#127. On The Frontiers of Science & Spirituality

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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 #127 is a essay, originally written for three friends, about what I think is one of the most important books in our time dealing with the convergence of science and religion.

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Dear M, D & M,

This is my review of Belonging to the Universe, Explorations on the Frontiers of Science & Spirituality, by Fritjof Capra, David Steindl-Rast and Thomas Matus. (HarperSF, 1991).

The book simply may have appeared a few years too soon. It is a highly edited record of conversations between the physicist, Frithof Capra and two monks, Br. David and another, Thomas Matus, whose name was not previously familiar.

Their main idea is that there are strong parallels between the paradigm shifts occurring in science and religion. It provides a compendium, I called it a "catechism," of basic religious insights that fit well into the new story of the world unfolding from the post-Newtonian scientific perspectives.

I like to call the paradigm shift the Immense Transition. But by whatever name, it involves a new understanding of the physical universe, of humanity's place in it, and of the creative source.

This "essay" (review) is an attempt to bring together and summarize in an easily readable form the main ideas suggested in the book.

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There are five major components to the paradigm shift in science. The first two concern nature: a shift from focusing on parts to seeing the whole picture, and seeing the whole not in terms of structures but as a vast net of relationships.

The other three components have to do with a change in human understanding precisely of human understanding. It includes explicit consciousness that our understanding and expression of reality is at best an approximation, always tentative and never exhausting. As Thomas Aquinas says, "In the end, all things fade into mystery."

The shift in science from parts to whole is described well in Mary Conrow Coelho's book in the section called "We have found no primal dust." The parallel shift in religion is from dogmas (truths and beliefs) to seeing all reality as revelation. It is stated clearly by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme as the first principle of the new cosmology: "the world itself is the primary revelation."

It is important to note that "the world" here includes not just the natural world but also human history and especially personal experience. The emphasis in both science and religion is on process, and a major aspect is the shift in human awareness away from the only-rational or logical way of knowing to include other forms of consciousness.

While the participants in these conversations do not mention the Jungian understanding of the four-fold functioning of consciousness, that Jungian perspective is extremely helpful in dealing with these issues.

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What follows are some main points about the five major components of the paradigm shift.

1. In terms of purposes, science is described as systematic knowledge, whereas religion is more concerned with praxis and inner experience. A major problem is that historically, both science and western religion quickly became patriarchal and institutionalized (religion long before science); a primary component of the paradigm shift is movement out of that hierarchical-institutional mentality.

All the participants agree, with regard to organizations, that anything new and/or inter-disciplinary is squelched; science does it via without holding grant-money, religion by withholding authorization to function as teacher or preacher. Any form of difference or diversity is a threat to the patriarchal mindset.

David emphasizes that religion is like language in that it only exists in specific forms; he says that whatever form it has, it comes originally from the encounter with mystery and meaning.

He describes religion as essentially the sense of belonging to the whole of reality, and seeing reality as participatory. I.e., the basis of religion is precisely our experience of mystery: the meaningfulness of our belonging to the whole of the universe. Thus the basic context of religion is, therefore, the scientific worldview.

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2. In terms of methods, science means collecting information and looking for patterns. The participants agree that the method of theology is less clear, and they move almost immediately into a discussion of faith which they agree has to do with intuition. (Right at the start, the limitations of discussing the paradigm shift without reference to the four-fold way consciousness operates becomes apparent.)

Religious faith is described as trust rather than intellectual assent to conceptual propositions. Frithof emphasizes that science also involves trust, specifically in the validity of non-rational perception. David emphasizes that religious faith is trust that "we have a future."

I think it would be correct to say that faith, in both cases, is trust that the intuitive and sensation functions of consciousness "work," that they have validity. My wording for religious faith is something like: trust in the cosmos as manifestation of the Mystery; trust, specifically, that in fashioning and guiding cosmos and anthropos, Divine Wisdom does not give up, that creation is not a failure. Religious faith is more "whole person" oriented than scientific faith.

The participants agrees that both religion and science use models to describe the patterns discerned, and that those models must be internally consistent and recognized as approximations. This gets them into a discussion of revelation. David emphasizes that because belonging is the basic common experiential ground of all religions, the Ultimate must then in some sense be personal and that our existence and essence is, then, gift. I.e., that the world, cosmos and anthropos, is the self-revelation of the Ultimate.

Important to recognize is that this understanding of revelation does not mean that the Ultimate intervenes from outside the world, but that what changes is our awareness. This is what anamnesis is about: remembering what really is the case: consciousness coming to a better or fuller understanding of how things work, that the Ultimate unveils itself in the luminosity of the world.

As I've put it: revelation is awareness of our creation via kenosis. We need a name for awareness of our fashioning as participants in the divine kenosis. This is what Sergius Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky were so good about: the understanding of cultural evolution as itself revelation, specifically resulting from, as well as caused by, the synergy of the divine human inter-activity. This is good stuff, and needs far more exploration that is offered here.

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3. With regard to theological paradigm shifts, Thomas emphasizes that Christian theology had for the first 1000 years a Gnosis-Wisdom orientation, focused on mystical (peak or transformational) experience, and that this is still the case in Eastern Christianity. But in the West, after roughly 1200 AD Aristotelian-Thomistic scholasticism took over (1200-1500), followed by total fragmentation with Counter-Reformation emphasis on "proof texts theology" centered on polemics and apologetics.

David sees today a rebirth of focus on inner experience, and 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.

