The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love
Ilia Delio
This is the best book I’ve read this year. A beautiful theology based on understanding evolution as the human story. Here are my notes:
Introduction
- “In my view, evolution is the story.”
- The area where evolution has the least influence is theology due to the “misconception that God and evolution have little in common.”
- Raimon Panikkar: “When theology is divorced from cosmology, we no longer have a living God, but an idea of God.”
- Zachary Hayes: “If Augustine was able to speak theologically in a world conditioned by neo-Platonism, and if an Aquinas was able to construct a theology using Aristotelian categories to speak to a world wrestling with the Aristotelian world view, is it possible for contemporary theology to do a similar thing, taking a world view from the sciences?”
- As entities become more complex in nature, consciousness increases or develops.
- “Anatheism” – a new God rising up from the old God. (Richard Kearny)
- Karl Rahner: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not be at all.”
- “Evolution is ‘wholemaking’ in action, the rise of consciousness that realizes self-separateness is an illusion.”
- Teilhard: the mover within evolution is God.
[more…]
Chapter One: The Decentered Human
- The origins of science are found within the Judeo-Christian tradition, “beginning with the OT and its emphasis on an orderly, rational, and contingent world….things were ordered not only within creation, but everything in creation was oriented and directed towards a telos.”
- In the Middle Ages, theology was the “queen of the sciences” and it “was not a particular science; rather it was related to the whole.”
- This privileged place of theology began to erode when scientific understanding shifted from the earth as the center of the universe to heliocentrism.
- Roger Bacon (c 1216-92) really was the first to articulate a “scientific method,” which was “in the service of theology, the purpose of which was to help prepare for the second coming of Christ.”
- Mark Taylor suggests that Descartes revives a form of androcentrism; Likewise Wilber suggests that his cogito is a substitute for the cosmos.
- “Modern atheism is less about the death of God than the death of the human person as human, that is, the absence of the human person from the cosmos story as significant to that story.”
- Luther’s sola scriptura led to a “preoccupation with sin and grace” and “reflected an ‘age of anxiety’ symbolized by the “wrath of God.” This intensified during the bubonic plague, creating “a new apocalyptic mentality.”
- “The widening gap between theology and cosmology relegated religion to a set of abstract, speculative ideas on fixed principles, while science opened up to a world of dynamic change.”
Chapter Two: Wholeness in Nature
- Evolution is what distinguishes our present modern world from the past.
- “With emergence, something is constituted from components in such a way that it has new properties that are not reducible to the properties of the components. (“irreducible novelty”)
- “Evolution applies equally to life as a whole and to every living creature.”
- “Evolution is not the background to the human story; it is the human story.”
- The human person is an “outflow of billions of years of evolution.”
- “Convergent evolution is directed toward a projected point of maximum human organization and consciousness, which is the Omega point.”
- Teilhard: Reflection is “the power acquired by a consciousness of turning in on itself…to know that it knows.”
- Julian Huxley: “We are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.”
- Evolution is the force driving towards greater unity AND complexity.
- “Matter is not composed of basic building blocks but rather comprises complicated webs of relations in which the observer constitutes the final link in the chain of observational processes.”
- “Quantum entanglement is nonlocal interaction or unmediated action at a distance, without crossing space, without decay, and without delay.”
- “If an atom’s momentum is measured, its true momentum is disturbed not only by the momentum meter itself but by a vast array of distant events – events that are happening right now in other cities, in other countries, and possibly other galaxies.”
- John Bell: “The act of measurement is not a private act but rather a public event in whose details large portions of the universe instantly participate.”
- Bohm started with the notion of an “undivided wholeness” and considered parts as abstractions from the whole. Bohm called this unbroken order, “implicate order.”
- Implicate order is a way of looking at reality, not as parts, but as enfolded relationships among things.
- Human beings seem separate, but we are part of an indivisible whole, sharing in the same cosmic process.
- Holomovement describes the undivided totality of the implicate order.
- “Movement is what is primary.” Structures are only emerging out of the whole of flowing movement and dissolving back into an unceasing process of becoming.
- Bohm’s theory of implicate order is based on:
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- Being is intrinsically relational, existing in an unbroken, whole system.
- Systems are in holomovement. Any portion of the whole contains information on the whole object.
- Because reality is based on movement and relationality, it has endless depth
- Law of the dissipation of energy (2nd law of thermodynamics) >> in closed systems, there’s a trend from order to disorder.
- Evolution runs contrary to the 2nd law, maintaining that we’re moving towards greater order (and complexity).
