How can seeing the human person through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ highlight the potential for happiness?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and noting its vagueness, began to place it into Teilhard’s context of ‘universal evolution’.   In this overview, we looked at several ‘material’ aspects from the viewpoints of science (such as surveys of this highly subjective topic as well as genetic influences) and saw that while all these searches for the ‘seat of happiness’ provide insights, the ‘bottom line’ still evades us.

This week we will look at human happiness from a second viewpoint, that of cosmic evolution.  If, as we have maintained throughout this blog,

• Teilhard’s insight that the underlying manifestation of universal evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present can be seen in the increase of complexity,
• and this increase of complexity can be measured by the increase of consciousness which leads to the human person.
• then, the fourteen or so billions of years of universal evolution of which we are products must be still somehow active in our own personal and social evolution.

Whatever it is that has been at work in the rise of complexity of the ‘stuff of the universe’ it must be active in each of its products.  As one of these products, it must therefore be active in us.  If it is, it can be trusted to continue in us, and our ‘happiness’ is in some way related to it.

Teilhard summarizes universal evolution as

“Fuller being in closer union and closer union from fuller being.”

   The attribute of ‘fuller being’ itself implies ‘better fit’, and in this ‘fit’ lies the evolutionary aspect of happiness.

Can Humans, As an Evolved Species, Ever be Happy?

Teilhard insists that we understand our evolution as individual persons as well as the aggregate of society   from the context of universal evolution.  This suggests that our happiness, or at least our potential for happiness, must be understood in this way as well.  How can our potential for happiness be understood in such an evolutionary context?

Paraphrasing Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, this long history of rising complexity suggests that, as its latest product, we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.  To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

Yuval Harari, in his book, “Sapiens”, suggests a less optimistic outcome.  From his perspective, humans have not only evolved much faster than their environment but are ruining the environment from which we are becoming increasingly estranged.  He notes that our predecessor species enjoyed long periods of florescence, on the order of several millions of years, because their pace of evolution matched the pace of the evolution of their environment.  This ‘fit’ with their environment insured, as he sees it, a continuing and long lasting ‘fruitful accommodation’ between species and their environments; an accommodation that humans have lost in their ongoing estrangement.  The result, in his opinion, is the existential unease that makes it almost impossible for us to be ‘happy’ and the resulting unhappiness will erode our survival instincts, eventually resulting in an untimely extinction.

He notes that in our quest to assure our continued evolution, we are becoming more and more dependent upon technology.  He sees the resulting explosion of technology becoming more damaging to the environment on the one hand, and on the other eroding our natural sense of ourselves.

Where Teilhard saw a ‘convergent spiral’ raising us to higher levels of complexity and ‘fuller being’, Harari sees our increasing reliance on technology as a ‘divergent’ factor which will reduce our sense of ourselves and lead to ‘lesser being’.  With humans, he suggests, ‘evolution’ will lead to ‘devolution’.

In mapping our estrangement from nature, he notes that every step humanity has taken from our animal predecessors’ hunter-gatherer state has come with increased emotional discomfort and dissatisfaction.  As populations increased, culture became sedentary, farms became necessary, requiring laborers, storage buildings, roads, and trade, which in turn saw the rise of cities and soul-less machines leaving us today as anxious, dependent on technology and widely divided between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.

While this dystopian conclusion is clearly orthogonal to Teilhard’s optimism, the observation that we have broken the implicit bonds with our environment is unquestionable.  How can happiness be possible if our evolution requires us to abandon our ancestor’s close relationship with nature?  As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it succinctly

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

   It is not so much that humans have become unable to be happy, but more that our instinctive reactions to our surroundings, kept in play for eons by the instincts of reptilian and limbic brains, no longer work as well for us as well as they did for our ancestors.  This is true for our potential for happiness as well.

So, What’s The Alternative?

