How can seeing love through Teilhard’s lens refocus it as an aspect of energy which moves us forward?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at the so-called ‘Theological Virtue’ of love by seeing it in the context of an emotion-based ‘act’ of personal relationship in which we are connected for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation.  This week we will take a second look informed by Teilhard’s understanding of it as the universal energy of evolution become manifest in human life by which we continue the fourteen billion years of evolution’s process of increase in complexity.

We will see Love through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, as less emotional than ontological. 

The Ontological Side of Love

Maurice Blondel articulated what had long been experienced by the great mystics when he asserted that:

“It is impossible to think of myself…over here, and then of God as over against us.”

  He goes on to explain why he asserts this:

“This is impossible because I…have come to be who I am through a process in which God is involved.”

   This process by which we “come to be who we are” is part of Teilhard’s essential insight: love is the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution as it rises through the human person.  He compares love to the phenomenon of gravity which pulls the grains of matter together to effect higher forms of reality when he asks:

“Can we not say quite simply that in its (love’s) essence it is the attraction exercised on each unit of consciousness by the center of the universe in course of taking shape?”

   This process by which we “come to be who we are” is part of Teilhard’s essential insight: love is the manifestation of the energy of universal evolution as it rises through the human.  He saw a distinctive facet of this energy of evolution at work in every step of the universe’s emergence, such as the forces which forge atoms from particulate electrons, electro-chemical forces forging millions of types of molecules from a few hundred types of atoms, the energies escorting molecules across seemingly impenetrable thresholds to cellular formation and so on to those forces which unite us in such a way that we are ‘differentiated’ into distinct but highly ‘connectable’ persons.  Every change of state that can be seen to have occurred in cosmic evolution has been powered by a more complex facet of the single integrated energy by which the universe unfolds.  In the case of the ‘change of state’ that saw conscious entities (the higher mammals) evolving into entities that were not only conscious, but conscious of their consciousness, the aspect of the universal evolutionary force that we know as love was necessary for the transition to this new mode of being.

This brings us back to Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’.  The entire history of science can be seen as the quest for (and the success of) understanding both the entities produced by evolution (such as molecules) and the energies by which their component parts are united in such a way as to increase the resultant complexity (such as the electro-chemical forces).  Teilhard simply extrapolates this past history into a future in which the process of evolution continues to effect more complex entities through more comprehensive energies.

In scientific parlance, the amount of ‘information’ contained in an emergent product of evolution is not only substantially larger than that present in the entities whose interconnection produced it, the potential of the new entity to parent offspring of similarly increased complexity is itself increased.

Teilhard’s ‘articulation of the noosphere’ simply recognizes that, just as there are electro-chemical ‘laws’ by which atoms are combined into molecules, expressed in terms of descriptions of matter and rules of combination (‘information’), humanity is in the early stages of understanding our nature as human persons and the energies of both individual and collective human ontology.   As we saw in recent weeks, these ‘human laws’ can be expressed in terms of sacraments and morals.

Simply put, just like the electrons, atoms, molecules, and cells before us, we are simply the latest products of evolution, and are therefore capable of moving forward in complexity by cooperation with the energies which Teilhard insists can be found in these ‘articulations of the noosphere’.

Just as Teilhard expands evolution both rearward and forward from ‘natural selection’ to ‘universal complexification’, he expands ‘love’ from ‘emotion’ to ‘ontological energy’.

”So as long as our conceptions of the universe remained static, the basis of duty remained extremely obscure.  To account for this mysterious law (love) which weighs fundamentally on our liberty, man had recourse to all sorts of explanations, from that of an explicit command issued from outside to that of an irrational but categorical instinct.”

  We have seen how Christianity has reduced John’s assertion that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him” from a highly intimate expression of the relationship between God and man to a belief that we need to love as God loves us if we are to merit the afterlife.  Teilhard restores John’s astounding assertion to its ontological and non-metaphorical truth: among the multifaceted manifestations of the energy by which the universe evolves is a principle by which its increasing complexity eventually manifests itself in the personal.

The less metaphorical understanding of John proposed by Teilhard is that God is the ground of being which manifests itself in the energy of love, and that when we love we are participating in our individual current of this universal flow of energy.  To Teilhard, expanding John, God is not a ‘person’ who ‘loves’, ‘He’ is the ultimate principle of the energy by which the universe unfolds and by which it eventually manifests itself in the ‘person’.

The Next Post

This week we followed Paul’s assertion that Love was the most important of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ by following Teilhard’s expansion of love from the traditional understanding as an emotional energy which connects us for procreation, social stability and ultimately salvation to a more universal perspective in which it can be seen as the energy by which we become persons and so continue the rise of complexity in human evolution.

Next week we will take a third look at Love as a force of continuing evolution by seeing how Teilhard understands its action in assuring our continuing ‘complexification’.