#94 Living into a New Consciousness
The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin
by John F. Haught
From the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
#8 ~ LIFE
A drama, a story, is able to carry a meaning. It is the drama of the meaning of life that merits the interest of theology. A drama, as Teilhard understood, requires that one wait until it has played itself out ~ we know the ending ~ before deciding whether it makes any sense or what sense to make of it. And it is just this posture of waiting in patient expectation that characterizes the biblical disposition that we call “faith.”
As a drama works its way toward a climax or conclusion, we need to allow that its passage/route will be circuitous, indeterminate, and even inelegant. No single episode in a staged drama can deliver the full coherence/meaning that spectators are looking for prior to the final act. Likewise, to take in the panoramic drama of life, we need to be willing to wait, reflective of biblical faith and hope.
Teilhard’s Dramatic Patience
Teilhard was one of the first scientists in the 20th century to notice and echo the fact that the universe unfolds as a story. For Teilhard, the story of life is seamlessly woven into the long cosmic drama that has shown itself to us only after Einstein and the astronomy of Edwin Hubble. Theology after Einstein is interested in why the whole universe has a narrative disposition. Why does the physical universe exhibit itself to us in the form of a story?
To be a story, a series of events has to be a combination of unpredictability, consistency (lawful physical habits that hold all things together), and a span of time.
FIRST, without a degree of unpredictability, any series of events would be completely deterministic, allowing no room for the uncertainty and surprise essential to every good story.
SECOND, without a backbone of lawful physical habits, there would be no steady loom on which to weave the many twists and turns in the story of life. Without the regularities of nature that we refer to as “laws,” there would be no “grammatical” grid to hold the story of life together.
THIRD, to sponsor the story of life, the cosmos must provide a span of time sufficiently drawn out for significant things to take place.
My point is that the properties of a story are already waiting on the cosmic “stove” long before LIFE begins to stew. A preexisting narrative matrix ~ inherent in the cosmos from the very start ~ renders life, along with the whole universe, horizontally dramatic rather than vertically hierarchical.
The theological significance of focusing on the drama rather than the structure/design of life is that a drama can be the carrier of a meaning, one that still lies hidden from complete human understanding. Until the drama is complete, we cannot properly claim to understand what it is all about or what it means. We can only hope.
Obstacles to Hope
What dramatic meaning could possibly be fermenting in the story of life? Since the drama is still unfolding, we must wait until it has played itself out to answer the question. Since we live in a far-from-finished universe, according to Teilhard, the only “place” we can look for its meaning is in the future. It is only in the arena of the not-yet that coher-ence may begin to appear on the horizon. If there is meaning to life’s drama, it can be captured, at present, only obscurely ~ and only with the virtue of hope.
Teilhard’s Metaphysics of the Future
What holds everything together is not the past or the present but something not-yet, something that has future as its very essence. A deep affinity exists between Teilhard’s understanding of the cosmos and the biblical themes of promise and hope. To discover the full meaning of creation, he wanted us to look forward to a future in which the whole cosmic story will be taken, through the mediation of the cosmic Christ, into the everlasting compassion and care of God. To encounter the universe’s dramatic meaning and intelligibility, it is not enough to peer intently into the world’s past. Rather, we approach meaning by waiting in faith and working patiently in hope for the whole universe—and we along with it—to be taken into the expanding beauty and compassion of God.
Teilhard’s Anticipatory Way of Understanding Life after Darwin
Teilhard always found it more interesting to talk about outcomes rather than origins. Our minds and souls are restless until they look to the horizon up ahead and try to fathom how things might be coming together in new and unpredictable ways. But if we seriously adopted Teilhard’s futurist perspective on the life-world, how would we make sense of evolution’s various outcomes? How would we understand nine standout features of life: descent, diversity, design, death, suffering, sex, intelligence, morality, and religion?
Since the drama of life is not yet complete, the nine items on our list of living traits can-not be fully explained presently in history. If the universe is a work in progress, nothing in it can yet be fully intelligible. The follow-ing is a highly abbreviated example of what our nine features look like from a Teilhardian perspective of a future opened up by hope. It defends a biblical understanding of God as creating the world from out of the future.
