The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin (John F. Haught)
#90 Living into a New Consciousness
From the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Introduction and #1 ~ The Cosmos
INTRODUCTION
Both as a scientist and as a religious thinker, Teilhard sought to make sense of evolution. Evolution, as he understood it broadly, is a process in which the natural world is becoming more, giving rise to fuller being over the course of time. But at each stage of its journey, the Cosmos becomes more only by organizing itself around successively new and higher centers. Teilhard called this recurrent cosmic trend “centration.”
At present, the latest dominant units in terrestrial evolution are human persons, and they too can be centrated — brought together socially into higher organic syntheses — only if there exists a powerfully attractive unifying center that is also personal. Human persons cannot be fully alive or moved to “become more” except by surrender in faith to the reality of a magnetic, transcendent, promising personal Center to which the whole universe may still be in the early stages of awakening.
In the following chapters, I ask what this cosmic awakening means by looking with Teilhard at a variety of topics: the Cosmos, the Future, Hope, Humanity, Morality, Spirituality, God, Life, Suffering, Religion, Thought, and Transhumanism. Let us begin by looking with Teilhard at how the Cosmos has become the greatest story ever told.
#1 ~THE COSMOS
Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. Hope is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the glow that suffuses everything.
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It was Teilhard’s writings that first convinced me that the substance of Christian faith lies in its fundamental concern about the future but not just the future of humans or the earth. More fundamentally, it is the future of the Cosmos. Our personal hopes find their true fulfillment and satisfaction only in company with the fulfillment of all things, that is, “the whole creation.”
Teilhard situated his evolutionary worldview inside the ancient Pauline intuition that the whole of creation finds its fulfillment in the universal Christ, “in whom all things consist” (Col 1:1). Teilhard’s spiritual life was itself a search for what he called consistence, that is, something that holds all things together.
Ultimately, “all things” are gathered up and held together by Jesus the Christ, whose fullest being lies not in the past or present but in the future. Teilhard, more than any other recent Christian thinker, has brought back the ancient biblical and patristic sense that the whole universe is to be redeemed and renewed.
The idea that God comes from the future has long been associated with Abrahamic faith, but it took a creative young Christian theologian (Jürgen Moltmann) to remind us that Futurity is God’s very essence. We may now think of God, in the words of the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, as the world’s “Absolute Future.”
God is present in the here and now as a gracious horizon of “futurity” that keeps inviting the universe to keep moving deeper into the territory of the “not - yet.” God acts characteristically not by moving the world from out of the past or from above, but by opening to new modes of being up ahead. God acts in the present not by overwhelming the world, but by “going before” it as an endless source of opportunities for its becoming more.
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God is the Future that empowers the world to exist as something distinct from God. God, is also deeply incarnate in each present moment, generously opening it up to what is new and unpredictable.
Divine creativity provides an immensity of space and time in which the whole universe may constantly be made new. Although, in giving rise to human consciousness, the universe has already attained a most consequential outcome, the growth of the universe is not yet complete. Its emerging unity can be sustained only if it allows itself to be further created, that is, brought into deeper communion with God, the Center and goal of all things.
The Vital Energy of this Movement toward a New Future
Theologically, Infinite Love is the vital energy of this movement toward a new future for the universe. Love is the means by which the Power of the Future holds all things together even now, opening up for each person, for each living community, and for the whole Cosmos, the prospect of deeper consistence and richer coherence up ahead. The Cosmos, Teilhard came to realize, gives rise to living and conscious syntheses only by being drawn toward the future amid “endless struggles and setbacks.”
The attractive power that calls the universe into being and that sustains, unifies, and illuminates its passage in deep time is ultimately the Divine Love incarnate in Christ.
God’s love works by opening creation to a new future, and so our human vocation is also that of opening up a new future for everything and everyone we profess to love. Human love flourishes most fully and effec-tively where there is a sustained, indeed intergenerational, expectation that something really big is awaiting all things up ahead.
