How can seeing love through Teilhard’s lens help us to use faith to become more hopeful?

Today’s Post

In the past several weeks we have addressed the three so-called “Theological Virtues”, Faith, Hope and Love, from the perspective of the evolutionary ‘lens’ of Teilhard de Chardin.  We have seen them as ‘attitudes’ or ‘stances’ that we can take as we ‘articulate the noosphere’, a mapping of the implicit laws of humanity that move our species forward in the increase of complexity that Teilhard saw as the key metric of continuing evolution.

We saw Faith as the confidence that we build in our capacity to act based on extrapolation of experience of the past.  Looking at Hope in a similar manner, we saw how Hope is manifested in an extrapolation of this experience to a hoped-for result of the act that we undertake.

This week we will take a final look at Love, this time seeing it as the hinge on which the belief afforded by Faith becomes an act whose outcome is anticipated by Hope. 

Present, Past and Future

What does it mean to say that we “live in the present”?  To neurologists, what we know about what we sense is by definition ‘the past’.  Considering that it takes between forty and eighty milliseconds for any sensory information to be introduced to the brain, anything that we’re aware of is by definition, ‘the past’; it has already occurred.  Considering the additional time it takes to make a decision to act on the sensed information, the neurological activation of a physical response (‘acting’) requires an additional delay, and our ultimate response to any external stimulus falls ‘in the past’ of the stimulus itself.  So, neurologically speaking, we cannot live ‘in the present’.  By this reckoning, the ‘present’ is an ephemeral concept which is already in the past by the time we are aware of it.

Yet there is a distinct transition between the past and the future that we perceive, either validly or invalidly, as the ‘present’, and it is in this transition that we act.

So, then, what does it mean when we say that we ‘act’?  What is involved in gathering sufficient motivation to act, to ‘decide’ to act, and then to engage our psychomotor system to carry out the decision?

From Past Faith to Future Hope By Way Of Present Love

Seeing the “Theological Virtues” through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, we saw Faith as an extrapolation of our past which provides us with the confidence, the ‘push’, to act on the one hand, and Hope as a ‘pull’ from the future as we envision a successful outcome of the act on the other.  But what gets us across the divide?

This idea of an ‘energy of activation’, by which we make this transition, is echoed in Teilhard’s collection, “Activation of Energy”.  This collection of articles focuses on the universal energy potential that over time effects increasing complexity in its products, but the application to human life is inescapable.  Each human act carries the potential of raising our ‘human complexity’ to a higher level.  And no human act, as we have seen in the last few weeks, carries more potential for our fulfillment than the act of love.  But this act requires a previous step, and that is, as we have seen, the decision to love.  Such a decision may well indeed be stimulated by sexual attraction, a need for companionship, or a response to a moral imperative, but whatever the source a decision is ultimately required.

Those of us that are engaged in deep commitments are no doubt fully aware of those times in the relationship in which one does not feel ‘in love’.  Early in any relationship, when this occurs there may be a panic that one is no longer “in love”, and that the relationship has thus failed.  The recognition that this emotional reaction may be premature, and that honest self-assessment, open communication with the other, and faith in the relationship is required, is a dramatic and often painful.  It is, however, always a necessary step not only toward strengthening the relationship but in increasing one’s personal maturity as well.  Such a recognition can only come from a ‘decision’, an action of the human neocortex to modulate the instinctive stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains which may shout, “Danger!  Run!” or “Pain!  Hide!”.  As we have discussed frequently, it is a skill most essential for our personal evolution.

So now we see another role for love in the triad of the ‘Theological Virtues’.  Love may well be, as Teilhard asserts, the only energy that can “unite while differentiating”, bringing us together in such a way in which we become more complete.  But, as the energy of evolution become manifest in our personal lives, it is also the energy that makes it possible for us to make such risky decisions as ‘excentration’ so that we can reap the rewards of our resultant ‘centration’.

We certainly may be able to understand our past well enough to have confidence in ourselves and foresee the future well enough to be enticed by it, but until we engage this flow of universal energy within us, nothing will happen.  Love is indeed the hinge on which Faith results in the outcome promised by Hope.   It is the precise moment of ‘the present’ in which the potential of ‘the past’ can become actualized in the fruit of the ‘future’ in which, as Karen Anderson puts it, “We are in greater possession of ourselves”.

The Next Post

This week we have looked at Love from another perspective, seeing it as the hinge on which the door of Faith is opened to the promises of Hope.  Next week we will take a final look at love, returning to Paul for insight into the works of love in our lives.