Western society and its religions have traditionally fallen on the dualistic end of the philosophical spectrum. Good is good and bad is bad. Good is rewarded and bad is punished. God is all powerful and up in the heavens – transcendent. We are sinners way down here, and going to hell if we aren’t careful. Or if we don’t belong to the “right” religion.

Non Sequitur 10/29/09

Eastern religions have been more non-dualistic. There is yin in yang and good in bad. The spirit inside a person, Atman, and the spirit of the universe, Brahman, are the same. Spirit is immanent – in all things. The three religions of China – Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism – often meld the strengths of each and find a way to all get along.

For this and other reasons, there were few Western writings on the unity of Spirit and Creation until quite recently. Even the European mystics were trying to close the gap between themselves and God rather than believing there wasn’t a gap.

But then the tenor of late 1800s began opening some doors, in part because travel made contact between East and West easier. The first Hindu to set foot in the West came as a visitor to the Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893.

By the late 1930s, French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin was writing a stunningly non-dualistic vision of the Cosmic Christ, but on orders from the Vatican the controversial treatise wasn’t published until  the 1950s, when The Phenomenon of Man came out in French and English. It was discussed in some progressive Catholic colleges by the 1960s, although with the caveat that some Church officials felt his views bordered on pantheism, a no-no.

Since the mid-20th Century, Buddhism has taken root in the West; Hindus have grown to more than a million in the U.S. and practices such as yoga, tai chi and qi gong have introduced everyday people to Eastern concepts.

At the same time, changes in secular society in the West have created an atmosphere in which the unity of God and Creation could be seriously considered. Even the new physics and the interconnectiveness of the internet have given us a new way to look at reality.

In essence, if one’s entire philosophy and world view is built on dichotomy, a separate, remote God makes the most sense. When the focus is more on interconnections, the Vedic Upanishads’ sparks flying from the same fire can become part of our belief system again.

As I searched for writings for In the Same Breath, a few examples from the earliest times and today were particularly striking. In perhaps the most interconnected, a 20th century Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, studied the writings of one of the founders of Taoism, Chuang Tzu, and  wrote personal versions of his favorites. Merton was part of a group of Christian, Buddhist and Hindu monks who studied and prayed together as part of an ongoing inter-monastic dialogue.

Chuang Tzu lived between 370 and 301 BCE. His writing is mind-bending and often shot-through with surprising humor. One of his writings in The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu is responsible for the domain name of the blog – beginningless.  Merton’s version is in his 1965 book, The Way of Chuang Tzu. Merton died in 1968 while traveling in Asia.

Chuang Tzu

There is a beginning. There is not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing.

Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don’t know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn’t said something.

There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T’ai is tiny. No one has lived longer than a dead child, and P’eng-tsu died young.

Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me.

Chuang’s words sound to modern ears almost like a Zen koan to tease the mind into reflecting on the mystery of this unity on a deeper level than rational thought. One has to let the words seep into one’s bones over several re-readings to begin to comprehend. That’s the fun of it. This brilliant gibberish, this impenetrable clarity, is early Taoism’s way of describing the unity of spirit and creation.

Thomas Merton

In the Beginning of Beginnings was Void of  Void, the Nameless.

© the Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

And in the Nameless was the One, without body, without form.
This One, this Being in whom all find power to exist  -
Is the Living.
From the Living, comes the Formless, the Undivided.
From the act of this Formless, come the Existents, each according
To its inner principle. This is Form. Here body embraces and cherishes spirit.
The two work together as one, blending and manifesting their Characters. And this is Nature.

But he who obeys Nature returns through Form and Formless to the Living.
And in the Living
Joins the unbegun Beginning.
The joining is Sameness. The sameness is Void. The Void is infinite.
The bird opens its beak and sings its note
And then the beak comes together again in Silence.
So Nature and the Living meet together in Void.
Like the closing of the bird’s beak
After its song.
Heaven and earth come together in the Unbegun,
And all is foolishness, all is unknown, all is like
The lights of an idiot, all is without mind!
To obey is to close the beak and fall into Unbeginning.

When next we meet: Taking a closer look at 600 to 300 BCE and all those beginningless beginnings!

gswimg at eartlhlink dot net

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Goal-seeking in culture

“If it is true, as earlier contended, that all cultures have implicit or explicit goals — that is, purposes toward which they endeavor to move with some sense of direction — then it is also true that all cultures have more or less articulate sets of values that symbolize rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness, beauty or ugliness.  But the nature of cultural goals, like that of order and process, may be interpreted again in conflicting ways, depending upon the metacultural assumptions from which it is approached.”  (p. 58)

“Let us consider … the view that the values of culture are primarily determined by the basic interest of human beings — by their striving for satisfaction of needs and wants. . . . These range all the way from the physiological hunger of food and sex to the more subtle but nevertheless equally genuine sociopsychological wants of recognition and cooperation.”  (p. 59)

