms. In a single, cohesive, integrated approach to the universe as ‘becoming’, he showed how the action of God can be seen as the basic life blood of evolution, and hence in which each individual life partakes of this universal bounty of universal life.

This grand vision deconstructs religion’s great and seemingly indissoluble dualisms.  One example of such deconstruction is his explanation of ‘spirit’ vs ‘matter’, found in ‘Human Energy’.  First, he lays out the dualism itself:

“For some, heirs to almost all the spiritualist philosophies of former times, the spirit is something so special and so high that it could not possibly be confused with the earthly and material forces which it animates.  Spirit is a ‘meta-phenomenon’.

For others, on the contrary, …, spirit seems something so small and frail that it becomes accidental and secondary.  In the face of the vast material energies to which it adds absolutely nothing that can be weighed or measured, the ‘fact of consciousness’ can be regarded as negligible.  It is an ‘epi-phenomenon’.”

Then he dissolves the dualism by identifying spirituality as the underlying phenomenon which is essential to universal evolution:

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more; and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

  He then restates his conclusion, this time answering the assertions outlined in his mapping of the dualism:

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.”

   It is worth noting that in this brief exposition, Teilhard not only deconstructs the traditional religious dualism of spirit/matter by moving them from ‘either/or’ to ‘both/and’, placing them in a dynamic, ‘becoming’ context in which they are simply different facets of a single phenomenon as it moves from past to future.   He also heals science’s dualistic mind/body treatment of the human person by recognizing that the state of evolution characterized by ‘consciousness aware of itself’ is simply the latest manifestation of a complexity which has been increasing in the universe since the ‘big bang’.  He addresses this process in the last part of the quote from “Human Energy”:

“The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.  It is a cosmic change of state.”

     So, in this example we can see how Teilhard goes about his ’interpolation/extrapolation’ process, drawing on science’s study of deep time and evolution to understand the thread of universal life to which our essence is connected, then to extrapolate to a future which we can trust to offer a continuation of such ‘increased complexity’.

He offers an approach to faith not based on (but also, as it turns out, neither orthogonal to) belief in scripture or the church’s ‘Magisterium’, but on a recognition that the fourteen billion year rise of complexity which (so far) has resulted in our own individual person can be expected to continue in our lives if we can but trust and cooperate with it.

And this is where faith and hope can be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to intersect in our lives.

The Next Post

This week saw how the intersection of faith and hope can be seen to intersect in our lives, from the insights of Blondel, Rogers and Teilhard.

Next week we will move on to a look at the third of the Theological Virtues, that of ‘love’.

January 18, 2024 – Hope : Expectation of the Outcome of Evolution

   How hope in the future can reorient us from past failures to the anticipation of future wholeness

Today’s Post

Last week we began our look at the attitudes (the ‘Theological Virtues’) that we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’.  We looked at ‘Faith’ and saw how it acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’ to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.

This week we will continue our look at the Theological Virtues by addressing ‘hope’.

The Traditional Approach to Hope

As seen by the traditional church, hope, like faith, is an attitude based upon the concept of a salvation earned by living a moral (as defined by the church) life.  Hope is deeply intertwined with faith, in that it is the result of believing that pleasing God is necessary for eternal salvation.  It focusses more on the ‘payoff’, than the ‘process’.  As the Catechism says, “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness”.  As such, it is given to us as a guard against despair, to help us keep our eyes on the end goal, the ‘next life’ while we endure the pains and disillusions of this one.

Like the traditional approach to faith, the traditional approach to hope assumes that ‘truth’ is ‘given to man by scripture and the church’, adhered to by ‘faith’ and trusted to result in salvation by ‘hope’.

Reinterpreting Hope

Even though the Church approached hope as rooted in belief in the afterlife, it was Paul himself who identified what can be expected in this life when we take the stance of ‘faith’.  As much of Paul’s writing clearly shows, as the first Christian theologian he took great pains to boil the teachings of Jesus down into specifics, such as we saw in his teaching on the ‘Theological Virtues’.  Another example can be found in his listing of what he referred to as ‘The Fruit of the Spirit’.  This ‘fruit’ consists of the human attributes which are ‘given’ by the Holy Spirit when we cooperate with the presence of God in our lives.  The facets of this ‘fruit’ are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness.

Of course, seeing these things through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, as when we addressed the Trinity, the ‘Holy Spirit’ is one manifestation of the tri-faceted energy of evolution which flows through our lives.   These ‘gifts’, from our perspective of reinterpretation, refer to those human potentialities that can be actualized as we become more aware of, and come to cooperate with, the energy of evolution as it rises in us.
Paul’s ‘Fruit’ describes what can happen in our lives as we live out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been describing, that are reflected in the sacraments, values, and morals of our culture.  One does not have to be religious to recognize the quality of life that would accrue to us were we better able to love, have our lives filled with joy rather than foreboding, feel at peace with ourselves and others, resulting in natural (vs forced) kindness, recognizing our innate goodness and being able to trust.

Paul’s facets of ‘fruit’ correlate well with Carl Rogers’ observations of a patient undergoing the process toward healing (excuse the fifties misuse of gender):

– The individual becomes more integrated, more effective

– Fewer of the characteristics are shown which are usually termed neurotic or psychotic, and more of the healthy, well-functioning person

– The perception of himself changes, becoming more realistic in views of self

– He becomes more like the person he wishes to be, and values himself more highly

– He is more self-confident and self-directing

– He has a better understanding of himself, becomes open to his experience, denies or represses less of his experience

– He becomes more accepting in his attitudes towards others, seeing others as more similar to himself

Comparing Hope to Faith

If faith involves trusting in the power of belief itself, that it is possible to find within ourselves the ability to act in the face of the emotion of fear, then hope provides a ‘pull’, in which we can make the decision and muster the energy to act because we can envision the importance, even the enjoyment, of the consequence of such action.   One of Paul’s ‘fruits’ is ‘joy’, and there are few greater joys than the feeling of satisfaction of completion of a difficult and risky task.  We can envision this potential for joy even before we undertake the risk, and as a result the arduousness of the task is therefore lessened by the anticipation of the result.  While faith can be seen in the ‘decision’, hope can be understood as the ‘anticipation’.

An example is Rogers’ insight that the risky choice to ‘be willing to live with ambiguity’ is counterbalanced by the ‘hope’ that, as a result, we will mature into the greater possession of ourselves as articulated in his list above.

Another result of the ability to hope is ‘patience’, another facet of Paul’s ‘fruit’.  Faith may provide us with the insight that we are growing by a principle of universal evolution working within us, but hope is a bulwark against the despair that can set in as we frequently experience failure.  No one gets through life without Shakespeare’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, but the burden becomes heavier with impatience.

While faith allows us to reinterpret our past in a positive light, hope allows us to taste a future in which today’s burdens have been overcome.  Faith and hope intersect in a present which we all too frequently experience as ‘dangerous’.  While there are many actions that we can take to mitigate the danger, none is more important than to believe in our ability to endure and that this endurance allows us, as Blondel puts it,

“.. to leave the paralyzing past behind and enter creatively into our destiny”.

The Next Post

This week we focused Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on the attitude of ‘hope’ in our reinterpretation of the ‘Theological Virtues’ as stances that we take when we ‘articulate the noosphere’ in terms of sacraments, values and morals of our culture.

Next week we will continue by looking at the intersection between faith and hope.