Features of Life
1. Descent: At one level of explanation the resemblance of one species to another has a genetic explanation. Scientifically, descent is the result of gradual modifications of shared ancestral genomes. Without denying this, an anticipatory interpretation of descent notices that each organism, including each human person is born into a dramatic and creative cosmic history, made irreversible by the laws of thermodynamics. Acknowledging our kinship with other species in the wide stream of living experiments, we are impressed not only by life’s grandeur but even more by a sense that the whole river of life is still flowing toward something signifi-cant downstream ~ something still hidden in the not-yet. Descent is a sign that signifi-cant things happened in the past but also a promise of “more or fuller being” up-ahead.
2. Diversity: It is an expression of the universe’s dramatic groping toward differentiation along with its overall dramatic advance toward more intense unity in the future. Beauty is a good name for the synthesis of diversity and unity. What gives meaning and purpose to life and to the whole drama of cosmic awakening is the universe’s aim toward the intensification of beauty. Such a universe is dramatic also because it includes the possibility of tragedy. The fact of tragedy, however, calls for redemption, and this is why Teilhard understands God not only as the Creator but also the Redeemer of the universe.
3. Design: From an anticipatory perspective, the important theological question is not whether complex adaptive design points to deity but whether the drama of life carries a lasting meaning. Instances of “design” are essential steps in the cosmic emergence of increasing complexity and consciousness, but we do not grasp their meaning if we view them apart from the larger drama of the universe.
In other words, if life’s design were fixed, organisms would be so rigidly frozen that life and the universe could not flow in the direction of fuller and deeper dramatic coherence. Also, the cosmic drama requires of humans the posture of waiting in hope, not passively but actively. It is only in hope that we can presently begin to sense the ultimately dramatic design of the universe.
4. Death: Scientifically, death makes good sense as a prerequisite for genetic diversity in life’s evolution. From the perspective of an anticipatory metaphysics, however, death of individual organisms must be situated within the drama of a universe still coming into being. Perishing and death find a foothold in the universe that is still unfinished, that is, not yet “perfected.” Yet, unless there is something that everlastingly garners and preserves each episode and each chapter in the cosmic drama, something that delivers it from absolute death, we should all “go on strike,” as Teilhard says. The reason for our hope is that, in Christ, the incarnate Word, every event in the story of life and the universe is saved and transformed in the Heart of God. In a fully finished and completely intelligible universe, death has no legitimate place: “Death will be no more.”(Rev 21 :4).
5. Suffering: It is part of the drama of life’s struggle toward more-being. Like death, suffering has no intelligible place in a fully finished creation. But in a still-emerging universe, suffering arises along with the increase of sentience, subjectivity and crea-tivity. Suffering is an inevitable aspect of a universe awakening to more-being.
6. Sex: An anticipatory vision is aware of the omnipresent temptation to depersonalize sex, but an anticipatory understanding of nature redeems sexuality from the dualism of classical, otherworldly theology, as well as from the impersonality that accompanies a materialistic worldview.
Mating, for example, is not simply a biological act, nor is it simply one of the Catholic sacraments. It is also a promise of the ultimate union of the universe with God.
7: Intelligence. What does intelligence mean from the point of view of a metaphysics of the Future? The emergence of intelligence is a crucial chapter in the drama of a universe opening itself to a future of more-being. As Teilhard states: “To be is good. To be more is even better. To be conscious is good. To be more conscious is even better.” Further-more, by way of human intelligence, with its quest for understanding and truth, the universe anticipates a final coherence or meaning. As long as this coherence eludes us, our minds remain restless. Our individual cognitive striving is also, at a deeper level than we usually notice, a function of the whole cosmos groping toward more-being.
8. Morality: To the evolutionary naturalist, human morality is simply an extension into the human species of the tendency of living beings to cooperate. An anticipatory per-spective, however, locates the source of our moral obligation in the stream of cosmic becoming into which each of us is born. The moral life, more fundamentally, is one that contributes even in the simplest and most monotonous ways, to the great work of creation and becoming more in a still unfinished universe.
9. Religion: An anticipatory metaphysics understands religion to be one of the ways in which the cosmos, having now become conscious of itself, opens itself through acts of faith and worship to climactic union with God through Christ-Omega in whom all things hold together. (Col 1:17).