How can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ help us to use faith and hope to build a bridge to the future?

Today’s Post

Last week we continued our look at the ‘Theological Virtues’ by addressing that of hope, which we saw as one of the attitudes that we take when we set about mapping the dimensions of human life as we ‘articulate the noosphere’ in terms of sacraments, values and morals.
We noted that “Faith and Hope intersect in a present which we all too frequently experience as ‘dangerous.’”  At this intersection, drawing on the energies of life which are ‘gifted’ in the flow of evolution, we become able, as Blondel puts it, “.. to leave the paralyzing past behind and enter creatively into our destiny”.

This week we will look further into this significant intersection.

Faith and Hope: From Interpolation to Extrapolation

Faith can be seen as an interpolation of the past.  Looking back on our experience, we begin to better understand what we are capable of, and in doing so we begin to increase our confidence in our capability to act.

Hope can be seen as an extrapolation from this experience to an anticipation of what can be accomplished in the future if we but trust our experience.   Hence faith and hope can be seen in the two recursive stages of our lives: our pasts becoming our futures in the evanescent moment of the present.

We can find examples of this intersection of our “currents of life” from the three great thinkers that we have explored in this blog:  Maurice Blondel, Carl Rogers and of course, Teilhard.
Blondel was one of the first theologians to recognize that science’s discovery of the immensity of the past and the dynamic nature of the universe provided both an opportunity as well as a rationale for reinterpreting legacy Christian teachings into a form not only congruent with the findings of science but offering a greater relevance to human life.  From science’s discovery of a universal unfolding, he recognized that the human species was better understood when seen in the same dynamic light as that of science, and whose individual ‘becoming’ is fueled by the same energy which underpins the entire universe.  In effect, he remapped the empirical insights of science into new spiritual insights, interpolating from science’s view of the past to extrapolating to a religiously optimistic view of the future.  From Blondel’s viewpoint, this was a religious reinterpretation, from science to religion, from science’s impersonal grasp of the distant past to religion’s deeply personal grasp of human life, and hence from past to future.

   Rogers, as we saw when we addressed “Secular Meditation, Finding Self”, also used empirical information to come to his conclusion that the human person was, at the most basic level, good, positive and trustworthy.  This was quite orthogonal to the then common Freudian perspective which saw the basis of personal existence, the id, as a dangerous and decidedly untrustworthy force in the human psyche.  Once again, we see in Rogers an interpolation from past, empirical data (in this case Rogers’ extensive case notes) to an extrapolation to an optimistic, hopeful human future.  We saw last week a list of the characteristics that Rogers observed in his patients as they underwent a process toward healing.   This time, however, Rogers offers a scientific, empirical reinterpretation.
Then of course, we come to Teilhard.  Going well beyond either Blondel or Rogers, Teilhard draws on the same scientific empirical findings, and expands them to the entirety of the life of the universe.  His first step in doing so was to unbind science’s understanding of evolution from the narrow perspective of the theory of Natural Selection and open it up to the immensity of universal evolution.  This unprecedented vision understood the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ as the basic measure to plumb both the universal depths of time as well as the long, slow accretion of ‘fuller being’ which emerged with it.

He begins by articulating the many stages now understood to have emerged during the ten or so billion years preceding biological terrestrial life.  He then shows how they are connected in evolution by a rise in complexity, a steady, reliable force which acts on all the entities in all the stages leading to the cell.  Having established this basis of universal ontological continuity, he goes on to show how it continues through the biosphere, and eventually emerges in the present noosphere.  In doing so, Teilhard offers an extrapolation from scientific findings to an interpolation, which is as valuable to the clarification of science as it is to the reinterpretation of religion.

Teilhard and The Continuity of Past to Future: “Spirituality”              

This insight into the basis of universal ontological continuity, providing as it does an integrated perspective inclusive of spirit and matter, science, and religion, and ultimately the human person and evolution, is Teilhard’s great contribution to a comprehensive perspective of the universe.  In doing so, he departed substantially from science’s materialistic menagerie of pre-life stages disconnected from life stages, and its current schizophrenic approach which inhibits the placing of the human person into a cohesive view of the universe.   To Teilhard, these eras can now be seen in a single, connected context, one in which the human person is no less a product of evolution than the stars that glow in the sky.   He also offered a reorientation of religion’s accumulated closet of dualisms. In a single, cohesive, integrated approach to the universe as ‘becoming’, he showed how the action of God can be seen as the basic life blood of evolution, and hence in which each individual life partakes of this universal bounty of universal life.

This grand vision deconstructs religion’s great and seemingly indissoluble dualisms.  One example of such deconstruction is his explanation of ‘spirit’ vs ‘matter’, found in ‘Human Energy’.  First, he lays out the dualism itself:

“For some, heirs to almost all the spiritualist philosophies of former times, the spirit is something so special and so high that it could not possibly be confused with the earthly and material forces which it animates.  Spirit is a ‘meta-phenomenon’.

For others, on the contrary, …, spirit seems something so small and frail that it becomes accidental and secondary.  In the face of the vast material energies to which it adds absolutely nothing that can be weighed or measured, the ‘fact of consciousness’ can be regarded as negligible.  It is an ‘epi-phenomenon’.”