“Such an approach to cultural goals may be expressed axiologically as a functional theory of ethics — ethics being defined here as the philosophic study of moral conduct. . . . the interests of human beings everywhere in the world can be found to have many common denominators, no matter how diversified cultures might otherwise be.  Thus, one of the typical contentions of this approach is that we need to study the values of people cross-culturally — that is, to compare one culture with another to see how far their goals function in both similar and different ways.”  (p. 59)

“Another approach to the problems of goals … is the theory that cultures are moving progressively toward an ultimate end that is somehow inherent in the order and process of culture.  According to this theory, goals are the driving force of all cultural change in that they provide the ‘magnets’ that draw men onward and, in a sense, upward toward perfection.”  (p. 60)

“In ontological terms, the view that culture … is moving inevitably toward an ultimate goal is called teleology.  The nature of the goal may vary according to different theorists, however.  Marxists, for example, hold that it is the ‘classless society’ — the Communist ideal of pure economic freedom through public ownership and control of all means of production.  Those of Father Teilhard’s [de Chardin] faith conceive that the ultimate goal is eternal salvation, and that all cultural processes are in one way or another a means to this perfect and final end.”  (p. 60)

“. . . one may hold that the first view of the goal problem — exemplified by Malinowski — is perhaps closer to what we have called the reconstructionist orientation than to the others.  Reconstructionists hold that the delineation of human goals is to be achieved through cross-cultural research that enlists not only anthropology but all the sciences of human behavior, such as psychiatry and political science.”  (p. 60)

“The reconstructionist educator also takes the position that not only is it possible to describe the desires of human beings by such research, but that it is possible to arrive at much greater consensus than we have thus far achieved as to the desirability of the most important cross-cultural goals.  In other words, description could lead to both prescription and proscription of goals — both to those that are recommended as culturally desirable and to those that are condemned as culturally undesirable.”  (p. 60)

“The bridging of the gap between described values … and prescribed — that is, normative — values, … is suggested by the reconstructionist theory of ’social consensus.’ . . . It is necessary first to consider the maximum evidence available as to whether certain goals … are in fact accepted by all or most cultures. . . . . The second step requires communication both among members of one culture and also among cultures that the evidence is what it claims to be.  The third step is the endeavor to express as wide agreement as possible upon the basis of the evidence communicated.  The fourth step is to act in order to test out the agreement by observation and experience — thereby determining whether verbalized testimony harmonizes with behavioral testimony.”  (p. 61)

“Referring back for a moment to the knowledge-getting process, one might say that social consensus involves both inquiring and acquiring.  That is, it involves the kind of social inquiring necessary in collecting and comparing evidence and in reaching maximum communication about that evidence.  It involves social acquiring in the sense that the aim of the collecting and communicating of evidence is to achieve as much active agreement as possible about desirable goals on the basis of the evidence and the communication.”  (p. 61)

The major process of culture, acquiring, is thereby linked with cultural goals and the seeking of them — a good indication of why it is impossible in the experience of living cultures to separate any one of the three dimensions (order, process, or goals) from the other two.  It indicates, also, why reconstructionist education, though concerned with achieving desirable goals by practice with social consensus at every possible stage of enculturation, recognizes that cultural goals in turn demand both effective processes of achieving them and effective order of human relationship within which these processes may function.  (p. 61)

“By contrast, the perennialist theory of cultural goals does not assume that one achieves them primarily by a social or public process of acquiring and inquiring, but rather that the goals of man, already inherent as they are in the nature of culture and universe, will be attained if you and I can somehow learn to recognize the absolute laws of reality, knowledge, and value necessary to their attainment and can then abide by these laws to the utmost.”  (p. 62)

In this recognition of objective law, the perennialist reminds one of the essentialist’s attitude toward superorganic order, but he differs from the latter in his insistence that the value-seeking and value-achieving process requires, no less than knowledge-getting, a strong ingredient of intuition and even of revelation.  (p. 62)

“The ultimate goals of culture are not delineated by a cooperative process of gathering, communicating, and agreeing upon relevant evidence; they are discerned, finally, by one’s inherent capacity to discover their character through one’s own rational and spiritual power — reinforced, of course, by divine power.  Education’s most important responsibility is to share in and enhance this discovery.”  (p. 62)

Click for Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3.

Part 4: Our Larger Community: The Unity of All Creation

Other books enlarge our community perspective to encompass the earth and all creation. In 1959, Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man cast the cosmic Christ in evolutionary terms as the hyper-personal Omega Point, in whom an all-enveloping noosphere of human relationships culminates. A later disciple, Thomas Berry, dreams of a time when we abandon our assault against the conditions of our earthly existence and renew our participation in the grand liturgy of the universe. Jurgen Moltmann applies his theology of the Trinity to promulgate an ecological doctrine of creation, in which the creation is embedded within the community relationship of the Triune God.  In the seventh of eight essays, Wendell Berry critiques Christianity’s negative influence on the survival of creation. Norman Wirzba proffers a biblical correction in The Paradise of God that calls upon humanity to be servants of God’s creation.

Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books, 1988.

Berry, Wendell. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community: Eight Essays, Pantheon Books, 1993 (chap. 7).

Moltmann, Jurgen. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, Fortress Press, 1993.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man, Harper & Row, 1959.