Both Thomas and David have very good things to say about Cipriano Vagaggini's work in promoting the paradigm shift: "A key person in our theology, who influenced hundreds, even thousands, of students."

In terms of 20th century European theologians and contemporary experience, the new synthesis of thought and experience, the personal-anthropological component began around the mid-1800s; an outstanding (and surprising, for me) example is John Henry Newman.

Thomas also pays tribute to the Belgian monk, Lambert Baudoin, OSB, who "almost single-handedly founded the RC liturgical movement and the ecumenical movement between RC, Protestants and Orthodox. He was imprisoned and silenced by the church authorities. His focus was ecumenical and mystery-focused liturgy, theology and pastoral practice."

Thomas also makes an important point about the slowness of the paradigm shift; he says that even though large numbers were turned off by the old forms, they clung to them because they saw no alternatives other than total secularism.

Today, of course, there are plenty of alternatives. An updated theology simply isn't a big issue anymore for large numbers, but people still need authentic mystery-focused liturgy, which, alas, remains unavailable. It is the global emergence of the New Cosmology which makes clear the need for a new paradigm in Western religion.

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4. With regard to the Christian paradigm. David makes the important point that there is nothing specifically Christian about religious experience, as it emerges within the global religious context. What is specific to Christianity is the person of Jesus (and of course the Jewish context out of which he comes) and the tradition or community of persons influenced by him in such as way as to consider themselves his followers. Note that in our day many non-Christian religious persons also consider Jesus to be of significance.

David says "It is a relationship to Jesus that defines a person as Christian." He calls it "decisive" but says there are many degrees of it. So Frithof asks, "Well, then, what makes Christianity Christian?

David says: It is the religious experience of Jesus. I.e., Jesus' own religious experience, not his follower's experience with Jesus as the focus.

Jesus comes across as a person with a particularly intimate and extraordinary (even "new," says David) relationship with ultimate reality. And that closeness to the divine is what others pick up and enter into.

This means that contemporary persons who would claim to be Christian are persons who seek the kind of religious experience Jesus exemplified: intimate relationship with the Ultimate.

Note that this unitive, non-dual experience is not that of union with an external and only-transcendent God but of a union simultaneously with "all my relations." It is an intimate relationship with the Ultimate and All.

That's a pretty good definition of "Christian," I think, in that it does in fact focus on Jesus as model or exemplifier, and thus savior in that sense.

The Kingdom of God is a central term in the New Testament. It is Jesus' term for the social implications of non-duality, the saving power of God present in human history and available to all, not just to the Jews of Jesus' tradition.

David says: Today, a good way to say what Jesus meant by "the kingdom of God is here" would be something like: the Ultimate's power and presence is manifest in our inner (deepest, peak) experience of belonging to the universe. It is a "saving" experience precisely because it saves us from alienation from the universe. Salvation means to not be alienated from "all my relations" and the material cosmos.

What about Christian love? David says, "Love is saying yes to belonging." To love someone or something is to affirm it/him/her. To be in love is to joyfully affirm who and what is loved.

Frithof asks if there is a difference between feeling connected to the cosmos and having a sense of belonging to it, "whether we call it peak experience, mystical experience, or religious experience." David calls these experiences of unitive non-duality "Kingdom moments."

On analogy with the animal kingdom and plant kingdom, the Kingdom of God is an "anthropos-cosmos-theos kingdom. David says there is a difference: "it is living accordingly." And this is what conversion (metanoia) means. He also adds that this moral thrust, of living accordingly, of not only giving our fiat to our non-duality but also of acting on it, is stronger in (and is perhaps a distinguishing mark of) Christianity than it is in most other religions.

While the three don't spell it out, I think that this understanding of "living according"-- work (task, opus, liturgia) of acting on the fact of our belonging to the universe and being related to all things-- presents an important alternative to patriarchal understanding of manhood.

Patriarchal manhood is one of exploitation and suppression of "others," based on fear of all that is "not-I." I.e., the essence of patriarchy is alienation from others-- the world, persons and God-- and responding to that alienation in terms of control.

What's the alternative? If not fear: not being afraid. If not control, suppression and exploitation: living in accordance with all things as "my relations." (I remember David once saying, the real question is "How big is my family?")

This perspective is the very opposite of, and alternative to, patriarchal masculine; it is a much needed post-patriarchal gnosis-wisdom, and is central to the New Cosmology.

Patriarchy "suppresses the image of the person," as Bruno Barnhart expresses. David emphasizes that while Jesus and Buddha are historically very different, at the deepest level both were faced with the same formalization and institutionalization of religion.

He says that a new thing in Christianity is the building up of a person's inner authority, whereas external institutional religion (Jewish or Christian) puts it down. David emphasizes that this new understanding of authority goes back to Jesus; he calls it the very starting point of Christianity. It is the religion of Jesus, in contrast to what comes later, a Christianity about Jesus.

The very essence of Christian religious experience is of the presence and power of belonging to the All, to the whole cosmos of "all my relations."

Note that it is not an external worldview but an inner experience. And not an experience of the Thinking function alone, but of the Intuitive, Feeling and Sensation functions together. (Not just of head, but of eye, hand and heart, together.)

This seems to me a really key understanding in the immense transition: the shift from hierarchical-institutional suppression of persons to recognition that "person" is central to the cosmic process. The implication is a shift from external authority to internal: being responsible for oneself. It is the opposite of fear of world and of dependence, therefore, on a only-transcendent divinity to save us from the world.

