#95 Living into a New Consciousness

The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

by John F. Haught

From the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM

 #9 ~ Suffering and #10 ~ Thought

 #9 ~ SUFFERING

 After Darwin, any honest theological response to the brute fact of life’s suffering which I take to be inclusive of the sensation of pain by nonhuman sentient life, cannot fail to take notice of nature’s indifference to suffering. Clearly, life on earth was no picnic even prior to the appearance of human beings, who have added their own accumu-lation of evil to the wrongness already present in nature. It even seems to the Darwinian evolutionist that suffering, death and periodic extinctions have been essential, not just incidental, to the ongoing creation and diversifying of life, starting long before humans came along.

 Christian hope encourages us to anticipate that in God’s good time all tears will be wiped away and death will be no more. So, for those who are moved by faith in the biblical promises, it should not be too much to expect that in Christ God’s gift of salvation will finally heal all of life’s suffering.

 Nevertheless, religions and theologies still generally avoid the issue of why evolution has to involve so much struggle, travail, and death in the prehuman chapters of the life-story. Theology today needs to consider more deeply what evolution entails regarding the meaning of God, sin, suffering, hope, and redemption.

 Let us consider how theology’s encounter with Teilhard’s writings can be a proper stimulus to such reflection.

subjects that Suffer

An important contribution that Teilhard makes is that suffering cannot occur at all unless there are subjects, centers of experience, capable of registering and remembering the sensation of pain or suffering. The question of the meaning of suffering is not the only concern. Cosmic-ally, the main mystery is why and how subjectivity ~ the capacity to be awakened ~ has made its way into the universe in the first place.  Without the existence of sentient and conscious subjects there can be no suffering, nor the dramatic cosmic awaken-ing that is ferrying our minds to ports unknown. So, without denying that suffering is biologically adaptive, the sheer existence of subjectivity remains a mystery that trans-cends any purely Darwinian understanding.

Each living subject experiences the world in an “inside” way, beyond the range of scientific scrutiny. They react in specific ways to environmental stimuli, such as the sun setting and the changing of their world from light to night each day. We shall never know what it is like to be a bat, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel has famously pronounced, but their subjectivity, their memories, their enjoyment, pain, and antici-pations are all part of the universe. They participate in the larger cosmic awakening.

 Subjectivity

Since subjectivity is the universe’s inner side, we can notice it at all only because each of us also participates in the “insideness” where the universe is awakening in unrepeatable ways. It is only in the inside domain of individual subjects that the awakening and the drama can be registered. Consequently, if we really want to understand the universe and what is going on in it, we cannot ignore the fact that for millions of years it has been a generous manufacturer of subjective experiences.

Maybe the whole point of the universe is to bring forth increasingly richer versions of subjectivity. Ironically, science itself requires the existence of a community of intelligent subjects in search of understand-ing and truth. For science to happen at all, moreover, the inquisitive human subjects who do science have to believe that nature is intelligible. They have to trust that truth is worth seeking. They have to have powerful feelings that the virtue of honesty is necessary to prevent cheating, and of course they have to believe that the human mind can be trusted to arrive at right understanding. For science to be successful, the inside world of the scientist’s own intelligent and moral subjectivity must first be awakened to the transcendental horizon of intelligibility, truth and goodness.

 #10 ~ THOUGHT

 On earth, cosmogenesis has given birth to the spheres of matter (the geosphere) and life (the biosphere), and is now seamlessly weaving around our planet a new kind of “geological” stratum, a sphere of mind—the noosphere. Cosmologists should take note of the noosphere simply because it contains visible clues regarding the nature of the universe. Among other outcomes, we are coming to realize that the universe is in the business of creating thought.

 The eyes of geologists, archaeologists, and paleontologists are trained to look for chronologically successive levels in the record of planetary evolution, but they have passed over in silence the most recent layer—that of mind or thought—that is now being deposited on the surface of our planet. The attention of most earth scientists has failed to focus on the gradual intensification and distribution of thought in the human phenomenon, even though it is a fully natural, terrestrial, and cosmic development.

