How can human love be seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ as the key structural link in human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the Theological Virtues of faith and hope intersect in an ‘extrapolation/interpolation’ dynamic that extends our knowledge of the past to build confidence in the future.

This week we will continue with a look at the third Theological Virtue, ‘love’ as it is a manifestation of the universal energy of evolution.

The Traditional Approach to Love

Paul, who first delineated the three ‘attitudes’ of the ‘Theological Virtues’, saw love as the primary of the three, mainly because it was most essential to Jesus’s message.  While he saw faith and hope as necessary to fullness of being, he understood that love was that which brings the whole picture together.  Paul goes into some detail in his description of Love in 1 Corinthians 13:4:

“Love is patient and kind, Love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.  Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

As is commonly understood in contemporary society, the traditional theological approach treats love as an ‘act’.  We are to “love one another” as one of the many criteria for eternal life after death.  As Jesus taught, we are to love God, love ourselves and love our neighbors as ourselves, restating and building upon Confucius’ statement of the Golden Rule from some 500 years earlier.

As Teilhard insists, however, even though humanity may be only in the early stages of such ‘articulations of the noosphere’, at least in the West the values of the uniqueness of the person and the necessity of relationships that enhance this uniqueness are paramount.  Any approach to regulation or enhancement of this relationship that impedes this understanding of personal growth also impedes the continuation of the evolution of the human species.

Nearly all the ancient thinkers recognized that a key to human maturity lay in the person’s rise above “egoism” both as a building block for personal growth and as a necessary component of relationship.  The concept of “losing” oneself, overcoming ‘ego’, as a step toward spiritual fulfillment is common in many venerable systems of thought.  The actual practice in which these results occur varies significantly among the religions and philosophies in which they are critical, but all the thinkers of the “Axial Age” recognized that you needed other people to elicit your full humanity; self-cultivation was a reciprocal process. As Confucius put it:

  “In order to establish oneself, one should try to establish others.  In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others.”

   Karen Armstrong sees this perspective as common to the thinkers of the Axial Age.

“In one way or the other, their programs were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence, and promoted the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule.  They understood that this reciprocal process required that we treat others as we would be treated.  This requires us to be able to rise above the limitations of our self, to become less focused inward and more open to “the other”: the overcoming of egoism.”

   Gregory Baum rephrases Blondel on this process.

“At the moment when we shatter our own little system and recognize another person, we become more truly a person ourself.  What takes place here is a conversion away from self-centeredness to the wider reality of life and people.”

Understanding Love – From Relating to Becoming

Of course, even the most emotional treatment of love would acknowledge its effect on our personal development, but the traditional approach tends to emphasize the action itself over the effect.  The evangelist John proposes a more fundamental understanding of Love as both the nature of God and the nature of man in his astounding assertion (1 John 4:16) that:

“God is love; and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”

   As Teilhard asserts and Richard Rohr frequently observes in his Weekly Meditations, this ‘ontological’ aspect of Love has been less stressed in favor of Christianity’s seemingly endless need for the promulgation of rules and society’s need for the stability that it affords.  As a result, it is far more common to see Love treated by religion as an act which gains favor with God than as a natural facet of the evolutionary forces with which we can cooperate to assure our personal growth towards wholeness.      The intimacy asserted by John, even though it has been diluted by Christianity’s love affair with Plato, is nonetheless the perspective which not only fosters a reinterpretation of the venerable religious concept of ‘immanence’ but provides a much more universal context to the idea of Love itself.

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ and explored the historical development of this undeniable but often bewildering aspect of human life.  We saw how the popular concept of love focusses on the ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected by instinct and emotion for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  We also saw how seeing it through Teilhard’s ‘lens’ opens it up to be recognized as the most recent manifestation of the energy of evolution.

Next week we will continue our shift from seeing love as simple relationship to follow Teilhard’s expansion of Love as a more universal perspective in which it can be seen as the energy by which we become persons and in doing so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.