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

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

ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

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

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

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

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

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

 ===

Dear D:

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

This book is a buried treasure!

+++

#106. Ritual & the Evolution of Culture

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

ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 
http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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

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

===

Dear R,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++

#1. On Recent Developments in Science and Religion

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

ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

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

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

This is my first-ever blog entry. It was sparked by three significant articles which appeared in the media in Oct-Nov 2006. It's both a response to those articles and an attempt to spell out more personal thoughts.

===

Anyone who knows me knows that the two big interests in my life have always been science and religion. Both interests put me outside the mainstream. Being interested in their convergence put me at the very edges of conventional views. But I saw them as two sides of the same coin: both are looking at the same thing (the world, reality), just seeing it from different directions.

Things are very different now. With the takeover of the American government by religious fundamentalists and their attacks in recent years on the scientific enterprise, "religion" once again entered into mainstream awareness. After the 9/11 attacks by religious terrorists, no one, no matter how personally uninterested in religion they may be, can say it's not important.

Unfortunately, "religion" quickly came to mean religious fundamentalism and identified with intolerance, ignorance and superstition. A backlash by reasonable people, especially the rationalists of the scientific world, was expected, and it has arrived.

In the month or so prior Thanksgiving Day, 2006, three significant articles appeared in the mass media with regard to the clash of science and religion. One was TIME magazine's (13 Nov 06) cover essay, "God vs. Science." The drawing on the cover showed a model of the DNA molecule, fading, as in an M. C. Escher drawing, into a Catholic rosary.

The article is as slanted as anything I've ever seen in TIME magazine. It preaches the fundamentalist view and actually mocks scientific knowledge. The TIME authors seemed to be trying to ingratiate themselves with religious fundamentalists; I presume it was a marketing ploy. The article probably was written sometime early in October and the authors seem to have had no clue of the mood of the country that surfaced in the elections a few weeks later.

Another of the three media articles was the NY Times (21 November 2006) report of a conference in La Jolla, CA: "A Free-for-All on Science and Religion." As the "evolutionary evangelist," Michael Dowd, said in his recent web zine, it expresses the backlash against religious fundamentalism from within the science community, and makes quite clear that that backlash is itself a form of fundamentalism, scientific fundamentalism in this case. But neither religious fundamentalism nor scientific fundamentalism is "where it's at," to be sure.

"Where it's at," it seems to me, is best described by the cover essay of US News (15 Oct 06), Is There Room for the Soul? It's about the scientific study of the nature of consciousness. In terms of cultural development, this article is easily a century beyond the silliness of TIME's pro-religious fundamentalism. But it's not easy reading; it shows just how complicated our present situation is. All three articles are on-line. It's the "Room for the Soul?" article I most feel the need to talk about.

It was written by Jay Tolson of the Woodrow Wilson Center in DC, an institution set up for the communication of academic ideas to the non-academic public. It reviews the whole history of the issues involved and tries to spell out the current situation concerning our understanding of what it is-- soul, mind, spirit, consciousness-- that makes us human.

===

After many centuries of religious and philosophical dualism-- the division of a human being into a physical body and an immaterial soul, a view originally kicked off by Plato-- science is beginning to work on the question of consciousness. St. Augustine inserted the dualistic idea into western religious thought, Rene Descartes did the same for western secular-scientific thought many centuries later.

The modern scientific effort got off to a good start in late 19th-century Germany, with people like Mesmer, Freud and Jung, and was very significantly carried forward with the work of the American psychologist William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). But it got derailed in the early 20th-century by "rats in the maze" psychology and a tremendous amount of fuzzy thinking which we still are dealing with.

Only with the mid-20th century invention of the computer and the technology resulting from it (such as MRIs and other brain scanning tools), has "consciousness studies," as it's usually now called, begun to get itself together. The US News article makes for difficult reading because of its efforts to sort out the fuzzy thinking and lack of clarity involved. Humanity's efforts to move beyond the long-established views of western civilization is not an easy process, to be sure!

At first, I was disappointed when reading the US News article: the research scientist I'm most interested in, the University of Pennsylvania's Andrew Newberg, wasn't mentioned. But surprise! There he was at the very end, his work and that of his late colleague Gene D'Aquili listed almost as a kind of grand climax to the whole essay. Newberg is professor of nuclear medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the university's recently founded Center for Spirituality and the Mind.

