Today’s Post
Last week we concluded our secular look at the three so-called “Theological Virtues”- Faith, Hope and Love- by seeing how Cynthia Bourgeault’s reinterpretation of Paul encapsulated the workings of these virtues in our most intimate relationships.
This week we will conclude this segment of the blog in which we have looked at Values, Morals and Sacraments as ‘articulations of the noosphere’ and saw how the ‘Theological Virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Love serve as attitudes, stances that we can take, in living them out.
The Articulation of the Spheres
Two things that nearly everyone can agree are the comprehensiveness of reality and the human’s ability to comprehend it. Science depends on it and Religion offers a long history of human inquiry into the nature of existence and our response to it.
The current state of religion is a many faceted, often contradictory, but fervently felt set of beliefs about the world and our place in it. The ten posts on the ‘History of Religion ‘ (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201509) offers a brief and somewhat superficial overview of religion and its quest for insight into the human condition.
Science, coming into play much later, also offers an approach to understanding existence, although coming at the enterprise from an entirely different perspective. While religion relies on the intuitions developed, passed down and modified in many ways into metaphors, practices and expectations, science, at least nominally, constrains itself to a collegially empirical approach, with heavy dependence on objective data, which is itself a product of independently verifiable observations.
Both of these powerful modes of thinking have developed significant ‘articulations’ of their respective spheres of thought. Physics, the mainstay of the science of matter, has laboriously effected its ‘Standard Model’, which underpins many of the modern discoveries and applications by which we are surrounded. Biology, the investigation of living things, through development of the theory of Natural Selection, has brought a profoundly deep understanding of living things, and more importantly, how we and they interact.
The Duality of the Spheres
As is commonly known, while these two profound modes of thought both address the single reality in which we all live, they are frequently seen to be in conflict. Like nearly every human enterprise, they fall into different sides of an underlying ‘duality’, a dichotomy divided by a deeply conflicting understanding of the human person.
Physics, with its ‘Standard Model’ can be seen to have developed an ‘articulation of the lithosphere’, and Biology with its theory of Natural Selection an ‘articulation of the biosphere’. Psychology steps in as the first attempt at a secular ‘articulation of the noosphere’. But, as I have discussed in the four posts addressing psychology beginning with “November 24 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 2: The Transition”, (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?p=302), psychiatry seems no more united in addressing the human than are science and religion. All three would seem, sharing as they do an adherence to the concept of evolution, to be in competition with Religion, and its basis of intuition and scripture, for a comprehensive ‘articulation of the noosphere’.
The Next Post
This week we took a first look at summarizing the last fifteen posts in which we have addressed 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 this summary by seeing how Teilhard understood uniting the Noosphere to the spheres of matter and life, and how his ‘articulations’ can lead to their successful inhabiting..