  Most commentators cite Hopkin’s view of our relationship with the environment in their critique of current affairs, but few follow with his next lines:

“And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

    As we have seen, in Teilhard’s vision of Hopkins’ eternal upward current, he charts the many ‘changes of state’ that the ‘stuff of the universe’ undergoes in its journey towards increased complexity, such as energy to matter, simple building blocks evolving into more complex atoms, then molecules, then cells, then neurons, then brains, then consciousness.  In this upward current, each new product emerges from its predecessors’ state of complexity by way of such a change of state.   With them new capacities appear, ones that were not in play in the precedent products, but ones neither completely free of the characteristics of their predecessors.  Teilhard notes the example of the cell evolving from the increasingly complex assemblies of molecules: “the cell emerges ‘dripping in molecularity’”.  It takes some time before new cellular capacities fully emerge, and the next rung of complexity can be mounted.

In this transitory state that we find ourselves today, humans can be seen as still, to some degree, ‘dripping in animality’.  Humans may have a new capacity in the neocortex brain, but the skill of using it to advance our evolution and actualize our new potential in this new ‘change of state’ is still early in undergoing development.

An example of such a new ‘skill’ has been mentioned several times.  The skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ can be seen in the intellectual process of overcoming the dualisms that infect our lives by simply using the neocortex to ‘ride herd’ on the stimuli of the ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic) brains.  It is not a matter of ignoring these stimuli; they have evolved to enrich mammalian existence and enhance the capacity for ‘survival’.  It is more a matter of becoming aware of them, understanding them to be able to manage them to enrich human existence and enhance our own unique dimensions of survival.  This skill can be further enhanced by balanced use of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brain hemispheres as addressed earlier.  These are skills which we are still learning.

Thus, the key to understanding ‘happiness’ from an evolutionary perspective is to understand what is indeed unique about the human person and how it can work (or should work) in the context of an evolving universe.

Put another way, human life is most enriched when it engages harmoniously with the ‘forces of evolution’.  Both humans and their environment have evolved in an evolutionary sweep of over fourteen billion years in which products have steadily increased their complexity.  Most recently this increase in complexity has been quickened by a ‘natural selection’ in which products and their environments are able to ‘fit together’ in increasingly varied combinations.

The excellent and insightful activities of science have certainly been able to quantify such things as universal time spans, the structures and configurations of evolutionary products which reflect this ‘complexification’, and details of the history of living things as well as our ontological and sociological part in it.

However, as we have seen, and as Teilhard, Sacks, Haught and Davies have pointed out, science is ‘marking time’ (Teilhard’s phrase) before it addresses what is unique about human existence: the person.  As Teilhard points out (and Davies, Haught and Sacks restate)

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature.  For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included, without some sort of sacrilege, in a general scheme of history.  For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences.  In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of, the universe.”

   This, however, does not mean that humans cannot reflect upon themselves and their unique place in cosmic evolution, and begin to discern ways to use their unique capacities to better ‘fit’ into life and hence to enhance their enjoyment of it.

In addition to the ‘material’ and ‘evolutionary’ grounds of happiness, there is also a ‘spiritual’ ground to be explored.  While acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond of instinct enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors, and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’ we can see how, in Teilhard’s grand vision of universal evolution, these consequences are neither unexpected nor injurious to the potential to happiness.

The Next Post

This week we looked at second of four facets of the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution.

Next week we will begin a look at a third facet of the subject of happiness as we continue our exploration of ‘happiness’ as we address a ‘spiritual ground’.

How can seeing reality through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ lead to experiencing it ‘joyfully’?

Today’s Post

Last week we moved from addressing the many aspects of religion which combine to not only aid us in our continuing journey to the future but can enrich us on our way.  We have seen how three ‘Theological Virtues’ represent attitudes, stances that we can take along this journey which open us up to a clearer, and therefore more meaningful, and ultimately fuller life.

Thus far, we have outlined the insights of Teilhard, Rohr, Rogers and Haught as we have followed the trail of increasing complexity as it flows through human life.  These thinkers all contribute unique and profound insights into the ‘human psyche’, as well as signposts to a future in which human evolution can continue to unfold.

