#128. Body & Soul, Flesh & Spirit, Sarx and Pneuma

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ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/

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Blog entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them with all who are interested.

If you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macspeno.com

Post #128 is a review I wrote for a friend of an extremely important book by the liturgist Cipriano Vagaggini; he is described very positively by the monks in the recorded conversations reviewed in post #127.

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Dear D:

This is another book review. The author is referred to in the earlier review I sent you [of Belonging to the Universe] where I mention that both of the monks involved in the new paradigms conversations "have very good things to say about Cipriano Vagaggini's work in promoting the paradigm shift."

They call Vagaggini "a key person in our theology, who influenced hundreds, even thousands, of students" (apparently at the international Benedictine college in Rome).

The context in which his name came up was David Steindl-Rast's comments about the contemporary rebirth of focus on inner experience, where he stresses that "much that is new is in fact a recovery of the older gnosis-wisdom perspective: a whole-person centered focus on transformative experience."

This book is even older than Belonging and is, I think, even more important. Its affirmation of the central significance of matter to a religious perspective is essential to Sophiology, the New Cosmology and the whole "immense transition." -Sam

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The Flesh, Instrument of Salvation: A Theology of the Human Body, by Cipriano Vagaginni, OSB (Alba House, 1969).

Somewhere in The Good Wine Bruno Barnhart has very positive things to say about this book (as do Br. David and Fr. Thomas in Belonging to the Universe), so I thought it was worth getting a look at, even though it's a half-century old.

I remember the author's name from way back, in connection with the "liturgical movement" of the 1950s and 60s, but I don't think I ever read anything of his.

This book was published after Vatican II but clearly was written earlier. It is just about unreadable; the language is that of a stilted English translation of a Latin document from the Council of Trent! The book even contains a nihil obstat.

But it's got some very good ideas in it. It is, in fact, a great treasure!

Its main point is something which the Christian world still needs to grasp, and which is essential to the perspectives of both the New Cosmology and Sophiology: that matter (the flesh, the human body, the physical universe) counts; that a material body is no less significant than a spiritual soul.

The author's key idea is that from a Christian perspective, the dichotomy between body and soul, which we inherited from Hellenistic matter-spirit dualism, simply has no validity.

He repeats over and over, in numerous contexts and in many different ways, the Latin dictum (which was not previously familiar to me and was the Italian title of the book: caro salutis est cardo).

Cardo is "hinge." So the dictum says that caro (flesh/matter) is the hinge, the cardinal or pivotal point, of our understanding of salvation.

Whatever "salvation" or "redemption" means, the body (matter, flesh) is central to it.

In The Good Wine Bruno talks about the apparent absence of a sense of reversal, paradox, irony in Christianity. That absence is strongly evident in Christianity's history: for almost its entire history, the flesh was considered the instrument of damnation.

Here it is seen as nothing less than the key, the cardo/hinge, the very means by which the cosmo-the-andric unity is achieved, so that the fullness of God may be in everything.

Vagaggini notes that the matter-spirit dichotomy of the past is only now, in our own day, coming to being resolved; and he says that the resolution is due is our understanding (from science) that the human person is at the core of the cosmos.

The copyright on the original Italian text isn't given; the English copyright is 1969. So he was certainly on the forefront of thinking back then.

And since the computer advances of the 1980s, allowing for the study of self-organizing systems, we can express his point even better: Because we can see that the self-organizing principle of the cosmos results in personal consciousness, we can also see clearly the non-validity of the body-soul distinction.

The author wants to take it even further, however. Although he doesn't use Eastern terms like "unitive" or "non-duality," his thought is rooted in the Christian idea of divinization.

His point is that flesh is no less divinized than spirit.

In different words: there is no dichotomy between theos and our real lives in the real world. As Karl Rahner says, "there is no dichotomy between grace and everyday life."

Vagaggini supports these views with texts from the Old and New Testaments and familiar early Church fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons and Cyril of Alexandria. He works his way up to Thomas Aquinas (of whom he is quite critical on several important points: "The learned doctor ought to know better," he says).

A good positive summary of Vagaggini's view might be: Our non-duality is "whole person." I.e., we experience our non-duality with God by being a whole, healthy, human being: a person in right relatedness with all things.

To paraphrase St. Cyril: A physically and psychologically healthy human being is the fundamental way the divine glory shows itself.

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So. If the matter-spirit dichotomy isn't valid, how can we understand the bible's and church fathers' clear distinction between flesh and spirit?

Vagaggini says the biblical and patristic distinction between sarx and pneuma is in fact the distinction between the developmental nature of matter/body/person (sarx) in contrast to its having arrived at the telos of the developmental process (pneuma).

This view is obviously coming from a dynamic rather than a static perspective; and with his emphasis on person and dynamis, Vagaggini is clearly in the post-patriarchal, post-rationalistic world of the New Cosmology and Sophiology.

Calling sarx "movement toward the fullness of non-duality," and pneuma "the attainment of the goal to which the process is moving," is new to me. It's very helpful.

That Vagaggini shows that it's both biblically and patristically based is a breakthrough.

He acknowledges that sarx is usually identified with death, decay, corruptibility, but he makes the point that those are, in fact, aspects of the developmental process (of change and transformation).

Thus pneuma is not the opposite of the temporal process (i.e., not just in-corruptibility) but precisely the telos of that process: transformation to glory, new person, new creation.

In this context, he gives a seemingly simplistic definition of the Christian life which I especially like: participation in the movement toward the goal (the pleroma of non-duality) in order to reach it. A fascinating way to put it!

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Although, as I've mentioned, the book was written in Italian about five decades ago and in a style that might have come from five centuries earlier, newly familiar words and ideas keep popping up: importance of matter, centrality of person, dynamic cosmos, participatory process. A new, contemporary translation of this book would be a gift to the world.