Wirzba, Norman. The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age, Oxford University Press, 2003.

From the Word of the Day

         May your kindness, O Lord, be upon us; who have put our hope in you.

(Gospel Antiphon)            

 How should we live this Word

 The Gospel antiphon gives us greater understanding of the words, ‘Do not be afraid’.  Yes, we need have no fear if we put our hope in God, if we are always ready to begin again as we ask for forgiveness.  We must not let ourselves be caught up in the frenzy of the moment, in doing even what is good and holy.  We need to abandon ourselves to the Providence of the Father who dresses the flowers of the field and feeds the birds of the air.  All this transforms our faith into a fundamental trust, a secure base for every journey of life that opens before us and for every relationship that is given to us or that we patiently build.

 Otherwise, our faith is merely a collection of exterior pious practices that the tempestuous winds of human limitations and of evil destroy in a moment.  Or our faith can be like spoiled yeast that ruins the whole mass and is a counter-witness!

 Today as I pause for silent contemplation, I will make a trustful and courageous profession of faith.  I will visualize the immense ocean of God’s mercy and I will dive into it with humble abandon.

 I trust You my Lord!  No evil shall I fear!

 The voice of Teilhard de Chardin, Scientist and Mystic

 O Lord, at the beginning of this day, You have just come down.  Yet, how infinitely different will be the intensity of Your presence in the events that are about to happen and will affect everyone!  There the same circumstances that shortly will befall my brothers and me, You may be present a little, a lot, ever more, or not at all.  So that on this day no poison may harm me, so that no death may kill me, so that no one may inebriate me, so that in every creature I may discover You and feel You, O Lord grant that I may believe!

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

- Teilhard de Chardin

When I was in high school, among the books I was attracted to was “The Phenomenon of Man” by Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I did not fully understand the book but somehow it impressed my young mind as a work of extraordinary importance.

It was decades later, when I was teaching at the Asian Social Institute’s doctoral program in Applied Cosmic Anthropology, that I fully grasped one of de Chardin’s insights: that the cosmos itself is evolving towards higher complexity and high consciousness. In fact, it had undergone a sequence of three creative quantum jumps:

1. “Big Bang” of the cosmologists: the birth of energy-then-matter from nothingness
2. Emergence of life and living forms
3. Emergence of human consciousness: to Teilhard de Chardin, humans becoming conscious of evolution and its part in that evolution is like “the universe folding back in itself.”

Along the three creative quantum jumps, according to de Chardin, Earth is a geosphere from which developed a biosphere from which he foresaw the coming of a “noosphere” or the sphere of human consciousness. Many believe that the Internet is the physical beginning of de Chardin’s noosphere. He dreamed of a vision — both scientific and spiritual — of a noosphere among women and men of goodwill and love: “The day will come when after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” Indigo learning practices belong to these new “second fire” technologies.

Like many prophets carrying forth a new message, he was misunderstood and made to suffer from his message. Institutionalized mindsets defended itself: his superior in the Catholic hierarchy formally silenced him and the Vatican officially denounced his works after his death.

However his writings were circulated secretly in mimeographed forms among Catholic priests and non-Catholic sympathizers. His book “The Phenomenon of Man” was published after his death in 1955. The dream and vision of de Chardin must have a compelling truth in them that resonates with many people; as a result his works continue to grow in popularity. For samplers, read what cosmologist Brian Swimme and theologian Ursula King says.

It may take decades and centuries, but in the end, people wake up to discard smaller truths and embrace larger truths. Last 24 July 2009, the Pope finally acknowledged Pierre Teilhard de Chardin by saying “This is also the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin: in the end we shall achieve a true cosmic liturgy.”

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

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The mystic is as uncommon in Christianity today as it was in Clare of Assisi’s day. But the goals of the mystic are the goals of normal faith, even when they are expressed in language that is more vivid and pictorial than we might normally be accustomed to.

In the last century, Teilhard de Chardin once prayed “When you stretched out nets to imprison me…thrilled with greater joy than when you offered me wings….the only element I hanker after in your gifts is the fragrance of your power over me, and the touch of your hand upon me….what exhilarates us human creatures more than freedom…is the joy of finding and surrendering…the rapture of being possessed.” (The Prayer of the Universe) Such is the mystical goal of any Christian, and it fairly represents how Clare of Assisi felt about Jesus.

Le 26 septembre 2009 de 9h à 18h

“It is true that in the end, from the organic point of view, the whole metamorphosis leading to man depends on the question of a better brain. But how was this cerebral perfectioning carried out–how could it have worked–if there had not been a whole series of other conditions brought together at the same time? …Surely the smallest thing formed in the world is always the result of  the most formidable coincidence– a knot whose strands have been for all time converging from the four corners of space. Life does not work by following a single thread, nor yet by fits and starts. It pushes forward its whole network at one and the same time. So is the embryo fashioned in the womb that bears it. This we have reason to know, but it is satisfying to us precisely to recognize that man was born under the same law of maternity…

…Without trying to picture the unimaginable, let us nevertheless keep hold of one idea–that the access to thought represents a threshold which had to be crossed at a single stride; a ‘transexperimental’ interval about which scientifically we can say nothing, but beyond which we find ourselves transported onto an entirely new biological plane…”

…In the first place it involved a change of state; then, by this very fact, the beginning of another kind of life–precisely that interior life of which I have spoken above…”

…the psychic center, once turned in upon itself… at the same time centers the rest of the world around itself by the establishment of an ever more coherent and better organized perspective in the realities which surround it. We are not dealing with an immutably fixed focus but with a vortex which grows deeper as it sucks up the fluid at the heart of which it was born. The ego only persists by becoming ever more itself, in the measure in which it makes everything else itself. So man becomes a person in and through personalisation.”