Such ‘survival’ is clearly important to our future as a species, and the part we play, as outlined by these thinkers, is indeed critical to it.  But, as we have seen many times on our journey, our personal confidence in the future, our accepting of, even our embracing of our lives is also critical.  All this evolution, if it is to be authentic, must somehow be compatible with satisfaction with life: our ‘happiness’.

The Slippery Subject of Happiness

A common term for accepting and embracing life is ‘happiness’.  Like the term ‘love’, the term ‘happiness’ is somewhat overused in Western society today.  This overuse belies a clear understanding of what it consists of and how it can be found in our lives.  The aspect of ‘happiness’ in the human person, while much to be desired, is both difficult to quantify, and if common belief would have it, difficult to attain.

This week we will look at this slippery subject through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, to see how Teilhard’s practice of placing a subject into the context of universal evolution, as has been done for other ‘slippery’ subjects, will help us to see it more clearly as well.

This approach to ‘happiness’ will address it in five facets.

This week we will address the ‘material’ facet: how human happiness is commonly addressed.

We will then address it from an ‘evolutionary’ perspective, in terms of how humans ‘fit into’ the universal evolutionary flow that Teilhard tracks from the ‘big bang’ to the current day.

In the ‘spiritual’ facet, we will then address how Teilhard’s reinterpretation of ‘spirit’ opens the door to a more intimate mode of satisfaction with life.

From the ‘psychological’ facet, we will then look at how psychology understands a person whose approach to life is mature, and hence better aligned with reality.

In the last facet we will explore religion’s approach to happiness and how it can be seen to align with the other facets.

What Is Happiness?

Not that happiness gives up its secrets willingly.  Teilhard takes note of our difficulty in finding a vantage point from which to address it.

“What, in fact, is happiness?  For centuries this has been the subject of endless books, investigations, individual and collective experiments, one after another; and, sad to relate, there has been complete failure to reach unanimity. For many of us, in the end, the only practical conclusion to be drawn from the whole discussion is that it is useless to continue the search. Either the problem is insoluble; there is no true happiness in this world or there can be only an infinite number of particular solutions: the problem itself defies solution. Being happy is a matter of personal taste. You, for your part, like wine and good living. I prefer cars, poetry, or helping others. “Liking is as unaccountable as luck.””

   He goes on to suggest a basic impediment to human happiness.

“Like all other animate beings, man, it is true, has an essential craving for happiness. In man, however, this fundamental demand assumes a new and complicated form for he is not simply a living being with greater sensibility and greater vibratory power than other living beings. By virtue of his “hominization” he has become a reflective and critical living being and his gift of reflection brings with it two other formidable properties, the power to perceive what may be possible, and the power to foresee the future. The emergence of this dual power is sufficient to disturb and confuse the hitherto serene and consistent ascent of life. Perception of the possible, and awareness of the future- when these two combine, they not only open up for us an inexhaustible store of hopes and fears, but they also allow those hopes and fears to range far afield in every direction. Where the animal seems to find no difficulties to obstruct its infallible progress towards what will bring it satisfaction, man, on the other hand, cannot take a single step in any direction without meeting a problem for which, ever since he became man, he has constantly and unsuccessfully been trying to find a final and universal solution.”

   Thus, to Teilhard, in seeming agreement with Juval Harari (“Sapiens”), the evolutionary emergence of the human interjects what Teilhard saw as “disturb(ing) and confuse(ing) the hitherto serene and consistent ascent of life”.  This disturbance brings about an inability in us to “bring satisfaction”.

The long current of human thinking in our literature, philosophies and religions presents us with a wide spectrum of stances that we can take in response to Shakespeare’s “slings and outrages” as inflicted by life.  At one end of this wide spectrum lies a simple acceptance and endurance of endless rounds of ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’, as the Easterners would have it.   At the far other end lies the ‘joyous embrace’ of the phases of life, which may well recur, but also tend to ‘raise’ us over time, as envisioned in the West.  Not surprisingly, most of us (and our literature, philosophy and religion) occupy the terrain closer to the center.  Most approaches to happiness contain a combination of some level of acceptance (or denial) of those things over which we have no power, mixed with some level of confidence (or despair) that whatever our lot, it is amenable to some improvement.

