Monthly Archives: March 2018

March 29 – Virtues: Hope – Expectation of the Outcome of Evolution

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Today’s Post

Last week we began our look at the attitudes (the ‘Theological Virtues’) that we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’.  We looked at ‘Faith’, and saw how it acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’ to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.

This week we will continue our look at the Theological Virtues by addressing ‘Hope’.

The Traditional Approach to Hope

As seen by the traditional church, Hope, like Faith, is an attitude based upon the concept of a salvation earned by living a moral (as defined by the church) life.  It is deeply intertwined with Faith, in that it is the result of believing that pleasing God is necessary for eternal salvation.  It focusses more on the ‘payoff’, than the ‘process’.  As the Catechism says, “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness”.  As such, it is given to us as a guard against despair, to help us keep our eyes on the end goal, the ‘next life’ while we endure the pains and disillusions of this one.

Like the traditional approach to Faith, the traditional approach to Hope assumes that ‘truth’ is ‘given to man by scripture and the church’, adhered to by ‘Faith’ and trusted to result in salvation by ‘Hope’.

Reinterpreting Hope

Even though the Church approached hope as rooted in belief in the afterlife, it was Paul himself who identified what can be expected in this life when we take the stance of ‘faith’.  As much of Paul’s writing clearly shows, as the first Christian theologian he took great pains to boil the teachings of Jesus down into specifics, such as we saw in his teaching on the ‘Theological Virtues’.  Another example can be found in his listing of what he referred to as ‘The Fruits of the Spirit’.  These ‘fruits’ are the human attributes which are ‘given’ by the Holy Spirit when we cooperate with the presence of God in our lives.  These ‘fruits’ are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness.

Of course, in our secular approach, as we have seen when we addressed the Trinity (3 August, 2017, “The Trinity”, http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201708), the Holy Spirit is one manifestation of the tri-faceted energy of evolution which flows in our lives.   ‘Gifts’, in our secular reinterpretation, refer to those human potentialities that can actualize as we become more aware of, and come to cooperate with, the energy of evolution as it rises in us.
Paul’s ‘Fruits’ describes what can happen in our lives as we live out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been describing, that are reflected in the sacraments, values and morals of our culture.  One does not have to be religious to recognize the quality of life that would accrue to us were we better able to love, have our lives filled with joy rather than foreboding, feel at peace with ourselves and others, resulting in natural (vs forced) kindness, recognizing our innate goodness and being able to trust.

Paul’s fruits correlate well with Carl Rogers’ observations of a patient undergoing the process toward healing (excuse the fifties misuse of gender):

– The individual becomes more integrated, more effective

– Fewer of the characteristics are shown which are usually termed neurotic or psychotic, and more of the healthy, well-functioning person

– The perception of himself changes, becoming more realistic in views of self

– He becomes more like the person he wishes to be, and values himself more highly

– He is more self-confident and self-directing

– He has a better understanding of himself, becomes open to his experience, denies or represses less of his experience

– He becomes more accepting in his attitudes towards others, seeing others as more similar to himself

Comparing Hope to Faith

If faith involves trusting in the power of belief itself, that it is possible to find within ourselves the power to act in the face of the emotion of fear, then hope provides a ‘pull’, in which we can make the decision and muster the energy to act because we can envision the importance, even the enjoyment, of the consequence of such action.   One of Paul’s ‘fruits’ is ‘joy’, and there are few greater joys than the feeling of satisfaction of completion of a difficult and risky task.  We can envision this potential for joy even before we undertake the risk, and as a result the arduousness of the task is therefore lessened by the anticipation of the result.  While faith can be seen in the ‘decision’, hope can be understood as the ‘anticipation’.

An example is Rogers’ insight that the risky choice to ‘be willing to live with ambiguity’ is counterbalanced by the ‘hope’ that as a result, we will mature into the greater possession of ourselves as articulated in his list above.

Another result of the ability to hope is ‘patience’, another of Paul’s ‘fruits’.  Faith may provide us with the insight that we are growing by a principle of universal evolution working   within us, but hope is a bulwark against the despair that can set in as we frequently experience failure.  None of us gets through life without Shakespeare’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, but the burden becomes heavier with impatience.

