#92. Evolution & Holy Communion

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You are probably thinking the words "Evolution" and "Holy Communion" don't go together. I think they do, of course. In fact, I think that they go together better than any other two words I know. But I admit it's not obvious. So once again I ask for your patience. Thanks!

We know that the religions of the Western world-- Judaism and its two offshoots, Christianity and Islam-- greatly value human persons. The gospels specifically stress that offering the smallest bit of help to any human being is equivalent to directly serving the ultimate cause of the universe.

But what about Western science? As I see it, with its understanding of the place of the human community in the evolution of life on Earth, Western science greatly enhances Western religion's respect for persons.

But because of our culture's emphasis on "soul" as the essence of a human person, Western religion at times degenerated into a disdain for the human body. Following Greek philosophy, the people of the Western world envisioned the soul as something separate from the body-- and along with that disdain for the body came a disdain for the world of nature as well.

In the process-- and this is the first of the two main thoughts I want to share in this post-- the Christian tradition unfortunately lost a major perspective on its own central rite of thanksgiving.

It was unfortunate because the basic Judeo-Christian response to reality isn't disdain for the world but thanksgiving for it and for our lives in it.

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The second main thought I want to share is that the evolutionary worldview of the New Cosmology is helping us to recover that profound attitude of thanksgiving which is at the heart of our Western world's religious traditions.

A point easy to miss is that the Judeo-Christian rite of blessing God is not a thanksgiving for a static world-- as the creation was seen to be in the patriarchal perspective. The ritual blessing at the heart of Western religion is a giving thanks for the created world understood as an on-going dynamic process-- exactly the way modern science sees it.

And a key aspect of this dynamic perspective is that we humans now know ourselves to be expressions of the world evolved to the complex level of personal consciousness. We now recognize that we are one with all things and conscious participants in the cosmic process.

So the central Judeo-Christian rite of thanksgiving is not just a blessing of God for the world; it's also a giving thanks for our participation in the creative processes of the dynamic world.

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I think it's especially important to note that this recovery of humanity's awareness of its communion with the physical universe-- "its recognition of the divine presence dwelling and working in all persons and things," as a reader says in a comment on post #90-- parallels Western culture's present movement away from the patriarchal perspectives of past centuries.

It's clear enough that thanksgiving for our existence in the world and respect for human persons are not characteristics of patriarchal manhood. Indeed, we know that it is precisely the attitudes of patriarchy which are responsible for a great deal of contemporary damage to the environment and for the on-going exploitation of the Earth's people.

In contrast to the dualistic and destructive perspectives of static patriarchy, Hebrew thought, as it is expressed especially in the Wisdom tradition of the Bible, is dynamic and creative.

And the very idea of evolution-- the central idea of contemporary science-- comes originally from the experience of the early Hebrews in their Great Escape from Egypt. I described its annual celebration at the Passover seder in the previous post (#91).

In the evolutionary context of modern science we can see that the New Testament is in total continuity with that powerful biblical vision of an ongoing transfigured cosmos. We know that Jesus and his earliest followers were part of the Wisdom tradition and so were no less characterized by the dynamic view of creation still in process.

With their expectation of what Jesus called "the coming of the Kingdom," the early Christians met weekly in anticipation of the Reign of God and in thanksgiving for their participation in that ongoing renewal of creation.

My point here is that those weekly gatherings in memory of Jesus have remained a constant in the Christian tradition for two thousand years, although their evolutionary perspective was lost along the way.

And as strange as it may seem to some, modern science is helping us recover that dynamic religious worldview. As I see it, this recovery is a major aspect of the contemporary convergence of science and religion.

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One of the reasons why talk about the "convergence" of science and religion still sounds odd is that, especially in American society, religion is usually identified with behavior: how we act-- or how others think we should act. For many, "religion" means either private morality at the individual level or political and social ethics at the academic level.

But religion isn't about behavior, it's about experience.

Specifically, religion is about that kind of experience of the numinous in the natural world which Thomas Berry describes as "coming from so deep within us that it seems to come from outside us." As I noted in post #90, Berry emphasizes that this was the experience of our earliest human ancestors and that the capacity for it is still in our genes today.

We know that in all the world's spiritual traditions, the emphasis is first of all on experience, not morality. Ethical behavior, both personal and communal, follows, rather than precedes, religious experience. 

Matthew Fox expresses this understanding nicely in a recent interview. Religious experience, he says, "finds its full expression in service and work of justice-making and compassion."

