Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness (Catholicity in an Evolving Universe Series)

by Ilia Delio

To paraphrase Saint Augustine: “You have made us for wholeness, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their wholeness in You.”3

If the Greeks understood catholicity as human consciousness of the wider cosmos, Christians appropriated catholicity as a consciousness of the whole centered in Christ.

The left hemisphere narrows things to a certainty while the right hemisphere opens them up to possibility.

To be Catholic at the dawn of the twentieth century was to be obedient to the institutional Church, the primacy of the pope, and the teachings of the magisterium. Since most Catholics knew little of either scripture or church history, a catechism of essential truths was instilled universally. Thinking was not essential to salvation.

Catholicity came undone after the Middle Ages and maybe even before then. Once heliocentrism became the accepted cosmological model, catholicity was reduced from a consciousness of the whole to a level of individual concern and personal salvation. The left brain became detached from the right brain.

Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack, who have devoted their work to reconnecting cosmology and anthropology, state: “There is a profound connection between our lack of a shared cosmology and our increasing global problems. We have no sense how we and our fellow humans fit into the big picture. . . . Without a big picture we are very small people.”

What quantum physics tells us is that nothing is real unless it is observed; it is a participatory universe.

“In ordinary language emergence refers to processes of coming forth from latency, or to states of things arising unexpectedly.”34

The Christian story is still based on an ancient cosmology described by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy (d. 168 CE). Early Christian writers adopted Greek science and philosophy, including Ptolemy’s earth-centered cosmology, Plato’s division between matter and spirit, and Aristotle’s notion of matter and form.

Catholicity, as the Greeks first conceived it, may be the best word to describe our universe today, since from the beginning it is a web of consciousness and undivided wholeness. The Big Bang universe emerged out of quantum wholeness. Life began with consciousness and wholeness. In the beginning was quantum foam, and the foam was overlapping waves, and the whole thing—from the beginning—was (and still is) brimming with consciousness.

In the 1930s astrophysicist James Jeans wrote: The universe looks more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accident intruder into the realm of matter. . . . Mind may be the creator and governor of the realm of matter—not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown and exist as thoughts. The quantum phenomena make it possible to propose that the background of the universe is mindlike.15

The quantum worldview transcends the dichotomy between mind and body, inner and outer, by showing us that the basic building blocks of mind (bosons) and the basic building blocks of matter (fermions) arise out of a common quantum substrate (the vacuum) and are engaged in a mutually creative dialogue beginning with the Big Bang. Mind is relationship and matter is that which it relates. Neither on its own could evolve or express anything; together they give us ourselves and our world.

To be human is to know that we know.33

Lothar Schäfer writes: The barbaric view of reality is mechanistic. It is the easy view of classical science and of common sense. In epistemology, mechanism is naive realism, the view that all knowledge is based on unquestionable facts, on apodictically verified truths. In physics, mechanism is the view that the universe is clockwork, closed, and entirely predictable on the basis of unchanging laws. In biology, mechanism is the view that all aspects of life, its evolution, our feelings and values, are ultimately explicable in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry. In our legal system, mechanism is the view that the assumption of precise procedural technicalities constitutes perfect justice. In our political system, mechanism is the view that the assertion of finely formulated personal rights constitutes the ideal democracy. In our public administration, it is the view that responsible service manifests itself by the enforcement of finely split bureaucratic regulations. All of these attitudes are the attitudes of barbarians.35

Albert Einstein: A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’; a part limited in time and space. One experiences oneself . . . as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of one’s consciousness [emphasis added]. . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.36

Heaven unfolds when we see things for what they are, not what we think they should be, and when we love others for who they are, and not what we expect them to be.

Thomas Merton writes: “The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of the road are saints looking up into the face of God.”7

How we see is how we love, and what we love is what we become.

