How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ help us to be confident about the future?
Today’s Post
Last week we explored a simple shift from locating ultimate meaning in the past, by both religion and science, to locating it in the future, as Teilhard’s concept of universal evolution asserts. We saw how such a shift of perspective not only opens up new relevance to traditional religion but affords an overcoming of the historical dualities and dangers of both science and religion, and hence leads to a new synergy between them. This week we will look at how such a reorientation not only adds to the richness of science and religion, but how such a change of stance offers an additional ‘principle of reinterpretation’ to our search for the ‘Secular Side of God’.
Reorienting Religion Towards the Future
In our series on reinterpreting science and religion, we looked at ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which could be applied to traditional Christian teachings if we were to examine them through Teilhard’s ‘lens’. In this series, we noted our use of his insights in establishing these principles:
“Teilhard’s unique approach to the nature of reality provides insights into the fundamental energies which are at work in the evolution of the universe and hence are at work in the continuation of evolution through the human person. His insights compromise neither the theories of Physics in the play of elemental matter following the ‘Big Bang” nor the essential theory of Natural Selection in the increasing complexity of living things, but instead brings them together into a single, coherent process.”
Based on last week’s post, and indebted to both Teilhard and John Haught, we delved into a very basic and powerful approach to reorientation which highlights the underlying problems of both traditional science and religion in making sense of our lives.
We saw that this reorientation is simply a shift of perspective from locating ‘meaning’ in the past to positing it in the future. Again, paraphrasing Haught
“While traditional religion locates the fullness of being appearing in the past, a ‘timeless fiat accompli’, and science locates it in a set of mathematically perfect principles extant at the ‘Big Bang’, an ‘anticipatory set of eyes’ sees it as a dramatic, transformative, temporal awakening.”
Or, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins saw it, as a
“Gathering to greatness/Like the oozing of oil”:
However, we can take this further in our search for the attitudes which we can adopt in the process of living out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’, sacraments, morals, and values that we addressed in the last few posts. We can add the development of Haught’s ‘anticipatory set of eyes’, as a reinterpretation principle that emerges when we look to an unfinished but positive future as the basis for our faith in life. In summary, to reinterpret our Christian set of beliefs through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we must also understand the universe, and hence our lives, as being ‘in process’, consisting of the development of Haught’s ‘anticipation’, and requiring attitudes which are firmly focused on the future.
The Three ‘Theological’ Virtues
Thus, the logical next step after establishing the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ as found in sacraments and morals, would be establishing the ‘stance’ that we must take if we are to embrace such articulation and further the cause of human development as we continue the long rise of complexity as it unfolds in the human species.
The first Christian theologian, Paul, summarized the teachings of Jesus as found in the three synoptic gospels. He was the first to recognize that Jesus was more than just another itinerant preacher (of which there were many to be found at the time), but a human manifestation of the creative energy of God. In Paul, we find not just a repetition of the ‘stories of Jesus’ found in the three synoptic traditions, but a synthesis, a ‘boiling down’ to the essentials, the key points, found in them. One such synthesis was expressed in what the church has come to refer as the “Theological Virtues”.
Paul presents these three virtues as the three facets of human attitude that recognize, focus, and enhance our response to the life of God within us, as taught by Jesus. According to Paul, when we ‘practice’ these virtues, when we adopt them as attitudes that we take on as we live our everyday life, we are opening ourselves to and cooperating with the flow of grace as it courses through our lives. In theological vernacular, then, virtues are “interior principles of the moral life which directs our relationship with God and others”.
From our secular perspective, they are the stance we take when we live our lives in a way that capitalizes on the flow of evolutive energy as it rises in our individual lives. In Teilhard’s terms, we are orienting ourselves to the ‘currents which bear us towards the open sea’, the energy of evolution. We are aligning our lives to the ‘axis of evolution’.
So, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, virtues can be understood as the basis of the actions we take that are consistent with the sacraments, values and morals that serve as the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which provide the framework for our continued evolution. While morals can be understood as ‘blueprints’ for the scaffolding of the edifice of a life which is aligned along the axis of evolution, virtues address the skills which are necessary to construct and maintain such an edifice. We have explored the ‘blueprints’ in the past few posts, but we now turn to the attitudes that are appropriate to live them out in such a way as to better become what it is possible for us to become.
As we noted last week, by introducing the concept that we are ‘borne along by the currents of evolution’, Science offers a unique ‘principle of reinterpretation’ to religion. Understanding ourselves, and the universe, as being in the state of ‘becoming’ permits religion to overcome not only its excessive dogmatism but also much of its dualism. At the same time, religion can offer a ‘principle of meaning’ to science in which, as we have seen, the locus of meaning shifts from the past to the future.
The three facets of the ‘stance’ that we can take to work together as we reorient ‘towards the future’ are labelled by theology as ‘faith, hope and love’. In our reinterpretation, this involves turning from the theological focus as attitudes necessary for salvation, to attitudes which enable us to cooperate with Teilhard’s ‘currents of life’.
Looking at these attitudes through Teilhard’s ‘lens’:
Faith is the recognition that there exists in each of us some component of the energies by which the universe has been lifted to its current stage of complexity. It recognizes that this component is neither summoned by us as a result of our ‘good works’, nor extinguishable by our ‘bad works’. In a term most often used by theologians, it is ‘gratuitous’: a gift. Faith, then, can be understood as trusting this current to take us to Karen Armstrong’s ‘greater possession of ourselves’.
Hope is the belief that this current will continue to effect our complexity in the terms by which we have measured it over the prior fourteen or so billions of years: increased ‘personness’ marked by increased centeredness, enhanced individuality, and deeper relationships. With hope, we expect that ‘fuller being’ will result from the energies of evolution as they continue within us. More simply, hope can be understood in Blondel’s assertion that “God is on our side”. As John Haught saw it, “..it is the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe” through us.
Love is our increased capacity to cooperate with the energy of evolution as it arises through our personal growth and our connectivity with others. It is the current manifestation of the same energy which connects electrons to form atoms, atoms to form molecules, molecules to cells, to neurons and eventually to consciousness. Each step of which united previous products of evolution to effect new and more complex products just as we unite among ourselves to become products of increased wholeness.
These three ‘attitudes’, stances that we can take as we turn towards the future, are deeply intertwined. One cannot have faith in any enterprise without hope of a favorable outcome, which would be impossible to achieve without the faith and the collaboration (love) to get there. Hope is necessary to overcome our instinctual recoil from the closer union that results from greater love which in turn requires a level of faith in our own capacity for such union and trust that such a union will bring us to a higher state of being. And finally, love is the basic energy of the universe become manifest in human life, without which our personal evolution is impossible.
The Next Post
This week we have transitioned from the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ to the stance, the attitude, that we can take if we are to make the most of the articulations reflected in sacraments, values and morals of our culture. We saw that the key aspect of a ‘forward’ approach to making sense of the universe is to change the orientation of traditional Science and Religion from the past to the future, and how this reorientation can be reflected in the stance we take toward living life.
Next week we will look a little more deeply at religion’s three traditional aspects of this stance, beginning with the ‘virtue’ of ‘Faith’.