Of special interest is his comments on (what else?) Romans 8: "the cosmos groans with us in wanting our bodies to be saved." I never really understood that text so clearly before.

In this context (i.e., that caro salutis est cardo), it is a tremendously powerful statement of the centrality of person in cosmic evolution.

If we keep in mind that "body" here simply means the material aspect of a person, so that from the beginning matter (living matter, human life) is oriented toward its persistence beyond all that threatens it, then the fulfillment of this built-in tendency of the material cosmos to persist depends on the non-duality of anthropos with theos.

What an affirmation of all that is represented by both the New Cosmology and Sophiology!

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Vagaggini was primarily a liturgist, so he wants to emphasize the implications of this insight for liturgy and sacraments.

He says that "the full cosmic value of the laws of the incarnation and sacramentality are derived from the human body." (Sounds like Bulgakov again!)

Unfortunately, it will probably take another generation or two before we can deal well with the liturgical implications of caro salutis est cardo. But once again the ultimate identity of eucharist, church and transfigured cosmos comes through clearly.

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Vagaggini has another, related idea, to which we can give our immediate attention: "The body appears as the result of a labor of tension which pervades the whole of material creation into the very vitals of its being."

This brings together the anthropos-cosmos link in terms of the labor of childbirth, the public work of the liturgy, and those aspects of endurance and burden connected with Sophia that modern Gnosticism seems to be especially concerned with.

This book is indeed a great treasure. Not only does the theological perspective on the ultimate identity of eucharist, church and transfigured cosmos come through clearly. With its biblical and patristic analysis of sarx and pneuma, the matter-spirit dichotomy of the past is resolved, and affirmed in our scientific understanding that the human person is at the core of the cosmos.

This book is a buried treasure!

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#106. Ritual & the Evolution of Culture

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ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 
http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/
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This is the 6th in a series of blog entries beginning with #101. It's a collection of notes and essays from my files all dealing in one way or another with the emerging new religious consciousness. They are mostly things I've written over the last decade or so to clarify my own thoughts but which I now want to make available for anyone who might be interested. This post (#106) originally was a followup to a phone conversation with a friend about the sophiological ideas of Sergius Bulgakov described in post #104.

If you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macspeno.com 

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Dear R,

As I said on the phone, this topic is too big! But I can't pass up the opportunity to try to spell out some thoughts about it, and hope that something here may be along the lines of what you're interested in. I hardly know where to start, there are so many inter-related things to think about! 

Ritual may be the focal point, but in a sophiological context things like church, eschaton, the cosmic evolutionary process and our place in it-- all go together along with ritual. Since my last note to you was about Bulgakov's Bride of the Lamb, some of his ideas about church may be a good take-off place for talk about ritual.

In section 5-1 on "The Essence of the Church" (where he begins with what he calls "the primordial significance of the Church") he says that the church is nothing less than the foundation and basis of the created world. God’s eternal plan is "to gather together all things into one" and the church is the fulfillment of that plan.

It is, as I've said, a profound set of ideas. The created world has a purpose, that purpose the unity of all things, and the fulfillment of that purpose is the church. What a contrast, indeed, this is with the prevailing conventional views of scientific rationalism (that can't acknowledge that there is any meaning or purpose to our existence) and also with the views of religious dualism (that claim only that we are to escape from the world rather than be united with it utterly). And as I also mentioned, even many of the new cosmologists seem unable to acknowledge a goal to cosmic evolution. So right from the start, "the sophiological perspective stands in the greatest contrast to all the conventional views about the world as either evil or meaningless."

To all that I added the note that it is precisely sophiology's unitive perspective which makes it so relevant to our understanding of the church tradition and the new cosmology. What the church is all about is unity; its very essence is the unity of all things. "To gather together all things into one."

This means that "church" can be understood only within a cosmic context. In the old (static) cosmos, church became the means of escape from the cosmos. But the very essence of the new cosmology is its understanding of the cosmos as dynamic, and this is totally in accord with the original ekklesia's self-understanding. In Bruno Barnhart’s words, the essence of the New Testament vision is "the transformation of cosmic matter (in the human person) into its ultimate unitive state in God." And it's that unity of cosmos, anthropos and theos which in Bulgakov’s view is church.

One thing we can see immediately is how the central place of individuals-- as the agents of this cosmic unity-- stands out in this dynamic and transformational view. It's clear that sophiology and the new cosmology agree on this critically important point: that we exist and live in a dynamic person-centered cosmos. Far from being incompatible, the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the emerging scientific worldview see the one same thing. (And indeed, they have the same source: the Exodus experience and Hebrew ontology.)

It's easy to say that "church" is what sophiology and the new cosmology have in common, but conventional Christianity has little real sense of ekklesia, and of course ekklesia is not part of the contemporary scientific perspective (even though the new cosmology supports the ekklesia's self-understanding and they have a common source). In both conventional Christianity and new cosmology, what's missing, as you've heard me say before, is eschatology: that the world has a purpose and we are its agents. So the new cosmology is much closer to a sophiological anthropology than is conventional Christianity, in that it sees human persons as participating in the cosmic process; it also clearly supports sophiology's view of personal creativity and inspiration in that context. Both Bulgakov and Brian Swimme even use the same word, "mission," to describe our personal participation in the process, and Bulgakov calls it the church's "very life."

So all that is the very messy situation in which we have to pursue the question of ritual!

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When I mentioned Bulgakov's note about language not being precise enough for what needs to be said about "church" I added in parenthesis, "[That's] one of the reasons why realistic ritual remains a major need in the immense transition!"

I emphasize "realistic ritual" because an authentic understanding of ritual is as much in contrast with the conventional dualistic perspectives as are sophiology's ideas about the world's purpose and about the church as the fulfillment of that purpose. It is also, of course, equally in contrast with rationalist secular views, which see ritual at best as only meaningless and at worst as repetitive or compulsive-- pathological-- behavior.