The new understanding of person and salvation go together: salvation is from alienation (fear, anger, hatred of world and of self and others within it). The gospel says, "Fear not. " And this is only possible if one accepts one's inner authority. This is the great new thing of Christianity, says David.

Thomas adds immediately, that that the main thing to keep in mind about theological statements about Jesus is that they must also be understood as being statements about us. Whatever we say about Jesus must also be said about you and me. He asks, "Even that Jesus is part of the Holy Trinity?" And responds, "Definitely!" That's what Athanasius and the Council of Nicea were all about: "The Divinity becomes human so that humanity may be divine."

Frithof asks, What about resurrection? From our perspective, all we can say is that Jesus' death is not the last word. And this inner experience is not just that of his disciples but of all of us who have been exposed to and influenced by and thus experience within ourselves the presence and power felt in earliest times and is encapsulated in the acclamation "Christ is risen!"

The whole point is that his and our non-duality persists. One of the participants makes that point that just as with the Nicene statements about the divinity of Jesus, so resurrection is ours too, no less than that of Jesus. Otherwise, it makes no sense, as St Paul says. Just as we are non-dual as was Jesus, so all that resurrection means can be said of us as well.

This is precisely what the presence and power of God means. This is what salvation means: the persistence of our non-duality with all, even and especially beyond death and all that threatens.

David points out what is often overlooked: that for this "there is no evidence." Christ is hidden in God. "Our life is hidden with Christ in God." It's not a scientifically collectable fact. But it is an experience. We need to accept our own inner authority for it.

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5. The place of person in the paradigm shift. The book contains a small but significant section on this critically important idea of the movement away from the mechanistic viewpoint of earlier science to one which takes into account human self-awareness; its focus is not just nature but also personal consciousness and human culture which results from it.

One of the most significant developments in contemporary science is that of Systems Theory, the foundations of which started in the 1940s with the beginnings of cybernetics and which emerged in to contemporary consciousness with the coming of the computer revolution in the 1980s.

Systems Theory emphasizes the place of the human person in the scientific perspective and indicates values quite different from those of the patriarchal mindset; these values include relationships, cooperation and creativity.

When Systems Theory first emerged, based on the systems philosophy of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, two schools resulted: a mechanistic school coming from the mathematician and inventor of the computer, John von Nuemann; and another, dealing with understanding of living things as self-organized systems, from Norbert Weiner.

The mechanistic school was dominant in the 40s and 50s; the self-organization school emerged at the beginning of the 60s. There, the emphasis is on autonomy (subjectivity or autopoiesis) as the hallmark of living things. It has been explored at various levels from the cell to the family and whole societies, with the largest self-organizing system seen to be the Earth itself, the well-known Gaia Hypothesis.

The new awareness and new values associated with this paradigm shift is a movement from self-assertion to integration. The shift is human consciousness moving from an only-rational focus: from analysis (compartmentalizing, distinguishing, categorizing) to synthesis; from reductionism and linear thinking to wholeness and non-linear (intuitive) awareness.

In the discussion, Br. David objects to describing the contrast as "rational vs. intuitive." He doesn't want to say intuition is ir-rational. They suggest "conceptual vs. non-conceptual," but David emphasizes the "intuition" means "looking deeply into" something so as to see its inner coherence; they eventually settle for "discursive" in contrast to intuitive.

The emphasis here on finding the right words to talk about this change is consciousness is indicative of the on-going struggle anyone concerned with these things has in being able to express well an awareness of the paradigm shift. Again: the key is our awareness of the shift in our awareness about human awareness. Complicated, indeed!

The accompanying shift in values is from self-assertion (competition, expansion, quantity and domination) to integration (conservation, quality and partnership). These are opposite and seemingly contradictory values.

Thomas notes that in the Middle Ages, society lacked the self-assertive tendency; the coming of the Renaissance and experimental science brought an over-emphasis on individuality. The contemporary task is to arrive at a dynamic balance.

For the record, I note that Frithof wants to call the assertive values masculine or patriarchal; he does not distinguish between a patriarchal masculine and a more rooted, alternative form of the masculine. I think that distinction, as I noted in the section on "living accordingly" (above), is a crucial aspect of the Immense Transition.

David also makes the point that, in the paradigm shift from the discursive to the intuitive in theology, movement is away from stating polemical or apologetic propositions and to an emphasis on story telling; originally, he says, "all theological insights were stories."

A story is a synthetic whole, greater than the sum of any of its propositional parts. We can also say the shift is away from abstract statements to poetry, metaphor and experience. Frithof mentions that a key figure in systems theory, Gregory Bateson, had story telling as his "preferred mode."

This section ends with an emphasis by David on the fact that much of what's new in the new paradigm "is really recovery of very old intuitions."

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6. Tidbits from the discussion of the five major aspects of the paradigm shift.

1) With regard to the shift from emphasis on the parts to the whole. Frithof notes that the new paradigm holds through all the physical and social sciences. While the old paradigm puts humans outside and above nature, since the 1970's the emphasis in "deep" ecology has been on humans as an intrinsic part of nature.

David makes the point that the idea that humans are made in the image of God doesn't mean we have an immortal soul (separate from our physical being); he notes that that is a Greek idea which he calls "cultural baggage." A new (and really, very old) way to say what image of God means is that "All things live by the breath of God." The divine spiritus (air, pneuma, chi, the very breath of God) fills the whole universe.

