September 25, 2024 – Introduction to the ‘Lens of Evolution’ Of Teilhard de Chardin

   Developing a perspective in which everything can be seen to make sense

This Week

This weekly blog has been in process for several years now.  It has focused on the writings of the Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, and on how they offer a wonderful and highly integrated insight into the universe we inhabit, and more importantly, the part we play in it.  The blog continues to grow as my awareness of the world, as seen through his unique perspective, slowly begins to take shape.

Making Sense of Things

We live in a reality which often does not make sense.  While global human welfare in general can be seen to increase over time, and most of us obviously benefit from it, the future today seems ever more unreliable in comparison to a past which becomes more tolerable as we move further from it.  Today’s currents are felt to be carrying us into a fickle tomorrow in which the successes of yesterday are not guaranteed.

Our ever-increasing technology, while it grants us certain respites from the labors of the past, seemingly undermines this ‘progress’ by exposing the possibility of a future of diminished energy, shortages of necessities and one rife with human conflict.  Even the unprecedented tightening of the web which connects us on so many levels is shot through with a dystopic framing of current events. News of conflicts, pandemics, and shortages all reflect a generally negative view of the human condition.

And, adding to this is the sense of the world closing in on us.  With the ever-increasing human population on a planet of restricted space and limited resources, one scarcely able to bear our weight upon it today, surely there will come a time that the human wave will crest and crash back into a dark void.

The Economist, a well-respected global magazine, reported on this pervasive sense of dread a few years back. They cited the many polls that identify generally comfortable people who nonetheless report that they are unhappy, a phenomenon which is relatively new in human history, breaking a long-sensed bond between ‘comfort’ and ‘happiness’.  This new ‘dualism’ can be seen in the newly emerging group of individuals who are relatively well-off and well-educated: the ‘middle class’.  Evidence of 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.

The statistics presented by Johan Norberg in his book, “Progress”, outline how the general improvement in global human welfare very clearly suggests an upward trend towards a positive future.  However, Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, notes a rising sap of pessimism, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores such data or rejects it outright.

Obviously, such dystopia requires a view of reality that is antithetical to the data which it seems to reflect.  What is needed is a perspective grounded in an objective assessment of existence, in which such phenomena can be put in context.

A casual look at our two major systems of understanding reality, science and religion, quickly surfaces their limitations in such assessment.  Religion’s many tangled threads of supernaturalism, otherworldliness, dogmatism and antiscience compete with its positive insights into human nature for our attention.  Science, on the other hand, with its astounding success in articulating what we see in the universe around us, still fails to offer succor for the threads of fear that persist in our existence.

Both, however, carry threads of insight into both the human condition and the place of the human species in the cosmic scheme of things.  What is needed is an integrated context into which these threads can be knitted.

Such an integrated context can be found in the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, and philosopher is most noted today for his insights into religion, spirituality and mysticism, but in this book we will widen the net to explore the application of his thinking to the wider scope of universal evolution and how it is playing out in human affairs today.   In seeking a more comprehensive grasp of reality, and our part in it, we will explore the phenomena of evolution, religion, science, and life in Teilhard’s integrated context.

The Evolutionary Perspective

Humanity’s earliest records address attempts to ‘make sense of things’.  Such ‘sense making’ seems to be required for humans to not only survive in a world rife with danger, but to arrange themselves in increasingly complex arrangements in doing so.  Evidently, belief in an underlying causality of events helps to add the confidence necessary to deal with them.  As the many early writings found in ‘sacred texts’ reveal, attributing both ‘natural’ and human-caused phenomena to supernatural beings was effective in developing the confidence to deal with them.
The sophistication of ‘sense making’ increased with the complexity of society.  The ‘Axial Age’ (some eight hundred years BCE), for example, ushered in a trend towards a ‘person-centered’ causality instead of one centered on the supernatural.  As Karen Armstrong puts it in her book, “The Great Transformation”, during this time civilizations across the globe were beginning to rethink “what it means to be human”.
One of the results of this ‘rethinking’, also charted by Jonathan Sacks in his book, “The Great Partnership” was the rise of ‘empirical’ (as opposed to ‘intuitional’) thinking in ‘making sense of things’.  This of course led to the emergence of science in the great human enterprise.