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So why do the patriarchal religions of the West put so much emphasis on private behavior?

By definition, patriarchy wants-- and indeed, needs-- to be in control. 

And what easier way to control people than by making them feel guilty about their behavior? Especially by telling them that the purpose of their lives is to escape from body and world.

In contrast to patriarchal dualism, the dynamic religious perspective understands the purpose of our lives to be our conscious participation in the world's evolutionary development. And-- from astronomy and biology to neuro-science, depth psychology and cultural anthropology-- all the branches of contemporary science support that perspective.

Another way to say it is that religion, in the dynamic-evolutionary perspective, is first of all a response to the mystery of our own existence. I've quoted the words of Karl Rahner many times in this blog. He says that "the great question of our time is not whether God exists, but whether we willing to be sensitive and responsive to the mystery which is always and everywhere making itself known to us."

"Sensitive and responsive," says Rahner. Two things!

Modern science helps us to be sensitive. Thanks to the evolutionary perspective, we are more aware today than ever before of the dynamic cosmos from which we have emerged and with which we are so much a part that we recognize that "all things are our relations."

And religion helps us to be responsive. Our appreciation of the world and gratefulness for our existence in it is the very heart of the Judeo-Christian response to reality.

So, as strange as the name of this post may at first seem, I think "Evolution and Holy Communion" is exactly right for the thoughts I'm attempting to share here.

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When we think about it, making sense of the Christian Eucharist in an evolutionary worldview should be easy. In post #90 I described Thomas Berry's understanding of the cosmic task of humanity-- to "return the world to itself and to its numinous origins"-- and Alexander 

Schmemann's expression of that same idea-- that "our primary role in the cosmos is to be priest."

But the perspectives of the static-dualistic religious context get in the way of the deeper realities expressed by the ancient words like "communion" and "eucharist."

In that static worldview, the word "communion" referred not to an action but to an object. The Eucharist was the blessed bread which was "received" from the hands of others during a service but which otherwise was kept locked in a special container or sometimes displayed for adoration.

In contrast to that view of communion as something which was given to those who received it, in the evolutionary worldview-- which was that of the early Christians-- the Eucharist isn't a thing but an action. It is a communal activity, an action shared in common by the gathered community.

And as an action done by the whole community together, the Eucharist is a communal affirmation-- a saying "yes" to ourselves and to all things as expressions of the Mystery of God. It is especially a recognition of ourselves as empowered by the energy of the dynamic holy Spiritus to carry out our public work ("liturgia" in Greek) of co-creative participation in the cosmic process.

And it's here-- in our common task-- that morality and ethics come in. 

Although still understood conventionally in terms of patriarchal prohibitions ("don't do this, don't do that"), morality in fact is nothing less than our creative participation in the cosmic process at the human level. Compassion and justice-making, as Matthew Fox says, are the kinds of behavior that follow from the fact that we are in communion with all things.

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In past ages, this basic understanding of the Christian Eucharist as a cosmic thanksgiving and as a rite of communal empowerment for participation in global humanity's cultural development became "eclipsed," as some religious thinkers politely put it. It was lost.

But it's being recovered. And the story of its recovery is a fascinating part of Western culture's history. Historically, the recovery of the dynamic understanding of Eucharist first emerged in a few monasteries in Europe sometime in the late 1800s.

What's especially fascinating is that this was just around the same time that Darwin's Origin of Species was becoming known to the general public.

While today everyone knows the name of Charles Darwin, almost no one-- yet!-- recognizes the names of religious researchers such as Odo Casel among Catholics, Gregory Dix among Anglicans and Nicholas Afanassiev among Eastern Orthodox. All of these thinkers were early contributors to the recovery of the dynamic understanding of the Eucharist.

It's only because of my personal life-long interest in both science and religion-- and specifically, in cosmic evolution and religious ritual-- that I'm aware of those late 19th- and early 20th- century religious thinkers.

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But I don't think it's just a coincidence that this recovery of the dynamic understanding of the Eucharist began around the same time that humanity was becoming more conscious of the evolutionary worldview of modern science.

From a long-range point of view, we can see that the same dynamic energy of the evolutionary process operating at the cosmic and biological levels is also empowering the process at the level of humanity's cultural development.

And while Western religion saw the dynamic process first, and called it "passover" and "transfiguration" and "new creation"-- and understood it to be empowered by the holy spiritus-- in our day Western science converges with this in-depth religious understanding of our place in the cosmos.