Frithof asks for a reformulation of the place of humans in nature from a Christian perspective. David offers the one from Isaiah: "The lion shall lie down with the kid." He says the human project within nature is play, delight and curiosity.

He offers the "gardener metaphor" for our role in the natural world. The gardener is not separate from the garden but an integral part of it and responsible to and for it. We nurture it, and we are to enjoy it. We are to hear its call and respond to it. Responsibility and responsiveness go together. "We damage the garden if we treat it as a machine."

The conventional idea of freedom as elbow room is Newtonian. The "systemic" understanding is of freedom is not pushing others aside but mutual enhancement. David adds an important related idea: that the diminishment of others also diminishes each of us. We are capable of not just manipulating nature but of living in harmony with it: we are capable "not only of science but also of wisdom."

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2) With regard to the shift from structure to process. The old scientific view saw reality as a whole made up of parts, and the new view sees that the parts as patterns in the whole web of relations. Similarly, the old view saw structures acted on by forces which result in processes, while the new view sees process as revealed by structures.

It sounds confusing, but an excellent example is offered: a tree, as a structure in connection between sky and earth, is shaped in a certain way to get sun via leaves, and nutrients via roots; the tree is an epiphany of the life-process.

David offers an important example from religion. In contrast to the old opposition between matter and spirit, we can now see that spirit or mind is revealed by matter. David emphasizes again that there is "no such thing as pure mind or disembodied soul." He mentions 20th century theological heavyweights, Raymundo Panikkar and Karl Rahner, in support of this radically new (but, again, really very old) understanding.

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3) With regard to the shift from objective to 'epistemic' science. With regard to how we know anything, Frithof notes that while there is no consensus yet, thinkers are moving in direction of seeing the world as being created or brought forth by our consciousness.

He notes that this does not mean that we materialize matter and energy, but that what we call objects are patterns that we see by omitting the rest of what's there. I.e., we "order" our experience of reality. He refers several times to Chilean thinkers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, whose efforts have been toward an understanding of knowing from a biological point of view.

David makes the point that "rational animal" is not a good translation of the Greek definition of human (zoon logikon) and that a better translation would be "pattern-reading animal." He says logos has the meaning of the "pattern that makes cosmos out of chaos."

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4) With regard to the shift from building to network as metaphor of knowing. Frithof notes that buildings, foundations, bricks and construction blocks are persistence images in science. But in a web or net of relationships there is no up or down, no hierarchal structures. The participants agree that the same is true in the shift in religion: "basic beliefs" are much less important than awareness of our interconnectedness.

This brings up the question of God as divine architect. In the old paradigm (in both Newtonian-mechanistic science and theology), God got things started. Even Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant scientists of our day, uses it, Thomas notes.

"God is on every page of Hawking's Brief History of Time," says Thomas, "but his theology is at the level of a grade school catechism."

Still today in religious fundamentalism, God is the architect of the building, and science is the discovery of God's building blocks. Thomas notes that the new paradigm talks of God as "horizon" of our understanding, by which he means "mystery" in the sense that things reveal ultimate reality. They "speak to us" and "tell us something," but it is in no way exhaustive.

David emphasizes that "It's like a dialogue." We are active partners in creation. Frithof mentions the Hindu idea of lila (divine play) and Thomas says say the same understanding is found in Proverbs 8, where the Wisdom of God is described as at play and delighting to be with human persons. He also distinguishes play and work: "we work to achieve a purpose, we play to arrive at meaning."

Frithof says old time science was about domination and control of mechanical nature, whereas the new scientific paradigm is about dialogue with a living reality. "With the deepest source of everything," David adds.

Frithof also mentions, with regard to tolerance and pluralism, what the scientist Geoffrey Chew calls "bootstrap physics." I.e., being able to view different models without prejudice. This is a major aspect of the new paradigm in science, says Frithof.

David observes that intolerance of pluralism in RCism is "doctrine made subservient to power, a tool of power." He offers as an example, the exclusivist understanding of the eucharist: "When it is seen as celebration of belonging, it has to be inclusive; everybody has to be welcomed at the table."

He emphasizes that the very meaning of the eucharist "explodes the Christian tradition to include all traditions." And again emphasizes that such thinking in theology is a return to "very old, original thinking about the Christian mysteries."

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5) With regard to the shift from absolute truth to approximations. Frithof says that in science it is now recognized that we simply can not take into account all the interconnections. Much has to be left out. That is, in fact, the scientific method; it is what experiments are all about.

David talks about religious dogma in this context. He says that dogma is a response to issues, where a great deal of effort has been expended. The term "dogma" comes from dokein: "that's the way it seems to us."

The problem is that religious dogma is always expressed in language of the time. A serious task of theologians is to figure out (in contemporary language) what the old dogmas were trying to say.

Dogmas use philosophical language. They were not expressed in literary forms, but are in fact based on poetic forms. Thomas adds that the even the Nicene Creed contains "poetry." "God of God, light of light." David says It's like a story or a play. The whole play or story expresses the meaning, the pattern of relationships.

David stresses once again that all this goes back to awareness of belonging, of being in relationship, as the essence of religious experience.

Thomas spells out this important idea very well: science and religion converge in the realization that the "objective viewpoint" is illusory. There can be no "detached observer." You're part of it all and what's being told is your story.

The paradigm shift from part to whole is realization that I (this part) belong to the whole universe, that this part (this "I") is a vital participant in a living cosmos. And this realization is both the context and the condition of God's self-disclosure.