The resultant conflict between this new mode of thinking and the traditional, well-entrenched institution of religion is well documented, as is the popular belief that while they might co-exist, collaboration is unlikely.

By the late eighteenth century, Science’s increased technology had enabled its inquiry into reality to extend to the entire cosmos.  Not only was ‘reality’ now considered much bigger in size but seemed to have a history of immense time as well.  These two recently discovered aspects added a third observation, that of universal evolution.  The universe, considered static for generations, was now seen as dynamic.
In this same time frame, while most Western theologians were resisting such ‘modernism’, a few were beginning to recognize how such cosmic insights might not be antithetical to the tenets of religion, but actually inform religious beliefs in a way that might stem the tide of secularism that science seem to be fostering.
One of the first was Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) who believed that this new cosmic vision could lead to a reinterpretation of traditional Catholic concepts in a way in which their inherent message could be seen as more relevant to human life.  As an example of such ‘reinterpretation’, in his book, “Man Becoming”, Gregory Baum cites such Blondel insights as

”Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life”.

   As Baum saw it, Blondel’s recognition of a dynamic universe opened the door to recognizing how such traditional Christian concepts could be mined for their relevancy to human life.  He correctly identified one of the key contributors to the drift of contemporary religion towards increasing irrelevance.

“A message that comes to man wholly from the outside, without an inner relationship to his life, must appear to him as irrelevant, unworthy of attention and unassimilable by the mind.”

   Teilhard de Chardin was no less concerned about the irrelevancy that dogged the traditional ‘extrinsicism’ of Christianity.  Like Blondel, he also recognized the immense potential that the new insights of science could bring to ‘reinterpreting’ traditional Christian teachings into terms more relevant to human life.
Unlike Blondel, Teilhard studied science much more intensely.  While Blondel opened the door to the recognition of how scientific insights could better focus religious concepts, Teilhard took the bold steps of doing so.  He recognized that a common hermeneutic between science and religion was essential to increasing religion’s relevancy.   He also saw how religion’s emphasis on the human person and his relationships could widen the scope of science to include the phenomenon of the human person.

Teilhard recognized that the starting point for such an audacious enterprise was the concept of ‘evolution’.  He envisioned a twofold expansion of this concept:

• science would open its concept of evolution beyond the Darwinist biological limitations to that of a phenomenon underpinning the evolution of the cosmos
• religion would recognize that such an understanding of the evolutionary process by which reality comes to be what it is provides an essential basis for a reinterpretation of its concepts in terms of human existence

Johan Norberg, a contemporary historian, summarizes many statistics to substantiate Teilhard’s general sense of confidence in the future (‘Progress”).  He and Teilhard both recognize, however, a headwind of pessimism that inhibits a general positive view of the direction of evolution in the human species.  This ‘headwind’ is indeed real and impossible to ignore.  It did not appear recently but depends on the existence of a dystopia that has been prevalent in human society since its beginnings and will continue as long as a narrow perspective of human existence persists.

Teilhard proposes a widening of this perspective as an antidote to this headwind.  If, he suggests, we can see ourselves in a context of reality which is evolving in the direction of ‘fuller being’, we will be able to

“..spread our sails in the right way to the winds of the earth and always find ourselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   This “spreading of sails” involves the recognition of a reliable causality in each of us that is always at work in our lives to bring us to an ever-fuller degree of ‘being’.  He asserts that such recognition will awaken us to our potential as human persons and provide the stimulus for our personal and collective fullness.  As he put it:

“.. I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized (made human) in him.”

   In saying this, he is stating a belief that when we, individually and collectively, see ourselves as the current manifestation of the same energy that has breathed the universe into existence over the past fourteen billion years, the emerging confidence in this energy within us will enable us to overcome all obstacles to becoming more what it is possible for us to be.  As he puts it in more poetic terms, Blondel’s insight that the universe is ‘on our side’ allows us to perceive ourselves as being held in God’s hands.

“..the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   To experience oneself as being held in the hands of God can truly count as a significantly ‘decisive moment’.  A person who feels that, as Maurice Blondel put it,

“The ground of being is on our side”

    will experience life quite differently than one who feels adrift in an uncaring, or even hostile, universe.