While faith allows us to reinterpret our past in a positive light, hope allows us to live in a future in which today’s burdens have been overcome.  Faith and hope intersect in a present which we all too frequently experience as ‘dangerous’.  While there are many actions that we can take to manage the danger, none is more important than to believe in our ability to endure and that this endurance allows us, as Blondel puts it, “..to leave the paralyzing past behind and enter creatively into our destiny”.

The Next Post

This week we took a ‘secular’ look at the stance of ‘hope’ in our reinterpretation of the ‘Theological Virtues’ as stances that we take when we ‘articulate the noosphere’ in terms of sacraments, values and morals of our culture.

Next week we will continue by looking at the intersection between Faith and Hope.

March 15 – The Virtues: Faith- Trust in the Axis of Evolution

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Today’s Post

    Last week we explored how a shift in perspective in the search for meaning in traditional science and religion, can open up a more positive stance towards understanding and living out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ as reflected in the sacraments, values and morals that we have addressed from our secular viewpoint.
We saw how the concept of the church’s ‘Theological Virtues’ expresses three key such attitudes which underlay our employment of these articulations.

In the series of posts on discovering the thread of evolution within each of us, which we saw as ‘finding God by finding ourselves’, we examined the thoughts of Carl Rogers, whose optimistic approach to psychology was infused with a secular approach to faith.  This series can be found beginning with the post of December 8, 2016, “Relating to God, Part 5, Psychology as Secular Meditation” (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201612).  In this series, we saw how the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love are strongly woven into his insights on human evolution

This week we will go into a little more detail on the virtue of ‘Faith’.

The Traditional Approach to Faith

Faith is the first of the virtues to be addressed by Paul, and has been traditionally expressed as a ‘belief in things unseen’.  As interpreted by the Christian church, it asserts that we must believe in ‘revealed truth’ (eg ideas that appear in our ‘sacred’ texts and interpreted by the church) that we do not (even cannot) understand, and that such belief is necessary for a successful eventual passage from this world to the next.  In the more conservative Christian expressions, ‘understanding’ is unnecessary for salvation as long as ‘belief’ is present.  Since belief is pleasing to God, says this interpretation, it will therefore insure one’s salvation: the entry into ‘the next life’.  At the extreme, the more difficult the ‘truth’ is to understand (eg the virgin birth), the higher the value of belief.

Karl Rahner commented on this approach to faith:

“We are often told that it is difficult to believe, and by this is meant that the truths revealed by God are beyond human understanding, that they demand the sacrifice of the intellect, and that the more opaque they are to human understanding, the greater the merit in believing them.”

    As Gregory Baum expands on this in his book on Blondel, “Man Becoming”:

“When Christians have difficulties with certain dogmatic statements, for instance with the dogmatic statements on the Trinity or the eucharist, they are sometimes told by ecclesiastical authorities that there is a special merit in not understanding, in being baffled by a teaching that sounds unlikely, and in obediently accepting a position that has no other link with the human mind than that God has revealed it to men.”  “Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life.”  (Italics mine)

Reinterpreting Faith

As we saw in the post, “Reinterpretation Principles Part 3- Reinterpretation Part 2”, 7 July 2016 (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201607), Maurice Blondel considered that this inability of religion to bring “meaning for man and its effect on human life” was one of the great failures of modern religion, as it severely limited the relevance it could afford to human life.        As he saw it:

“Faith in this context appears as the obedient acceptance of a heavenly message, independently of its meaning for man and its effect on human life   Man cannot accept an idea as true unless it corresponds in some way to a question present in his mind.”

   And, presaging both Teilhard’s recognition of God as manifest in the threads of evolution which are at the core of each life, as well as a principle of reinterpretation of traditional religion,  Blondel goes on to say:

“To the man who accepts the Gospel in faith, it is not a message added to his life from without; it is rather the clarification and specification of the transcendent mystery of humanization that is gratuitously operative in his life.”  (Italics mine)

   As we have discussed earlier, such reinterpretation in terms of human life is necessary for religion to regain its lost relevancy.

