Maurice Blondel on the Process of Reinterpretation of Traditional Religious and Spiritual Insights
Discussion
Matt Landry:
"From the earliest days of human thought, humans have attempted to understand the workings of their environment, to make sense of it, and to better relate to it. The whole of human history, from both science and religious viewpoints, contains a record of such activities. Human artifacts such as legal and moral codes document our attempts (in Teilhard’s words) to “articulate the noosphere”.
This articulation always involves searching and growing, which in turn requires the readiness to replace previous, outworn concepts with ones more consistent with a constantly expanding grasp of the universe.
With religion, according to Blondel, such ‘replacement’ consists of discarding all the superstitious, anthropomorphic, and otherworldly statements of belief, much like Jefferson did in forging his assertion of human equality based on his reinterpretation of the Gospels. In the resulting perspective God becomes the ‘core’, the “ground of being”, the ever-present agency which underlies everything as it ‘comes to be’.
In Blondel’s process of interpretation, this leads to new artifacts. Statements can be made from the new perspective which emerges from our understanding that we are embedded in a process of ‘coming to be’. To Blondel, it makes a difference that we see ourselves as ‘dynamic’, not static. We are ‘becoming’.
Teilhard expands and refines this approach by seeing the essential act of ‘becoming’ through his ‘lens of evolution’. From his perspective, this ‘becoming’ can be quantified by the increasing complexity of the ‘stuff of the universe’ over time which underpins the evolution of the entire universe. His insight provides the single thread which unites the three eras of universal evolution (pre-life, life, human life), and which is the key to explaining how humans ‘naturally’ emerge.
Teilhard understood that the evolutionary energy by which cosmic particles unite to increase complexity is just as present in the human activity of love as it is in the uniting of electrons and protons to become atoms."
(https://dtnetwork.org/the-evolutionary-lens-of-teilhard-de-chardin/)