#20 Awakening Consciousness
The Not-Yet God:
Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole by Ilia Delio, OSF
Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Chapter 6~Trinitization and 1ST Part of Chapter 7~The Individuation of God
THE CLASSICAL TRINITY
Theologians of the early Church recognized a God of deep relationality because they realized there cannot be an incarnation without a relational or self-communicative God: without the Trinity, there is no Christ.
The earliest Christians had to cope with the implications of Jesus as the Messiah and the power of God among them. They reasoned that God could not communicate God’s life in a finite way if God was not communicative in Godself. Hence, God must be relational. Neither the word “Trinity” nor the explicit doctrine of the Trinity appears in scripture.
The early Church reflected on the experience of Jesus and developed an understanding of God that broke new theological ground. God was not only a deeply personal God (indicated by the proper name of “God”), but God was a deeply relational God, a Trinity of persons.
This was a radical departure from the earlier Abrahamic theological understanding of God and unlike the later understanding of the prophet Mohammed. The doctrine of the Trinity emerged from the need to make sense of God acting in Christ.
COSMIC PERSONALIZATION
Teilhard claimed that love undergirds a fundamental law of attraction in the universe and that this force of attraction is the basis of personal being. In this respect, trinitizing the universe is the flow of love, which gives rise to personhood.
= 2 =
Personhood, in turn, forms community, and community grows as divine love is continuously hybridized and transcended in love. In this way, everything that exists is integral to the ever-growing unity of God as love; evolution is the actualized personali-zation of divine love.
The Cappadocian Fathers were the first to define God in terms of personhood. Each divine person is the divine nature; God’s common nature is distinguished by persons. Since God is expressed in a personal way, God must be personal. Catherine LaCugna writes:
“A person is not an individual but an open and ecstatic reality,
referred to others for his or her existence. The actualization of personhood
takes place in transcendence.”
God’s ultimate reality is not found in substance but only in personhood, that is, what God is toward another. Personhood is defined by relationships. God exists as the mystery of persons in communion.
“Only in communion can God be what God is, and only as communion can God be at all.
Since love produces communion among persons, love causes God to be who God is.”
Something vital is taking place in our midst: we are moving toward something more. Consciousness is increasing as we converge into new pluralities. If we look around the planet we realize we are shifting from separate continents and nation-states to interconnected fields of shared concerns.
If we can realize the root meaning of our religious lives and reconcile ourselves in love, then we can evolve toward the fullness of the Body of Christ or pleroma.
= 3 =
Openness to pleroma or fullness is pleromization, and such fullness
is not possible without interpersonal relationships.
Hence, pleromization is trinitization and trinitization is the evolution of cosmic personalization, signified by the Christ.
The unification of divine and human natures emerges in a third nature—the Christic—which opens up to a new type of person in creation. If creativity is the essence of divinity and the highest expression of divine creativity is incarnate love, then the Trinity’s creative love is openness to creative personhood-in-love.
God’s love is an eternal movement from potentiality to act; from nonbeing to being, and from interiority to expression. For God is love, and it is love that makes personhood possible. God is always becoming God, as love deepens personhood. Christ symbolizes the unitive and unconditional love of a relational God, rendering all reality personal and creative in love, oriented toward communion.
CHAPTER 7
THE INDIVIDUATION OF GOD
Individuation means becoming a single, integrated person, and, insofar as “individuality” embraces our incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could, therefore, translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization.”
Individuation, Jung contends, is a force of nature within the human that cannot be denied. Individuation is the process of becoming a “person,” a fully integrated and relational being. It is not an option, in Jung’s view. It is our only hope for the welfare of the planet: “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”
= 4 =
CHRIST, AN INCOMPLETE SYMBOL
Jung reflected on Christ not as a divine savior but as the exemplary archetype of the human person. He claimed the symbol of Christ is incomplete as a symbol of absolute wholeness because the doctrinal Christ, the Christ of the Creed, has no dark side; its dark side has been split off, leaving only an all-good Christ.
When Jung says that Christ is the archetype of wholeness, he is not making a statement about God. Rather, he sees Jesus as living from the infinite potential of love within him, able to ascend into this love by going into the desert and facing his own conflict and darkness.
The stage of consciousness at which God is fully transparent in the person is that of Christ consciousness. This is the level, according to Todd, where the divinization of the world is realized. As we become whole with the aliveness of God, our lives become holy and divinely radiant. The world too becomes holy and sacred. To reframe the incarnation as a process of divinization and individuation is to awaken to the holiness of everything, the divine milieu. Todd states:
“The human evolves from an incomplete whole to a new level of completion
and thus a new vision, a new knowing and new acting in the world.”
We begin to see things the way they are, not as we are. Teilhard put it this way:
“One can say that the whole of life lies in seeing—if not ultimately, at least essentially….Unity grows…
only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision.”
A widened vision brings the whole into a new field of conscious reality. By bringing consciousness into unconscious darkness through a confrontation of the self.
= 5 =
This is by facing our fears, failure, and anxieties, the unresolved obscurity within, our inner chaos and confusion is confronted and reconciled, releasing us from separation and bringing us into light. As we come to a higher consciousness of God and thus wholeness in love, God becomes God in us. This “becoming God in us” is incarnation. Christ is not the great exception to humanity; Christ is every person who makes the journey in love.
We are now in the midst of the second axial period, an age of ecological consciousness and intersubjectivity. The individuation of God connotes deep relationality. The more one is reconciled inwardly on the level of Christ consciousness, the more one lives by the life of the whole. To “put on the mind of Christ” is to live from a new awareness of interbeing, what is termed today “posthuman” or the interweaving relation-ships of shared life.
THE INDIVIDUATION OF GOD AS A CO-CREATIVE PROCESS
Jung, like Teilhard de Chardin, was a process thinker. He maintained that God and humanity are in an entangled state and the individuation of each is inextricably bound with the other. The evolution of God and the evolution of humanity cannot be separated. God and human form a whole, and the whole is the Christic, the person who is more God than self and more self than God.
Every human person has the potential to manifest Christ, because every person is divine and entangled with the energies of divine love. Teilhard’s thought is complemented by Jung’s insights. Since Christ symbolizes the capacity of the human for divine wholeness, every person can realize their capacity for infinite love. Christ symbolizes the archetypal “self,” the psychic totality of the individual.
= 6
As the one who reconciles the shadow of evil with the clarity of truth, Christ is the symbol of wholeness and unity. Without the integration of evil, there is no totality. Since the goal of psychological and biological development is self-realization, the process of individuation is incarnation and under-girds the openness of God to fullness (pleroma).
The Spirit of God grows us from the inside out,
physically, emotionally, and mentally. Reconciling the inner Spirit of God with
the opposites and tensions of the self is a growth in the energies of love,
which leads to a more explicit expression of our divine entanglement.
Such inner growth brought to the level of conscious action
is expressed in personal transformation which energizes the world.
This is what Teilhard anticipates by using the term, “zest for life,” an energy of life that enkindles
and furthers evolution!