#96 Living into a new Consciousness - Teilhard de Chardin
The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin
by John F. Haught
From the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
#11 ~ RELIGION
Religion, whatever else it may be,
is an especially interesting development in the drama of cosmic awakening.
As far as individual persons are concerned, of course, religiousness entails a unique kind of consciousness ~ a distinct state of human “subjectivity.” Religion, expressed outwardly in rituals and moral actions, is something that goes on “inside” human beings and shapes their feelings and thoughts in fascinating ways.
We now explore with Teilhard
the fascinating phenomenon of religion and its connection to cosmic history.
Together with Teilhard, I propose that we tell not only the outside but also the inside story of the universe. In doing so, we may arrive at a whole new way of understanding religion.
Instead of treating religion as a purely personal or social phenomenon, or as an illusory means for human persons to escape from the universe, as many modern critics of religion have done, I suggest that religious subjectivity is central to the awakening of the universe.
What is Included in the Inside Story?
The “inside” story of the universe cannot be detected by science, but only by centers of experience known as subjects.
It includes all the events that have taken place in the world of sentient human and nonhuman subjects alike.
The inside story of the universe is made up of all the sensations, moods, cognitions, desires, enjoyments, and sufferings that have accumulated beneath the outer crust of cosmic history since the origin of life 3.8 billion years ago.
The inside story also includes human intellectual, moral, and aesthetic aware-ness, and it covers our species’ religious longing for deliverance from suffering, death, and meaninglessness.
Interpreting religion as a newly emergent development in cosmic history adds an entirely new twist to our understanding of it. From the point of view of cosmology, religion is a new chapter in an awakening universe. In hosting the phenomenon of religious subjectivity, the cosmos has now arrived at a point where it reaches out consciously, gratefully, and implor-ingly toward its indestructible goal.
From a cosmological perspective religion is a concentration of the anticipatory drift (future focused and hope-filled) of the whole emerging universe.
The feeling of being “lost in the cosmos” that sometimes accompanies religious subjectivity is not a signal that the physical cosmos is alien to us. Rather, our subjective religious restlessness is a signal that the whole cosmos is still far from having reached its destiny.
From a cosmic perspective, religion, despite its ambiguity and fallibility, is a reminder that the anticipatory “inside-ness” of an entire universe has yet to reach its goal. Religion, in this vision, is a refusal on the part of an awakening cosmos to reconcile itself to absolute death.
Religion means many things and no doubt its participants are often blind to its cosmic function. Teilhard’s cosmic vision leads us to look for the cosmic significance of religion. Religion, among other effects, leads to the intuition that an indestructible rightness lies beneath, above, beyond, and within “the passing flux of immediate things,” as Alfred North Whitehead puts it.
Religions, as Whitehead also emphasizes, have come into history mixed with the crudest kinds of barbarism, and have been mixed up with unimaginable violence. Here, we are focusing on the cosmic significance of the wide religious consensus that perishing is not final and that an indestructible rightness permeates, grounds, encompasses, and transcends all transient things.
In religious subjectivity, starting as far back in human history as we can see, countless images, narratives, rituals, and (more recently) theologies have pointed, either directly or indirectly, to an essential state of indestructible being wherein life conquers death, good vanquishes sin, and the cosmos finds its everlasting fulfillment.
If we understand religion cosmologically, this expectation is not childish escapism. Rather, religious longing is the way in which an unfinished universe is now embarking unsteadily on a new stage of its own long journey into mystery. In terms of the whole cosmic drama, subjectivity is what keeps the cosmos open to the future.
God As Goal
What does it add to a Christian sense of God, then, that the universe is still coming into being and that religion, cosmologically considered, is how the universe allows itself to be taken into the indestructibility of a divine mystery?
Teilhard could not suppress his longing for a theological renewal that would link our prayers, hopes, and moral actions to a universe that is now coming into being.
At the same time, he wanted our search for a “new God” to remain completely loyal to the church’s main teachings from of old.
Fidelity to tradition, however, did not mean for him that we must still cling to the fixist cosmology of traditional theology as though it were part of the deposit of faith.
In summary, and in full agreement with Teilhard, we need a whole new worldview ~ a “metaphysics of the future” ~ in which to fashion a truly big history. We need a kind of survey of events that would simultaneously take into account the inside story along with the outside.
What makes it possible in the age of science to link religion tightly to the cosmic story is that the universe itself can now be understood as having a dramatic a story with a meaning.
As long as the universe was thought of as a stage for the human drama, and not as inherently dramatic itself, religion could be interpreted as a desperate maneuver of souls trying to get out of a prison.
The newly discovered fact of a universe still coming into being, however, provides a refreshing framework for understanding the age of religion as an essential new episode in the drama of a cosmos awakening to the Absolute Future that we call God.
In his search for a “new God,” Teilhard did not mean an Absolute that would be discontinuous with Christian tradition.
There must be a way, however, of connecting evolution and cosmogenesis to our worship of the God of Abraham, Moses, the Prophets, and Jesus.
To his joy,
Teilhard discovered such a connection
by merging the new cosmic story
with the Johannine and Pauline belief
that the whole of creation
is coming to a head,
and that it is being brought
to ultimate unity
in the resurrected person of Christ!