Friends may remember the report I sent via e-mail last spring of a fascinating conference on Spirituality and Medicine I attended at the University of Pennsylvania, which was organized by Newberg and his associates. Tolson's article presents Newberg's work as the growing edge, "pointing in a promising direction," of the whole movement begun more than a century ago to come to a clear scientific understanding of the nature of human consciousness.

I'd been interested in Newberg's work ever since reports of his research first began to appear in the media back in the early 1990s; but it was only after that March 2006 conference that I got to read his books.

His first book, written with Eugene D'Aquili, is The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (Augsburg Fortress, 1999). I found it incomprehensible.

His second book, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (Ballantine, 2002), was written with the help of a journalist, Vince Rause. It's a bit better; but it's still not very good. It seems that these research scientists don't have good teaching skills. They just don't seem to be able to do a good job at communicating their findings.

Despite my disappointment with both of Newberg's books, I found them very exciting. That sounds contradictory, but it's not. Thanks to Newberg's book, I have, as I said to many, "finally found my vocation in life." Since early Spring last year I've had the feeling that I was about to enter into a whole new phase of my life, and that is indeed what has happened.

As I said in a letter to a friend last summer: 'After all these years, I think I have finally-- in my 69th year!-- found my "field" or "area of interest" or "vocation," my "calling from the universe." '

'I have found [I went on to say] a group of science researchers who put into words the kinds of things I've been interested in all my life; they "think the way I do," is the way I've tried to say it. They are centered in Philadelphia, just across the (Delaware) river, at the University of Pennsylvania; involved in neurological research in connection with religious experience. I am, so it seems, an evolutionary structuralist.'

Newberg's third book, just out, is: Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth (Free Press, 2006). It was written with the therapist Mark Robert Waldman, founder of the academic journal, Transpersonal Review. It's far, far better in every way than those first two books. If you want to read something of Newberg's, I suggest you just skip the earlier books and pick up this one.

I'm saying that (i.e., "skip the earlier books") despite the fact that it was those which provided the spark that probably will keep me going for the rest of my life.

What I've discovered in Newberg's writings is the work of the earlier generation of scientists on which his work is based. His work is a kind of second generation research. It's the work of the first generation, out of which his work is coming, that I've found so fascinating. Newberg spells it out a bit on pages 281-282 of his recent book. It's called Biogenetic Structuralism.

===

The work began around 1970 thanks to a chance conference-meeting of Canadian cultural anthropologist, Charles D. Laughlin, and University of Pennsylvania neurologist, John McManus.

They quickly realized that they had something to say together. Their first book, published in 1974, was called simply Biogenetic Structuralism. Their second, which appeared in 1979, is The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis. Both were published by Columbia University Press. A third appeared in 1990, Brain, Symbol & Experience (New Science Library).

I'm not exaggerating when say that these scientists seem to be dealing with the same things I've considered important all my life and that the best way I can describe it is that their way of thinking seems to be my way of thinking, too.

An interesting sidelight: used copies of the first and third of these three books are readily available via Amazon. But copies of the middle one, on ritual, aren't. No used copies were listed by any of the used-book sellers; even the publisher had none left (Rosy contacted them for me). 

But then a copy became listed by a used-books seller. The price: $1,870.00. I wrote asking if maybe the decimal had been displaced. "Is it really $18.70?" Nope, said the seller. But he also mentioned that he knew of another seller who had just listed a copy, in much less good shape than his, for only $90. My Scotch genes rebelled, but Rosy and Anne encouraged me to get it. "Think of it as an old-age extravagance." So I did. I've made a little shrine for it over my desk.

It feels good to have discovered where I fit in with the human enterprise of trying to understand human existence. And to know that my religious interests, especially in liturgy and ritual, and my scientific interests, especially in biological and cosmic evolution, have a central place in the contemporary scientific study of consciousness.

===

The term "structuralism" in Biogenetic Structuralism comes from the famous European anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss. Essentially it's an emphasis, previously lacking, surprisingly, in scientific and sociological thought, on how the parts of a whole fit together and relate to one another. It seems so elementary, but it really was a new way of looking at things, hardly more than a half-century ago.