The situation is even more complicated, however, in that, for religious dualism, "ritual" is considered to be only empty gestures except when those gestures are done by authorized persons (and for the purpose of providing temporary freedom from the possibility of eternal punishment once the individual is freed from the cosmos). 

I'm aware how odd that sounds, but you know it's not a caricature of how sacraments were (and, alas, still are) understood.

For many good-willed church people today, those who have titles such as "religious educator" or "liturgist" or "liturgical musician," and who thus find themselves responsible for educating people (primarily kids) about ritual ("sacramental preparation"), "ritual" takes on the meaning of educational activities or artistic performances. They are essentially thought of, at their best, very much like plays or lectures and concerts, or even spectator sports, where the few do something for the edification and/or entertainment of the many. I don't, of course, mean to say there's anything wrong with concerts or lectures or games; but I do mean that such spectator events are not ritual.

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In her talk, "Teilhard and the Fabric of the Universe," (which I sent you a while back), Sister Kathleen Duffy, from the physics department at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, describes Teilhard as a pioneer who had to "break through to the core" of both science and religion. Today, many have broken through to a post-rationalist view of science; and also many are at work on a post-rationalist view of religion. But the break-through to a specifically post-rationalist view of ritual hasn't happened yet.

The best we've come up with so far is the New Age movement from back in the 60's. It was a mind-blowing mixture of authentic ritual and utter nonsense, and although it had a broad impact on people interested in spirituality, almost none of it (good or bad) rubbed off on church leaders (clergy, DREs, liturgists, musicians). Thus church-goers (the people in the pews) are for the most part in an incredibly impoverished situation.

And of course ritual was held in utter disdain by academic people. That includes even cultural anthropologists, who do pay attention to ritual, in that they collect and record data about it. But nobody, as far as I'm aware, is into studying what it is and how it works in itself. Ritual in the academic world seems to be much like "religion" was until the early 20th century or shamanism was until the late 20th century: irrational activity, unworthy of serious attention.

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So. All of that (all those many words!) is background explanation for why I said, when we were talking on the phone, that any talk of evolutionary ritual may be premature. It's just "too big" an issue to deal with. I said the old things (of tribal, native, "first" peoples) are best: sweat lodge, vision quest, talking-staff council, sacred pipe; things that allow us to be in right relationship with the earth. That's essentially what rituals are, a saying "yes" to our human situation, an affirmation of our belonging to the universe; and the more authentic they are, they more they result in empowerment for growth and development. (They "give grace," exactly what's said of the sacraments, but it's much more clear when we see "grace" as Bulgakov does: a "new how, not new what"). So authentic ritual is about our personal and communal growth, our development as participants in the developmental cosmos. (Which is why it is especially powerful in liminal moments, such as dawn, sunset, winter solstice, spring, puberty, birth, sickness....)

The issue, as I see it, is that for ritual to be authentic the persons involved need to have an active, participatory role in the rites themselves; they can't be passive spectators or recipients. Remember "active participation" as the rallying cry of the liturgical movement back in the 50's? The liturgists of that time were on the right track. One of the (many) reasons the liturgical movement fizzled was the "active participation" that was permitted was almost totally verbal, whereas participants in authentic ritual have to do something, not just say words. It has to be something primarily physical. (This also explains why dualistic religious disdain for matter and body is also a disdain for ritual; it explains why even the seven "legitimate" church rituals are almost totally reduced to nothing but words.)

As far as I can see, we won't be able to evolve appropriate contemporary ritual until we have moved beyond projecting "sacred" in to another worldly category. (Again, it's consciousness of making the "immense transition"-- to a dynamic cosmos, a unitive theos and a participatory anthropos-- that makes all the difference.)

Once we are moving toward making that transition, we see that there is, in fact, a treasury of appropriate ritual available to us. Much of it from tribal (native) peoples, but also much of it that is long-neglected, indeed buried, within the Christian tradition, covered over with the dust of the centuries. Someday, those buried treasures will make sense as "just what we need" by future new cosmologists and post-patriarchal Christians.

One more point to all this. I don't mean to say that we have no appropriate rituals available to us right now. But we have to "do" them in a non-dualistic and non-rationalistic context: with non-dualistic and non-rationalistic attitudes. Whatever we do, it always has to be in affirmation of our real lives in the real world, a 'yes' to our material and biological existence. It either allows us to stand at the center of the world or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's either escape from the world, which is why secularism condemns it, or it's only artistic performance or audio-visual education. Neither of which is bad in itself, but they have to be distinguished from ritual.

Making that distinction is nearly impossible in our culture, due to the pervasiveness of rationalism and dualism. The contrast with authentic ritual-- affirming our belonging to the universe and thereby being empowered to active collaboration with the cosmic process-- is great.

In a sophiological context, authentic ritual makes good sense. It is precisely our affirmation, to use Vagaginni's neat terms, of the caro that is the cardo of salvation. (And of which the essence, as Irenaeus says, is healing and wholeness; or in Bulgakov's blunt statement, "that the body will be restored to the person and be changed.")

Also helpful are the terms of sarx and pneuma: ritual is affirmation of the developmental cosmic-body process (sarx) in light of its realization or fulfillment (pneuma). It's easy to see why rationalism would dismiss all this, and why church sacraments so easily slip in to a dualistic framework. But it's a delight to see that the new cosmology gives us a much better context for keeping ritual grounded and thus authentic.

