How does seeing love through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to see it as an aspect of evolutional energy?

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from seeing love as depicted in popular culture (as well as traditional religion) as emotionally based, to seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as ontologically based.  To Teilhard, love is much more than an emotional stimulus to procreation, the stability of society, or an act that qualifies us for the next life.  To him, Love was nothing more (and as he would add, “nothing less”) than the current manifestation of the universal energy of evolution as it rises in the human person.   Without denying the significance of love as an ‘act’, Teilhard asserts that it must be understood as an ‘energy’ with which we can cooperate to increase our wholeness, and recognizes it in the context of the wellspring of cosmic evolution.

This week we will move on to address how such an energy can be seen to work among humans to energize our increasing ‘complexification’, both as a species as well as in our individual lives.

 Love as A Force of Evolution

   In Teilhard’s unique ‘lens of universal evolution’, he notes that each step of evolution results from an action and a consequence which effects the increase of complexity in a product. He understands such increase as the primary metric of evolution.  Without this metric, as he points out, universal evolution would have been still born, stagnant, and static.  Everything that we can see around us came into existence from such a process.

The action in each evolutive step going back to the Big Bang is simply the joining of two products of like complexity in a way which results in the consequence of a new product of increased complexity.  John Haught sees this as

“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature”

Effectively, in this process, two ‘parent’ entities join on a ‘two dimensional’ plane of common complexity, but the result occurs ‘vertically’, in a third dimension of increased complexity, turning what started out as a two-dimensional activity into three dimensions.  Teilhard sees this simple but profound process underlying the appearance of everything that we can see in the universe.

He notes, however, that science is unable to account for this vertical aspect, even though without it, as he notes, the universe remains static.  Next to the “vast material energies” studied by science, this agent of complexity “adds absolutely nothing that can be weighed or measured”.  Hence there is no branch of science that acknowledges it, much less addresses it.  Again, from Haught

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the ‘person) has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

   Teilhard devotes a significant amount of his writing to address this aspect of cosmology.  In doing so he notes that this dyadic activity, two entities joining in such a way as to produce a product of higher complexity, occurs at the very basis of cosmic becoming, as described in the fundamental scientific treatment of the Big Bang, and continues unabated all the way to the present day.  Therefore, he sees this simple but profound activity as still at work in human relationships and their resultant contribution to human evolution.  Our love relationships aren’t unique to humans, they are simply the latest echo of the rise of this dyadic activity through each wave of evolution.

How did Teilhard understand how love between humans can be seen to reflect such activity?

 Excentration and Centration

We have frequently adverted to John’s classic assertion that “God is Love and he who abides in Love abides in God and God in him,” to address the nature of love as an ontological effector rather than just an emotion.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, this statement by John speaks volumes about God, about us and about our ongoing genesis as humans.

As we saw last week, Teilhard’s less metaphorical (and more empirically correct) understanding of John is that God is the ground of being which manifests itself in the energy of love, and that when we love we are participating in our individual current of this universal flow of energy.  To Teilhard, as we saw, God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, ‘He’ is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the evolutionary product of the ‘person’.

    Teilhard articulates this dynamic further, seeing it in the light of cosmic evolution and particularly in its continuation in the human person.  In relationships between persons, Teilhard sees the workings of love coming about through the dynamics which he refers to as “excentration” and “centration”.

“Excentration” occurs when we are able to grow beyond our biases, assumptions and thought structures and become aware of different and more meaningful aspects of life: the “aha” moments in which we realize the limitation that incomplete presumptions or positions are imposing on us.

“Centration” occurs when this scaffolding of ego gradually falls away and excentration naturally leads to increased transparency, openness, and honesty.   Thus as we, in Jesus’ metaphor, ‘die to ourself’ we become more authentically ourself.  In this new state, our capacity for relationship is also increased, as we saw when we addressed ‘Psychology as Secular Meditation’, as quantified by Carl Rogers.

Engaging in a deep relationship, or deepening the relationship that already exists, enhances not only our self but also our relationships, and contributes to the ability of those that we love to “excentrate”, and thus increase their own maturity and capacity for love.  As their level of person is enhanced and the love returned, this results in an increased level of self-understanding in both persons.

Seen ‘ontologically’, love is a way of making ourselves by making others.  As we have seen, Confucius seems to be the first to have discovered this ontological essence, when he said

“If you would enlarge yourself, you must first enlarge others.  When you enlarge others, you are enlarging yourself.”

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ by following 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 of universal evolution become manifest in the energy by which we become persons, and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a fourth look at Love, going a little deeper into how Teilhard’s mapping of ‘excentration’ and ‘centration’ as the principle actions of the dynamic of Love can contribute to our personal ‘complexification’.