May 27, 2021 –  With Love, Evolution Becomes Conscious of Itself

   How is love the awareness of 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, 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, 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 they unite in order 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 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, it 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 the last chapter.  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, in Teilhard’s understanding of the mechanisms of the energy of Love by which we are both ‘united’ (become closer) and the same time ‘differentiated’ (become more complete), we can see the energies of cosmic evolution at work in the human person just as they were at work in the first ‘atomicization’ 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.  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.  In our secular reinterpretation, they represent the stances, the attitudes that are necessary for us to take in 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 persons 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.