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7. The final section of the book deals with social implications of new-paradigm thinking. The central idea is personal freedom.

Thomas notes that liberation is the main theme of Christian revelation. David adds that what set it all in motion was the Exodus. All the biblical books, even Genesis, were written after and in light of the exodus experience.

Liberation is the key of Old Testament: God's judgment always means God's helping people to be liberated from oppression. Liberation is also the key to New Testament. It is Jesus' main point. His was essentially a revolutionary message, and it caused an authority crisis.

David says Jesus does not stand on his own authority nor on God's authority behind him, but the divine authority people experience in their own hearts, the common sense we share with all humans, animals and plants and the whole cosmos operating from its divine ground. "What's more liberating than common sense?"

His point is that people are intimidated by public pressure and external authority, and Jesus is all about empowerment against that authority which puts down the inner authority of common sense.

Even the Gospel of John, which contains most highly developed teachings about Jesus, makes it clear that every one should be able to say with Jesus, "I and the Father are one."

Authority originally means "having a firm basis for knowing and acting."

David says that the purpose of external authority is to use its power to empower others. To empower means to give others inner authority, to give them personal responsibility.

Frithof adds that the main issue is parenting. "All over the world," he says, "people learn about power, authority and responsibility via the parenting process." David says, And this is what Jesus did. He empowered his hearers; he authorized them to trust their own innermost awareness. Of all the aspects of the paradigm shift, this is probably the most important: giving full weight to our personal experience of the divine.

And how nicely this ties in with Mary Conrow Coelho's work! She is the only writer I know pointing out the crucial role of parenting for the acceptance of one's personal inner authority, a perspective absolutely central for the New Cosmology to catch on and flourish.

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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/

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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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#94. Religion "At Its Best"

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ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 
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This post now contains all three parts which were originally published separately.

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"There's more to religion than it seems."

I've made that statement many times during my years as a teacher. And in the home-stretch reflections that I described in the previous post (#93) about my nearly five-year-long blog-writing effort, I discovered that what stands out most for me is the inadequacy I feel with regard to sharing my thoughts about that "more."

So in this post I'm going to try say, as well as I can, what I mean by "Religion 'At Its Best'."

The very fact that there is a "more"-- an inner core of wisdom at the depths of Western culture's Judeo-Christian tradition-- is difficult for many of us to realize. It's difficult because it's precisely that "best" that got lost.

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Religion's "best" was replaced by body-soul and matter-spirit dualism-- the basic outlook of patriarchal culture and classical philosophy-- which has dominated western culture and religion for many centuries.

I'm aware that I am more personally attuned than many, apparently, to that kind of depth awareness often called "right brain" or "intuitive" perception. But still I have to say that I'm continually amazed that the very fact that there is a "more" to religion-- more than the static dualism of rational empiricism-- remains for the most part unknown to the general public.

The "more" is still there. That inner core of wisdom is preserved in the rituals, customs, art and music, creeds, feasts and seasons of the Western religious tradition. But it's precisely the significance of such things that rational empiricism can't see because of its position at the bottom rung of the Great Ladder.

We need to move up the ladder. It's only when we make use of our intuitive rationality that we can recognize the "more" of the Judeo-Christian tradition and can enter into an experience of that inner core of wisdom which is our Western culture's religion "at its best."

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I have referred repeatedly in these posts to the four-fold way our minds work-- the fact that we don't just think sequentially and we don't just perceive our existence in terms of its surface details. We can, in fact, be aware of our connections with everything; and we can, in fact, see the whole picture-- the big picture of how the world works and how our lives fit into it.

Even though the Judeo-Christian tradition originally gave the world its evolutionary viewpoint, the dynamic and unitive perspective at the base of Western religion was gradually replaced by the static-dualistic outlook of classical philosophy. For many in our patriarchal culture, the word "religion" still means only that world-rejecting outlook of patriarchy's static dualism.

So if we are to get to the heart of our Western religious tradition, we need to move higher up the ladder; we need to see the world, and ourselves in it, from the dynamic and unitive perspectives.

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Everybody know what "dynamic" means in contrast to "static," but hardly anyone is comfortable with either "unitive" or its opposite, "dualistic."

Nowadays, our world is changing so fast that no one any longer thinks that "there's nothing new under the sun." Indeed, we know now that the world has never not been undergoing great changes. We know from science that over billions of years galaxies, planets and the stars have evolved; that on Earth living matter has emerged from the dust of the stars; and that we ourselves have developed from those earlier life forms.

But it's still a surprise to many to learn that that dynamic (emergent, evolutionary) worldview comes originally from our Western religious tradition, and that we even have a biblical name for the "energy" or "power" of the cosmic process: dynamis in Greek, spiritus in Latin.

Spiritus also means wind, air and life-breath; the holy spiritus we understand to be empowering the evolution of the universe is the same dynamis which gives each of us our life and breath and personal self-awareness.

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This dynamic perspective-- that we are not separate from the matter of the physical cosmos, nor from the Earth's biological life-forms, nor from the holy spiritus which empowers the evolution of the universe-- also helps us to understand what's meant by "unitive."

For most of us, it's an unfamiliar word. As the opposite of "dualistic," "unitive" refers both to our union with the natural world and to our union with the world's creative source.