“…Above the point of reflection, does the whole interest of evolution shift, passing from life into a plurality of isolated living beings?

Nothing of the sort. Only, from this crucial date the global spurt, without slackening in the slightest, has acquired another degree, another order of complexity. The phylum does not break up like a fragile jet just because henceforward it is fraught with thinking centers; it does not crumble into its elementary psychisms. On the contrary it is reinforced by an inner lining, an additional framework.”

I scooped up these excerpts from the Phenomenon of Man, the chapter entitled “The Birth of Thought.” Interesting points to consider. My mind dwells on these ideas:

The emergence of thought is an organic process, a whole slew of different processes combine to form consciousness, which is then, so to speak, a thing in itself, although entirely dependent upon the environment which formed it. Self reflection, self-consciousness, self-awareness are synonymous with this. Also, the interesting case that throughout evolution, the emergence of consciousness (according to Teilhard) seems to be general direction. But, it doesn’t stop there. The general direction of matter to animate, to become sensitive and dynamic, integrated, and gradually sentient is a fascinating cosmology–although some argue entirely human-centric. I would argue that it is rather “conscious-centric,” in the fact that, life isn’t linear, and so many other creatures may have also been the ones to evolve minds, selves, and eventually cultures.

There is also a possibility that life is a rarity, that in the universe, life does not have the tendency to become more complex over time. There are inhibitors; cosmic rays, differing conditions, lack of atmosphere, etc. that would stop emerging complexity. Or, in Teilhard’s conception, the universe appears mostly hostile towards life, and any “law of complexity consciousness” arising would be as rare as a diamond in the ocean. That may be the case, but given favorable circumstances, isn’t it still fascinating that life does have a non-linear, emergent direction?

Another interesting idea Teilhard presents is the interdependence of life. No creature that has ever lived has “come onto its own.” Each organism is intricately connected to the surrounding environment, and, temporally, to the decisions and mutations of its ancestors. It suggests the idea that even consciousness is not a mere, unique diffusion of “mind,” but instead an emergent and new layer of life. Vastly more complex than biological, but not disconnected from it. Also, the idea of plurality only makes sense in this point of view, if we acknowledge that plurality is also interdependence, and emergence. Or, as Teilhard has mentioned, the point from which many, non-linear processes converge, and something new is born. Thus, we are not isolated societies destined to stretch infinitely on in our own ways, removed from each other. We come together, we meet and are changed by that meeting. Communion is the guiding force of evolutionary processes. Scientifically, there is the ecosystem, tit-for-tat, interdependence–and hopefully in the future as we discover the vastly complex processes underlying evolution, and integrate them, this may help us have a better sense of ourselves and the whole of life.

This raises other points, but I think they can be mentioned in a future blog. Particularly, claims by B. Alan Wallace on the nature of consciousness. He argues that consciousness is beyond the brain, and in fact something “before,” the brain. Consciousness, then, is a convergence of matter, arranged in such a way to gain sentience of some underlying reality, also known as Buddha-nature (Could that be related to Omega point?). Fragments of light shining through. Are these claims valid? They’re huge claims, and I think require anyone exploring them to delve into huge, cosmological and spiritual questions. Definitely the subject for another post!

This is terrific news for those of us who are drawn to the teachings of the great French Jesuit scientist and philosopher. My book, Almost Catholic, concludes with an extended reference to the ways that de Chardin envisioned a future where all people are Catholic without demarcations or unnecessary distinctions.

Pope Benedict XVI praised Teilhard de Chardin on July 24, 2009 while preaching at Vespers in Aosta Cathedral. He was preaching on a text in Romans where St. Paul refers to the world becoming a place where worship of God is common. The Pope said:

“It’s the great vision that later Teilhard de Chardin also had–at the end we will have a true cosmic liturgy where the cosmos becomes a living host.”

During his lifetime, Teilhard de Chardin clashed with Vatican watchdogs over his interpretations of the Creation stories in Genesis, and other matters. He would be pleased to be embraced once again.

This essay is, admittedly, quite lengthy. However, it’s darn good.

