Today’s Post
Last week we took a look, in our recap of “The Secular Side of God’, at how Teilhard’s secular insights into God leads back to not only understanding God as the ‘universal ground of being’, but one which, as ‘His’ energy of becoming runs through all things in the universal ‘tree of becoming’, is alive in each and every human person.
This week we will begin a look at how awareness of this ‘spark of divinity’ in each of us can lead to the continuation of evolution of the human species.
Searching For The Path
In their eternal quest to determine “the will of God”, all religions represent an attempt to, as Teilhard puts it, “articulate the noosphere”. It is clear to most religionists that there is a right way and a wrong way to live life in keeping with the ‘intentions of the creator’.
The issue of dogma, however, is also clear. Human history is rife with examples of systematic and wholesale slaughter of those with different beliefs by those who believe themselves to be more correct. Less developed countries today still have laws which mandate death to those whose statements of belief are considered ‘heretic’.
With this dismal picture in mind, the West’s insistence of ‘freedom of religion’, and consequently ‘freedom from religion’, are in retrospect a step towards a society in which the person and his personal freedom can thrive more completely. As we saw in the writings of Johan Norberg, both are essential to continued human evolution.
In this positive path, the values of “The Enlightenment” can be clearly seen (See Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now”). One other less positive effect, however, is noted by Teilhard:
“Faced with a sort of spiritual revolution, the first result of which was to make man bow down before himself.. Christianity.. initially recoiled in an attitude of disquiet and defense. Accidentally, owning to its materialistic interpretation of the evolutionary movement it had just discovered in the universe, science took up a hostile attitude to the God of the Gospels. To this challenge, believers in the Gospels had necessarily to reply by condemnation. In this way the only too familiar unhappy war between science and religion was born and continued throughout the nineteenth century. “
As Richard Rohr points out, one factor in the movement away from the Christian dimensions of society as seen in “The Enlightenment” was the increasingly formal and tightly structured Christian beliefs that Jonathan Sacks sees as influenced by Greek thought. Rohr notes this as an emphasis on ‘adherence to teachings’ as opposed to metanoia, the transformation of human life that is essential to continued human evolution. The end result is not just the primacy of ‘facts’ over ‘beliefs’, as stressed by the authors of the Enlightenment, but over time a reduction of the relevance of teachings. In Rohr’s words:
“For centuries, Christianity has been presented as a system of beliefs. That system of beliefs has supported a wide range of unintended consequences, from colonialism to environmental destruction, subordination of women to stigmatization of LGBT people, anti-Semitism to Islamophobia, clergy pedophilia to white privilege.”
While the Enlightenment certainly gave birth to a new wave of ‘left brained’ thinking, especially in the realm of science, Sacks notes that the many modes of government in which the primacy of the person and his freedom, as well as the fundamental moral and religious principles on which they were based, were diminished, yielding horrendous results, such as seen in the rules of such despots as Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kims and others.
Rohr points out that the over-structured, tightly hierarchical Christian edifice in many ways has lost the path initially struck by the early church.
“Unfortunately, in the fourth century, St. Jerome translated the word metanoia, (“to transform life”) into Latin as paenitentia (“repent” or “do penance”), initiating a host of moralistic connotations that have colored Christians’ understanding of the Gospels ever since.”
Such a focus on the primacy of atonement, leading to such theories as ‘original sin’, the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’ and, in in many expressions a negative understanding of the human person, was to eventually surface in Martin Luther’s statement that persons are “piles of excrement covered by Christ”, and Freud’s negative assessment of the person as “dangerous”.
Relocating The Path
Rohr, following Teilhard, sees the essential, life-affirming, positive assessment of Jesus as the original theme of the gospels. When John asserts that “God is love, and he who abides in love and God in him”, he is stating a basic hermeneutic of Jesus: We are not just ‘children of God’: whatever is at the core of existence by which all things grow in the increase of complexity, it is active in our personal growth, our metanoia, and hence is at the core of our existence as well.
Richard Rohr is adamant that this hermeneutic must be restored to the center of Christian belief if Christianity is to regain the relevance to human life that can balance the empirical and impersonal basis of science.
The existential intimacy understood by Blondel, Teilhard and Rohr, while essential to Christianity (even to those expressions which minimize it) is not necessarily religious. Teilhard offers a very secular description of encountering it:
“And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.
But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.
And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life.
What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life? It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion. And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.
We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.
But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life.
My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.”
This perspective is reflected by Blondel when he says (and I paraphrase):
“There is no stance which I can take where I see God there and I here. Such ability to see, analyze and conclude lies on the crest of a tide which has risen in the universe over billions of years, which I did not summon and over which I have no power. As a gift, my powers of sight, analysis and action can only be enhanced by more focused cooperation with it, or enfeebled by denial of it.”
The Next Post
Last week we took a relook at how God can be understood as the basic agent of evolution which over time adds a quantum of complexity to each new product, and how the current manifestation of this agency is the person.
This week we moved on to the single thread by which this quantum is added ‘from age to age”, how it manifests itself in all things, including us, and Teilhard’s example of finding it, not through adherence to religious dogma, but by simple recognition of its agency in our life.
Next week we will move on to seeing how recognition of this ‘divine spark’ is a cornerstone to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species.