And while "Big History"-- the big picture of the universe we have from contemporary science-- makes clear that we are indeed part of the natural world, we don't yet have something analogous to "Big History" which we might call "Big Religion." The most explicit contemporary perspectives available about our non-duality with the divine come from the unitive views of the Asian religious traditions.

While the spiritualities of Asia have remained more open than have those of the West to the sense of divine-human unity which goes back to Paleolithic times, in Western culture the unitive view was smothered by the static dualism of patriarchy. So the non-Western religious traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism can help us recover the human-divine aspect of the unitive worldview.

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I've mentioned in several posts the twentieth-century religious thinker and British monk Bede Griffith. He not only makes the point well that science is helping religion recover its "inner core"; he even left England and went to live in India "to find," he said, "the other half of my soul."

Bede's words may sound confusing, but the unitive view is in fact two-fold, and we need to be especially clear here in thinking about it: there is a human-cosmos unity and a human-divine unity. We need both, if we are to recover the non-dual vision of cosmic-human-divine unity at the heart of the Western tradition.

But while help for seeing the cosmic-human view comes from science, and while the divine-human perspective is clearer with the help of Eastern spiritualities, that's not enough. It's the convergence of these two perspectives-- the cosmic-human from science and the divine-human from Asian religions-- that provides the context for us to enter into and to experience the inner core of wisdom at the depths of our own Judeo-Christian tradition.

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You may be thinking, "All that is just the context? What, then, about the content?"

Well, I have three Greek words which, in addition to "evolution," seem to me to be needed to spell out what I'm calling the Judeo-Christian tradition "at its best." They are eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia.

In the previous post I mentioned that if I were sharing these thoughts in an article for an academic journal, the essay would have a title something like "Evolutionary Eschatology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology."

That's quite a mouthful, but those are the words I have to work with! 

"Eschatology" is a deep-level comprehensive view of the purpose of our evolving universe, "Eucharistic" refers to our human response to that understanding, and "Ecclesiology" is concerned with the nature of the community of those who respond.

What holds all these ideas together is, as I see it, the modern understanding of person-- which, remarkably, is honored both in Western secular culture and by Western religion. In what follows, I will use each of these ideas-- eschaton, eucharist, ecclesia and person, all in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution-- to do my best to spell out my understanding of religion at its best.

If you've been feeling that this post has been heavy-going so far, you're right. But you've got through the worst of it. And while the rest is relatively easy, it's long. So if you're reading it at one sitting, this is a good place to take a break.

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ESCHATON. Eschaton is our understanding of the world's end-purpose. 

In the old static context, "the end of the world" meant its annihilation-- "when God will come to judge the world by fire," in the words of the hymn sung at Catholic funerals for a thousand years.

In the dynamic context, we're not talking about the world's "end" in the sense of its annihilation, nor in the sense of the coming of the "Rapture" repeatedly announced by religious fundamentalists. In unitive (non-dualistic) terms, the world's "end" is its purpose: why it exists-- and why, of course, we exist.

If we are to appreciate our Western religious tradition "at its best," we need to understand the end-purpose of the world in terms of the tradition's own dynamic-unitive insights.

I noted back in post #20 that even those who promote the New Cosmology seem to shy away from this aspect of the Western tradition. 

But as I see it, no matter what we may call the divine creative power-- the ultimate, the numinous, the great Mystery-- we have a profound need to understand-- in terms of the Western tradition's own evolutionary and unitive context-- the tradition's insights into the creative source's purpose.

And this is one area where the rational empiricism of science isn't of help. We simply can't see the "end" or "purpose" of anything-- let alone the purpose of everything-- from the bottom rung of the great ladder. 

Our Sensing function's focus on details just isn't good enough. We need to use our mind's Intuitive ability if we are to see the biggest of all Big Pictures: why there is anything, rather than nothing.

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In writing this blog over the last four-and-a-half years I've worked hard to spell out my understanding of modern Western culture's upward movement to this higher rung of the great ladder-- where we can, in fact, see the Big Picture.

I focused on that cultural transition especially in post #80, where I described the mid-20th-century efforts of the "two mavericks"-- depth psychologist C. G. Jung and atomic physicist Wolfgang Pauli-- to accept and express their understanding of our mind's intuitive capacity in the face of several centuries of its neglect and denial by Western science's empirical rationality.

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In the science of cultural anthropology, any social group's response to the basic human need to understand "our place in the vast scheme of things" is called its cosmology. The "New Cosmology" is new precisely because it replaces Western culture's previous static cosmology. And as 

I've mentioned frequently, in that older dualistic religious perspective we were told that our purpose was to escape from the world.

We can now see, however-- thanks to the evolutionary worldview of modern science-- that we do in fact have a place in the evolving cosmos. And it's this insight which allows us to recover the older inner core of wisdom-- that "more"-- that I've been calling the West's religious tradition "at its best."

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I've noted many times that the very idea of evolution comes originally from the Judeo-Christian tradition. And that to this day, the perspective of an on-going emergence of newness-- imaged traditionally in terms of Exodus, Passover and new life arising in Spring-- remains an essential aspect of its inner core of wisdom. When we think in terms of transformation, we can see that it's not an exaggeration to say that evolution is what Western religion is all about.

Christianity sees this transformation process at the heart of the cosmos as a manifestation and embodiment of the divine source. We even have familiar words for this understanding: "epiphany" and "incarnation." But it is precisely the deeper meaning of those terms which got lost when patriarchy's static dualism replaced the earlier dynamic perspective.

