How does 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’.

 

   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.