- Ludwig von Bertalanffy >> living systems can’t be described by thermodynamic laws because they are open systems, with energy always coming in and leaving the system.
- Kant “prophesied” this breakthrough saying that in living organisms:
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- (1) order is “internally emergent” rather than “externally imposed”
- (2) relation of parts to whole is interactive
- (3) whole is an interplay of parts
- (4) whole may provide stability, but is a dynamic pattern that changes constantly
- (5) relationship structure provides constraint within which the parts develop
- In living systems, “the product of its operation is its own organization.”
- Stephen Talbott: Nature is an interlocking network of systems, an “unbearable wholeness of beings.”
- Various animals have methods of helping one another.
- Sustained behavior of a species is eventually ingrained into genetic structures.
- Rupert Sheldrake postulates that repetitive animal behavior creates informational fields that affect similar behavior in unrelated areas. These are called “morphogenetic fields.” Morphic resonance guides species towards the same form of behavior. [Todd: this seems similar to Girard’s mimetic theory]
- Holons are simultaneously wholes and parts.
- Holarchy is a “hierarchy of self-regulating holons that function first as autonomous wholes in supra-ordination to their parts, and secondly as dependent parts in sub-ordination to controls on higher levels, and thirdly in coordination with their local environment.”
- Holarchy is different that hierarchy in that there isn’t value judgment in a holarchy – each “part/whole” is valued for its uniqueness
Chapter Three: Love, Sex, and the Cosmos
- “Science’s preoccupation with objectivity…has created a partial understanding of life. What needs illumination is its wholeness, depth, and relationality.”
- “We understand the details concerning the consequences of…[gravity’s] attraction. We do not understand the attraction itself.”
- “Evolution, through all its stages, seems to be an immense complexification of psychic energy that, through different forms, eventually becomes more aware of itself.”
- Teilhard says the something driving evolution is the “energy of consciousness.”
- Teilhard’s two forms of energy: “tangential” and “radial”
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- Tangential – “bonding” energy that makes elements interdependent with everything else in the universe; follows 2nd law of thermodynamics
- Radial – attracts energy in “ever more complex and centered state, toward what is ahead, which is…conscious energy.” Defies 2nd law of thermodynamics
- Physical sciences do not account for growth in conscious (radial) energy. Teilhard says this energy is the “core of evolution.”
- “Evolution seems to be the unfolding of mind.”
- “The development of consciousness is a transition from a lower to a higher state of centro-complexity”
- Centricity is “another way to talk about integration.”
- Integration is another way of saying wholeness.
- Teilhard calls the unitive principle undergirding wholeness, “Omega.” It is operative from the beginning of evolution.
- God is the energy of love.
- “For so long we have kept love outside the limits of nature…love is rooted in the fundamental nature of reality.”
- “Eros…stretches beyond oneself for the sake of oneself.” Agape “impels one to act wholeheartedly for the other.” Philia is cooperating love.
- Love is a cosmological force operative since the Big Bang.
- “Love is the integrated energy field, the center of all centers, the whole of every whole, that makes each whole desire more wholeness.”
- Even among the molecules, “love was the building power that worked against entropy and under its attraction the elements groped their way towards union.”
- “The physical structure of the universe is love. It draws together and unites; in uniting, it differentiates.”
- “Being is an outflow of union.” “Reality is woven through layers of bondedness.” “Being is first a we before it can become an I.”
- “Hyperphysics: existence is for the sake of giving.”
- “love is the end [telos] of all knowledge”
- Union differentiates, which gives rise to personalization.
- Evolution is the process of cosmic personalization.
- Sex is to cut off. Sexuality is integral to a personalizing universe.
- “Authentic sexual love is the emergence of spirit.”
- Altruism has competitive advantages. [Todd: Is this oxymoronic?]
- Binti Jua, a gorilla, saves a boy who fell into zoo exhibit
- Richard Dawkins says genes are inherently selfish. Holmes Rolston disagrees saying genes can’t be either altruistic or selfish, rather they simply transmit information, aimed more at survival of the species than the individual.
- “Survival of the fittest turns out to be survival of the senders.”
- “Where there is love there is suffering, because love is always aimed toward greater wholeness, that is, more being. In a world of limits, the drive towards more being will always encounter resistance.”
Chapter 4: Birthing a New God
- Religion is necessary not merely for the individual, but to the whole of the universe. “There is no cosmos without God and no God without cosmos.”
- Panikkar’s “pantheism” isn’t saying God and nature are equivalent, but rather God renders the cosmos’ existence.