Most of us, myself included, have very little sense of what the science of cultural anthropology is about. But it is of major significance. It might be described briefly by an analogy with psychology. As psychology deals with individuals, asking: How do people act? What do individuals do? and Why do they do it?, so the emphasis in cultural anthropology is on how people act in groups (ethnic groups, large or small societies, even whole cultures): What do societies and cultures do? and Why do groups of people do what they do?

Personally, this seems to me to be the most fascinating area of science-- ever. I said many times, long before I discovered Biogenetic Structuralism, that I would love to have majored in cultural anthropology when I was in college-- had I known in those days that there was such a thing.

The term "biogenetic" in Biogenetic Structuralism is simply a synonym for "evolutionary." Thus the evolutionary structuralist perspective seeks not only to understand how and why people act as they do in social groups; it also takes into account the entire biological history of life on earth in doing so: it see humans, individuals and humanity as a whole, as the major result on planet Earth of cosmic and biological evolution.

Biogenetic Structuralism clearly holds to a non-dualist perspective, in that it does not put humans in a unique category outside the rest of the natural world but, rather, sees us an integral part of the evolution of the universe. It recognizes that human cultures and civilization have their roots in the behavior of our animal ancestors, just as the human body has its roots in the chemical compounds of which it is composed-- and just as the chemical elements themselves have their roots the galaxies and stars where they were first produced.

Although many would think so, this view does not in any way deny soul or spirit or mind, but it does enlarge and expand our perspectives tremendously; and it offers the beginnings of a much more mature understanding of the religious aspects of our human existence. Today, we know far more about our roots in the past than Plato or Augustine ever could. They did their best in their day; we should do no less in ours to deepen our understanding of human existence.

===

Religious activities, rites and symbols are, of course, a major object of study for cultural anthropology. And even though, until recently, most anthropological field work was done among the so-called "primitive" tribes in places like Africa or in the Amazon Basin, for example, its findings apply equally to all of humanity's religious activities. This includes everything from a shamanic healing ceremony in New Guinea to a Lakota sun dance in South Dakota, and from a Catholic mass at a nearby suburban parish to Buddhist meditators in the Himalayas.

The evolutionary emphasis in Biogenetic Structuralism seeks to look at all of these religious ritual activities in the same terms as do those scientists in the field of ethology who study things like the territorial rituals of wolves and the courtship rituals of birds. The Biogenetic Structuralist viewpoint puts much emphasis on using the one same language to understand and talk about such behavior across the spectrum of living things-- humanity, of course, not excluded.

To me, this is one of the most significant things about Biogenetic Structuralism. It's a new viewpoint, for most of us, to see that our social behavior has its roots in the behavior of our animal ancestors, just as our human anatomy and physiology has its roots in the anatomy and physiology of those same pre-human ancestors. This is not a denial of human uniqueness but, rather, a clear look at its roots, and thus allows us an even greater appreciation of that uniqueness we call consciousness (or soul or spirit or mind).

All this sounds complicated. And, indeed, it is. But there's even one additional and very major component of Biogenetic Structuralism that I need to mention: neurology, the study of the brain and nervous system. And, again, specifically in terms of its evolutionary development.

The Biogenetic Structuralist perspective looks at the anatomy and physiology of the brain in terms of its evolutionary development from those primitive flatworms that have only a few hundred nerves cells to the much more complex reptilian and mammalian brains, including our own-- with its billions of nerve cells combined into astoundingly complex arrangements. The human brain is the most complex thing known to us in the whole universe, and just as we know far more about our roots in the past than Plato or Augustine ever could, so we know more about the workings of the brain than Descartes could ever have imagined.

A major goal of the biogenetic structuralist perspective is to understand how the individual and social behavior of animals and humans is related to the workings of the brain and nervous system. Thus it combines the findings of neurology and cultural anthropology. And here, too, the ideal is to be able to use the one same language to talk about both neurological processes and our cultural behavior: to use the same words to relate how people act-- as individuals and in social groups-- with what's going on in the brain.

===

This perspective is referred to as "monist" or "non-dualist." Sometimes it's called "unitary" or "unitive." As I said earlier, it's not in any way a denial of what people call soul, spirit, mind, psyche, consciousness, but simply an attempt to understand both matter and spirit in a more updated way than was available to us previously.

