Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ilia Delio
Read between
December 2 - December 18, 2023
In the fourteenth century, the Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus argued against Anselm’s doctrine of satisfaction, or what has come to be known as “atonement theology.” Anselm said that the incarnation took place to repay the debt incurred by human sin. Scotus rejected this position. Rather, he said, creation and incarnation are two interrelated mysteries of divine love. The reason for all divine activity is found in the very nature of God as love. The Trinity is a communion of love.
The Scotist doctrine of the primacy of Christ situates Christ at the center of creation, predestined to grace and glory. The incarnation shows divine freedom for self-revelation and relationship to humanity, without regard to human sinfulness.
In Scotus’s view, every creature is made in the image of Christ. Every leaf, cloud, fruit, animal, and person is an outward expression of the Word of God in love.
Christ is not a unique savior figure but a universal archetype. Jung spoke of Christ as the “Self,” a cosmic archetype, the Self of every person. Jesus lived from the depths of his Christ consciousness. Christ symbolizes the psychic totality of the individual.
In other words, if we never face the darkness of God within us, the unreconciled God, we will project that chaotic darkness into the world. Unless we make peace with the inner ground of God, God is not made whole, we are not made whole, and the world remains divided. Hence, we must go into the desert of our minds and hearts, like Jesus, and confront our darkest (and fractured) selves.
The most difficult journey to make is the journey within. Without this journey, Christ is not born in us, God remains incomplete, and the world remains in partial darkness.
“I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate” (Rom 7:15).
Jung’s spirituality is similar to the Twelve Steps program of Alcoholics Anonymous, namely, facing the truth within oneself and realizing there is a greater power within. Such realization begins the process of individuation. The healing process of the self begins with acceptance and surrendering to a “higher power” by which the inner conflicts of the self are eventually reconciled. If we do not do this, we run the risk of depriving ourselves of our true self, living unfulfilled lives of quiet desperation. Without the process of individuation, we can project the fractured inner soul of darkness
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The Christian Incarnation is a universal human event unless we reduce Jesus Christ to a mere historical being. If we sever Christ from his humanity, he becomes a platonic ideal of perfection and an instrument of dominion and exploitation of others. If we break his humanity from his historical walking on earth and his historical roots, we convert him into a mere Gnostic figure who does not share our concrete and limited human condition. In Jesus, the finite and infinite meet; the human and divine are united; the material and spiritual are one. Whoever sees Jesus Christ sees the prototype of all
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To reframe the incarnation as a process of divinization and individuation is to awaken to the holiness of everything, the divine milieu. Todd states: “The human evolves from an incomplete whole to a new level of completion and thus a new vision, a new knowing and new acting in the world.”29 We begin to see things the way they are, not as we are. Teilhard put it this way: “One can say that the whole of life lies in seeing—if not ultimately, at least essentially…. Unity grows … only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision.”
This “becoming God in us” is incarnation. Christ is not the great exception to humanity; Christ is every person who makes the journey in love.
The evolution of God and the evolution of humanity cannot be separated. God and human form a whole, and the whole is the Christic, the person who is more God than self and more self than God. Every human person has the potential to manifest Christ, because every person is divine and entangled with the energies of divine love.
In the infinite beauty of the human person, we see the infinite beauty of God. The flesh that weeps and laughs; the mother weeping for her lost son, the child dancing with bare feet on the wet grass, filled with joy—in the many events of our lives, God springs up from within and is overflowing with life.
“Union differentiates,” Teilhard wrote. Whether it is the cells of the body or the members of a society, single lives are perfected and fulfilled in union with others.
When we awaken to the reality of God as the deepest center of our existence, we live in hope that the world can be recreated in justice, that the future will be different. When we live in God, we live in the future; we dream, hope, create, and travel lightly on this cosmic journey. The future depends on our choices in the moments we are given.
“Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days” (John 2:19). Jesus identified the temple with his own body, indicating that the living God dwells in the living person, not in concrete walls or buildings (John 2:21; 1 Cor 3:17).
Acquiring a new religious consciousness means that the human person discovers a new locus of sacred meaning—the world—the place where God is emerging. Matter, mind, person, community, all form the matrix of the living God. Consciousness brings the living God into the personal expression of active engagement.
Jesus internalized the Torah and challenged those who were addicted to power, those who were blind to the needs of others, leading them to “bind up heavy loads and put them on the shoulders of men and women” (Matt 23:4). He chastised those who substituted legalism for charity or looked down on others, or separated themselves from others, as if being superior (cf. Luke 18:9–11) or of greater authority.
Teilhard, too, thought that the overly rigid dogma of Catholicism paralyzes the human spirit. The power of religion to change the world has in fact divided the world. Clearly, something is off.
Teilhard was clear that evolution changes theology in a radical way. His dismissal of divine participation and creation out of nothing were not mere rejections of the past. His lament of an antiquated Christology was not meant to be antagonistic. Rather, he was pointing out that scientific insights invite us to reconsider what we mean by the tremendous word, “God,” and the presence of God in matter.