Christ, Original Sin, and the Church at the Omega Point

The concept of the Omega Point as conceived by Teilhard de Chardin and elaborated upon by Frank J. Tipler sounds so radical that a Christian familiar with Scripture, upon hearing of the idea, will struggle to understand how the idea can even be reconciled to Scripture at all, if it isn’t plainly heretical. The Omega Point theory is dependent upon such recent developments of science, in contrast to the theological traditions of Christianity, that it has not yet taken hold or even been seriously considered by any self-claimed authoritative body in Christianity, receiving no recognition from Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, essentially the whole or Protestantism, and having been shirked at first by Catholicism. As a Catholic, I am wary of stepping over bounds of orthodoxy, and I do honestly try my best to maintain my beliefs and speculations within orthodoxy. As far as I am aware, my ideas do not require the rejection of any infallibly defined doctrine of faith, although I am aware that it rejects the classical historical explanation to the origins of Original Sin. It is my intent in this essay to expound upon the Omega Point theory (from here on abbreviated as OP) in my own conception and thought.

“And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of 

heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.”

Revelation 21:2

Centrality of Christ to the Universe

Why did God create? This is a question that theologians and philosophers have struggled with for millennia. It is an ultimately mysterious question, which is seemingly simple but ponderously difficult. If God is infinitely and eternally self-sufficient, then while He may have the ability to create, why should He create if it offers nothing to Himself? There is, I think, no sufficient way of answering this side of time, and while there are certainly fruits to considering it, this is not the essay for it. However, we must accept that, no matter the precise reason, God has chosen to create, for we are here to ponder the question, and, naturally, only existing things ponder. As Balthasar so aptly put; “ If there is no absolute being, what reason could there be that these finite, ephemeral things exist in the midst of nothing, things that could never add up to the absolute as a whole or evolve into it? But, on the other hand, if there is an absolute being, and if this being is sufficient unto itself, it is almost more mysterious why there should exist something else.”

Since God did create, there are two more questions worth answering; What does God have to do with His Creation? and What does Creation have to do with its God? It is in the frame of these two questions that my essay will make sense.

Since God has created, it can be presumed He knows His creation; God is, after all, omniscient. If He knows His creation, then it is not a leap to say that God cares about His creation. And so, if God cares about His creation (for why should He create if He doesn’t care?), then in some way He must care to reveal Himself.

The revelation of God is immediately apparent in that there is creation; the cosmological proof of God is simply the recognition of God as the author of nature. But, this is not the sort of revelation that a God who cares about His creation would reveal. For that to be all He revealed would be for God to have hidden Himself beyond not only those who despise Him, but those who would seek Him. And so, if there are those who would seek Him, and God is one who cares, then there must be some revelation of Himself to His creation.

What is this revelation, then?

As only persons can care to seek God, and God is personal, there must be some sort of communication between God and the created persons on the personal level. As God is a community of persons, then this community of persons must be the highest state of spiritual achievement, for “in God we rest,” which is almost tautological; God is Himself eternally existent, and so to exist as God is to exist in perfect peace. If God wishes to make communion with His creation, or creation make communion with God, then the created must be raised up to the level of God to partake in the Trinitarian life that is God for the created to be able to truly communicate with God.

This is where the difficulty lies; how does creation become raised up to God? If this is to happen, it is necessary for God to first “lower” Himself to creation. The answer to this is the Incarnation.

So, if from the beginning it was God’s knowledge that beings in the universe would seek Him, then from the beginning it was not only God’s intent for these beings to reside in perfect union with Him, but for Himself to bring these beings into perfect union with Him; so God’s intent from the beginning (I speak from our perspective in time) was the Incarnation. The Incarnation is for the universe, and the universe is for the Incarnation.

Hence the universe can only be made sense of by the Incarnation, and, on the other hand, the Incarnation can only be made sense of by the universe. The two exist for each other.

Who is to be the Incarnation? We can know from reason alone that God must exist in multiple persons (but not necessarily as a Trinity; I do not yet know how to reason that God must exist in three persons rather than only two or four), so this grants us at least two persons in God who immediately seem as valid candidates for the Incarnation; the Father and the Son.

However, the Father is the one who the other is begotten of; the Son is the revelation of God to Himself, as God’s love necessitates He love another beyond Himself (hence others in God). So, the Father cannot be the Incarnation, as He is the person of the Trinity unsuitable to being the revelation of God. Therefore, it must be the son who is the revelation of God, making the Son the Incarnation with is the revelation of God to Creation.

Since this is so, it is then necessary that the proper worldview starts with the Incarnation, meaning it illuminates the universe with the light of the Cross. It is only in this light that the meaning of the universe becomes apparent, and otherwise we are left with unanswerable questions and suppositions.

Why the Cross? That is the next question I aim to pursue.

Creative Transformation of the Universe

God is, by His nature, infinitely perfect. His perfection cannot be added to in any way, as it is already infinite.

Creation, on the other hand, is by necessity not infinitely perfect, for to be infinitely perfect is to be God. However, to be less than infinitely perfect is to be finitely perfect, and not necessarily less than perfect.

By His nature, God’s creation will be initially perfect, though it can only be finitely perfect. Because of its less than infinite perfection, imperfections can enter into creation through its own means (and as being rejections of God in any form that is the perversion of God’s natural goodness, truth, and beauty). However, this is no reason for despair; this possible imperfection offers another thing; the ability to grow. God by His nature is infinite, without potentiality, and so He cannot possibly grow in any way, except for being not God, except that He is God. The universe, being not God, can grow, and will always remain with a potentially infinite amount of growth ahead of it.