Teilhard de Chardin believed that “we can be saved only by becoming one with the universe.”3 The problem, as he saw it, is the inability to resolve the conflict between the traditional God of revelation and the “new” God of evolution or to see salvation as becoming one with the universe. N. Max Wildiers writes, “The conflict we are suffering today does indeed consist in the conflict between a religion of transcendence and a secularized world, between the ‘God of the Above’ and the ‘God of the Ahead,’ between a ‘religion of heaven’ and a ‘religion of the earth.’”4 Teilhard’s solution to the problem of the God-world conflict is to rid ourselves of the old God of the starry heavens and embrace the God of evolution. Only in this way, he indicates, is God truly revealed in the world, which is a “divine milieu.” To reject evolution is, in a sense, to reject God because God is the power of evolution, Omega, who is within and ahead.

Teilhard used the term Christogenesis to describe evolution as the genesis of the total Christ, “the triumph of the personal at the summit of the mind.”5 He envisioned the evolutionary process as one moving toward evolution of consciousness and ultimately toward evolution of spirit, from the birth of mind to the birth of the whole Christ.6 He urged Christians to participate in the process of Christogenesis, to risk, get involved, aim toward union with others, for the entire creation is waiting to give birth to God. He opposed a static Christianity that isolates its followers instead of merging them with the masses, imposing on them a burden of observances and obligations, and causing them to lose interest in the common task. “Do we realize that if we are to influence the world it is essential that we share in its drive, in its anxieties and its hopes?”7 We are not only to recognize evolution but to make it continue in ourselves.8 We are to “christify” the world by immersing ourselves in it, plunging our hands into the soil of the earth and touching the roots of life. Union with God is not withdrawal or separation from the activity of the world but a dedicated, integrated, and sublimated absorption into it.9 Before, he said, the Christian thought that he or she could attain God only by abandoning everything. Now he writes, “We must make our way to heaven through earth.10

Teilhard’s words: It is not well being but a hunger for more-being which, of psychological necessity, can alone preserve the thinking earth from the taedium vitae. . . . It is upon its point (or superstructure) of spiritual concentration, and not upon its basis (or infra-structure) of material arrangement, that the equilibrium of Mankind biologically depends.61

Teilhard writes: “The future universal cannot be anything else but the hyperpersonal.”63

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?34

Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) advocated a similar position when he wrote: The church’s preference for the work of Aquinas is primarily intended to provide, at a time of spiritual dissolution, a sound philosophy by which the abiding, naturally known antecedents of the faith are eminently validated; it is not aimed at forcing theology into a determined form. The church did not mean at all to put an impassable obstacle in the way of reshaping theology by the search of new philosophies.35

Teilhard de Chardin proposed a philosophy of love to support the principal features of evolution that include attraction, unity, complexity, and emergence—reflecting something deep and profound at the heart of nature. Love, he writes, is a passionate force at the heart of the Big Bang universe, the fire that breathes life into matter and unifies elements center to center; love is a cosmic unitive principle, a “cosmological force.” Teilhard states, “Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces . . . the physical structure of the universe is love.”

Evolution brings with it the rise of consciousness, and as consciousness rises, so too does awareness of God. The human person is created to see God in every aspect of life, charged with divine energy, and to love what he or she sees. In this respect scripture is written daily in the supermarkets, nursing homes, playgrounds, post offices, cafes, bars, and in the scripts of home and community life. God is not hovering over us; God is the amazing depth, breadth, imagination, and creativity in culture, art, music, poetry, science, literature, film, gyms, and parks—all in some way speak the word of God. Every place is the place to find God, and God is in everything. “God is at the tip of my pen, my spade, my brush, my needle; of my heart and my thought,” Teilhard wrote.43

Evolution invites us to expand our consciousness of the divine mystery beyond the realm of human history and to see humankind within the process of an evolving cosmic history. We come from the whole and belong to the whole. As church, as theologians, as citizens of the universe, therefore, we need an “option for whole,” and by this I mean we need a new consciousness that includes our Big Bang expanding universe and biological evolution as part of our intellectual search for truth. Theology must begin with evolution if it is to talk of a living God, and hence it must include physical, spiritual, and psychological change as fundamental to reality. Einstein’s discovery of relativity means that space-time is a dimension of the unfinished, expanding universe; thus, whatever we say about God is bound up with the universe. By extending the knowing process into the furthest realms of cosmic relatedness, being acquires new depth. Knowledge cannot be satisfied with human history alone; it must reach into cosmic history, if it is in search of truth. To see evolution as revelatory of the divine Word means that we come to see the various forms and rhythms of nature as reflective of divine qualities. This means moving beyond the static images of God that are so familiar to us and that remain irretrievably tied to an archaic understanding of the cosmos. We are invited, through modern science, to widen our theological vision, to awaken to a dynamic cosmos in which we are deeply related, a...