Happiness, to some extent, is related to the degree of acceptance with which we respond to these cycles mixed with some degree of expectation that the future can be better.

Thus, happiness is difficult to pin down.  Circumstances which would depress one person might be tolerated by another.  Personal welfare that would cause satisfaction in one might not be enough to satisfy others.  Our news is filled daily with stories of people who remain un-consoled by their good fortune, as well as those that manage some degree of life satisfaction without significant material welfare.

In other words, not only is the concept of happiness slippery but recognition of it in reality is highly subjective.

Still, the search for its dimensions continues.  Psychologists conduct surveys, biologists explore chemicals, and religionists look to faith.  Does this level of often contradictory activities mean that there’s nothing that can be said?  Let’s look at a few aspects:

• Surveys: For decades, psychologists have been searching for a process for conducting surveys free of cultural, economic, gender, religious and racial bias.  Not only do the continuing waves of surveys show a wider range of reported states of happiness than statistics suggest, but many of them are contradictory.
• Biology: Many biologists suggest that happiness results directly from our chemistry.  They can measure that chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin in the brain are direct causes of the sensation of happiness but minimize the influence of those experiences that lead to their secretion in the brain.  Thus, in the ‘nature vs nurture’ spectrum, in their view nurture is clearly a secondary influence.
• Genetics: All of us know persons who are generally cheerful, even under difficult circumstances. We also know those whose ‘glass is always half empty’.  From this view, we are all predisposed by our generic heritage toward some fundamental level of happiness or unhappiness.  The ‘wiring of our brains’ is always complicit in our emotional reaction to reality.
• Religion: The religions of the world all aim at some level of accommodation with reality, from (as above) acceptance to embrace.  Their beliefs and practices are clearly myriad, and often very contradictory.

For all this, neither religion nor science can be seen to have an unequivocal grasp of happiness, contentment, or any of the ‘states’ of well-being.

A more nuanced approach to happiness falls into the realm of relative measures.  For example, if a very poor person comes into a large sum of money, the impact on their happiness is directly related to the improvement in their situation that the money enables.  They can be safely said to have increased the level of their happiness by a large amount.

For a wealthier person, even a large amount of money will have much less impact as it did in the case of the one less well off.  In the first case, the impact will likely be longer lasting as well, as the money can also be put to use in caring for family and assuring a comfortable future.  In the second case, the money will most likely have little effect on the person’s sense of well-being, much less that of the family.

The ‘Satisfaction Paradox’

A curious take on this subject, as reported by the Economist in the issue of July 11, 2019, involves generally comfortable people who nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human evolution, breaking a long-sensed bond between ‘comfort’ and ‘happiness’.  This new ‘dualism’ occurs in the evolutionarily recent group of individuals who are relatively well-off and well-educated: the ‘middle class’.  This ‘satisfaction paradox’ can be seen when seemingly comfortable people vote for political parties which would upend a status quo which had previously supported a high level of life satisfaction.

This involves the dissociation between two longtime political partners: personal well-being and incumbent political parties.  As the Economist relates, the re-election of an incumbent party has historically been the result of a general feeling of ‘well-being’ among the population.   Today, we are seeing a surge in ‘developed’ countries of angry ‘Populist’ and ‘Nationalist’ parties elected by populations who consider themselves as ‘well off’.

The Economist article traces one possible cause of this phenomenon, prevalent in the ‘developed’ world, as the result of aging populations.  Certainly, this demographic feels uncomfortable being caught up in the rapid changes precipitated by the swift advances of technology.  As an example, many of us ‘old folks’ were taught by our parents, just as we taught our children, how to use a dial phone.  This same group, in many cases, are now being taught the often-bewildering complexities of ‘smartphones’ by their grandchildren.

The reliance on ‘habits’, those learned since birth to enable us to smoothly function, can become a liability, as the necessity for a rapid learning curve seems to be increasingly prevalent.  The ‘fruits of our labor’, pensions, investments and assets built up over a lifetime of cultivating productive ‘habits’, may well have provided us with much quality of life, but do not necessarily constitute a comfortable emotional bulwark against today’s turbulence.