- Panikkar is panenthiestic, describing God as the “cosmothandric invariant.”
- “God is not an idea but the living wholeness of reality.”
- Tillich: When scientists claim to have “refuted religion” by saying no evidence exists that a God exists, they have actually done religion “a considerable service,” by wrestling it away from God as “highest being” in the created order conception of God.
- “God is not a timeless being without relation to anything in time; nor is God apathetic to the fate of the cosmos. God belongs to the cosmos, and when this relationship is aborted theology becomes a mere abstraction of a nonexistent God.”
- Acosmism: a cosmos without God and a God without cosmos.
- “From the moment we say God is Being, it is clear that in a certain sense, God alone is.”
- Ontotheology – God as Super Being (Heidegger) – this sort of God “became the great letdown.”
- Nietzsche: “The death of God was the death of the transcendent moral God but, conversely, in the chaos of human evolution, God was born as ‘the divine artist whose creativity is beyond good and evil.'”
- Weil: “Whoever says ‘I’ lies.”
- God simply is.
- Meister Eckhart: “Let us pray to God that we may be free of God.”
- “Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becoming fully man.”
- Eckhardt: “God is closer to me than I am to myself.”
- Tillich: “If every idea and image of God is a projection, it is a projection of something.” The realm against which it is projected is the domain of “ultimate concern.”
- “Tillich focused on the human passion for meaning – what gives fire to our lives.”
- “God does not merely exist; rather, God is existence.” I am. “God is not a Being among beings. God is existence itself.”
- God does not exist EXCEPT in the paradox of God becoming manifest under conditions of existence.
- Being cannot exist without form and is therefore dynamically oriented towards becoming.
- “Everything tends to conserve its own form as the basis of its self-transcendence…it is impossible to speak of being without speaking of becoming.” (Tillich)
- Cosmotheandrism is a co-inherence of divine, cosmic, and anthropic being, mutually co-existing.
- Univocity refers to God’s oneness with the created through the concept of being. (Panikkar)
- There is no first principle (God) lying outside the created order, but rather “everything makes a piece” of the “unified whole” that reveals the creativity of God.
- God is the cosmotheandric depth dimension of all created reality.
- God is not one of many, but the ground of unity. G
- “God and creation mutually co-inhere.”
- [Todd: “Communion” can be central in this type of theology.]
- Tillich, Panikkar, and Teilhard are overturning the “hellenization of God” that no longer speaks to the world of modern science.
- “While in the case of a static world the creator is structurally independent of his work, in the case of an evolutive world, the contrary is true. God is not conceivable except insofar as he conincides with evolution.”
- “God is a ‘hyper-center’ – that is to say, of greater depth than us.”
- “The world is not God and God is not the world, yet God is the unlimited depth of love of all that is, a love that overflows into new life.”
- “Creation is a kenosis of divine love.”
- “Creation is not merely gift of God; it is being-in-love with God.”
- We are not saved from the world, but saved to cooperate with it.
- “The whole cosmos is a theophany.”
- Creation “emerges out of the innermost depths of trinitarian life.” “The drama of creation is the drama of trinitarian life.” [Todd: This resonates with Bourgeault.]
- “God is rising from within evolution to become the God of evolution.”
- God is up ahead as the future of evolution because God is the fullness of love…God is the One who is and who is coming to be.” [Todd: This resonates with Rob Bell’s God is AHEAD of us.]
Chapter 5: Love and Suffering
- Religion is to be “bound back.”
- “Religion is the heart of evolution.”
- Eckhart: God is the newest thing there is.
- “God is love” inherently means God is dynamic and creative.
- The longing for more being in the creative act of loving is a kind of suffering. Creation still lacks what it needs to be complete.
- Universe as cosmic womb. Birth involves suffering and longing.
- Through the theotokos, we see that creation/birthing is the place where God becomes God.
- Sin is the resistance to love. The “reverse side of creation.”
- Love doesn’t exist in the abstract, but is an “embodied act.”
- “The pouring out of divine love into wholly other matter is the christification of the universe.”
- Referring to creation, “There is nothing profane here below for those who know how to see.”
- “Incarnation and creation are two dimensions of one act of cosmotheandric love.”
- “All that God is, is given in love. God is hidden in the appearance of being (that is, the Father is hidden in the Word) and made visible by the energy (Spirit) of love.”
- “The very gift of the parent’s love is in the withdrawal of control.”
- Creation isn’t about boundless power, but boundless love.
