Today’s Post
Last week we saw how in Teilhard’s insights into evolution as a truly universal process, he understood each step of evolution as resulting from a union which produced something new. He refers to this critical step (without which the universe would be static, unchanging, and effectively ‘still born’) as ‘complexification’. From such a vision of the past, he extrapolates to a vision of human love as ‘nothing more’ (and he would add, ‘nothing less’) than the continuation of such a universal dynamic in each human life.
This week we will continue our exploration of this dynamic a little further, seeing how while such a process indeed continues in our lives, it becomes more complex in itself.
Excentration and Centration as The Continuation of Evolution in the Human Person
The Excentration-Centration reciprocal activity is drawn from two Teilhard insights. First, in many of his works he identifies ‘centration’ as a key aspect of ‘complexification’. In other words, in evolution the more ‘centered’ an entity is, the higher it can be seen in the order of complexity and the later in the history of evolution. He offers examples such as nuclei in atoms, nuclei in cells, central nervous systems in animals, and brains in higher animals. Second, he notes that “. .in a converging Universe each element achieves completeness.. by a sort of inward turn towards the Other (as) its growth culminates in an act of giving and in excentration”.
Effectively, centration is the essential characteristic of evolved products, but this changes in the human when entities not only unite to produce more complex products, but they unite in order to increase their own complexity as well. This recursive action, such increase in ‘centricity, however,’ requires an increase in ‘excentricity’ in order to effect the increased complexity of both partners.
Teilhard wasn’t the first thinker to understand such reciprocal forces at work in human relationships. Such a dynamic seems to have first been recognized by Confucius some five hundred years BCE,
“In order to establish oneself, one should try to establish others. In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others.”
Jesus himself asserted that we must ‘lose’ ourselves in order to ‘find’ ourselves.
In such a dynamic, “excentration” can be seen to foster a renewed “centration“, which in turn fosters a continued “excentration” and so on. In this rich recursive rondo, both persons become more complete, more “realized of their potentials” than before. Essentially, in this way our relationships are the fertile ground for our growth. This growth in turn fosters the deepening of our relationships, which further fosters our growth.
Such a process goes far beyond responding to instinctive urges to procreate, or to fulfilling emotional needs for comfort. It is the essential act by which we become what it is possible for us to become.
But, It Ain’t Easy
That said, if the current state of the world offers any clue, it is not a trivial undertaking. As many of our popular love songs suggest, if it were easy they’d be more of it.
Love as understood by Teilhard does not come without work: it requires a conscious decision to rise above the comforting scaffolding of ego. As the Marriage Encounter movement stresses, “Love is a decision”, and such decision requires trust that the energy of love will carry us forward to more completeness. As we have suggested previously, one of the principle mechanisms of our personal ‘complexification’ is development of the skill of using our neocortex brains to moderate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains, Such skill in ‘decision making’ is a critical facet of this evolutionary skill.
As we only have to look into our own lives to verify, these dynamics of excentration and centration are not without cost. The process of excentration, traditionally of “loss of one’s self”, “transcendence of egoism”, or even more descriptive of the difficulty, “dying to self”, does not come easy. As Khalil Gibran says, “The pain you feel is the breaking of the shell which encloses your understanding”. One aspect of a secular approach to sin can be seen in the resistance, even the avoidance, that we offer to such a painful undertaking.
The acknowledgement of the difficulty of such an undertaking better delineates the domains of the ‘Theological Virtues”. In order to take the risks that Love requires, we must have Faith in our power to do so and Hope in the ensuing outcome before we can take the leap that Love requires.
So, in Teilhard’s understanding of the mechanisms of the energy of Love by which we are both ‘united’ and ‘differentiated’, we can see the energies of cosmic evolution at work in the human person just as they were at work in the first assemblages of electrons. There are, in the human however, two significant exceptions.
The first can be seen in that, while primitive particles could unify in such a way as to increase the complexity of their products, human ‘particles’ can unify in such a way as to increase the complexity of themselves.
The second, which is much more important, is that these human entities must first understand, then trust and finally consciously cooperate with this complex energy to effect such complexity. This is where the three ‘Theological Virtues’ come in.
Enter the ‘Theological Virtues’
As we have seen, the ‘Theological Virtues’ have an importance that goes far beyond the conventional religious goal of qualification for the next life. In our secular reinterpretation, they represent the stances, attitudes that are necessary for our continued evolution both as persons and as a species.
Teihard stresses the need for Faith in this process of understanding and cooperating in the excentration/centration: belief that the self will not be lost in this journey from past to future; it will be enhanced. The true, underlying, core nature of the human person that results from the long rise of consciousness mapped by our knowledge of the past continues to follow the thread of cosmic evolution which leads to the Hope of greater possession of ourselves in the future. This thread of complexity which has manifested itself in the current which runs through life, awareness and consciousness now continues as Love which powers the engine of our becoming. While the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ as mapped by the concepts of sacraments, values and morals can be seen as the early markers of the pathway of the axis of evolution as it rises in our lives, the ‘Theological Virtues’ offer an increased understanding of how these articulations can be ‘lived out’ in our personal ‘complexification’.
The Next Post
This week we continued to follow 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 Love 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 fifthl look at the Theological Virtues by seeing how Love can be seen as the hinge on which the belief afforded by Faith becomes an act whose outcome is anticipated by Hope.