Until we realize that thought is the outcome of a long drama of cosmic awakening, we shall not have understood either the universe or mind. The impressive phenom-enon of scientific thought, for example, relies upon our native cognitive abilities to observe, think, understand, deliberate, judge, and decide. In this chapter, therefore, we explore with Teilhard what mind or thought looks like once we locate it inside the long drama of cosmic awakening.

 Around the middle of the last century Teilhard was already calling for a “hyper-physics” that would allow us to take seriously the fact that mind is part of the universe. The emergence of thought is not just a topic for psychology but also for earth history and cosmology. Teilhard insisted that the phenomenon of “thought” is a real part of nature, not something that comes in from outside. It would be an exciting new development in cosmology if scientists could “see” the eruption of mind as cosmic and acknowledge that nature has always had an “insideness” that has recently burst out in the phenomenon of “thought.”

 A Teilhardian Vision of Mind and Nature

The powerful instrument of thought that we call the human mind could have arisen in life’s evolution only if the universe from the start was already awakening. And it could have begun to awaken in the beginning only if it had already been lit up by the gentle dawning of infinite being, unity, intelligibility, goodness, truth and beauty at the dawn of cosmic becoming. It is because the cosmos has always been prompted by these invisible but indestructible “transcendentals” that it has been able to awaken at all.  

 Teilhard adds to the classical trans-cendentals the additional mark of futurity.  In his worldview, the universe has always been greeted silently by the coming of the future.   That is why it has evolved.

In response to the invisible dawning of the Absolute Future,  as theologian Karl Rahner named the God of Abraham, the universe has taken on the posture of anticipation. When mind arrived full-blown in terrestrial and human evolution, a strain of anticipation had already graced the cosmos. The world has always been leaning on the future as the ultimate source of its being and becoming. The phenomenon of “thought” is a real part of nature.  Accounting for the wondrous attributes of mind or thought requires a new understanding of the cosmos,  a universe awakening into reflective self-conscious-ness.    For Teilhard, it is undeniable that, if one steps back and takes a sweeping view of natural process, there has been a net increase in organized physical complexity and a corresponding intensification of what he calls “consciousness.” Along with attempts to make sense of the emergence of mind, therefore, we need to ask the more sweeping question of how to tell the whole cosmic story from both, simultaneously inside and outside. Only an earthquake in method and metaphysics, as implied in Teilhard’s Phenomenon, can bring the inside and outside cosmic stories together into the richer synthesis needed to satisfy our drive to understand.

  Nature’s Insideness Allows the Spirt

 of God to Interact Intimately with Nature

Since the only universe we know is the one that has given birth to beings endowed with minds, it seems extremely shortsighted to draw portraits of nature that leave out this most arresting of all emergent phenomena ~ subjectivity. Our own intelligent subjectivity, which is just as much part of nature as the blowing of wind and the rushing of water, typically gets left out of representations of nature by “objective science.”  It should now be clear that mind/thought is the blossoming of a potentiality that has been latent in matter from the very beginning.

This means that there never could have been any moment in natural history where the stuff of the universe was closed off to mind, spirit—or God. Divine action and divine incarnation in the world would be hard to envisage if matter were essentially mindless, but the idea of mindless matter is the product of logical error and the failure to “see” nature’s insideness.

 And it is just this insideness that allows a supreme Subject—the Spirit of God—to interact intimately with nature. It is also the insideness of nature that allows the incarnate and now risen Christ to gather the entire universe into the crowning majesty of Christ’s eucharistic body. Inwardness, including human reflective self-awareness, is clearly part of the natural world ~ of looking at the universe in light of the fact that it has become conscious.

 Teilhard insists that science cannot credibly leave the fact of thought and subjectivity off any realistic map of nature. Thought and spirit are too luminous. To make room for mind in nature, therefore, anyone who professes to see things as they really are must interpret the prehuman evolutionary world in explanatory terms that are large enough to allow for the eventual emergence of human subjectivity from within the bowels of nature itself. Teilhard places humans and other living subjects in complete continuity with our still emerging cosmos. As far as a theology of nature is concerned, the universe’s tendency to give rise to subjects suffuses the whole story of nature with promise, thus revealing the universe itself as a very good reason for our hope.