In that patriarchal context, the meaning of "incarnation" came to be limited to one time, one place and one person. As its broader meaning was lost over the centuries, that limited understanding came to be taken for granted and, eventually, it was presumed to be the very basis of Western religion.

But as we recover the earlier dynamic-unitive perspectives at the inner core of the tradition, the entire evolutionary process can once again be recognized as the incarnation of the creative source of the cosmos. We can see, in that evolutionary context, that the embodiment of divine creativity is happening always and everywhere-- and that it excludes nothing and no one.

Here are some examples of this understanding, from three profound 20th-century religious thinkers:

Karl Rahner says, "The Mystery is always and everywhere giving itself to us." It is "always and everywhere making itself known to us."

Sergius Bulgakov calls the cosmic process the "actualization of the divine potentialities."

Raimundo Panikkar-- in his demanding but significant language-- names what's being embodied "the cosmo-the-andric unity." The union of the cosmic (cosmos), the divine (theos), and the human (andros) is what's being manifest by the cosmic process.

Rahner was a German Catholic and Bulgakov was Russian Orthodox. Panikkar had a Spanish mother, an Asian Indian father, and he described himself as "Catholic when I'm in Rome, Hindu when I'm in India, Buddhist when I'm in China."

Each of these profound religious thinkers, with their highly varied cultural backgrounds, is expressing-- in the dynamic-unitive perspectives available to us from modern science-- the same inner core of wisdom at the heart of the tradition. And that is "religion at its best."

My whole point here is that the "more" isn't new. Rahner, Bulgakov and Panikkar are saying exactly what the New Testament's Second Epistle of Peter proclaims, for example, when the apostle says that we are called to be "partakers in the divine nature." That "more" is expressed even more dynamically in Paul's letter to the Ephesians where he describes the end-purpose of all things to be "the fullness of God in everything."

It is a great gift that, in our time, thanks to science, we can understand once again this dynamic and unitive understanding of eschaton as the embodiment of the divine-human-cosmic unity, "God all-in-all."

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EUCHARIST. Gratefulness is the normal response to anything we experience as a gift, and clearly this deep comprehension of the eschaton evokes in us a very deep response.

To this day, Jewish tradition preserves this fundamental human response to the dynamic world in words of thanks-giving over bread and wine. The early Christians continued this form of grateful response when they gathered in homes on the first day of the week in remembrance of Jesus; and this tradition, too, is still continued daily throughout the world.

But just as with the dynamic understanding of eschaton, the evolutionary meaning of eucharist was lost when the static-dualistic-- patriarchal-- view replaced the earlier Judeo-Christian perspective. But also as with eschaton, the shift in our day away from the static perspective to a recovery of the older dynamic understanding is happening with regard to eucharist as well.

I wrote about the recovery of the dynamic view of eucharist in two recent posts. In post #91 (Evolution and the Passover Seder), I described how the seder's central act of thanks-giving is an explicit response to the evolutionary worldview which originated in the historical Exodus from Egypt.

And I wrote about the unitive meaning of eucharist-- our cosmo-the-andric union with all things-- in post #92 (Evolution and Holy Communion).

I don't feel the need to repeat those thoughts here. But I do want to note just how different was the original dynamic understanding of the eucharist from its later static meaning. In the same way that eschaton in the dualistic worldview came to mean not the fulfillment but the annihilation of the world, so eucharist in the dualist context came to refer not to an activity by a group of persons, but to an object. A sacred object, surely, but an other-worldly sacred object.

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You may be expecting me to say that a similar process happened with regard to ecclesia, the third of the Greek terms needed for understanding Western religion at its best. You are right, again!

Of those three terms, ecclesia is by far the most difficult to understand from the dynamic-unitive perspective. This is not, however, because the meaning of ecclesia is difficult to understand in itself-- it isn't-- but because patriarchy continues to dominate the (essentially unconscious) perspectives of the Western religious tradition's own self-understanding.

That self-understanding is what the following section is all about. It's challenging material in that it requires time and effort to work through it well, so if you are reading this post in one sitting, you might want to take another break.

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ECCLESIA. We don't have a English equivalent for the Greek word eucharist, but the English equivalent of ecclesia is, of course, "church." 

It comes from an Old English word, kirk, which simply means "assembly" or "gathering"-- just as the Greek ecclesia does.

Probably the best contemporary translation of ecclesia is "community"-- not in the sense of a geographic or genetic group, but in the sense of a gathering of persons who intentionally get together for a specific purpose.

In the New Testament, eucharist was the name for an action, what the early Christians did when they gathered; ecclesia was their name for themselves when they got together to do it.

As the perspectives of static dualism took over, however, "church" lost its meaning as community and eventually acquired the patriarchal meaning it has today: a hierarchical institution or sociological establishment, often top-heavy with authority. And as it's commonly used nowadays, especially by journalists and media people, "the Church" has come to mean only those authorities.

This patriarchal, static and dualistic understanding of ecclesia obviously does not represent our religious tradition at its best.

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But just as with eucharist and eschaton, the modern evolutionary perspective helps us in recovering the original-- dynamic and unitive-- meaning of ecclesia. It does takes some effort, however.

We know from contemporary science-- and specifically from the study of complexity theory-- that the 14-billon-year evolutionary process has been continually characterized by the emergence of new levels of self-organization.

We know that stars can produce chemical elements, that some of those elements can combine to form living cells, and that some cells unite to form the kind of brain and nervous system which is needed for the emergence of our uniquely human self-reflective awareness.