Therefore, no matter what arbitrarily finite perfection God creates His creation at, it will have an infinite stretch of growth ahead of it, a growth that by God’s intent would be to bring it ever closer to God’s infinite perfection. Hence, the “rest of God” that Augustine speaks of is actually an unhindered journey to God at the peak of an infinite mountain. By this, it is meaningless to consider the amount of perfection that creation was begun with, but what perfection it is being made into and what lies ahead of it.

Since any greater perfection can only be measured and performed by a more greatly perfect being on another less greatly perfect being, then God, by creating, necessarily entails Himself to raising up His creation to ever higher reaches up to Himself. The idea of a “greatest finite” is a contradiction in terms and meaningless. Therefore, creation was, is, and always shall be in a process of creative transformation. Its initial perfection is through creation, and its continuing perfection is through creative stimulation.

Since it is only God who can always stimulate creative transformation into His creation, the method necessarily involves Himself. If it involves Himself, what better way than the Incarnation? The Incarnation has the ability to offer man a means to the journey of greater perfection, since the Incarnation is God.

It should then be a good time to ponder upon what perfection will look like. These terms of perfection can only be understood as perfection appears in God, so we shall start with God.

The most apparent aspect of God to perfection is His eternal and perfect community of persons. There exists an unhindered and infinitely virtuous love between all three persons of the Trinity, vertically under the Father and horizontally across all three persons.

If this is so, then this will necessarily be replicated, or mirrored, in creation, for everything is what it is as it is like who God is. Perfection then entails the universe as a community of persons horizontally between each other and vertically under God; this is a description of the Church.

The Church, then, is the bride of the Incarnation, as it is the Church which the Incarnation comes to establish as the means of depositing creative transformation into creation; in traditional terms, it can be said that the Church is Christ’s bride through which all graces of justification and sanctification flow into the world by her sacraments as established by Christ.

I will explain this later, but I believe it here established that Christ came to establish the Church as the means for which God’s creative transformation to be imputed into creation, and this has everything to do with the OP.

Evolution and Original Sin

The problems of Scholastic theology in contemporary times revolve around one crucial error; the theology was meant to make sense in a static and anthropocentric cosmos. With scientific achievements of the last several centuries, it has been demonstrated how fluid and non-anthropocentric the universe really is. Evolution is essentially a basic fact of the world, as it explains nearly everything in living things on earth, from diversity of life to “junk” DNA. All opponents of evolution have been demonstrated to defend nothing more than a single particular interpretation of the Genesis creation accounts, and moreover, that their interpretations glean nothing meaningful or important to the human condition or the character of God.

This being so, theology has not yet been able to properly respond. It is immediately obvious to the intellectual Christian that the fact of evolution offers no argument against the existence of God, or the work of Christ, His divinity, or the infallibility of the Church, or the inspiration of Scripture. However, evolution, being a radical change of our conception of the cosmos since Augustine and the Scholastics, is a threat to traditional understandings of the historical origin of Original Sin.

Original Sin is, more or less, the doctrine that all of humanity is under the taint of concupiscence, which entered the human consciousness through the sin of Adam and Eve, who are the ancestors of all people on the earth. The antithetical image of Christ to Adam, as the orderer rather than the destroyer, is dependent upon this certain historical understanding, of there being a certain Adam with a certain Eve who were in God’s perfect and natural grace. Christ’s work was to suffer and die on the Cross, to bridge the infinite distance created between man and God by this sin committed by our first parents, Adam and Eve. While the reading of the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden is typically metaphorical, it is asserted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that “Genesis 3 […] affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.” (390)

According to evolution, it is impossible that an entire race should be born of a single pair; the branch of the evolutive tree that humanity inhabits is defined by an indeterminately large group (although no more than several dozen, if even that many) of hominids who became separated from others related to them, including homo erectus and the Neanderthals. The most commonly agreed upon theory of human transmigration points to Africa as the cradle of life, where humans as we would recognize them first lived and breathed.

The difficulty then becomes that there is no determinate single pair of parents from whom all people are born of, and so it would seem that Original Sin, no matter how apparently real it is in history, must have some history other than it has been classically told.

On the other hand, why is it that Original Sin can be proved so easily from history, yet the historical cause of it is so mysterious, when the answer to its origins seems to be just as immediately obvious from history as well? According to evolution, those traits which were beneficial were passed on; this did not lend itself to perfection except until after an infinite amount of time (or at least up to the time that God would decide to intervene), but to feasibility. A creature doesn’t need to be “the most fit” to survive, only “fit enough.”

As evolution lent itself to fitness, there are certain vices which can become apparent as determined by nature to be pragmatically beneficial; an intense desire towards sex, selfishness, and pride. Those creatures born without pride do need attempt to establish themselves as fathers or mothers as well as those creatures who do, and so, by evolution, the characteristic of pride in the instinct of animals was determined.