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So one of the main things I want to say about "evolution and ritual" is that, in the immense transition, an understanding evolution, not an understanding ritual, takes priority. Conceptually, an evolutionary cosmology supports and helps us to understand ritual, but ritual can't help us to understand evolution. We have to have some real sense of the evolutionary worldview before we can ritually "own" our place in it. (This would be true even if we created an initiation rite for moving into the evolutionary worldview.) But we don't need to "ritually" embrace the new cosmology; what we need to embrace is the cosmos. We don't really need any new rites or ceremonies; we only need to do the old ones, even the Christian eucharist, in the ways they were done before religious dualism set in.

And Homo sapiens has been doing earth-rites-- cosmos-embracing rites of belonging and participation-- for many thousands of years. If we want to recover good ways of doing ritual we have to go to those indigenous peoples whose early cultures pre-date Western civilization and who have managed to hold on, to some extent, to something of those old ways. They are, as Matthew Fox said many years ago, a great gift to the world. So at least with regard to ritual, the immense transition includes a going back as well as a moving ahead. (All this is "very messy," indeed!)

In a nut shell, what's needed, re "evolutionary Christianity," is not ritual but kerygma. Only after there's been a proclamation-- a declaration, a consciousness-expansion-- is there something to which we can give our fiat. As I mentioned in one of the earlier notes I sent, the old Angelus provides a clear pattern for authentic ritual: first the announcement by the angel, then the fiat by Mary. And only after that comes grace, cosmic empowerment, "not a new what but a new how," an incarnation of the holy breath/wind/spiritus.

So people like Michael Dowd and his wife Connie are on the right track. If you looked at the list of churches participating in "Evolution Sunday" (on one of their links I sent recently), I'm sure you noticed how few RC groups were listed: out of more than 460 congregations, only two were RC for sure. (Maybe three. There were two "Antioch Catholic" parishes listed, one of which also calls itself Malabar rite, and which may or may not be in communion with Rome; the other, also called "Antiochan Catholic," is definitely not: it lists a female bishop!) Quakers and Unitarians, the least sacramentally oriented groups, are leaders in the proclamation of the evolutionary kerygma. (I find it interesting that it may be because they are the least sacramentally oriented groups. An interesting question to pursue sometime!)

In any case, the main point I'm trying to make with all this is that-- far from being a pathological escape mechanism (from the universe and from punishment in the hereafter, as sacraments are, in a dualistic context)-- ritual is essentially the acceptance and affirmation of our cosmic-material-physical-bodily reality and, thereby, of our active role in the world's on-going development. As I've said before (probably too many times!), "it all fits together."

In a sophiological context, all these things-- evolution, cosmos, matter, caro, non-duality, salvation, ekklesia, eschaton, ritual-- all are part of a post-patriarchal "package." If we move into any one of these areas, we eventually find ourselves dealing with all of them. One very nice example is Bulgakov's comment that the physical universe is "the cosmic face of the ekklesia." Here are a few more examples of that interconnectedness.

1) As I've mentioned before, the Sanskrit term rita, from which our words "rites" and "ritual" come, means the order of the universe, the way the world works: the wisdom of the cosmos which (or who, as the old Advent hymn has it), "orders all things mightily." As the very means by which we enter into and are empowered by the universe to participate in that wisdom-ordered cosmic process, ritual is what makes evolution happen at the human culture level. So just from the Sanskrit word alone we can see how Sophia-wisdom, cosmic evolution and our unitive participation in it are all connected.

2) Thomas Berry's Principle Twelve of New Cosmology is that “the main task of the immediate future is to assist in activating the inter-communion of all the living and non-living components of the earth." Ritual activates that inter-communion; it empowers us to enter into communion with "All our relations." (Native Americans use that phrase in connection with almost all their sacred ceremonies and even in public talks.) So ritual is at the heart of the New Cosmology.

3) The "inter-communion of all the living and non-living components of the earth" is the human task. In Panikkar's words, the focused energy or concentrated consciousness of ritual is “the act by which the ‘thing’ is converted into a bit of the human world.” That's the "public work" which is accomplished by every person and community participating in the cosmos process to bring about the new creation of diversity and communion, peace and justice. (In Bruno’s words, that work is "the transformation of cosmic matter [in the human person] into its ultimate unitive state in God.") This is the work of the ekklesia, done "on behalf of all and for all," and for which the Greek word is, of course, "liturgy." So once again we see evolution at the cultural level, cosmic unity, ritual and ekklesia to be utterly interconnected.

4) The almost forgotten Christian image of "the lamb slain at the foundation of the world"-- an image which goes back to the Paleolithic (hunting culture) understanding of the game animal willingly giving itself "so that the people can live"-- is an image of the most primeval of all rita: God's, not ours, the divine kenosis by which the world comes to be.

The New Cosmology doesn't have the lamb imagery, of course, and neither does most of the Christian world. But Sophiology has it, and sees our on-going participation in the world's evolution (what Bulgakov calls Bogochelovechestvo) as nothing less than our participation in that original creative kenotic rita. So yet again we see how ritual, evolution and participatory unitive reality all go together.

Here's a few comments about our basic 'mind and body' needs with regard to ritual. I see dealing with those needs as essentials in the recovery of an authentic religious anthropology:

1) Patriarchal culture's lack of understanding of imagery makes understanding life-giving ritual all but impossible. So whatever can be done to raise consciousness of the four-fold nature of the psyche-- and thus help validate images, intuition, feelings and emotions as legitimate modes of human awareness-- is important.

2) Our collaboration with the workings of the wisdom of the universe obviously depends on our contact with nature. Legitimating for people things like walks in the park, "wasting time with the ocean," enjoying good cooking, are important. Ultimately, the need here is to see our very caro as nature. The chart on page 40 of Mary Conrow Coelho's book is invaluable kerygma.

Well, as I've said, the topic is too big. I hope something here is along the lines of what you were interested in. If it's helpful, great. If not, let me know. I can give it another shot. - Sam

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#103. "Nature's Magic"

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ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This is the third in my series of blog entries beginning with #101. It's a collection of notes and essays from my files all dealing in one way or another with the emerging new religious consciousness. They are mostly things I've written over the last decade or so to clarify my own thoughts but which I now want to make available for anyone who might be interested.