That's a greatly simplified summary of the idea of emergence in the evolutionary process, but I think it's good enough to make fairly clear that the natural next step-- beyond atoms and molecules, life-forms and personal consciousness-- would be those groups and gatherings of persons we call "communities."

It's in this context of evolutionary emergence that we can better understand the ecclesia as a community rather than as a patriarchal and hierarchical institution.

In the Western religious tradition at its best, what characterizes the ecclesia is its self-understanding precisely as a community of those who gather to give thanks. Just as in the evolutionary context we can better understand the meaning eucharist in terms of eschaton, so in that came context we can better understand the meaning of ecclesia in terms of eucharist.

A fancy way to summarize these confusing-sounding thoughts is to say that "as eschatology is evolutionary, so ecclesiology is eucharistic." (That's where my imaginary academic title for this post-- "Evolutionary Eschatology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology"-- comes from.)

But those fancy words aren't helpful. In fact, they get in the way of our entering into the deeper meaning of the insights they are attempting to express.

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For me, the two religious thinkers who are most helpful for an understanding of the meanings of eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia in the context of evolution are Alexander Schmemann and Thomas Berry.

I quoted both of these profound religious thinkers in recent posts: #90 ("Returning" the World...) and #87 (Stardust's Imperative). If you haven't read those posts, I hope you will. Here's a very brief summary of some of their main thoughts.

Both Berry and Schmemann begin with the primary evolutionary insight that, in Berry's words, "persons are a cosmic phenomenon," and that it's this cosmic perspective-- that we are "the evolutionary process come to self-awareness"-- that allows us to see "our proper role in the universe."

Each describes "our place in the vast scheme of things" with quite different words, but with remarkably similar meanings.

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Alexander Schmemann speaks in a more traditional and liturgical language. "Our primary role in the cosmos is to be priest," he says. The "first, the basic definition of humanity, is that a person is a priest." And it is the "only natural reaction of humanity, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, to bless God in return."

Returning the world to God in thanks, says Schmemann, is "our common task." Because we are "the world become conscious of itself," we humans are its "spokespersons." We speak as the world and for the world. In Schmemann's words, "We stand in the center of the world and unify it, in our act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God."

And "by filling the world with this eucharist," he adds, "we transform our life." In a wonderfully Teilhardian sentence in summary of these thoughts he says, "The world was created as the 'matter,' the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and humanity was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament."

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Thomas Berry's words sound much less traditional, but his meanings are very much the same. Here too, we humans are understood to speak as the world and for the world. It's easy to overlook, but Berry even uses the word "return," just as Schmemann does, in describing our cosmic role. We are "to return the universe to itself and to its numinous origins," he says. And we "return" the world to its source by returning the world to itself.

Berry is especially strong in his emphasis on our need to recognize that "community" is the very goal and purpose of the cosmic process. Eschaton and ecclesia come together in Berry's words when he says, quite explicitly, that "the ultimate community is the whole universe together."

Understood in this way, we can see that ecclesia includes everything: no one and nothing is outside the cosmic process of divine incarnation. 

This-- obviously-- is an understanding of ecclesia utterly unlike the conventional understanding of "church" as an authoritarian patriarchal institution.

And when we do see ecclesia in this way-- as the ultimate community, the whole universe together-- then "church" is simply another way of expressing the meaning of eschaton, as God all-in-all and the fullness of God in everything.

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You may be thinking the meanings of these Greek words are starting to overlap. They are!

Our rational, right-brain, linear Thinking ability just isn't able to produce the words and concepts well enough to express these profound, deeper-than-rational, left-brain intuitions. The religious tradition itself offers an outstanding example of this fact about the limitation of our rational-only minds: since New Testament times, the underlying realities referred to by the words eucharist, ecclesia and eschaton have all been given one same name.

The eschaton as the embodied cosmic community of the fullness of God in everything, excluding nothing... the eucharist as humanity's deepest response of thanks-giving for the evolution of the universe as the manifestation of the divine-comic-unity... the ecclesia as the community gathered around bread and wine in thanks for this divine incarnation of God all-in-all, and for our participation in it-- all of these profound realities are traditionally called the Corpus Christi.

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These are deep thoughts. It's not easy to wrap our minds around them. 

And yet they are in fact what Western religion is all about "at its best."

For me, what holds them all together is the centrality of person. In the convergent perspective-- where eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia are understood within the context of cosmic-biological-cultural evolution-- what stands out most for me is our personal uniqueness.

We are unique from the moment of our conception. The chance that anyone else might have the exact same DNA is said to be one in 10, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.

We not only have our own inner world from the first moment of our existence, however. Our personal self-awareness is continually being modified by every life-experience. And once we reach the stage of self-reflective maturity, we add to it ourselves by our personal relationships and free choices.

And all of this-- the mystery that we are-- becomes our unique contribution to the Corpus Christi.

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So that's the "more" as I see it. In the simplest words I'm able to come up with: Each of us makes a difference with regard to the ultimate end of the world.

In my previous post about reviewing my almost five-year-long blog effort (#93, The Home Stretch), I said that what stood out most for me was the feeling of inadequacy I had with regard to doing a good-enough job in expressing my thoughts about the depths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I think I've probably done as well in this present post as I'm going to be able to do. It's my best in sharing my thoughts about religion at its best. My thanks to you for staying with me through all these efforts!

sam@macspeno.com

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