This certainly leads to an increase in indignation, a level of personal life satisfaction which is nonetheless deeply critical of others.  We have seen how indignation can induce pleasant feelings, but this phenomenon also brings us back to the insights of Yuval Harari (‘Sapiens’) concerning the ‘fit’ between the human person and his environment.

Harari notes that in the human person, consciousness such as ours, aware as it is of itself, speeds up evolution in an environment which becomes increasingly subject to our influence.  This recursive spiral of ‘upset,’ is not unlike that found in weather, where a stable air mass becomes unstable, leading to the emergence of patterns unforeseen in the stable state.  Can the tension between a changing environment caused by humans who are themselves rapidly changing have such a future?  Harari questions the possibility that the incessant but more frequently recurring cycles of harmony and disharmony that we see today can result in a future plateau of harmony.

And, on top of this, what is the forecast for a level of accommodation, even happiness, for the human person caught up in such a dynamic milieu?  Is the very increasing speed of our evolution a material impediment to our happiness?

If Teilhard understood it correctly, and the energy which unites human persons is no more (but no less, as he would say) than the current manifestation of the fourteen billion years of energy by which the cosmos has risen to its current complex state, then how can we fail to recognize the potential for fulfillment, both at the personal level as well as the level of society?

More germane to the topic of happiness, how can Teilhard’s ‘lens’ be used as a signpost to happiness?   If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal manifestation) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?  What is the appropriate niche for the human person in this grand process of universal evolution?

The Next Post

This week saw a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and its vagueness, and began to place it into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution.  If the energy of increasing complexity and emerging consciousness can be seen in human relationships (love, in its most universal appearance) and consciousness aware of itself, how can we better understand how we fit into it?

Next week we will begin to explore such ‘universal accommodation’ and attempt to locate the appropriate niche for the human person is this grand process of universal evolution.

How can living the Theological Virtues lead to finding joy in the noosphere?

Today’s Post

Last week we concluded our look through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ 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 our look at Values, Morals and Sacraments as ‘articulations of the noosphere’ and see how the ‘Theological Virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Love serve as attitudes, stances that we can take not only in living them out, but in experience the joy of existence.

The Articulation of the Spheres

Two things on which nearly everyone can agree are the intelligibility of reality and the human’s ability to comprehend it.  Science depends on them, and religion offers a long history of human inquiry into the nature of existence and our response to it.  Both require a belief that whatever the universe is, we can make sense of 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.

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 two spheres of thought 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 of, and applications to, the reality which surrounds us.  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 demarked 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 discussed in our look at psychology, it seems no more united in addressing the human person than are science and religion.  Science would seem, in its empiricism, to be in competition with religion in its basis of intuition, for a comprehensive ‘articulation of the noosphere’.

The Unity of the Spheres

As Teilhard sees it, it is not the evolutionary perspective that provides the wedge that is evident not only between science and religion, but also among the various ways these beliefs play out within their respective spheres.  He sees these dualities as due to the lack of a comprehensive and universal understanding of evolution itself.  Such an integrative and universal approach to evolution would afford the possibility of bringing these cornerstones of belief into a coherence that begins to erase the dualities that plague them, leading to greater relevance to human life.

From this unique insight Teilhard sees any attempt to articulate the noosphere as requiring a perspective in which matter, life and the person can all be seen in a single context.  Such an integrated perspective will provide the light on reality that we need to successfully manage our habitation of it.  He understands this ‘sphere’ of human existence as needing 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 frequently seen quote, 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 our treatment of ‘grace’, Teilhard sees the ‘abundant life’ to which Jesus refers 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?”

Understanding how his three facets of life are reflected in the three aspects of Paul’s Theological Virtues is a starting place for learning how to ‘trim our sails’.

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 come in.