This convergence doesn't seem at all to be a coincidence. It seems to me to be a perfectly clear example of the Evolutionary Spiritus at work in human self-awareness as part of the evolutionary process taking place on our planet at the level of human culture.

And to put these thoughts in a very big picture, I don't doubt that a similar process is taking place on other planets in the cosmos where personal awareness has emerged. We can expect that the same kind of cultural development is being called forth elsewhere by that same dynamic Energy (urge, impetus, drive, holy spiritus) which has been behind the unfolding of the universe for the last 14 billion years.

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One final thought. Nothing of the more conventional understanding of the Eucharist is negated by seeing those teachings in the broader perspectives we have today as a result of both scientific and theological research.

There are no contradictions. Indeed, there is much enrichment!

Just as what's meant in the evolutionary context by "Holy Spirit" is precisely the divine life-force, the energy empowering the cosmic process, so it's equally clear that what's meant by "Holy Communion" in the evolutionary context is our union with all things in the created world and with the ultimate mystery of which we and they together are the epiphany.

Our contemporary context of cosmic-biological-cultural evolution was unavailable to the early followers of Jesus. We can see more easily today that the main point of the weekly gathering (ekklesia) by those early Christians is conscious awareness of and thanksgiving (eucharist) for humanity's place and role in the world.

The view of the world as cosmic process-- the evolution of material complexity and the emergence of personal awareness-- is the essence of the scientific view of reality. And communal thanksgiving for that dynamic reality as it is now revealed to us by science is the essence of the Judeo-Christian response to it.

So, as I see it, Western science and Western religion converge not just 
in greatly valuing human persons but in their awareness as well of humanity's communion with all things.

And what else can that be called other than a holy communion?

sam@macspeno.com

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P.S. Our communion "with the divine presence dwelling and working in all persons and things of the physical universe" has nothing about it of the sentimentality associated, for example, with having children dressed up in white clothing for their first holy communion.

On the morning after the announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the prophetic Shalom Center in Philadelphia, whom I've mentioned in several previous posts (#47 and #51), sent a note which helps us to see just how challenging it is to understand Holy Communion in its own native-- evolutionary-- context.

Rabbi Arthur begins: "How do we address the death of a mass murderer?"

He observes that in the commentaries on the story of the Passover and its celebration at the Seder, the rabbinical tradition says that God did not rebuke Moses and the children of Israel for singing and dancing when Pharaoh and his soldiers were drowned in the sea. But when the angels began to dance and sing as well, God rebuked them: "These also are the work of My hands. We must not rejoice at their deaths!"

He also notes that at the Passover Seder "we spill wine from our cups as we mention each plague, lest we drink that wine to celebrate these disasters that befell our oppressors."

"The legend," says Rabbi Arthur, "is not addressed to angels but to our higher selves."

We see just how challenging is the Judeo-Christian understanding of thanksgiving and of our communion with all things when we understand that our higher selves-- our deeper, truer, more inclusive selves-- may not rejoice in the death of any creature.

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#40. Wisdom/Sophia

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This post is the third in the series introduced with #37 where I described plans for "What's Next." My probably overly-ambitious aim is to look at the Judeo-Christian tradition in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution.

Post #38 (Exodus) deals with the origin of the evolutionary worldview. The main idea is that the Exodus event occasioned a breakthrough in human consciousness: a major step in humanity's movement out of the cyclic mind-set of the Neolithic period. In the agricultural age of the Great Mother, the plant cycle of life-death-life-- where nothing new ever happens-- dominated the human mind. With the Exodus, the Hebrew people realized that something new had happened. As odd as it may seem, the Great Escape from Egypt was the beginning of the evolutionary-scientific view of the world.

Post #39 (Hebrew Thought) deals with this dynamic understanding of nature which grew out of the Exodus experience and which stands in the greatest contrast to the negative and static views about the natural world then current in Mediterranean culture. The biblical mind sees the world as good rather than as something from which we need to escape; and as the French philosopher Claude Tresmontant says, it sees "being" itself, the central concept of Greek metaphysics, as dynamic rather than static. Tresmontant notes that the idea that it is the nature of whatever exists to be continually evolving is as significant as the discovery of fire.

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While the reflections of the Jewish people on the Great Escape from Egypt opened the mind of humanity to the dynamic-evolutionary view of the world, it hasn't been an easy transition. It has taken the western world more than three thousand years to catch on to the fact that "it's the nature of whatever exists to be continually evolving." As Teilhard says, "We're just coming out of the Neolithic Age."