Of course, there are few things more fundamental to human action than ‘faith’.  Surely we act only to the extent that we believe in our capacity to act, and this has nothing to do with religion.  Our history is filled with ‘acts of faith’ which lead to actions profoundly affecting the evolution of society.  The post on “Secular Sacraments” (December 7 – Reinterpreting Sacraments – Part 3 – Secular ‘Sacraments’ – http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?p=420) discusses, for example, how the evolution of the belief of how human equality leads to the West’s practice of democracy.

The difference between secular faith and religious faith can be seen in the ‘hermeneutic’: what is the basis for the act of faith?  Why should we believe what we believe?  Or as Blondel asks, “what difference does a doctrine make in our lives?” In the case of secular faith, the hermeneutic is built up over time, in a trial-and-error approach in which the results of beliefs can be evaluated as positive or negative.  Those seen as positive can be filtered through society and passed forward as laws, standards or practices through the mechanism of culture.  An example is those recognized and adopted by society at large.  The U.S Constitutional Bill of Rights is the result of such an approach.

The many laws of Science are themselves based on faith.  Science is based on two unprovable beliefs:  that the universe is intelligible and that humans are capable of understanding it. Over time, this belief has led to the ‘scientific method’, a sort of set of secular virtues which has proved successful in building our understanding of the universe.  Without adherence to these elements of faith, neither Western society nor or its pillar of scientific endeavor would survive.

Religious faith, on the other hand, comes from adherence to interpretations of canonical scripture by church hierarchy, expressed as ‘doctrines’.

Our secular perspective agrees with traditional religion that we do not ‘earn’ this gift of increasing complexity, but recognizes that in each of us there is a continuation of the fourteen or so billion years of universal activity that has brought us to this moment.  Secular faith is the intuitive, unprovable sense that not only is evolution carrying us along with it, but that its direction is from a past simplicity of the earliest components of matter to an as yet unknown future state of complexity and completeness.  It is the expectation that while we are as yet unfinished, we are nonetheless embraced by a current that will carry us to future wholeness.

The Next Post

This week we began our look at the stances we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ with a look at Faith.  We saw how the attitude of faith acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’ to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.

Next week we will address the second of the ‘Theological Virtues’ that of Hope.

March 1 – Reorienting From the Past to the Future

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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 can lead 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’.

Reinterpreting Religion  

In a series of earlier posts, we looked at ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which could be applied to traditional Christian teachings if we were to examine them for their secular meanings (“Reinterpretation, Part 3 – Reinterpretation Principles, Part 1”, http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201606).  In this post, we noted our use of the insights of Teilhard de Chardin 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 rather brings them together in 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 Manly Hopkins saw it, as a

“Gathering to greatness/Like the oozing of oil”:

   However, we can take this further in our search for the attitude by which we can live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’, sacraments, morals and values, that we addressed in the previous several posts.  We can see developing an ‘anticipatory set of eyes’, as one of our reinterpretation principles.  In summary, to reinterpret our Christian set of beliefs into secular terms, we must also understand the universe, and hence our lives, as being ‘in process’, consisting of the development of Haight’s ‘anticipatory set of eyes’, and requiring attitudes which are firmly focused on the future.

The Three ‘Theological’ Virtues

So, the logical next step after establishing the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ as found in sacraments, morals and values, 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, addressed 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.  (11 May 2017-“Paul and the Synoptic Gospels”, http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?p=355).  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 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, cooperating with, God’s grace.    In terms of the Christian church, 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 our secular terms, we are orienting ourselves to Teilhard’s ‘currents which bear us towards the open sea’, the energy of evolution.  We are aligning our lives to the ‘axis of evolution’.

So, 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 ‘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 ‘towards the future’ can be labelled as ‘faith, hope and love’.  In our reinterpretation, this involves turning their focus from attitudes necessary for salvation, to attitudes which enable us to cooperate with Teilhard’s ‘currents of life’.

In summary

  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 years: increased ‘personness’ marked by centeredness, enhanced individuality and expanded connectivity.  With hope, we expect the energies of evolution to continue to enhance our completeness.  More simply, hope can be understood in Blondel’s assertion that “God is on our side”.

Love is our increased capacity to cooperate with the energy of evolution as it rises 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 in our 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 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’.