Whereas the Church holds that Christ is divine by nature and we become divine by grace, Jung maintained that all nature is endowed with infinite potential; all matter is deep grace. Every person has infinite potential and infinite love; hence, every person has a transcendent ground, a divine nature.
Myths are sacred stories that shape life, but myths can change. Jung thought that the Christian myth had lost its power to transform.
When this happens, empathy is limited to members of specific devotional or tribal communities whose imperative then, too often, becomes the conversion or death of the differently-bonded.23 We have seen this in our time with the politics of evangelical conservatives and the platforms of racism and white supremacy. Such atrocious acts bear witness to the tragedy of humanity’s loss of its common ground, from which all the gods and other absolutes derive.
Neither Jung nor Teilhard thought that revelation is completed in the New Testament. Jung especially warned that, unless the West undergoes a “symbolic death,” it will likely face the probability of a “universal genocide.”26
The symbolic death must be a death of our current religious and political symbol systems, that is, the extant religions and their political equivalents.
He suggested that it is not God who saves but we who must choose to save ourselves by reconciling the inner darkness with divine light.
Salvation is a co-creative process of choice and decision, a cooperative relationship of divinity and humanity. The choice to become fully human is the choice for God, and the choice for God is the choice for wholeness.
God must become human to become God because, without incarnation, God is unpredictable. That is to say that, for Jung, God is more real in “fallen” humanity than in Godself.
God is unreconciled within the human, and the human is unreconciled within God. Since God and human need one another to be complete, the incompletion of God and human results in human evil and chaotic forces in the world.
Rather, sin is the law of the universe, the cosmic condition of a world in evolution. In a universe this large, evil is statistically inevitable at every level of evolving life. The work of the unification of all things in Christ inevitably involves the pain of reconciliation. Teilhard called this the “creative pain” of unification, a necessary pain if we are to evolve and not regress to a lower state of existence that returns us to multiplicity or dissipated existence.
God’s pain is the aching heart of absolute love longing for creative union.
the wars within us become the wars among us; the violence within us becomes the violence among us; inner self-hatred becomes outer hatred of others; the inner war of rejection becomes the outer war of rejection. What we cannot realize within ourselves is projected onto others, often the innocent of the earth. God becomes a plaything of the isolated ego, crying out in agony on the cross of alienation and rejection.
God needs the human person to realize the fullness of God’s love, and the human needs God to be whole and complete.
As the exemplar of evolution, Christ does not save us from sin but shows us how to rise above sin, that is, to rise above incompleteness, resistance, and apathy through the power of love.
He wrote: “The truth about today’s gospel is that it has ceased … to have any attraction because it has become unintelligible.”15 The old “savior model” stifles us because it fails to enkindle God’s super-abundant love within us, the same love moving the universe toward more life. The old savior model has created fearful, frightened, and guiltridden people, who are more concerned with going to heaven (and avoiding hell) than with the health of the planet, the atrocities of racism, the wounds caused by gender inequality, or just the importance of plain common courtesy without being overly
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Love is the core energy of the universe because love is the energy of attraction, union, and transcendence.
Love is not something God has—love is what God is, God’s very essence.
When one strives to live in the archetypes of love, peace, compassion, forgiveness, and nonviolence, Christ is alive and active in that person, even if one has never heard of Jesus or accepts the Gospel.
Sin is a failure to see and thus a failure to love.
Teilhard wrote: “I feel that the more I devote myself in some way to the interests of the earth in its highest form, the more I belong to God.
God cannot be saved without us, and we are not saved without the wellspring of divine love.
Many people today are discovering ways of connecting with God, one another, and the earth without relying on institutional religious norms.
The Christic is the new God-person who lives from the deepest level of Christ consciousness. Such persons are dynamically engaged in holistic God-life, which springing from their own inner selves into the world. As a wholemaker, the Christic is being saved through the creative energies of love.
The Eucharist is to be a celebration of holiness and wholeness; matter, life, and spirit woven together into one divinely centered cosmos, enriched by the energies of love.
The universe is unfinished, we are unfinished, the earth is unfinished, and, much to our amazement, God is unfinished, as well. We are co-creators of the great movement toward Omega, the complexified wholeness of empowered life. We do not save ourselves without God, not by money or power or self-preservation. We are saved by our reconciliation with God within and without, by making a conscious option for the whole.
God and humanity are entangled or, in Jung’s words, “functions of each other.”
The human person does not dwell in God and God does not dwell in the human; rather, God and human are correlative and require each other for completion. God completes the human, and the human completes God. The completion of God and human is the cosmic joy of the earth; all nature resounds with the glory of God.
The Catholic Church does not consider Mary as a divine figure, but the Assumption does suggest a goddess figure as part of divine reality. Jung wrote: “I consider the declaration of the Assumption the most important symbological event since the Reformation.”7
Christ is more God than “God” and more human than “human.”
He found the Latin Fathers and Western Christology in general far too juridical: “[T]he Christian history of the world has assumed the appearance of a legal trial between God and his creatures.”