The Joy of the Noosphere

As we addressed the virtue of “Hope”, the wonderful facets of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ promised by Paul resonate strongly with Carl Rogers’ empirical insights into personal growth.  Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ they are not ‘rewards from God’ for following ‘His laws’, but the direct result of first understanding the ‘noospheric articulations’ and then orienting our lives (living the Theological Virtues) to living them out.  While Teilhard’s metaphor of sailing is a poetic 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 early in the construction stage) are necessary for undertaking the journey of life, but it is the quality of the life, the abundance of it, the richness of it which is enhanced by the attitudes and stances that we have seen in the ‘Theological Virtues’.

The Next Post

In the last several weeks 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 to explore it by looking at where evolution is taking us.

   How do Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution echo Paul’s insights on love?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked more closely at Teilhard’s recognition of how Love is active in our personal lives as the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution.  We saw that when we decide to act, we bridge the gap between what we believe we can do and what we hope will ensue by cooperating with the flow of energy that we now recognize as love.

This week we will take a final look at Love from Paul’s perspective, seeing a familiar passage in a new way.  In doing so this illustrates how familiar things can take on a new light when we look at them differently.  As T. S. Eliot sees it

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Reinterpreting Paul

Now that we have looked at the ‘Theological Virtues’ from several secular perspectives, we can return to Paul, the first theologian, who recognized that Love was primary in the teachings of Jesus.

Cynthia Bourgeault is a faculty member of Richard Rohr’s ‘Center for Action and Contemplation’.  In her book, “Love Is Stronger than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls” she beautifully uses a well-known passage from Paul to describe growth in “conscious love”:

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7)

Bourgeault interprets Paul’s four assertions into secular terms which not only expand our treatment of the ‘Theological Virtues’, but weave Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the universe’ into the fabric of our relationships.

Love bears all things  “This does not mean a dreary sort of putting-up-with or victimization. There are two meanings of the word bear, and they both apply. The first means “to hold up, to sustain”—like a bearing wall, which carries the weight of the house. . . . To bear [also] means “to give birth, to be fruitful.” So love is that which in any situation is the most life-giving and fruitful.”

• Here we can see a tangible reminder of the facet of Love that Teilhard refers to as ‘ontological’. Above the biological ‘fruitfulness’ of love there exists the power of love by which we ourselves are born and reborn.

Love believes all things  “. . . .  [This] does not mean to be gullible, to refuse to face up to the truth. Rather, it means that in every possible circumstance of life, there is . . . a way of perceiving that leads to cynicism and divisiveness, a closing off of possibility; and there is a way that leads to higher faith and love, to a higher and more fruitful outcome. To “believe all things” means always to orient yourselves toward the highest possible outcome in any situation and strive for its actualization.”

–    Here we can see the interpolation of Faith being carried into the extrapolation of Hope

Love hopes all things   ”. . . In the practice of conscious love you begin to discover . . . a hope that is related not to outcome but to a wellspring . . . a source of strength that wells up from deep within you independent of all outcomes. . . . It is a hope that can never be taken away from you because it is love itself working in you, conferring the strength to stay present to that “highest possible outcome” that can be believed and aspired to. “

–    Here we can see that the recognition of the flow of energy that we now recognize as Love is not only a foundation for Faith and a basis for Hope, but the very ‘wellspring’ of the agency by which we act.

Finally, Love endures all things   .” . . . Everything that is tough and brittle shatters; everything that is cynical rots. The only way to endure is to forgive, over and over, to give back that openness and possibility for new beginning which is the very essence of love itself. And in such a way love comes full circle and can fully “sustain and make fruitful,” and the cycle begins again, at a deeper place. And conscious love deepens and becomes more and more rooted. . . .”

–    Here Bourgeault restates Teilhard’s vision of the recursive act in which centration and excentration can work to effect our continued ‘compexification’: the continuation of the agency of cosmic evolution through our individual lives.

The Next Post

This week we took a final look at Love, this time by returning to a familiar text of Paul but seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’.  Next week we will overview our travel from ‘the Sacraments’, through 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 by summing up the process of ‘articulating the noosphere’ and living the ‘Theological Virtues’.