But the central concepts in Hebrew thought-- newness and creativity-- don't sound to us like biblical ideas, even though they are expressed clearly in the Bible's wisdom literature and were continued into early Christian times by the New Testament authors and the early Fathers of the Church. Why aren't they an obvious part of the Judeo-Christian tradition?

Those evolutionary perspectives were lost after the Dark Ages and replaced by the static worldview of Greek thought promoted by Scholastic philosophy. That static view has dominated western culture since the 14th century. It wasn't until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the evolutionary perspectives of the Judeo-Christian tradition began to be recovered once again.

As I noted in post #38, "Scholars in areas such as biblical, liturgical and patristic studies began to recover it on the religious side, while researchers in astronomy, physics, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology-- and most recently in the area of neuroscience-- did the same on the science side."

In our day, science and religion are converging in humanity's efforts at self-understanding. That's the main idea of my blog efforts. And at the heart of that convergence is the idea of creative newness, the dynamic rather than static worldview of Hebrew thought which is enshrined in the Bible's Wisdom literature. So the Wisdom literature is the focus of this post.

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The Bible's wisdom books are much less known than the historical and the prophetic books.

The Bible's historical stories "are in our blood," as C. G. Jung says. Almost everybody in western culture knows the story of Noah and the ark, for example; Moslems even have an annual feast remembering the ark's safe landing after the flood. And most of us have at least heard of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Joshua and the battle of Jericho, and the story of David and Goliath.

We're less familiar with the Bible's prophetic literature. Some references in Christmas carols to the messianic prophecies-- the lineage of Jesse, the little town of Bethlehem, and the ox and ass at the crib, for example-- are familiar, and most of us know the names of the prophets "Isaiah" and "Jeremiah," but that's about it. We hardly know anything at all about the Bible's wisdom literature.

The one explicit reference to Divine Wisdom which may be familiar to many of us is found in the often sung Advent hymn, Come, O Come, Immanuel. It not only names Divine Wisdom, it also describes wisdom's cosmic function: "Come, O Come, thou Wisdom from on high, who orders all things mightily." It's saying that Wisdom's "job," if you will, is to take care of everything.

It's an unfamiliar idea, to be sure. Even the names of some of the wisdom books sound strange: Ecclesiastes, Quoleth, and Sirach, for example. Some wisdom books are not counted as authentic scripture in Protestant Bibles, and even in the churches with strong liturgical traditions (such as the Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) very little of the wisdom literature is included in their liturgical readings. In the 1990s, one Methodist group even passed a law prohibiting the reading of wisdom books at their Sunday services.

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Why the hostility? How come the Bible's wisdom literature is treated so poorly?

We need to keep in mind two things. One is that while the focus of Hebrew thought is dynamic creativity-- "the universe branching out into ever newer things," as Tresmontant expresses it-- patriarchy is about just the opposite: stasis, not dynamis, control, not creativity. The other thing to keep in mind is that the wisdom literature also has a strong feminine aspect. It's easy to see why the patriarchal churches ignore it.

A major problem in western culture is that we hardly know what the word "wisdom" means. As I mentioned in post #34, we live in what has been called in Susan Jacoby's recent book, The Age of American Unreason, a "culture of distraction." The superficiality of so much in contemporary society prevents us from focusing on the deeper aspects of our lives. In our trivia-based culture we readily can name celebrities in politics and in the sports and entertainment industries, but who among us can name even one person we would want to call an "elder" or a "sage"?

"Wise people" are in short supply. Most of what might be called wisdom in American culture seems to be found on the Comedy Channel. No wonder we haven't a clue what the biblical literature is referring to!

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Wisdom is, of course, a human quality: it's something in us, neither theoretical nor legalistic but practical: a sense of how to live intelligently and decently. And of course the Bible's wisdom literature also recognizes that wisdom is a divine quality. Wisdom-- hochma in Hebrew, sophia in Greek-- is something we share with God. It's both divine and human.

In the New Testament, Divine Wisdom is usually referred to as logos, the Word of God. The gospel authors apparently shied away from using sophia because it was also being used by other religious movements such as Gnosticism current at that time and they did not want to identify with those movements. (Saint Paul, however, writing several decades earlier than those who wrote the gospels, didn't hesitate to use sophia. In 1 Corinthians 1:30, for example, he says explicitly, "Jesus has become the wisdom of God for us.")