Then he dissolves the dualism by identifying spirituality as the underlying phenomenon which is essential to universal evolution:

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more; and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

  He then restates his conclusion, this time answering the assertions outlined in his mapping of the dualism:

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.”

   It is worth noting that in this brief exposition, Teilhard not only deconstructs the traditional religious dualism of spirit/matter by moving them from ‘either/or’ to ‘both/and’, placing them in a dynamic, ‘becoming’ context in which they are simply different facets of a single phenomenon as it moves from past to future.   He also heals science’s dualistic mind/body treatment of the human person by recognizing that the state of evolution characterized by ‘consciousness aware of itself’ is simply the latest manifestation of a complexity which has been increasing in the universe since the ‘big bang’.  He addresses this process in the last part of the quote from “Human Energy”:

“The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.  It is a cosmic change of state.”

     So, in this example we can see how Teilhard goes about his ’interpolation/extrapolation’ process, drawing on science’s study of deep time and evolution to understand the thread of universal life to which our essence is connected, then to extrapolate to a future which we can trust to offer a continuation of such ‘increased complexity’.

He offers an approach to faith not based on (but also, as it turns out, neither orthogonal to) belief in scripture or the church’s ‘Magisterium’, but on a recognition that the fourteen billion year rise of complexity which (so far) has resulted in our own individual person can be expected to continue in our lives if we can but trust and cooperate with it.

And this is where faith and hope can be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to intersect in our lives.

The Next Post

This week saw how the intersection of faith and hope can be seen to intersect in our lives, from the insights of Blondel, Rogers and Teilhard.

Next week we will move on to a look at the third of the Theological Virtues, that of ‘love’.

   How can seeing universal evolution through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ enhance our confidence in life?

Today’s Post

Last week we explored how a shift in perspective in the search for meaning in traditional science and religion can open a more positive stance towards understanding and living out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’.  As reflected in the sacraments, values, and morals, we have addressed this stance from

Teilhard’s evolutionary perspective.   We saw last week how the concept of Paul’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.  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 explore this weaving as it can be seen in 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 truths’ (eg ideas that appear in our ‘sacred’ texts and as interpreted by the church) which we do not (even often 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, by 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 was one of the theologians who influenced the changes of Vatican II.  His acute theological insight into identifying issues facing the church as it progressed into the future was resonant with Pope Francis’s current project of ecclesial reform and sharply critiqued 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.”

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

“When Christians have difficulties with certain dogmatic statements, for instance with the those 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 developed our ‘principles of reinterpretation’, we saw how 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.

On a purely secular level, there are few things more fundamental to human action than ‘faith’.  Surely, we act only to the extent that we believe in both our capacity to act and success of the outcome, 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.  We earlier saw, for example, how the evolution of the belief in human equality leads to the West’s practice of democracy.

The difference between secular faith and religious faith can be seen in the question: what is the basis for the act of faith?  Why should we believe what we believe?  Or as Blondel asks, “what difference does a belief make in our lives?”

In the secular case, faith is built up over time, in a trial-and-error approach in which the consequences 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 secular 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 its pillar of scientific endeavor would survive.

Teilhard’s perspective 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 a 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 stance we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere,’ beginning with that of ‘faith’.  We saw how the religious 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’.

How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ help us to be confident about the future? 

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 hence leads 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’.

Reorienting Religion Towards the Future

 

In our series on reinterpreting science and religion, we looked at ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which could be applied to traditional Christian teachings if we were to examine them through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.  In this series, we noted our use of his insights 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 instead brings them together into 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 Manley Hopkins saw it, as a

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

   However, we can take this further in our search for the attitudes which we can adopt in the process of living out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’, sacraments, morals, and values that we addressed in the last few posts.  We can add the development of Haught’s ‘anticipatory set of eyes’, as a reinterpretation principle that emerges when we look to an unfinished but positive future as the basis for our faith in life.  In summary, to reinterpret our Christian set of beliefs through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we must also understand the universe, and hence our lives, as being ‘in process’, consisting of the development of Haught’s ‘anticipation’, and requiring attitudes which are firmly focused on the future.

The Three ‘Theological’ Virtues

Thus, the logical next step after establishing the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ as found in sacraments and morals, 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, summarized 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.  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, focus, 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 and cooperating with the flow of grace as it courses through our lives.    In theological vernacular, 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 Teilhard’s terms, we are orienting ourselves to the ‘currents which bear us towards the open sea’, the energy of evolution.  We are aligning our lives to the ‘axis of evolution’.

So, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, 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 unique ‘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 as we reorient ‘towards the future’ are labelled by theology as ‘faith, hope and love’.  In our reinterpretation, this involves turning from the theological focus as attitudes necessary for salvation, to attitudes which enable us to cooperate with Teilhard’s ‘currents of life’.

Looking at these attitudes through Teilhard’s ‘lens’:

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 of years: increased ‘personness’ marked by increased centeredness, enhanced individuality, and deeper relationships.  With hope, we expect that ‘fuller being’ will result from the energies of evolution as they continue within us.  More simply, hope can be understood in Blondel’s assertion that “God is on our side”.  As John Haught saw it, “..it is the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe” through us.

Love is our increased capacity to cooperate with the energy of evolution as it arises 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 as we 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 (love) 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’.