interview

WIE: In this issue we are exploring spiritual evolution and the relationship between enlightenment and evolution. You are one of the pioneering thinkers in evolutionary spirituality and your work has been devoted to bringing an evolutionary view to Christian contemplative life. In your book, God's Ecstasy, you have said, "Evolution is a part of religious life. Creativity is built into the natural world. And the Divine is the creative principle." Can you explain what you mean?

BEATRICE BRUTEAU: Somewhere deep down we are all filled with a mystical longing, with a longing for ultimate meaningfulness, and therefore we need to see all of our world in that context. To attain this in today's climate, we need a new theology of the cosmos—one that is grounded in the best science of our day. It will be a theology in which God is very present precisely in all the dynamism and patterns of the created order. A theology of evolution sees God as deeply involved in the evolutionary process of the world. God is making the world by means of evolution. And the evolutionary process in its turn is seen as striving toward God. So, you see, God is Self-expressing and Self-realizing in evolution.

All sorts of wonderful creatures have been generated from a few simple principles and a handful of elementary particles. The creativity that makes the world is built into the world as its own essence. And in this self-creating world there is gradually growing the most Godlike capacity, consciousness. The cosmic complexity has supported the development of consciousness, and now we can know and understand and contemplate this beautiful and marvelous universe. More and more, creatures know what they're doing, appreciate their environment, choose their actions. And when you get to human beings, consciousness is aware of the fact that it is conscious. We try to understand where consciousness comes from, how it works, how we can manipulate it. At the human level, consciousness is trying to make new forms of consciousness. We've developed consciousness-altering practices and we've taken consciousness-altering drugs. Now we're even making machines that do things we used to think only conscious brains could do. Thus, consciousness is evolving further consciousness.

WIE: Can you describe what the movement or process of evolution actually is?

BB: Evolution is the linked changing of the world. There is a basic urgency in life to grow, to expand, to become new and renewed. We might even say that the very meaning of being alive is to be constantly in the process of becoming a new creation. This happens on small scales with every biological form we know, and it happens on a large scale in the universe as a whole. At least one contemporary view of the cosmos sees it as one huge, dynamic, evolving being that passes through a series of stages in which its forms and internal relations assume ever-new patterns. Some theorists of evolution point out that with each succeeding stage of development, the complexity of the patterns is increased. So evolution is the passage in time from simpler organizational forms to more complex organizational forms, carrying with it an increase of consciousness, which means a sense of unity in the organized entity. Now, this process is usually thought of as advancing by a series of small steps. But sometimes there is a Great Step. Great Steps occur when the cosmic organization goes to another level of complexity. It does this by uniting elements of the preceding level. These are what French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin called "creative unions": they bring into being something that never existed before. The New Being emerges from the connections and interactions of the composing units, and it constitutes a new level of oneness and wholeness.

Creative Union

WIE: Could you say more about Teilhard's view of an evolutionary progression toward greater and greater degrees of unity?

BB: As I said, in Teilhard's view, all of evolution has progressed by a series of creative unions. More complex and more conscious beings are formed by the union of less complex and less conscious elements with one another. Subatomic particles unite to form atoms, atoms unite to form molecules, molecules unite to form cells, and cells unite to form organisms. This same pattern of creating something new, something more complex and more conscious, by the union of the less complex and less conscious recurs at each of these levels. It is because we can look back and see the pattern, see it recurring, that Teilhard believes we can legitimately extrapolate and project the pattern into the future, looking forward to another creative union in which we will be the uniting elements.

WIE: How do these "creative unions" come about?

BB: What Teilhard says is that each time this occurs there is an exchange of "characteristic energy" among the uniting elements. For instance, the characteristic energy of atoms is electrical energy. It is by sharing this energy among themselves that the atoms make themselves into molecules. The atoms are capable of making connections with one another, and then they interact to form the union. So in order for us as human beings to unite with one another to form the next creative union, according to the same pattern that the atoms and molecules and cells followed before us, we must share with one another our characteristic energies. It is the energy sharing that forms the bond. The characteristic energy at the level we have now reached is human energy. And what is human energy? It is not just physical energy or chemical energy or biological energy. It is the energy of thinking, or knowing, and the energy of loving, or willing. It is this most intimate energy of ours that we are asked to commit to the new union. In other words, we are being asked to give ourselves as persons in order to create a higher-level New Being. The question, however, is whether human beings will actually do this enough to form the next level of cosmic evolution.

So you see, at this point, evolution meets a situation that is unique in its history: the uniting elements, in our case, are free agents. We will not automatically unite merely because of some natural affinity. Since each of us is free, we can each choose whether we will enter into the proposed union or not. Thus the union, the New Being, the next creative advance of evolution, will come about only if we freely consent to form it because the energy exchange itself, which forms the bond of the new-level cosmic organization, consists of free acts. This is why Teilhard says that the whole cosmic enterprise now hangs on our decision: we are evolution.

WIE: So human beings are in a unique position, and we bear a great responsibility for what happens. You could say that we are at a crucial evolutionary juncture.

BB: Yes we are. And in order to appreciate and feel the force of what the present human vocation is, we need to zero in on how the elements of any particular level of cosmic organization actually perform the uniting by which they come to constitute a new kind of wholeness in the world. There is not some outside force that causes this to occur. The capacity for it is inherent in the uniting elements, and they themselves do it by their own characteristic power. Every level of cosmic being has its own power of communication, the power to unite with others of its level to make something yet grander. This is the pattern that repeats in the course of evolution.

And this, therefore, is the clue to our human vocation, the next stage of the cosmic evolution. Human beings have a far more wonderful power of communication than have atoms. If the pattern repeats at our level, then we are to exercise that power to form a new kind of further Being, a Being born of our voluntary togetherness that will be able to do things that we singly cannot do.