For many of us, it's not easy even to keep each of these various perspectives together in our minds at one time, so it's not surprising that we don't yet have any commonly recognizable name for what might be called "neurological anthropology."

But that's where humanity's "at." That's the growing edge of the contemporary effort at human self-understanding in terms of our material and biological origins and our cultural and religious perspectives. The contemporary scientific enterprise uses all the information that's available to us; it tries not to leave anything out. It's the very opposite of both religious fundamentalism and its present backlash, scientific fundamentalism. And as I've said: I find all this to be as attractive and fascinating as anything I've come across in my life.

===

Personally, I feel that I was born into both an evolutionary world and a religious world. I never saw them in contradiction. They seem to be about the same thing, just looked at from different directions. In my many years of teaching at various levels, I often said to students in a scientific (and sometimes anti-religion context), "There's more to religion than it seems." And in a religious (and frequently anti-science context) I usually said the same thing. (Not, "there's more to science than it seems," but there's more to our religious traditions than it seems.")

And there is, indeed, more: there's an inner core of wisdom at the depth of the Judeo-Christian tradition which got lost precisely due to the body-soul and matter-spirit dualism which dominated western culture and religion for so long.

And as odd as it might seem to religious fundamentalists, contemporary science is helping us reclaim it.

It's understandable that when the modern scientific attitude first emerged a few centuries ago, it rejected the soul-spirit side of dualism, just as religious dualism had long since devalued and rejected the body-matter side. We're finally moving beyond that split. Our schizophrenic culture has the potential to be healed, and it's especially via the findings of the neurological and anthropological sciences that that healing can happen.

So that's where I find myself.

===

I don't have anything more to say about the "God vs. Religion" article in TIME than I said earlier. I'd like to think of it as the dying gasps of the arrogance that has pervaded religious fundamentalism in recent years.

I do have some comments on the "Free-For-All" report in the NY Times. One the things it points to is the gross deficiencies we have permitted to exist in both our science education and religious education programs.

For example, the report says that there is among scientists "a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace." If that's true, then clearly it is the science establishment's fault. The academic and research science world needs to pay far more attention to what's going on in science education at the college, secondary and primary levels.

The article quotes a Dr. Porco of the Space Science Institute saying, “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty." Yes, let's!

Then she adds, "It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.” That comment shows her ignorance.

But it's an ignorance which isn't her fault. That she can't see that science's story and religion's story are the same story is religion's fault. Dualistic religion is what split the world into matter and spirit, so religion has to shape up, no less than science. Indeed, religion has to shape up even more than science.

Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience, has the right idea. He says that both scientists and religious people have to begin questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs.

There is after all only one reality, and the most fundamental human response to it is awe and wonder, which is the basis for both scientific discovery and religious participation in the world's progressive unfolding. As Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, said: “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.” Indeed! Some of us call it an experience of "mystery." And it's precisely neurological studies that can help us understand the nature of such experience.

And of course we need a sense of meaning and purpose, as the evolutionary biologist Francisco J. Ayala mentioned. But our sense of "identity" or "significance" (our "sacredness," as we can say in a religious context) comes from a different part of the psyche than does information from the thinking processes so extensively used by science. 

We need a wholistic understanding of how the mind works. And neurological studies like those of Andrew Newberg and associates can make a great contribution to that understanding.

===

I have a few comments on the US News "Room for the Soul?" article. It has seven sections; the last two, despite their harsh-sounding titles (Survival Machines and Hard-Line), are well-worth whatever time and energy we can give them.

If modern science's evolutionary perspectives help us understand where we fit into "the grand scheme of things," consciousness studies deals with the even more basic question, "Why?" The question "What is our place?" probably is the most comprehensive question we can ask. But asking, "What's our purpose?" takes us even deeper.

Before saying something about that, however, I want to mention another side of the issue of moving beyond dualism that's easily overlooked: the fact that a non-dualistic view of the world changes our understanding of matter as much as it changes our understanding of mind.

Dualistic scientists want to describe us as "nothing more than Darwinian survival machines." That's the "nothing but" view, called "reductive materialism," which dominated experimental science from its beginnings in the 17th century to the early 20th century.

