If Spirituality occurs naturally in Human Life, how can it be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the energy of evolution can be seen as active in the milieu in which we live our human lives, ‘grace’.  We also saw how the concept of ‘sacrament’, refocused by Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ is simply identification of some of the ways that this energy can be encountered.  In Teilhard’s vernacular, they point to instantiations of ‘articulations of the noosphere.’

This week we will look a little more closely at the way that Teilhard viewed the ‘noosphere’, and how such articulation is necessary to light the path to the advance of evolution through our lives.

The Noosphere

As Teilhard sees it, the evolution of our planet can be seen as the appearance of ‘spheres’, layers of evolutionary products which have appeared in succession on our planet.   He sees these spheres as:

• The ‘lithosphere’, the conglomeration of molecules which pack together under the influence of gravity, the same force by which our planetary disk precipitated out into distinct planets surrounding the Sun.
• The ‘atmosphere’ which forms as the gas molecules separate from the solids
• The ‘hydrosphere’ which forms as the atmosphere evolves into water and air
• The ‘biosphere’ which emerges as some molecules become complex enough to form cells

These ‘spheres’ are well recognized by science, and their appearance in evolutionary history is well established.

To these fundamental spheres, Teilhard adds the ‘noosphere’, literally the ‘sphere of thought’.  He sees that with the appearance of the human, our planet acquires a new layer.  As humans emerge and begin to cover the planet, he sees it as obvious that the planet is in the process of assuming a new form.  Today’s controversies over such subjects as ecology and global warning are evidence of the emerging awareness of just how significant the noosphere has become.

The Articulation of the Noosphere

As we have seen, Teilhard sees evolution proceeding through the human as a continuation of the increase of complexity that can be observed to have occurred over the preceding fourteen or so billion years.  He also notes that in each phase of evolution, from the ‘inorganic’ phase, through the ‘biological’ phase, this complexity ‘changes state’ as it increases.  In his view, the energy which drives complexification itself becomes more complex.  The Standard Model of Physics is still evolving, as the emerging theories of Quantum Physics and ‘dark’ matter illustrate, and thus offers new paradigms by which complexification in this phase can be articulated.  The theory of Natural Selection is also still evolving as it struggles to address the phenomenon of the increasing complexity of living things.  However, when it comes to understanding, much less measuring, the process of how the continuation of the rise of complexity can be seen in the human person and his culture, it is much less clear.  As many thinkers have mused, making sense of ourselves while we are evolving is like traversing a bridge while we are still building it.

Teilhard notes that all religions attempt to identify ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’.  With the strong infusion of myths, superstitions, and dualities that are inevitable over such long periods of development (arising in the prescientific world of thousands of years ago), we are left today with inconsistent and even contradictory guidelines for our continued development.  Science does not offer much help in this area.  Those expressions of belief that claim scientific foundations are simply attempts to derive meaning from empirical data and offer little support for the faith needed to deal with the daily effort of human life.

But as Teilhard sees effective human life as learning to ‘set our sails to the winds of life’, the skills of reading the wind and tending the tiller are first necessary to be learned.   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?”

   It seems obvious ‘keeping the vital connection with the current’ comes down to ‘trial and error’.  Seen thusly, this is simply ‘survival of the fittest’: those things that we learn which enhance our life are collected, refined through the development of our culture, and encoded into morals and laws.  Those which don’t atrophy over time as they become seen as less valuable.

As we have seen, Richard Dawkins offers yet another insight into the issue of human evolution.  Like Teilhard, he recognizes the difference between evolution in society and as understood as ‘Natural Selection’ by biology.  In his book, “The Selfish Gene’, he proposes that evolution continues through human society by way of ‘memes’, packets of cultural information that act as the cultural parallel to biological genes.  Such ‘memes’ are echoed in what Teilhard refers to as the ‘noosphere’, which is the body of human thoughts, ideas and inventions which accumulate in human lore, rituals, books, schools, and networks over time, and is thus ‘spiritual’ in nature.

The body of insights and skills that we accumulate in our culture are, as Teilhard sees it, ‘articulations of the noosphere’.  They can be understood, as Dawkins suggests, as the ‘genetic material’ of human evolution, weaving their way into the thread of universal evolution as they prompt the continued evolution of the human person.

By this criterion, sacraments can be understood as examples of behavior that are passed from generation to generation via the cultural ‘tissue’ of religion.  Effectively they are signs of the play of evolutive energy as it flows through human life: the ‘DNA of human evolution’.

Religion is not the only place where such noospheric articulations can be found.  As we saw in our focus of Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on spirituality, a secular example can be found in a fundamental axiom of our government.  It is at the basis of the idea of a ‘representative government’, and often described as the ‘will of the people’ so essential to democratic governments.  While not finding articulation per se in the new American constitution and bill of rights, Thomas Jefferson was very clear in his concept of the validity of this ‘consensus in government’ as an ‘articulation of the noosphere’:

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be other that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.  I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

   This exercise of ‘trust of the people to govern themselves’ is a secular example of an ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  The ‘meme’ of human equality can be seen here as one which, as Jefferson asserted, rises in the teachings of Jesus, evolves through such things as societal norms, then ‘charters’, and finally blossoms unequivocally in the laws which flow from the Constitution of the Unites States.  When we engage in such activity as the process of voting, we are implicitly connecting with one of the threads of evolution as it runs through human evolution.  This activity is effectively a ‘secular sacrament’ which, if we choose to see it, points to an underlying agency of the energy which moves us forward: ‘grace’

Grace

As we have seen, the coming to be of the universe involves an underlying energy by which things unite in such a way that results in increased complexity of the product of the uniting.  Or, as Teilhard puts it

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

   We have also seen how this energy is just as essential to matter as matter is essential to it.  This is the core of Teilhard’s insight into applying the term ‘spirit’ to this agency which is the essential manifestation of this energy.  We also saw how science is beginning to address this elusive agent in its approach to ‘information’.

Traditionally, religion has addressed this agency in metaphorical terms, seeing it as a ‘flow’ of supernatural life in human affairs.  With Teilhard’s insistence that this flow is the natural manifestation of evolutionary energy in human life, he moves its focus from the emotional connection between humans to the ontological connections which effect their personal evolution.

From this perspective, the metaphor of ‘flow’ becomes stronger.  Teilhard uses it when he says,

“Those who set their sails to the winds of life will always find themselves borne on a current to the open sea.”

   The term ‘grace’ is very common in Western religion, but it finds many diverse expressions in the many forms that Western religion takes.  From our perspective of interpretation, grace can now be seen as the current into which we can insert ourselves if we are to be borne to fuller being.  Grace is simply the current manifestation of that same energy which has, for fourteen billion years, ‘raised the complexity of the universe to its current level’ (paraphrasing Dawkins).

But, as we have noted, it is very elusive indeed, as science has yet been unable to quantify it, and religion seems to require supernatural sources for it.  Teilhard insists that recognition of it is necessary for our continued evolution.  To ‘set our sails to the winds of life’ we must first learn to recognize the wind.

That’s where the idea of ‘sacrament’ comes in.

The Next Post

This week looked a little deeper into Teilhard’s insights; the evolving understanding of ‘how we should be if we would be what we can be’, which he refers to as ‘articulation of the noosphere’ and saw how such insights contribute to the continuation of the thread of evolution as it rises through the human.

We saw that such articulations are essentially the ‘cultural DNA’ of our evolution, but that their recognition is essential if we are to cooperate with them.

Next week we will move onto reinterpreting sacraments through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.