This post #103 is about an especially significant book.


If you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macspeno.com

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Some thoughts I wrote out in July '04 for a friend; a review of Nature's Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind, by Peter Corning ISBN: 0521825474 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

As I’ve already said, this is the most interesting book about the evolutionary worldview I’ve seen since I first read Teilhard’s Phenomenon Of Man forty years ago. Corning calls synergy “magic,” and if “the working together of things to produce results otherwise not possible” isn’t magic, I don’t know what is. The cooperative relationship between things, or more correctly, the creative results produced by such cooperation, is what makes evolution happen: “The synergies produced at one level become the building blocks for the next level.”

It seems to me that the very appearance in our time of the idea of synergy is itself an example of synergy. Such a concept isn’t even possible in a static worldview. We are, indeed, in the midst of an “immense transition.”

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the awareness of synergy is that it is also, among many other things, the discovery of creativity. In the evolutionary process, the new forms that emerge were previously unpredictable, so that, as Corning says, “the whole process of cosmic evolution is profoundly creative.” In a static perspective, we were able to use the passive tense to say that the world “was created.” But then we came to see that creation “is still going on.” And with an understanding of synergy as a central aspect of the evolutionary process, we can now say something even more significant: the world itself is creative.

We’ve come a long way from saying creation “happened six thousand years ago.” But there’s still more to this synergy perspective. Not only is creation creative, we now see ourselves as the central agents of that creative process. Human persons have a major role in the cosmic process of things “working together to produce results otherwise not possible.”

If the transition from static to dynamic cosmos is a great challenge to many, the transition from what Bruno calls the “suppression of the image of person” to seeing that image located at the very heart of the evolving universe is far more challenging.

The British scholar (and now-retired Orthodox bishop Kallistos of Patmos), Timothy Ware, said in a talk at Princeton a few years that the great task of the 21st century is that we should finally come to an adequate understanding of ‘person.’ The synergy-perspective helps tremendously. It sees persons called both to their individual uniqueness and to communion with others. And called to bring about-- precisely via those cooperative relationships-- new things at new levels of complexity.

What a contrast from “the suppression of the image of the person” that prevailed through most of the history of Western culture.

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Corning asks at some point, “If synergy is everywhere, why are we not more aware of it?” His response is that “it seems to have to do with the way our minds work.” We can perceive parts or wholes fairly easily, he says, but not the relationships between the parts.

To put it in Jungian terms: the Sensation function allows us to perceive parts and the Intuitive function lets us perceive wholes, but our consciousness apparently does not operate in such a way that we can directly perceive relationships. Certainly the Feeling function focuses on relationships, but it’s an evaluative activity: we don’t so much “perceive” as judge relationships (in terms of whether or not they are agreeable to us). In dealing with the relationship of parts to wholes, it looks like conscious awareness “skips a step.”

That thought got me wondering whether something similar might also be true about the Thinking function. Do we skip a step there, too? I think we do. What the Thinking function evaluates seems to be the agreeability of words (spoken or visual) with data (facts). If that’s so, it explains why there can be many different versions of what’s considered to be the truth about something. It looks like we don’t directly “perceive” thoughts (and their verbal expression) any more than we directly perceive relationships.

Most of us readily accept that “we can not dispute taste.” But we are very far from accepting that, similarly, we can’t dispute what people hold to be true, either. If nothing else, this perspective lets us see why pluralism is an acceptable, and indeed necessary, contemporary attitude. De veritas, non disputandum.

In any case, so what if we can see parts and wholes but not relationships? From an evolutionary perspective, the Thinking and Feeling functions of consciousness are thought to be later developments than Sensation and Intuition (which functions it’s understood we share with pre-human animals). With the emergence of the synergy perspectives, we would seem to be not only witnessing first hand, but indeed experiencing within ourselves, a newly emerging aspect of consciousness. I.e., We have first hand experiential evidence of the evolution of consciousness.

My point is that whether my thoughts about the Thinking function are right or not, the emphasis of synergy on cooperative relationships seems to be, in itself, a further evolution of human awareness. And, in this sense, consciousness of synergy really is a very big step away from the rationalism of the patriarchal worldview, which so neglects (and indeed suppresses) of the Feeling function.

We not only can know by inner experience that the universe is evolving but also that, as personal centers of consciousness, we humans are at the creative heart of it. The book by Mary Coelho, Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood, is precisely about this dawning emergence of our understanding of the central place of ‘person’ in cosmic evolution. We are well on our way to fulfilling the task Bishop Kallistos spelled out so clearly.

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The immense transition also has a third important aspect. It’s not only movement from a static to a dynamic cosmos and from the suppression of the image of person to recognition of our central participatory role in the cosmic process. The immense transition also includes movement from a dualistic understanding of God to a non-dual or unitive sense of the divine mystery.

When Corning says synergy is “a fundamental property of the universe and of human societies” [italics added], it’s clear that he intends no dualism between nature and culture: the synergy perspective moves us well beyond the patriarchal alienation of anthropos from cosmos. And it is equally clear, when Corning makes the point that synergy is the creative source of the world’s evolution, that it sees no dualism between the creative mystery we call theos and the manifest world of anthropos at the heart of cosmos.

Synergy offers us a worldview that is just the opposite of patriarchal dualism. Corning describes synergy as “the wellspring of creativity which makes evolution happen.” In older (if, alas, still unfamiliar) language, that same thought would sound something like, “Synergy is the manifestation of eternal wisdom.” Synergy is nothing less than the inner wisdom of God, the divine Sophia, manifesting in the workings of the universe. The early 20th century Russian Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov, even uses the same word, synergy, when he talks about the results of what he calls Bogochelovechestvo, the cooperative inter-action of the world and God.