But the act of experiencing is very dependent upon understanding.  Considering the way that understanding contributes to belief, and hence the importance of such understanding, Teilhard develops a way of seeing that can contribute to this skill of sailing.  This mode of seeing is based on his grasp of all reality as it exists in a flux of a universal ‘becoming’.  It is his ‘lens of evolution’.

Next Week

Having restarted this blog in a new edition, next week we will go on to look at how Teilhard’s unique insights into cosmic evolution can provide a ‘lens’ for seeing how the past leads to a present with such a powerful potential for a future.

 As seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, how can mysticism be seen as a key ingredient of human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at mysticism as a skill required to move into the future.

This week we look at the part such a skill plays in human evolution.

The Mystical Role in Human Evolution

We have addressed mysticism as a skill which is required to move us into the future.  As such, it is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay.  (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)

If we can agree that coming to recognize that whatever perception that we have of reality falls short of whatever is ‘real’, one of the challenges of life is pursuing a bridge to close this gap.  Human history is filled with examples of both failing to do so as well as those where success has led on to a clearer understanding of life and our part in it.   There have been many historical attempts to solve the enigma of the ‘one and the many’, manifested in the cacophony of social experiments which attempted to tame human self-centered tendencies while reaping the harvest of human capabilities.  They speak volumes of attempts to develop the skill of building this bridge.

Richard Rohr addresses the role of mysticism in developing this skill.

 “Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, wrote with great insight that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” Everything new and creative in this world puts together things that don’t look like they go together at all but always have been connected at a deeper level. Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level, to the unified field of nondual thinking, where God alone can hold contradictions and paradox.”

   This journey from mysticism to politics frames the path of human evolution.

Teilhard offers another perspective on this path.

“Truth has only to appear once, in a single human being, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting the whole world ablaze”

   Teilhard’s understanding of the slippery term, ‘truth’ is very simple.  As he sees it, it is simply that articulation of reality which is most consistent with the reality that it is addressing.  The narrower the gap between our inner grasp of reality and the reality itself, the more confidence we can have in our understanding of it.

We have referred frequently to the statistics assembled by Johan Norberg in the quantification of our human evolution in terms of human welfare.  As he sees it in his book, “Progress”, this data was summarized in the nine categories of

Food                                                      Sanitation

Life Expectancy                                 Poverty

Violence                                              The Environment

Literacy                                                Freedom

Equality

In his identification of objective historical data which shows how human welfare has exponentially increased in each of these categories, we can see aspects of the mystical basis of our journey to the future in play.

In each of these nine cases, for the specific advances which he documents, an individual or group of individuals must first become aware of some specific phenomenon, wonder as to its causality, try to replicate it, and eventually be able to reliably cause it to happen.  The first two steps are intuitive in nature, then transferring to the empirical state in the last two.  The first two begin with a single person, or with a small ‘psychism’, and as the movement to the second two occurs the ‘reach’ of the idea extends.  As we saw from Péguy above, “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”  Paraphrasing this in our terms: “Every idea begins with an intuition about reality which becomes articulated into the standards by which we govern ourselves.”

In the case of a tenth category, that of ‘fuel’, this can be clearly seen.  The phenomenon of ‘fire’ was experienced long before it could be caused.  The ability to control heat, of course, had obvious value to human welfare, and as Teilhard notes, the ‘truth’ of this value spread inexorably among early humans.  The next steps continued the spiral of development between awareness and articulation, as the need for greater thermal efficiency grew along with the need for surviving the inevitable downsides of each new articulation.  The deforestation related to wood burning was replaced by the asphyxiation of coal burning, then by the atmospheric damages from gas:  all resulting in ever more efficient fuel which was offset by new ecological risks.  Each step requiring new insights into our reality followed by new articulations of these insights and new effects on human evolution requiring new insights.

Thus, the ‘mystical skill’ of humans can be seen as the essential aspect of our spiral path to the future as it is followed

–     from our intuitional peering into liminal space

• through our conscious articulation into ‘ideas’
• and finally emerging as the set of social norms encoded into our cultural practices.

This winding path is the social counterpoint to Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution: “fuller being from closer union and closer union from fuller being”.