But we know now, especially from physics and quantum mechanics, that the further one goes down the scale of physical reality, the less "material" matter appears to be. It's been said that "at bottom, there is no materiality." In Tolson's words, "The further we look into the flux of particles and waves at subatomic levels, the more reality seems to consist of nonmaterial information, pure potentialities of matter or energy, but not quite either."

The basic source of the material world, including life and consciousness, is sometimes called the Plenum ("Fullness") or the Quantum Sea or the Implicate Order. New Cosmologist Brian Swimme's phrase is "the all-nourishing abyss." Some call it the Hindu "Akashic Field" or the Buddhist "Void." One of my favorites comes from Chinese Taoism, where it's named the "Great Mother": the "No-thing from which comes every thing." That there are names for it from the ancient Asian traditions shows that it's not a new idea. Using the language of waves and particles, western science became aware of it early in the 20th-century, so it's not even a new idea in the world of contemporary science.

Most surprising and radical, and as yet not part of the conventional perspectives of our culture, contemporary science says that consciousness itself makes a difference to our understanding of matter. What we humans observe apparently depends on our observation of it. That is, human consciousness influences how physical reality shows itself.

As Tolson puts it, "Not only quantum mechanics but a number of new fields such as the science of complexity put into question the whole enterprise of explaining reality in terms of bottom-up causality alone." 

By "bottom-up causality" he means understanding the mind in terms of matter. From quantum physics we're coming to see that we need "top-down" causality too: we need to understand matter in terms of mind, not just mind in terms of matter.

It's clear now that neither "mind" nor "matter" mean today what those terms have meant for the last few centuries and longer. There's more to both mind and matter than Plato, Augustine or Descartes ever knew. 

They were giants in their day, but with regard to an understanding of our own past, the nature of the cosmos, and the functioning of the brain and psyche, we know far more than they did; we don't need to remain stuck with their dualistic understandings.

===

It is a big change, to be sure. We're in the middle of an immense transition to these new perspectives. But that's precisely what cultural evolution means: as we learn more, our understanding of the world we live in changes, improves, gets better. We're still young, newcomers to the planet. As an immature species, we have a lot of growing to do: we have much still to learn.

And none of it will take anything away from the best of the past. Part of our present task is to sort out what's no longer useful or valid, as important as it may have seemed in earlier, less-informed contexts.

One of the main things that's being said in Tolson's "Room for the Soul?" article is that just as biological life is something more than merely the chemical elements and compounds which compose it, so the human mind is something more than just living matter. And it's this "more" which is, at the human level, the source of meaning for us.

As Tolson puts it, "If the fundamental levels of reality are more informational than material, as quantum physics suggests, then consciousness may be the interface between the fundamental quantum world of information and the "classical" physical world that is more accessible to our senses." That is, consciousness may be the interface between the Quantum Sea or Plenum and the world we see, touch, hear and experience.

From the new scientific perspectives, it may be that the mind (soul, spirit, person) is, in Tolson's words, "a profoundly complex emergent system whose capacity for intentional acts and creative discoveries connects it with the underlying order of reality." He's saying that we are its manifestations.

That's where our understanding of the "Why do humans do what they do?" comes from. We not only have a better sense of our place in the scheme of things, we also have a much better sense of our purpose. It would appear that, via both our personal and cultural development, we have a contribution to make, a creative role to play in the evolution of the universe.

Has anyone said things like this before? Yes, indeed! Two of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century: the Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Russian Orthodox Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov. In Bulgakov's words, the human role in the evolution of the universe is to contribute to the "actualization of the divine potentialities."

Teilhard worked in the physical sciences and Bulgakov worked in the social sciences (economics). It's thanks especially to these two 20th-century geniuses that we are able to recover that more of religion which I described above as "the inner core of wisdom at the depth of the Judeo-Christian tradition which got lost precisely due to the body-soul and matter-spirit dualism which dominated western culture and religion for so long."

===

But what is a person? What is it that we are? That's the essential question of consciousness studies. What is this "profoundly complex emergent system," as Tolson describes it, that we call "mind" (person, soul, spirit) and which has the "capacity for intentional acts and creative discoveries" and thereby connects us "with the underlying order of reality"?