A fascinating aspect of Corning’s book is its emphasis on economics (“in a broad sense,” as he says) with regard to how the world works, and Bulgakov began his career as an economist.

Corning’s economic perspective is that the “payoff” of synergy at the biological and anthropological level is “simply” those results which contribute to life’s on-going survival and reproduction. This is a radical change from the patriarchal perspective. It puts fairness and cooperation, rather than competition and violence, at the center of human life and cultural evolution. It’s no small thing to recognize that what causes evolution to happen on the biological level is “simply” life itself working at keeping itself going. It’s even more significant to see that this understanding of synergy-- as yielding an economic payoff-- is valid at the cultural level as well.

Life makes use of the helpful new things that result when at one level things join together to become parts of a more complex new thing at the next level. And what promotes the on-going survival of human life is nothing other than cooperation. What a positive outlook! And, in our troubled times, what an extremely hopeful one! As I mentioned in the review, the synergy perspective provides us with a straightforward ethics and morality, a way to be human based on the clearly observable fact that what succeeds is cooperation: on how the universe works.

So, here we have a “rationally-based norm for human life in an evolutionary world: cooperation rather than competition, creativity rather than conventionality, awe and wonder rather than dullness and boredom.” But also-- and especially-- a non-dualistic and participatory (person-centered) understanding of the workings of the world. This is realistic and down-to-earth view couldn’t be more different from those of competition and alienation on which patriarchy is based.

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I have a half-dozen or so other thoughts about Nature’s Magic which I need to mention. I don’t know how to put them into any meaningful sequence.

1. While it results from the serious study of the scientific worldview of the last few centuries, the synergy perspective would seem to be a validation of the intuitive wisdom of Israel and early Christianity (and also of India). The emergence of the synergy perspective is the beginnings of a rational understanding, from the “science of history,” of the intuitions of those ancient cultures about “how the world works.” That’s real progress.

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2. The whole idea of creativity is much clearer from the synergy perspective. We humans create, in a literal sense. By our cooperative interaction with others, increased complexity allows newness to emerge.

At its deepest level, this creative newness seems to me to be what Meister Eckhart meant when he talked about “releasement” (sometimes translated as “waiting”). Eckhart’s understanding seems to be an intuitive sense of the synergy process precisely in its aspect of allowing newness to emerge via the cooperative synergy of anthropos and theos.

To put it in obviously inadequate language, our cooperative inter-action with God (via Eckhart’s “waiting”) allows what’s in the divine unconscious to seep out (leak out, be released) into the world.

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3. With regard specifically to Christianity, the evolutionary-synergy perspective allows us a deeper understanding of traditional ecclesiology and eschatology. If synergy is the creative source of the dynamic evolutionary universe, and if the relationships between things is that out of which newness emerges, then relationship is the very essence of cosmic creativity: the world creates itself, precisely by forming relationships. If human persons are that world become conscious of itself and, now, with the synergy perspective, we see ourselves as the world become conscious of itself as self-creative, then ecclesia would seem to be a name for that segment of humanity that is aware of humanity’s central self-creative role in the cosmos.

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4. The evolutionary-synergy perspective also opens up once again the long-neglected area of eschatology. Thomas Berry names the ultimate goals of the universe to be “differentiation, subjectivity and communion.”

In response to a question about these abstract terms, Brian Swimme said once in a note that the ideas are Teilhard’s, although the terms themselves are Berry’s. The synergy perspective offers us a much less abstract but still conceptual expression of the ultimate eschaton: something like “the on-going cooperative relationships between (uniquely differentiated) persons.” Swimme expands on Berry’s terms nicely: “the fullness of differentiation, the deepest subjectivity and the most intimate communion.” Personally, I like Bruno’s Teilhardian phrase even better, “eucharistic omega.” But, in any case, being able to talk about the eschaton in terms of creative personal relationships in an evolutionary cosmos is a delight. And it makes clear, as nothing else I know does, the traditional understanding of the ecclesia as already the beginnings of the eschaton.

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5. Thomas Berry repeatedly describes patriarchal culture as being under a spell with regard to its alienation from the natural world. One of the best things about Corning’s work is that it makes clear how we can break the spell. The means by which we can step out of the patriarchal prison is nothing other than our awe and wonder at synergy’s magic. We need only look and see the real world as it is, see that we are active participants in the creative evolutionary process, to replace patriarchal dualism’s feelings of anger and rage at not being wanted by Mother Earth.

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6. Personally, it’s a delight for me to realize that helping others experience that awe and wonder at the natural world is the essential task of the shamanic personality. I find the understanding of complexity and synergy to be a profoundly liberating and validating affirmation of my life-long focus on both science (nature, evolution) and religion (spirituality, shamanism).

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7. Finally, a thought that keeps impinging on me is that while the focus on cosmic evolution is a tremendous breakthrough for human culture, these synergy perspectives of the New Cosmology need artistic expression. Science education is obviously essential; so is a serious understanding of the nature of religious ritual (although that would seem to be still a long time coming). But the invitation to awe and wonder seems to require something else, something “earlier” or prior to such things. I’m thinking especially in terms of fiction. Since I retired, I’ve been reading several contemporary works of fiction weekly; that’s hundreds of books in the last four years. Not once did I ever see a reference to humanity’s creative role in cosmic evolution. I wish I could write a novel.

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#93. The Home Stretch

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I began writing this blog about the convergence of science and religion late in 2006. I didn't expect, then, that over the next five years I would end up writing almost a hundred mini-essays. I didn't know I would have so much to say. I've learned a lot in five years!

As the number of posts continued to grow, I had the feeling that I should stop before I reached the one hundredth post. That's still my plan. I hope to end with #99.