- Delio’s theodicy: “The theodicy question is not why God allows bad things to happen to good people but why we abandon God in the face of suffering. If God is love, then our only real hope is in God, because hope is the openness of love to infinite possibilities and new life.”
- To love is to risk being rejected by the other
- “When God and cosmos are severed, then theology becomes a mere abstraction of a nonexisting God.”
- Evolution “bears witness” to “divine love” because “every cosmic death” is “transformed into new life.”
- Every act of creation is a crucifixion (Hans Urs von Balthasar)
- “Love is not what God does; love is what God is.”
- Suffering is an inevitable part of love.
- The process of evolution is cruciform.
- Beautiful quote from Jewish woman inside concentration camp on helping the God within and admitting that God can’t help them alone (loc: 2007)
- Merton: “If I find God I will find myself, and if I find myself I will find God” (Delio adds…) “because the essence of who I am lies in God.
Chapter 6: Sacred Secularity
- The principle consequence of modernity has been the decline of religion.
- Jose Casanova: Secularization hasn’t dispensed with religion, but unseated it from its privileged place at the core of knowledge and society. Now it is relegated to its own sphere.
- “It is not the world that is opposed to God. It is we who are opposed to God when we try to control God for our own religious purposes. We are not asked to create an alternative world or to reject this one but to divinize it from within.”
- Teilhard: the physical universe is the third nature of Christ.
- Teilhard: We must rid ourselves of the old God of the starry heavens and embrace the God of evolution. Only in this way can the world be seen as a divine milieu.
- Evolution as “the new Genesis story”
- Teilhard > Religion should be more than a personal matter, but should belong “to the whole of humankind.”
- Amorization > As elements of creation unite, they differentiate, which is the basis of greater union.
- Merton: “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.”
- Teilhard > “[Christianity] gives the impression of not believing in human progress.”
- “The idea that God is dead is already contained in…the death of God.”
- On the Incarnation: “This is not some anthropological reduction of the infinite to the finite, but a recognition that the infinite is to be found at the core of each finite now.” (Richard Kearney)
- God works not like a magician, but through the earth’s elements.
- Beautiful poem on not worshiping God out of fear of hell or reward of heaven by Rabe’a al-‘Adawiya at loc: 2320
- Hebraic gematriyya of words for love and one both equal 13, and together they equal 26, which is the number for YHWH.
- “Unless I go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (Jn 16: 7).
- Teilhard envisions a future convergence of religions
- Teilhard > World is not suffering from proliferation of athiesm, but unsatisfied theism.
- “To recognize the face of God in the face of the other liberates the other from idolatry, as an object of control or rejection.”
- Namaste: The God in me recognizes the God in you.
- “Love is what we feel when we become aware of our oneness with what we thought was separate from us: a person, a place, a thing, or idea.”
Chapter 7: Christian Love
- Teilhard’s “original sin” – sin is the inevitable correlate of incompleteness
- The relationship between Adam (Original Sin) and Christ is due to Paul and an enhancement of Paul by later writers. Jesus solution to sin is to heal it.
- “Jesus appears not simply as the perfect union of divine human and cosmic natures but on the edge of emergent chaos.”
- Pelikan: Jesus changed as culture changed. “We can say that Jesus began as anointed prophet and is not evolution’s future.”
- Teilhard: Evolution is not birthing something, but someone – the cosmic person (Christogenesis)
- Evolution is not random – but a directed change, organized becoming, patterned process and cumulative order
- “Evolution is an unfolding theophany.”
- “Jesus ushered in not a new religion, but a new humanism.”
- “God is love, not infinite power.”
- “The greatest evolutionary act of Jesus was his death on the cross, a conscious decision to remain faithful in love despite the forces of hatred and oppression.”
- “If we seek a monarch, an omnipotent power who will save us from death, we are outside the Christian God revealed in the cross.”
- “God is the omnipotence of love.”
- “To realize our human capacity to love is the beginning of divinization because in the beauty of our “I” is the living Thou waiting to be called upon as God.”
- Clare of Assisi – cross as a mirror
Chapter 8: Love, Learning and the Desire for Power
- Emmanuel Falque states: “Any strictly theo-logical truth, one that has its roots in God, will no longer be content with its unique objective determination. Such a truth will take on a performative sense, one that is transforming for the subject that states it, or it will not exist. . . . Knowledge through love is the only thing that puts in motion whoever comes to know them.”
- The scientific shift towards making sense by rational thought alone has disconnected knowledge from a larger, harmonious knowledge rooted in love.