Hope and Love and the Need for a Future
Even in Christian life and thought, cosmic hope seems weak and this is unfortunate because wherever hope is absent, love scarcely has a chance to survive, let alone flourish.
~ Can love find sufficient nourishment unless what we love has a future?
~ Can we fully love the universe unless we place it in
“the dawn of an expected new day?”
~ Can we humans fully love one another unless, in some way, we are assured that all things have a future?
Teilhard points out that the universe has not yet reached the goal of full consistence and coherence. It is still “on the way.” The idea that nature can give birth to new kinds of being during the passage of time, however, should never have been disturbing to Christians.
An impression that creation can change dramatically, and that life in some way “evolves,” is an ancient one. God is not only the one who initially creates and subsequently sustains the world’s existence but also the one “who makes all things new.”
According to Teilhard, what evolution teaches us is that God makes things make themselves. Consequently, scientifically enlightened Christians do not have to fear that there is any conflict whatsoever between the idea of evolutionary descent and the theological doctrine of continuous and new creation.
Think of the Creator as bringing into being a world that can, in turn, give rise spontaneously to new life and lush diversity, and eventually to the human mind. The divine maker of such a self-creative world is arguably much more impressive—hence worthier of human reverence and gratitude—than is a “designer,” who molds and micromanages everything directly.
The Three Phases of Evolution
Theology long ago took it for granted that God keeps on through natural causes. Even in Genesis, God says, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind. And it was so.” God is the underlying creative principle, but creation comes about by relying on the lawfulness, consistence, and spontaneity of nature. What evolutionary science implies, however, is that as the Cosmos unfolds from one level of physical complexity to the next it passes through THREE DISTINCT PHASES:
DIVERGENCE, CONVERGENCE, EMERGENCE.
For example, as individual cells (single-celled forms of life) began to inhabit our planet, they spent a couple billion years simply spreading out over the face of the globe. This is the phase of divergence.
But at a certain point a critical threshold is passed, and then the cells began to coagulate, first in loose associations, but later in tighter and more integrated forms of communion. This is the phase of conver-gence. Eventually, as the convergence of cells grows tighter, more complex organisms enter the cosmic scene. This is the stage of emergence.
The same sequence—divergence, followed by convergence, followed by emergence—has repeated itself at every stage of cosmogenesis.
The latest dominant development in life’s evolution, was when humans began to take over the earth. Starting around 200,000 years ago, modern humans began spreading out, diverging into familial and tribal patterns of existence. About 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, in places like the Nile River basin and Mesopotamia, the smaller individual tribes began to converge into tighter and increasingly complex social arrangements.
The increasing compression of people led to the emergence of the ancient city-states and more recently nations. If we look at what has been happening historically, politically, economically, and technologically, the earth is now undergoing an increasingly rapid convergence. Human existence on our planet is now arriving at the threshold of a new phase of terrestrial and cosmic history.
The Emergence of the Noosphere
Presently, a lively envelope of “thought” is beginning to take shape on a global scale. The “human phenomenon” is now weaving itself collectively into a new “geological” stratum encircling our planet, taking advantage of the cultural complexity being spun by politics, economics, education, scientific developments, and especially communications technology. Teilhard is sometimes called the “prophet of the Internet” because he predicted that, through technological complexification, the earth would be increasingly encircled by “thought.” He called this new planetary level of being the “noosphere” ~ from the Greek word nous, “mind.”
The earth, having only recently given birth to the noosphere, could be moving in the direction of being unified and made new by the birth of a planetary consciousness. The sweeping movements of matter, life, and thought here on earth are also stages in an awakening universe. Teilhard interpreted this awakening, in his Christian cosmic vision, to mean that the whole of nature is the extended Body of Christ, and that cosmo-genesis is therefore Christogenesis. The universe’s earliest coming into being is already oriented toward the birth of Christ. This is why, for Teilhard, evolution is holy.