The need to stop before post #100 has the feeling for me of the old Zen story about the novice who was assigned to swept a littered garden path but each time he thought he was finished, the chief gardener said "Not good enough." When, after a half-dozen attempts, the young monk finally asked in frustration to be shown what more he needed to do, the old gardener picked up a handful of leaves and scattered them on the path.

Not going to the nice round number for the blog posts feels something like leaving a few leaves scattered on the path. So, at this point (June 2011) I'm in the home stretch and I've been looking back at my earlier entries to see what thoughts I feel I still want to share. I've found several; that's what this post is about.

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I need to begin with a few words about how this blog got started in the first place.

It was an invitation, in the summer of 2005, from the alumni committee of my high school's fiftieth anniversary reunion which originally got me started in sharing my thoughts about the contemporary convergence of science and religion. "Send us a note," the committee said, "telling us what you've been up to in the last few years. We'll publish the responses we get in a booklet for the reunion."

When I retired in June 2000-- after 40 years of teaching high school science and college level theology-- I finally had the time to think about the links between those two big areas of human endeavor. Since that was, in fact, "what I'd been up to over the last few years," I wrote a brief report about my reflections for the reunion committee.

It was my earliest attempt to share my thoughts about the connections between science and religion. With an introduction and a few additional comments, that reunion report was eventually published in February, 2007, as post #3 ("High School 50th-Anniversary Report"). It's still on-line, if you'd like to look at it. (It's brief.)

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When I first considered the reunion committee's request, it felt important for me to send something less conventional than the usual comments in such reports, like "living in Florida now" or "had our third grandchild." I felt the need to say something about my efforts to understand the connections between science (specifically, evolutionary science) and religion (specifically, Western culture's Judeo-Christian tradition).

I mean it quite literally when I say that "I felt the need." I experienced a strong sense of being urged or called to say something of significance about how cosmic evolution and the spiritual side of life are related. I felt as if I was being given a "calling"-- a "vocation" in the old-fashioned sense. It seems I was. It turned out that this was, indeed, a major start for a new phase of my life.

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The task I felt was being assigned to me was to make use of my many years of teaching experience along with my background in science and religion (I have masters degrees in both) to share with my fellow high school graduates something about where my life-long interest in science and spirituality had taken me over the half-century since we graduated together from high school.

It wasn't until a year after I wrote the report for the reunion, however, that the idea of writing a blog about the convergence of science and religion came to me. It was originally my daughter's suggestion.

While many in our society tend to back away from any serious interest in science and math, and many more remain amazingly (to me) uninformed about the religious traditions of the world, Rosemary knew that I was comfortable with both areas and she obviously thought that I had something to say.

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I have, in fact, been fascinated by these two areas of human endeavor all my life. But in contrast to many who think of science and religion as incompatible perspectives, I always saw them as complementary and converging ways of understanding human life and our existence in the world.

I'm not alone, of course. In reviewing my earlier posts to see what thoughts I still felt wanted to be shared, I was surprised to see how many of the names of the thinkers-- scientists and religious writers-- who I mentioned in the first few posts are mentioned in many of the later posts as well.

Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry top the list, as might be expected, since Teilhard was a prophet and Berry a pioneer of the integration in our culture of science and spirituality. But many other less well-known names are also mentioned frequently: Sergius Bulgakov, Bede Griffiths, Brian Swimme, Raimundo Panikkar, Michael Dowd, Mary Conrow Coelho, and Bruno Barnhart, for example. All of them are mentioned in my first few posts.

These are persons who I see as being on the growing edge of humanity's present cultural development. And, as I said in the high school reunion report, "Although they each use very different words, they all seem to be saying something similar."

What they are saying, in one way or another, is that "we humans are an integral part of the evolving universe and that we thrive in dynamic relationship with the cosmic Mystery."

That last sentence is from post #3. It's a pretty good summary of what the "new cosmology" is all about and why the contemporary convergence of science and religion is so important in our day. For the most part, in recent centuries, Western religion has denied that we humans have any place in the material universe and Western science has denied that there was any mystery for us to relate to.

That's the context, thanks to that high school reunion committee's invitation, for my "calling" to help make the insights of the new cosmology available to others who might be interested but who, for one reason or another, do not happen to have the background or experience I do. In a word, my teaching career wasn't over, it just took on a very different form.

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There was a second event, in addition to that high school reunion committee's invitation, which helps to make sense of my "calling." In the spring of 2006 I attended a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania, co-sponsored by a number of medically and spiritually concerned groups, on the place of belief, "religious and otherwise," in the healing process.

It was attended by a large number of medical people, as well as hospital chaplains, pastors, persons involved in religious education, and the curious-- like me.

It was very exciting to be part of that symposium. When I returned home and reflected on my experiences, I had such a strong desire to share with others what I'd learned that I wrote a report about it which I e-mail to friends. That report also became a blog post, and it, too, is still on-line, if you'd like to read it. Look for post #2 ("Spirituality Research Symposium").

Unlike the high school reunion committee's request, I had not been invited to write about the symposium. I wrote it simply because I had a strong inner need to "share my thoughts."

So that's how this blog came to be. And, as I've said, it did, in fact, begin a new phase of my life.

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Now that it is five years later, and I'm in the home stretch, in looking back I see something else which quite unexpectedly stands out. It's how frequently I express frustration at the lack of adequate words for communicating the thoughts I want to share.

I see that I have complained repeatedly about the available words being just not good enough; I've even entitled one of the posts (#21) "Struggling with Words."

My teacher-instincts rebel at the inadequacy of good tools, in our culture, for communicating new ideas about our place in the world and the presence of mystery in our lives. There's a good example in post #2 where I end a brief description of the cosmic and biological basis of our human origins with the words, "And we started out as stardust."