Narrow mind imagines itself as separate from the world. It is isolated, often alienated, and sees the world as a zero-sum game in which success depends on another’s failure. Scarcity defines the world of mochin d’gadlut: fear is its primary emotion, and anger is its most common expression.

Thomas Merton distinguishes solitude from isolation: He who isolates himself in order to enjoy a kind of independence in his egotistic and external self does not find unity at all, for he disintegrates into a multiplicity of conflicting passions and finally ends in confusion and total unreality. Solitude is not and can never be a narcissistic dialogue of the ego with itself. . . . Go into the desert not to escape other men but in order to find them in God.15

The gospel life is not a social agency of good works but a life of mindful presence or oneness in God. As such, the sacraments do not make one Christian; only a disciplining of the mind, following the way of Jesus, can truly form a christic life. Christian life, like Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim life, requires personal responsibility. One must desire to put on the mind of Christ, one must choose to follow the way of the gospel with the guidance of a teacher or master, and then one must practice the gospel life in community. Going to church does not make one a Christian just as saying the Our Father does not make one a Christian. Rather, gospel life is praxis; it begins with awareness of God’s presence and discernment of the inner mind or spirit. It is a life of awareness that something new is being formed and an invitation to be part of the creative process. Gospel life is receptivity to the gift of divine energy and a conscious “yes” to accept God’s energy as the transformative energy of self and world. Thus, Christian life requires a conscious decision to shift the mind (metanoia) by training the mind to focus on the central values of the gospel and to dispense with all other things. Without the choice for a new level of consciousness, there can be no new reality or reign of God. Where our minds focus, there our treasure lies.

Rabbi Shapiro states: Will you engage this moment with kindness or with cruelty, with love or with fear, with generosity or scarcity, with a joyous heart or an embittered one? This is your choice and no one can make it for you. If you choose kindness, love, generosity, and joy, then you will discover in that choice the Kingdom of God, heaven, nirvana, this worldly salvation. If you choose cruelty, fear, scarcity, and bitterness, then you will discover in that choice the hellish states of which so many religions speak. These are not ontological realities tucked away somewhere in space—these are existential realities playing out in your own mind. Heaven and hell are both inside of you. It is your choice that determines just where you will reside.17

Carol Flinders writes: “Desire is the human being’s most precious resource. Spend it heedlessly and we are spiritually bankrupt.”18

When Saint Paul states that we are to have the “same mind as Christ Jesus,” he means we are to break through our individual egos and become one with God in all our relationships so that, like Jesus, we create the world as a reflection of the One we love, God.

Both Francis and Thérèse had a focused Christ consciousness, a deep entanglement with divine love that governed the direction of their lives.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro, The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness: Presparing to Practice (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2006), 5–6.

Charlotte Tomaino, Awakening the Brain (New York: Atria Books, 2012), 60.

Carol Flinders, Enduring Lives: Living Portraits of Women and Faith in Action

John Richard Sack, Mystic Mountain: The Ascent to Love (Jacksonville, OR: CyberScribe Publications, 2014), 54–55.

Closed off from the world, we have become inattentive to it. The world has become an object for our control and manipulation because we are unconscious of belonging to it; thus, we are prone to devolve it.

Jesuit spiritual writer Anthony de Mello writes: “Most people don’t know they are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing we call ‘human existence.’”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, trans. René Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1969), 239.

Zachary Hayes, OFM, A Window to the Divine: Creation Theology (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1997), 89.

Barbara Marx Hubbard and Noel McInnis, The Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth (Book of Co-Creation) (Santa Barbara, CA: Foundation for Conscious Evolution, 1993).

Anthony De Mello, SJ, “Spirituality Means Waking Up,” demellospirituality.com website.