So we may be familiar with Divine Wisdom when it's called the "Word of God," but unfortunately the word "Word" makes wisdom sound like something rational. The Greek word logos (and the Hebrew word for "word," davar or dabar) means far more, however, than "reason" or "thought" or "concept."

Probably the best way to say it is that logos means something like "the divine self-expression," which is of course why the New Testament authors wanted to identify it with Jesus.

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The Hebrew literature talks about wisdom not only as an aspect of God and also as a companion of God-- just the way John's gospel says that in the beginning "the logos was with God and was God."

The Hebrew literature also talks about Wisdom as a feminine aspect of God. It's a recovery of the best aspects of the Neolithic perspectives, but with a practical emphasis on an everyday life of creativity and newness. So Divine Sophia is also the last of the Great Mother images.

But there are many other aspects of hochma-sophia, as well. With my long-time interest in our mind's four-fold nature-- which I've described and made use of in many previous posts-- I've found that exploring Divine Wisdom from the quaternary perspective offers us a wonderfully rich and non-patriarchal understanding of that creativity which is at the heart of all things. I hope to share some of those thoughts in the near future.

The main thought I want to share in this post is the biblical literature's understanding of Wisdom's place in the evolution of the universe.

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The wisdom literature emphasizes that Sophia was with God from the start; she was there at the foundation of the world when humans first appeared. It also emphasizes that she delights in the Earth and its people which God is creating. Here's one description from the Book of Proverbs. Sophia is speaking.

When God set the heavens in place, I was present,
when God drew a ring (the horizon) on the surface of the deep,
when God fixed the clouds above,
when God fixed fast the wells of the deep,
when God assigned the sea its limits--
so the waters will not invade the land--
when God established the foundations of the earth,
I was by God's side, a master craftsperson,
Delighting God day after day,
ever at play by God's side,
at play everywhere in God's domain,
delighting to be with the humanity's children.

Notice the emphasis on creativity and delight. What a new slant on the meaning of divine logos this brief quote offers!

Notice, too, that the translation says Sophia is a "master craftsperson." I've also seen it translated as "master craftswoman." You may be unfamiliar with the Bible Gateway website; it offers about a dozen and a half different English translations of Bible. If you look up a number of the translations of this text from Proverbs you can get an even fuller sense of what Sophia's task is with regard to the world.

If you're not used to looking up Bible passages, it's easy: just open Bible Gateway and plug in "Proverbs 8: 27-31" where it says "enter passage to be looked up."

I find it especially interesting to see how the various translations express what Sophia's part is in the creation of the world. They all emphasize that she works along with God. "I was at God's side," she says. "I was a skilled worker... right there with him," the "master and director of the work." "I was the architect at his side... helping him plan and build... making sure everything fit right."

Although we can easily miss it, Sophia's "job," if you will, as it's described here is precisely what the Advent hymn refers to when it addresses the "Wisdom from on high who orders all things mightily." The original Latin words are Veni, O Sapientia, quae hic disponis omnia. "Disponis" might be translated "disposes" or "carefully arranges." Sophia "methodically orders" everything; she "puts every thing in its proper place," she "sees to it that everything is taken care of."

It's even more interesting to see how the various translations describe what it is that Sophia delights in. Some translations are obviously patriarchal: "I delighted in mankind," "I delighted in the children of man," "in the sons of men." But others are not: "I was delighting in the human race," "in the human family," "in all human beings." "How I rejoiced with the human family!" says Sophia.

Another thing that's easy to miss is that it's not only human beings that Sophia delights in, she delights in the Earth itself: "I was pleased with God's world," "I rejoiced in God's earth," "the whole world filled me with joy." "How happy I was with the world God created!" says Sophia. "I delighted in the world of things and creatures."

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Needless to say, this is not the "world of dead things" which was once thought to be the height of western culture's scientific perspective. Nor is it the "suppression of everything new for the sake of power and control" which patriarchal religions continue to perpetuate today.

As we work our way out of the Neolithic Age-- out of the oppressive values of patriarchy as well as out of the rationalism of the Enlightenment period-- we can see that the human task isn't to escape from "a world of dead things"-- as religious dualism insists-- but to delight in the world of "things and creatures."

As creative participants in Divine Wisdom's on-going creation of the Earth, it's now our job to "order all things well." At the human level of the cosmic process, it's up to us Earthlings to take care of things, to see that everything "fits right."

sam@macspeno.