- William of Ockham helped invent modernity by denying universals.
- The university has become the multiversity – instead of educating to know the universe as an interconnected web, it is now the study of highly specialized fields.
- “Only when thought and emotion are combined are we able to obtain real knowledge, that is, a knowledge that belongs as much to the body as to the mind.”
- “Abstract knowledge is sterile and lifeless.”
- Catholic as the movement towards universality and wholeness
- “Knowledge is the energy of desire.”
- “Information can tell us about things, but knowledge is an exploration of the mind that seeks to form wholes out of thought fragments gained from experience, judgment, and reflection.
- “As the mind gathers fragments of knowledge into a more unified synthesis, it promotes beauty in the world.”
Chapter 9: Technology and Noogenesis
- Turing test is when computer generated text is indistinguishable from human produced text. It shows “thinking.”
- “Techno sapiens”
- “As the editors of Nature wrote in 2007, ‘God has competition.'”
- Kevin Kelly >> “the future of evolution is about ‘the marriage of the born and the made.'”
- “In the past, evolution proceeded by way of natural selection; today, evolution advances by creativity and invention.”
- Cybergnosticism is a term describing the rise of a neo-Platonism where the dualism inherent in Platonic thought has to do with the divide between digital and analog/physical.
- “Cyberspace is Platonism as a working product. The cybernaut seated before us, strapped into sensory-input devices, appears to be, and is indeed, lost to this world. Suspended in computer space, the cybernaut leaves the prison of the body and emerges in a world of digital sensation.”
- Intelligent machines = “Machina sapiens”
- “Biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat.” – Bart Kosko
- “The ‘I-Thou’ relationship has mutated into an ‘I-Phone’ relationship.”
- R. Cole-Turner: We believe we have created the means to control the self, “when in truth we have only increased the power of the self to control, leaving the self unchanged, yet self-changing.”
- Noosphere is a new collective consciousness – a step forward in evolution
- Teilhard makes a distinction between “well being” and “more being.” More being can only come from spirituality and involves an increase in consciousness and psychic energy.
- Teilhard: “Science cannot fulfill the cosmic need to evolve.”
Chapter 10: Contemplative Evolution
- “Emotions are central to cognition” and the functioning of the brain. The brain is more than raw computational power.
- “Every aspect of nature is part of an unbearable wholeness of being.”
- “God is the energy of wholeness and the irresistible lure to greater wholeness. God is the integral whole that attracts every whole toward greater wholeness.”
- “This divine wholeness in love – Trinity – pours itself into otherness to become oneness. God’s love empties into being; God is the being of being, the breath of breath, transcending every breath (leaving us breathless at times), by the sheer excess of love. God’s love is always the more of what any finite being can express; hence, God is always on the horizon of what we are coming to be. God emerges from within by means of union in love as ever newness in love and the future of every new love.” (Seems to resonate with Bourgeault’s trinity)
- “Wholeness is salvific.” [Todd – Salvation isn’t about any change of status in heaven, but real saving in the real world. It isn’t theoretical or metaphysical.]
- Individualism opposes evolution.
- “The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible.”
- American Beauty – on the failure of love in life and poverty of plastic consumerism
- “All things are said to be transformed in the transfiguration of Christ in as far as something of each creature was transfigured in Christ. For as a human being , Christ has something in common with all creatures. With the stone he shares existence; with plants he shares life; with animals he shares sensation; and with angels he shares intelligence. Thus all things are transformed in Christ since in his human nature he embraces something of every creature in himself when he is transfigured.” – St. Bonaventure
- “Ken Wilber refers to the emergence of this new level of consciousness as the experience of the “econoetic self”; we do not recognize ourselves as merely strands in the web but we try to perceive reality from the perspective of the web as a whole: “You are doing something no mere strand ever does—you are escaping your ‘strandedness’ transcending it, and becoming one with the entire display; to be aware of the whole system shows precisely that you are not merely a strand.”
- “The challenge, therefore, is not to argue or defend evolution but to drench ourselves in it, to go inward and meet, in silence and solitude, a power no human power can vanquish.”
Conclusion/Unfinished
- God is the unbearable wholeness of being; the relentless drive of love cutting through all things towards wholeness
- “Integral thinking is thinking the whole and the parts as wholes within the whole.”
- “Theological education should include Big Bang Cosmology, quantum physics, systems biology, consciousness studies, as well as tradition and scripture.”
- “God is not the divine mechanic above but the power of love within – the unbearable wholeness of love pushing through the limits of being to become more visible and alive.”
