Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our series of posts on the structure and navigation of the milieu in which we are immersed, the noosphere.  We followed the sacraments, values and morals which humans have (so far) fabricated in an attempt to order the seeming cacophony of personal human energies in ways beneficial to both the person and society on the one hand, and the attitudes and stances that can be taken in order to receive the maximum benefit of our noospheric navigation on the other.  The question can be asked, however, “To what end?”
This week we will begin to take a look at the future.  Although Teilhard’s mystical experience of the ground of being was balanced by a strong empiricism, heavily informed by his deep scientific bent, he applied both of these strengths in a vision of how those religious and scientific perspectives can be seen as guides to moving us towards the future.

Surveying the Status

A good way to begin to look at the future is to understand the past and the present.  Teilhard offers a wonderful use of metaphors in his writings, and one excellent example is that of ‘the sphere’.  He develops this metaphor to peer into the future at the end of his book, “Man’s Place in Nature”, which he presented as a somewhat simplified rewrite of his “Phenomenon of Man”.

Consider, he proposes, a geometric sphere with north and south poles, meridians from south to north, and an equator ‘round the middle.  In this metaphor, the axis from south to north represents time, with the south pole representing the past, and the north the future.

In this metaphor, he sees the human race beginning as a small population at the south pole, and as it branches  into its various (‘manifold’) manifestations of families, tribes, cities, states and countries, it ‘ramifies’, spreads out, seeking unsettled territory and available resources as it enlarges, and as it grows it progresses towards the equator.

As this wave of human expansion approaches the equator, due to the curvature of the surface of the sphere, the amount of available territory necessarily decreases with the increase in human population.  This of course increases the tensions among the branches of human population as they begin to compete with each other for the remaining space and resources.

At the same time, consider, he suggests, that the individual human entity (the ‘person’) does not appear as a finished product of evolution, with any particular expertise in utilizing the unique capability with which he has been endowed, the neo-cortex brain.  Just as with the cell at its birth resembles the molecule from which it evolved (“it arrives ‘dripping in molecularity’”), an onlooker at this first moment of human evolution would have been hard pressed to distinguish the new human ‘person’ from its predecessor ‘higher anthropoids’.

As a result, it should not be surprising that in these early years, the human was more subject to the influences of the same instinctual stimuli which served ancestors so well, than able to modulate these stimuli with actions stemming from the new level of brain which is unique to the human species.   And, further, given the slow increase in the tensions resulting from closer contact with humans from other, alien. and potentially dangerous, social units, it’s not surprising that the instinctual needs for resources and survival would outweigh any thoughts of cooperative engagement at this early stage of development.

Then, there is the agency of basic human mistrust.  We do not seem to ‘naturally’ seek closeness with those outside our closely-knit family or clan groups.  We recoil from being forced into closeness with others that we did not initiate ourselves.  And, as a result, when it becomes more necessary for our small, familiar groups to federate into larger states, the problem of ‘cohesion vs aggression’ begins to rise.  As Jonathan Sacks points out:

“Reciprocal altruism creates trust between neighbors, people who meet repeatedly and know about one another’s character.  The birth of the city posed a different and much greater problem: how do you establish trust between strangers?”

One answer, repeated over and over in history, is that you don’t.  In order to assure the stability of a society which grows in size as it increases in diversity, one tactic is total control over the individuals that make it up.  The objective is not ‘trust’, which comes from within, it is ‘control’, which is imposed from without.  The police state, which insures order at the expense of personal autonomy, has been common to nearly all civilizations going back to antiquity, and still can be found today.   Even in those societies which have tried to equitably accommodate the person and the state, there are many who abhor the ‘closing in’ of outsiders.   As Teilhard remarks, in terms that are as applicable to  today’s Western societies as they were when he expressed them seventy years ago:

“…so many human beings, when faced by the inexorably rising pressure of the noosphere, take refuge in what are now obsolete forms of individualism and nationalism.”

   Given this state of affairs, what sort of light does Teilhard see ahead?  Can there be a basis for optimism?

The Next Post

This week we took a first look at where the flow of evolution which we have been addressing may be taking us.  At first glance, it might well seem that the future of an increasing human population on a world of decreasing space and resources is one to be considered with some trepidation.  Is the future of the past the past?  Do we anticipate ‘more of the same, only moreso’?

As we will see in the remaining posts of this blog, however, based on the picture we have constructed, anchored firmly on Teilhard’s clear-headed foundations, there is indeed a strong case for optimism in both our lives as persons who make up this population and the organization of our human energy which makes up our societies.

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 a vision of the past, he extrapolates to a vision 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 a little further, seeing how while such a process indeed continues in our lives, it becomes more complex in itself.

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

The Excentration-Centration reciprocal activity is drawn from two Teilhard 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 in the history of evolution.  He offers examples such as nuclei in atoms, nuclei 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, 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 they unite in order to increase their own complexity as well. This recursive action, such increase in ‘centricity, however,’ requires an increase in ‘excentricity’ in order to effect the increased complexity of both partners.

Teilhard wasn’t the first thinker to understand such reciprocal forces at work in human relationships.  Such a dynamic seems to have first been recognized by Confucius some five hundred years BCE,

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

   Jesus himself asserted that we must ‘lose’ ourselves in order to ‘find’ ourselves.

In such a dynamic, “excentration” can be seen to foster a renewed “centration“, which in turn fosters a continued “excentration” and so on.  In this rich recursive rondo, both persons become more complete, more “realized of their potentials” than before.  Essentially, in this way our relationships are the fertile ground for our growth. This growth in turn fosters the deepening of our relationships, which further fosters our growth.

Such a process goes far beyond responding to instinctive urges to procreate, or to fulfilling emotional needs for comfort.  It is the essential act by which we become what it is possible for us to become.

But, It Ain’t Easy

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

Love as understood by Teilhard does not come without work: it requires a conscious decision to rise above the comforting scaffolding of ego.  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 have 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”.  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 leap that Love requires.

So, in Teilhard’s understanding of the mechanisms of the energy of Love by which we are both ‘united’ and ‘differentiated’, we can see the energies of cosmic evolution at work in the human person just as they were at work in the first assemblages of electrons.  There are, in the human however, 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.  This is where the three ‘Theological Virtues’ come in.

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.  In our secular reinterpretation, they represent the stances, attitudes that are necessary for our continued evolution both as persons and as a species.

Teihard stresses the need for Faith in this process of understanding and cooperating in the excentration/centration: 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 in the future.  This thread of complexity which has manifested itself in the current which runs through life, awareness and consciousness now continues as 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 persons and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a fifthl 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.

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the Theological Virtues of Faith and Hope intersect in an ‘extrapolation/interpolation’ spiral that extends our knowledge of the past to confidence in the future.

This week we will continue with a look at the third Theological Virtue, Love.

The Traditional Approach to Love

   Paul, who first delineated these three ‘attitudes’, saw Love as the primary of the three, mainly because it was 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 to Love treats 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 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” (900-200 BCE) 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.  As we have seen in the two  posts on Love (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201701) John proposes a more fundamental understanding of both Love, 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 Richard Rohr frequently observes in his Weekly Meditations, this is an aspect of Love which 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 an ontological force with which we can cooperate to assure our personal growth towards wholeness.

The intimacy asserted by John, even though it has diluted by Christianity’s love affair with Plato, is nonetheless the perspective which not only fosters a reinterpretation of the venerable religious concept i 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 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 Teilhard’s insight opens it up to be seen as the most recent manifestation of the energy of evolution that it truly is.

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