I don't have the talent to express well the awe I experience when I reflect on our origins and destiny seen in the context of evolutionary science and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. As I've said many times in the blog, I'd really like to be a poet!

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Another fact which stands out in my home stretch blog-review is how consistently I have made use of the four-fold or "quaternary" understanding of human consciousness in trying to put my thoughts into clearly understandable words.

That sentence I just wrote provides another example of the frustration I mentioned above about the lack of adequate words. The fact is that I can't count on every reader knowing what I mean by the "quaternary understanding of human consciousness." Few people in our culture are yet aware that our conscious awareness functions in four distinct ways.

So we don't just need a better understanding of our religious instincts and of how the physical world works. We also need a better understanding of how our own minds work!

I've found my understanding of the four-fold workings of our conscious minds to be a big part of what I've had to say with regard to the new cosmology. More accurately, it's a big part of how I've tried to say what I have to say. I've come to see that the quaternary perspective provides us with a basic set of "tools" for our understanding of the new relationship between religion and science which emerged in the 20th century.

My genes didn't give me any poetry-writing talents, but they certainly have provided me with strong thinking skills and teaching instincts!

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In my home stretch reflections I have also recognized something about the quaternary perspective which I hadn't seen before: how useful it is precisely for understanding the details of the great cultural shift that's happening as we move away from the static worldview of patriarchal civilization.

Knowing that conscious awareness operates in four distinct ways is tremendously helpful for understanding the many details involved in global humanity's movement to the dynamic-evolutionary perspectives of the new cosmology. And some of those details about that great shift in human consciousness are still calling to me to be shared.

If I was writing about it for an academic journal, I'd name that article something like "Understanding the Contemporary Immense Transition in Terms of the Four Jungian Functions." That wouldn't work as a title for a post, of course, but it is a good expression of what would be the main thoughts I'd be sharing.

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Perhaps what stands out for me most in the review of my five-year-long blog effort is the inadequacy-- or maybe, more correctly, the incompleteness-- of my attempts to express well my thoughts about the depths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

With regard to the spiritual side of the science-religion convergence I often say, "There's more to religion than it seems."

By that "more" I mean precisely the inner core of wisdom at the depth of the religious tradition that got lost over the centuries due to the body-soul and matter-spirit dualism which has dominated western culture and religion for so long.

Even though the Judeo-Christian tradition originally gave the world its evolutionary viewpoint, the static-dualistic outlook of classical philosophy and patriarchal culture gradually replaced the dynamic and unitive perspectives at the base of the Judeo-Christian religion.

So, in talking about the convergence of science and religion, to indicate that I don't mean "religion" in the static-dualistic sense-- as it's still understood by fundamentalists-- I often use the words "religion at its best."

I say "at its best" because I can't assume that all readers know what I mean by Christianity's "dynamic and unitive perspective"-- any more, unfortunately, than I can take for granted that every reader knows what I mean by "quaternary consciousness."

For me, religion "at its best" specifically includes all those concerns which are outside the competence of the rational-empirical awareness of science and which, for that reason, are dismissed as non-existent by those lacking the quaternary perspective.

We need that four-fold outlook to recognize that there is "more" to our lives than just the details. A good example of the "more" is our deep, if usually unspoken, wonder about the end of the world.

Even those words-- without an understanding of our minds' intuitive-rational functioning-- are usually misunderstood!

I mean "end" in the sense of purpose. At the level of intuitive rationality-- where we focus not on empirical details but on the big picture of our lives in the world-- our consciousness asks questions like, "Why does the universe exist at all?" And, "What's the place of conscious creatures such as ourselves in the vast scheme of things?"

Those who are still stuck on the bottom rung of the Great Ladder laugh at such thoughts. (If the idea of the "Great Ladder of Being" is new to you, see posts #74, #75 & #82.)

While I have already written many posts about the four-fold capacities of our minds, in this home stretch I still feel the need to spell out more clearly my thoughts specifically about the dynamic and unitive perspectives which are part of what I mean when I refer to "religion at its best."

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One more concern is closely connected with the world's purpose or end. 

Since we can't remain indifferent to it, we have the question of what kinds of responses our awareness of the world's end might take.

I think that topic-- of how we respond to our conscious awareness of the purpose of the world-- must be the most difficult of all the thoughts I feel called on to share.

Just as my "academic" title for a post on a quaternary view of the shift 
away from patriarchy wouldn't work well as the name for a post (it was, you will remember, "Understanding the Contemporary Immense Transition in Terms of the Four Jungian Functions"), neither would the title appropriate for an academic journal work well for what I want to say in the blog about "religion at its best."

In an academic context, that post would have a title like "Evolutionary Eschatology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology."

As you can see, at this very moment-- even after five years of writing these posts-- I'm still "struggling with words"!

In any case, the fact is that an awareness of world's purpose is at the heart of Judeo-Christian tradition, and my thoughts about how we can most humanly and authentically respond to it are ideas about which I still feel urged to share my thoughts. I hope to do it in the next few posts.

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The final topic I still feel called to write about-- even after more than 90 posts-- will not come as a surprise to long-time readers. Yes, it's ritual.

From the time I first started the blog, I've felt a very strong need to share my understanding of the explanation of ritual presented in what's now a more than 30-year-old text, The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis (Columbia University Press, 1979).

I think the insights coming out of that early neurological research-- done completely in the context of biological and anthropological evolution three or four decades ago-- are by far the best perspectives yet available on the nature of religious ritual.

I feel, in fact, that I won't be able to die in peace if I don't share with others at least some understanding of the ideas offered by the early Biogenetic Structuralists. I hope to do it.

If nothing else, I would like to write at least a brief book review-- so I can rest in peace!

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Well, that's my agenda as I move into the home stretch of the blog. If you would like to add something to my list, let me know.

sam@macpeno.com

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