Today’s Post
Last week we saw how Teilhard understood the ‘spheres’ of existence (and the difficulty that both science in religion have dealing with them) as the first part of summing up the last fifteen posts. This week we will review how he saw overcoming the duality in such traditional approaches and how such an understanding can lead to our navigation of the noosphere not only successfully, but joyfully.
The Unity of the Spheres
As Teilhard sees it, it’s not the evolutionary perspective that provides the wedge that is evident between all the different perspectives of the spheres of existence,, but the lack of a more comprehensive and universal understanding of evolution. Such an integrative and universal approach to evolution affords the possibility of bringing all four of these cornerstones of belief into a coherence that begins to erase the dualities that plague them. (See the posts on “The Teilhardian Shift” for a more comprehensive treatment of his unique insights).
So from this unique insight Teilhard sees the noosphere in need of a perspective in which matter, life and the person can all be seen in a single context. If this can be done, it is possible that whatever structure which underpins this context will provide the light that we need in order to successfully manage our habitation of it. He understands this ‘sphere’ of human existence to be in need of our grasp of its structure, expressed in our beliefs of its ‘nature’ and the calls to action that such beliefs require. In his words
“The organization of personal human energies represents the supreme (thus far) stage of cosmic evolution on earth; and morality (the articulation of the noosphere) is consequently nothing less than the higher development of mechanics and biology. The world is ultimately constructed by moral forces; and reciprocally, the function of morality is to construct the world.” (Parentheses mine)
More to the point, he goes on to say
“,,,to decipher man is essentially to try to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making it.”
with the goal, as identified by Jesus, for us to
“.. have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)
Navigating the Noosphere
In a quote I have frequently used, Teilhard remarks that
“Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea.”
As we saw in the post on “Grace and the DNA of Human Evolution”, Teilhard sees the ‘abundant life’ that Jesus offers as requiring us to develop the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller. As he sees it:
“And, conventional and impermanent as they may seem on the surface, what are the intricacies of our social forms, if not an effort to isolate little by little what are one day to become the structural laws of the noosphere.
In their essence, and provided they keep their vital connection with the current that wells up from the depths of the past, are not the artificial, the moral and the juridical simply the hominized versions of the natural, the physical and the organic?”
Paraphrasing Teilhard, this ‘trimming our sails to the winds of life’, is nothing more (and as he would add, ‘nothing less’) than aligning our lives with the axis of evolution. This alignment is where the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been addressing for the past fifteen weeks, come in.
The Joy of the Noosphere
As we saw in the posr on “Hope” those wonderful ‘Fruits of the Spirit’ which are promised by Paul resonate strongly with Carl Rogers’ empirical insights into personal growth. In our secular context, they are not ‘rewards from God’ for following His (sic) laws’, but the direct result of first understanding the ‘noospheric articulations’ and then orienting our lives to living them out. While Teilhard’s metaphor of sailing is a wonderful way to contemplate the journey of life, it is significant to see his critical point that when we are employing such ‘sailing skills’, it is ‘alignment to the winds’ that makes it possible to be ‘borne by the current’. The articulations that we humans are developing (thus far still under construction) are necessary for undertaking the journey of life, but it is the quality of the life, the abundance of it, which is enhanced by the attitudes and stances that we have seen in the ‘Theological Virtues’
The Next Post
In the last fifteen posts we have been addressing the structure of the noosphere, looking at its ‘articulations’ from the perspective of sacraments, morals and values, and from the additional perspective of how it is that we can orient ourselves to navigate it. The goal is not only navigating it successfully, but abundantly: not only are we to manage our lives, but fully partake of the joy that is possible in life.
But there is yet another aspect to these articulations and attitudes, and next week we will begin explore it as we begin to conclude this blog by looking at where evolution is taking us.