Tolson quotes the very first line from Francis Crick's 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Crick was the discoverer, along with James Watson, of the double helical structure of DNA. He's obviously in the fundamentalist, "bottom-up," camp in his understanding of consciousness. He attacks the dualistic idea of body-soul directly by reducing the mind to nothing but matter in the 19th-century pre-quantum sense: "The Astonishing Hypothesis," he says, "is that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

Surely we can do better. Not only can we understand that by our "intentional acts and creative discoveries" we are connected with-- indeed manifestations of-- "the underlying order of reality." It may be, as Tolson also points out, that our consciousness is not, in fact, any thing.

Note that saying "it's not a thing" doesn't mean consciousness isn't real or that the mind doesn't exist, but only that "thing" may not be an accurate way to understand it.

As Tolson says, "Here, Christians and others might turn to the wisdom of Buddhism, in which the self is correctly understood not as an entity or substance but as a dynamic process." Note that the Buddhist concept does not suggest (as is commonly thought) that the self is nonexistent but that the mystery of the self cannot be reduced to any kind of substance, essence or thing. (What Buddhism does negates is the reality of the self-affirming "big ego" kind of self.)

Consciousness studies seems to be saying, as Tolson suggests, something similar to what Buddhism means when it sees the self as a process rather than a substance. And this makes great sense. If the cosmos is a dynamic process, and each of us is an "interface" with (or an "epiphany" of) that dynamic quantum world, then in our deepest reality we too must be a dynamic cosmic process.

So Francis Crick's statement would be quite accurate, if we simply changed his "nothing more than" to "nothing less." Keeping in mind the perspectives of quantum physics that the physical cosmos, biological life and human consciousness are manifestations of the underlying Quantum Sea, here's how I'd phrase Crick's opening sentence: Via the behavior of the vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules in the brain, 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are nothing less than a glorious manifestation of reality in all its fullness.

If we use Bulgakov's words, it becomes a truly astonishing hypothesis: You, via the nerve cells and molecules in your brain, are an actualization of the divine potentialities. In more traditional religious language: Each of us is an incarnation of the divine mystery, a "unique-in-all-the-world dynamic manifestation of the Mystery of God."

And as a uniquely self-constructed actualization of the divine potentialities, it would appear that our purpose, then, is to make a freely given contribution to the evolution of the universe and the divine self-realization.

That's the non-dualist (unitive) view of reality, understood from a non-fundamentalist religious perspective. And there are some within the Christian tradition who have been saying similar things for a number of years now: that we have much we can learn from the Asian "unitive" traditions.

Perhaps familiar examples would include the Frenchman, Henri Le Saux; the British monk and friend of C. S. Lewis, Bede Griffiths; and the Spanish-Indian theologian Raimon Panikkar. And in our own country, Bruno Barnhart and his fellow monks of the Camaldolese Benedictine order at Big Sur in California.

===

It may seem like a enormous jump to go from quantum theory to theology; and it is! But that's the whole point. At least that's my whole point. Science and religion are indeed "two sides of the same coin," two different views of the one same world, looked at from different directions.

As I said earlier, Tolson's concludes his article with mention of the work of Andrew Newberg. He says Newberg's work as professor of nuclear medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of his university's recently founded Center for Spirituality and the Mind is a "cross-disciplinary program devoted in part to the fledgling field of "neuro-theology."

Tolson also notes that "In one respect, this venture [in neuro-theology] marks yet another return to the legacy of William James, whose masterful Varieties of Religious Experience" appeared 100 years ago. As I also said earlier, Tolson's essay ends with the very positive comment about the findings of Newberg and his late colleague, Eugene D'Aquili," that they "point in a promising direction."

It's taken me ten pages to get to where I can say: I want to follow in that promising direction.

I don't usually read the daily horoscopes, but I often check them on the birthdays of friends and relatives. Back on my own birthday in November of 2005, my horoscope said: "You are beginning a new phase of your life." My response: "I'll take it!"

And it was about six months later, in June of this year, that thanks to the work of Andrew Newberg and his biogenetic structuralist predecessors in cultural anthropology and neurological studies, I was able to say, 'I have finally-- in my 69th year!-- found the name for my "calling from the universe." ' I got the name slightly wrong when I said "I am an evolutionary structuralist," but it was close enough.

In future entries, I'd like to try to spell out what I see as some of the interesting lines of thought about the convergence of science and religion I'm hoping to pursue with the help of Biogenetic Structuralism.

sam@macspeno.com