Next Week

This week we took yet another look at the role played in evolution by the human consciousness mode of ‘mysticism’.

A key theme in this blog has been the seeing of reality, both of ourselves and the environment we inhabit, through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  In doing so, we have seen how such a seemingly secular perspective can open traditional Western religious beliefs to a new and deeper bearing on human life, one which is not only more relevant to it but more intimate with the source of life which underlies our being insight.

Next week we will look at the play of mysticism in the weave of music in the fabric of human consciousness.

How does Teilhard’s ‘lens’ show mysticism to be a key to the continuation of human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we continued our look into Cynthia Bourgeault’s insights into ‘enstasy’ and saw examples of it in scripture and in the works of Elaine Pagels.  This week we will take a look at how mysticism can be seen in both our ‘personization’ and in the continued flow of human evolution.

The Mystical Role in Personization

We have seen how Teilhard understands the progress of universal evolution as captured in the process of ‘complexification’.  He further sees this process leading to the emergence of ‘personization’ as he sees the ‘reflexive consciousness’ of the human as the point of greatest complexity reached thus far on this planet.  To Teilhard, not only does ‘true union differentiate’, and ‘fuller being result from closer union while closer union results from fuller being’, but that in these recursive dances the continuous rise of complexity takes on the unique mantle of ‘personness’.  What role can mysticism be seen to play in this unfolding?

As we have come to see, Teilhard exemplified the enstatic mode, continuously weaving the profound insights of Christianity into a common cloth with the profound insights of science.  As we saw two weeks ago, Cynthia Bourgeault, who introduced the concept of enstacy to our conversation, showed how Teilhard’s insights into the evolutionary foundation of the human person led to his insights on the uniqueness of the person.  She also noted the potential danger of the other face of the ‘liminal space’.

“Teilhard’s evolutionary vision is profoundly enstatic.  He fought ecstasy all his life- the siren call, as he took it, of the Asian traditions to dissolve into the One, to fund union at the point of undifferentiated simplicity.”

   She notes elsewhere that ecstasy and enstacy are not necessarily opposites but work differently in the human person.  In the traditional treatment of ecstasy, the person is pulled away from Teilhard’s psychism in order to come into contact with what is most real within us.  In the great stories of Christian mysticism, the mystic’s first step is to pull away from the trappings of society.  Some see this happening in the early days of the church as the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ sought to escape the hierarchical church’s need for orthodoxy.  But no matter what the cause, the mystical life was a clear ‘siren call’ from the depths of the soul.

Teilhard’s concept of the psychism, on the other hand, recognizes that we can be called into fuller being as we undergo closer union.  Teilhard, reflected in Bourgeault’s insight, notes that both enstasy and ecstasy require a ‘peering into liminal space’ for the vision that can move us to fuller being, but it is only the translation of the inner sight into fuller articulation that causes this to happen.

It should be noted that the great mystics often return from their ecstatic visions with such articulations.  For example, we saw above Hildegard’s understanding that her visions were instances of a natural human capability of ‘resonance’ with the divine.

When we explore this resonance, we are peering into the liminal space between what we know and what is real, by seeking what is still left to be understood.  To the extent that we understand, we activate our potential not only to understand more fully, but to become fuller ourselves.  Such mysticism is not only an aspect of the potential by which we become more fully what we can be, but by which the evolution of our species becomes more fully resonant with its environment.

Not only are the things we see in liminal space yet to be understood, but they also illuminate the potentiality yet to be actualized.  Thus, when we peer into liminal space, it can be said that we are looking into the future.

As we have explored it here, mysticism is simply a skill which is, as Audre Lorde put it in her poem “The Unsayable’

“…the way we give names to the nameless so it can be thought.”

   Giving the ‘nameless’ a name so that it can be thought is bringing an intuition into the empirical state in which it can be objectively considered.  An insight into the future thus becomes a tangible way of preparing for it.   Seen from the perspective that we have been developing, mysticism can be seen as the building of planks to be installed on the bridge that we are building to the future.

Next Week

This week we began to address mysticism as a skill which is required to move into the future.  It is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay.  (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)

Next week we will take yet another look at human history to see how it shows the slow increase in the ‘skill of mysticism’ at work in the building of our bridge to the future.