As pride is a classical vice, and the doctrine of Original Sin is overtly historical, why should it not be attributed to the imperfection of evolution that has not yet finished? Yes, I propose an evolution that is still at work in humans, though not necessarily in the same way as it worked before in animals. Let me come back to this in just a moment.

If evolution delivers up concupiscence, and concupiscence is what makes sin desirable, then concupiscence is established as being historically rooted in prehistory. On the other hand, what of the original transgression, which places man outside God’s natural grace? As Original Sin can only be caused by actual sin (not mere material sin), actual intent of separation from God, what does the story of Adam and Eve really look like?

New Historical Conception of the Sin of Adam

How then, if it didn’t happen in the Genesis account exactly like it said, did it really happen?

There are really only several things that need to be established for a valid conception, that there is;

1) an event

2) in which our parents

3) who were in a perfect and natural state of grace with God

4) sinned

5) because deceived by Satan

6) that they could be God

I will here describe a way in which this could have happened, not contradicting the teachings of the Catholic Church or evolution.

Before the distinct race known as homo sapiens sapiens came about, pre-human species were evolving. These species, as remarked before, were not without vices as dictated by what evolution found beneficial enough. The origin of their vices, however, were not from the mind, but from instincts.

This is the first difference to be drawn between man recognized by God, and pre-human hominids. Where man operates both on a subconscious level and a self-aware conscious level, the operation of animals can be sufficiently described as instinctual, not meaningfully distinct from computer programs or complex machines. They had a material soul, or “rational animating principle,” which is, to be redundant, merely material, that guided them to live; however, we must be wary of over-anthropomorphizing these animals, as they did not think as we do.

Those animals who were the first people, and so no longer animals, were those beings which, though they displayed many human characteristics already, entered into communication on the divine (using abstract language) and so God revealed Himself. This is, of course speculation; I don’t really know. They might have only just entered into communication (even with just gestures and grunts), they might have started communicating on the nature of God, they might not even have started communicating at all. Allow me to speculate however, and show why I make this particular speculation (which is probably wrong).

The divine life of the Trinity consists in perfect community. Community can only happen where there is some form of communication. Communication as we understand it is as nearly perfect as possible through abstract tokens of denotations, aka words. Whichever humans it were who started this communication most nearly reflected the divine life of the Trinity, and so God chose to reveal Himself to these humans, giving them a supernatural soul, making them creatures capable of sin as they were now morally obliged to obey the natural moral law.

This then meant there existed a supernatural soul alongside the natural soul; an immaterial mind, but ultimately bound to the physical body, and a supermaterial mind, which would exist for eternity. I do not mean to confuse my reader, so allow me to clarify a bit more.

This natural soul was bound up in instincts and was not held up to moral obligation. The supernatural soul, though, had knowledge of the divine, and so, conversely, (theoretical) knowledge of evil. As the supernatural soul was the seat of moral will, it would be in competition with the natural soul which was no more than the result of evolution. However, the supernatural soul was originally in perfect dominance of this natural soul; reason held the seat of the will, and the passions and appetites were subservient.

I have here so far described criterion one through three.

These people, being now in perfect community with each other under their relationship with God, were perfect, but only finitely so (as described above). They were set apart from the others, and so those others of their race died out (as they presumably didn’t reproduce with them). Whether this happened before or after the event of the Fall is further than I can speculate.

These humans, now having formed a perfectly knit group (for they are without sinful desires), were eventually tempted by Satan

. As the story in Genesis would reveal, the nature of this temptation appeared to be that these humans could be better than God. I believe that this manifested itself by humans believing they could reject God, and create for themselves a better moral law

. This was a sin of the entire group, without exception; or, if there was exception, they were killed (by the demand of the group’s new, better moral law).

This is, of course, impossible, and it is a transgression against that which God had revealed to them, for them to obey the natural moral law which found its substance in the creation of God. In this way could Original Sin have occurred, by which man was placed outside the natural state of grace with God and the supernatural soul was perverted, so that concupiscence offered temptation to man.

The conception I just offered as a possible historical model is, of course, speculation, but I believe there is more to be found in revelation. I speak of Genesis 3, in which the serpent tests Adam and Eve to eat the fruit. There is moral value to the story, and while it may not be historically valuable, there is worth to understanding the story on that account.

In the Scriptural terms, Adam and Eve represent those people who were the ones to encounter Satan, or the group of people as a whole. The serpent, of course, represents Satan, or even their own malicious minds. The fruit of the tree represents the line of moral demarcation; what line couldn’t be crossed without being able to come back to Original Justice (the state of man before Original Sin).

However, beyond these metaphors, I believe there is greater significance. While the garden is traditionally placed in only the past, I would place it in the future as well; not the mistake, but its correction. I do not reference Jesus as the Second Adam, but the belief that the state of perfect union with God that man will reach at the end of the universe, the Omega Point.

