How does Teilhard see universal evolution as a hermeneutic for understanding reality?
Today’s Post
We have been looking at how the human person and the society in which we live can be seen by Teilhard in a distinctively optimistic light. We have also seen that Johan Norberg’s statistics shine this light even brighter but, how there seems to be a headwind of pessimism that inhibits a general positive view of the direction of evolution in the human species. We also saw how Steven Pinker identifies several examples how this headwind is evident in contemporary society today.
These ‘headwinds of pessimism’ that we addressed in the past two weeks are indeed real and impossible to ignore. They did not appear recently, but depend on the existence of a dystopia that has been prevalent in human society since its beginnings, and will continue as long as a narrow perspective of human existence persists.
Teilhard proposes a widening of this perspective as an antidote to such headwinds. If, he suggests, we can see ourselves in a context of reality which is evolving in the direction of ‘fuller being’, we will be able to
“..spread our sails in the right way to the winds of the earth and always find ourselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”
This “spreading of sails” involves the recognition of a reliable causality in each of us that is always at work in our lives to bring us to an ever-fuller degree of ‘being’. He asserts that such recognition will awaken us to our potential as human persons, and provide the stimulus for our personal and collective fullness. As he put it (and please forgive my overuse of this quote):
“.. I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”
In saying this, he is stating a belief that when we, individually and collectively, see ourselves as the current manifestation of the same energy that has breathed the universe into existence over the past fourteen billion years, the emerging confidence in this energy within us will enable us to overcome all obstacles to becoming more what it is possible for us to be. As he puts it in more poetic terms, the insight that the universe is ‘on our side’ allows us to perceive ourselves as being held in God’s hands.
“..the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”
To experience one’s self as being held in the hands of God can truly count as a significantly ‘decisive moment’. A person who feels that, as Maurice Blondel put it,
“The ground of being is on our side”
will experience life quite differently than one who feels adrift.
But the act of experiencing is somewhat dependent upon understanding. Considering the way that understanding contributes to belief, and hence the importance of such understanding, Teilhard develops a way of seeing that can contribute to this skill of sailing. This mode of seeing is based on his grasp of all reality as it exists in a flux of a universal ‘becoming’. It is his ‘lens of evolution’.
Next Week
This week we introduced Teilhard’s fundamental approach to ‘making sense’ of reality and our role in it: seeing reality through the ‘lens of evolution. From this perspective, he believed that the oft confusing aspects of reality, expressed in the many ‘dualities’ of Science, Philosophy and Religion, can be used as a tool for knitting their many seemingly contradictory cosmic stories into a single fabric.
Next week we will begin to see how Teilhard’s view of evolution was unique in many ways, but how his expanded view enabled the whole of the universe, including the human person, to be understood holistically and therefore lead to a clearer understanding of our part in it.