Ecclesiological Eschatology

As Christ is wed to the Church, it is a most grievous error to discount the Church from theology or any conception of Christian history. This has seemed to be to be the actual practice of Protestantism, which has made “the Church” nothing more than some vague and ephemeral body of believers, which has not ability to define doctrine or authoritatively decide anything for Christians. This conception of the Church is, as I have elaborated many places else, is an avoidance of reality, being both human nature and history. However, there are a few principles that I must bring up to help come to the conclusion as to an ecclesiological eschatology.

The first and most crucial aspect is that man is unable to know that he knows correct Christian doctrine. Whether from interpreting Scripture or just having a good idea of doctrine, no person is guaranteed a correct conclusion. Even I here am speculating, and though I might be pretty sure that I’m right at least on most counts, I could be grievously wrong without knowing it. Protestants who truly believe that they can discern truth from error just by interpreting the Bible attribute to themselves a greater ability than any man has apparently had, for all the Reformers’ beliefs were at times radically opposed, and the history of Protestantism under the “justification” of private interpretation through Sola Scriptura only serves to illustrate this like fish out of water dying serves to illustrate they need to be in water to live.

The idea that God’s kingdom shall be full of divergent and contradictory beliefs is absurd, if not laughable, and so I don’t think it worth responding to the view that latitudinarianism is really what God wants. Convergence towards common belief and practice appears to be what Paul preached, and he didn’t withstand error even in churches not under his jurisdiction.

A man by himself being unable to discern truth leads to one conclusion; there must necessarily be a visible authoritative body that can discern the truth for its faithful; the Church. The Church, led by the Holy Spirit, is necessary to answer not only doctrinal controversies of the past, but moral questions of our own day, and it will be always necessary throughout history to discern truth. A believer will always be able to look to the Church, Christ’s bride, to know what is true.

Again, I have developed this all elsewhere, so this principle is sufficient here.

As the Church is the bride of Christ, and all ability to raise up creation to higher perfections comes through the Incarnation, then all graces, via the sacraments, come through the Church. There is no grace anywhere in the world that did not first come from Christ’s bride; otherwise Christ would be an adulterer.

The history of the universe demonstrates convergence. Elementary units of matter became atoms, atoms formed molecules, molecules became self-replicating, life occurred, life evolved, humans came about and were self-aware, humans entered and enter into increasingly complex and interconnectedness modes of life. All things are tending towards convergence; super-individuality organized horizontally in human relationships united under the vertical relationship the Church has with Christ who is the mediator between man and God. This means that at the Omega Point, the Church will have incorporated all people; at the Omega Point, all knees will bow. This is not to implicate universalism, only a universal Church.

This is necessary towards everything being pulled up towards the Father at the OP. The universe is in constant flux, constant growth, under transformative creation. In the end, matter and spirit will be identical, the universe being spiritualized, made to be truly the Kingdom of Heaven, the Church, Christ’s bride.

As Christ came to establish the Church, and God is a community above a communion, then it can only make sense to interpret and understand Christ amidst the Church. Christ cannot be truly perceived outside the communion of the Church. In the end, all souls must be united to each other as they are united to God. Not that their individuality is obliterated, but that their individuality is made sense of as a part of the whole united under Christ. “The organ for seeing God is not the isolated human soul; it is the human soul united to all the other souls, under the humanity of Christ.” (Teilhard de Chardin)

Overview

It was my intent to paint the cosmos as a whole and relate Christ to it, and it to Christ, in this essay. There is room for improvement and better explanation, but as I have spoken of it here is as best I can put it yet. I understand my view is sweeping and cosmological, but I find it to be sufficiently explanatory. My view here offers a theodicy, as well, and also strengthens all my other beliefs, this being a framework for them to relate to by placing Christ at the center of everything in reality. It is in this way I read Scripture, and in this way I look forward to the eschaton.

I’ll see you at the Omega Point, then.

“Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them.” (Rev. 21:3)

Footnotes:

¹ Note I am saying that the Incarnation exists for the universe, and the universe for the Incarnation. I am not saying God exists for the universe or the universe for God; I am maintaining that God’s existence is self-sufficient, and the universe’s existence is contingently dependent upon God.

² I would formulate it this way with Scripture; “The Son Incarnate is the revelation of God the Father to Creation. (2 Cor. 4:4, Col. 1:15) The Son is the only suitable mediator between man (creation) and God the Father. (1 Tim. 2:5) We are drawn to the Father through the Son. (John 14:6) Hence the Incarnation is necessary for the universe to be drawn to the Father.”

³ In fact, that these people were tempted by Satan is not necessary; however, this is my own speculation, and this temptation by Satan seems to be the only way I can imagine that the idea of committing sin would even come about. For practical purposes, however, we can actually do away with criterion 5 and 6.

⁴ I admit I may be influenced by my own age, which has exalted human reason and ability, to the point that its become feasible to some people that man can create his own meaning in the universe (and so, by extension, his own valid ethical law); just see Sartre.

⁵ I would suggest reading Revelation 21 with my idea of the Omega Point in mind, and you should be able to see it quite clearly.

De: foy valencia <foyv_2000@yahoo.es>
Fecha: Dom, 26 de Jul, 2009 12:33 pm
Asunto: 211. La noosfera del día (26 de Julio)