Keene Lecture 2
‘Nature as Sacrament’
Dr Arthur Peacocke
Wednesday 21st November 2001
I want to start with two short quotations from the golden prose of a writer who represented, I think, the efflorescence of certainly Anglican or English spirituality of the 17th century. This is Thomas Trehearne writing in 1670, but undiscovered until the 1890s and unpublished until 1903:
‘The world is unknown, till the value and glory of it is seen, till the beauty and serviceableness of all its parts is considered. When you enter into it, it is an unlimited field of variety and beauty where you may lose yourself in the multitude of wonder and delights, but it is a happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own felicity and to find God in exchange for oneself, which we then do when we see him in his gifts and adore his glory.’
And again:
‘Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in heaven, see yourself in your Father’s palace and look upon the skies, the earth and the air as celestial joys, having such a reverent esteem of all as if you were among the angels. The bride of a monarch in her husband’s chamber has no such causes of delight as you.’
So the theme I want to touch upon this evening is one close to my own personal background as a scientist who’s moved into priesthood. It’s close to what I might call our English sensibilities about the significance of the natural world.
I started my last lecture last week by referring to a meeting in Berkeley in 1998 when a whole lot of scientists talked about their spiritual quest. As a matter of fact, this October the follow-up in a separate ‘scientists in a spiritual quest’ meeting was held in Boston and I was present at that. Again, the meeting included Muslims, Jews and Christians and some who would describe themselves as agnostics. Again, there was a striking sense of a shared sense of wonder at the natural world, rather like that of Thomas Trehearne, in their personal anecdotes of their joys in discovery when that had been vouchsafed to them. There was amongst these scientists no sign of that arrogant scientism which we may have seen on our TV screens, which claims that the only knowledge available to humanity is scientific, or that scientific knowledge could alone satisfy the human quest for meaning, even when it helps us to search for intelligibility. They were very different, as in the previous meeting, in character, race, temperament, ethnic group and so on, yet I think they would all have concurred with the humility of the outlook expressed by that arch hammer of ecclesiastics, Thomas Henry Huxley (Darwin’s Bulldog, as he was called), who invented the word ‘agnostic’. He wrote in a letter to Charles Kingsley, the author and Anglican clergyman, the following:
‘Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I’ve only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I resolved at all risk to do this.’
Those same scientists also echoed the wonder expressed in the concluding remarks of Fred Hoyle, then a convinced agnostic, in his broadcast lectures in 1950, on the nature of universe:
‘When, by patient enquiry, we learn the answer to any problem – speaking as an astrophysicist – we always find, both as a whole and in detail, that the answer thus revealed is finer in concept and design than anything we could ever have arrived at by a random guess. All of which gives grounds for hope that the misconception of the supposed warfare between science and religion is at last giving way to a recognition of their symbiotic role in the human quest for both intelligibility and meaning.’
Certainly for the last 150 years this has not been the popular or academic perception, and it is light years away from that synthesis of theology and natural philosophy which pervades that great epitome of the Middle Ages, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante could then depict the figure of Virgil, the Latin poet, whom he admired above all others, and for him was the embodiment of human wisdom – he depicted the figure of Virgil as leading him through Hell and Purgatory to the very threshold of Heaven. Today science appears to most people to represent the surest and soundest form of human knowledge, but, alas, it is not perceived as leading into the divine presence, even though its practitioners evince attitudes to nature of reverence and even awe, as I was mentioning both at Berkeley and at Boston.
Given these signs of the beginnings of awareness by at least some members of the scientific community to the spiritual dimensions of their concern, has not the time come for the Christian community to reflect more profoundly on the experience of nature, of the world, that the scientists have opened up? I am not, at least in this talk, here concerned with the increasingly fruitful interaction between science and theology in which so many have been involved and to which, incidentally, the British, and not least Anglicans, have made a disproportionately large contribution. Rather, I am going to be concerned with how our attitudes as Christians to nature and to the world can be enriched by the panorama of the sciences and provide new resources for widening our spiritual sensitivities. As last week, the presuppositions of what I say here will be critically realist with respect to both science and theology, namely, I think both science and theology aim to depict reality, that they both do so in metaphorical language with the use of models, and that their metaphors and models are revisable within the context of the continuous communities which they have generated.
So, what is the vista that 20th century science unveils for our contemplation? We now know that we live in a world that, extrapolating backwards in our clock time, may be said to have begun some 13 or so billion years ago, in the fluctuation of something which we might call a quantum field, which became an unimaginably condensed mass of particles and energy. This has, over millions of years, coalesced in an expanding space into the present observable universe, with its billion galaxies each containing between 100 million and 100 thousand million stars. Our earth is one planet near one of these stars, in one of these galaxies. Conditions were such as to allow the formation of more complex molecules that could copy themselves and form life. This matter became living and developed by natural selection with natural propensities towards complexity, self-organization, information storage and, we would say, consciousness. The history of the cosmos and of life on the earth manifests an emergent quality, for the concepts which are hammered out by the sciences appropriate to each level of complexity cannot be reduced to those that are pertinent to their constituents. Generally, new kinds of reality appear in the evolutionary process in the course of time. The stardust of the cosmos is become us. Humanity has thus come into existence through this seamless web of evolutionary natural processes, now unveiled in broad outline by the sciences. At no point is there any need for a miraculous intervention by some deus ex machina to account for its history; no laser-beam miracle. This humanity which is emerged seeks urgently and even passionately for the meaning of its existence and of that from which and within which it is emerged. This long quest for meaning is the religious quest of humanity and cannot but be affected by this perspective from the sciences of where we have come from and the processes that have resulted in us being here at all. It is important to stress how this new vista is, quite unlike anything that Christian or any other theology has assumed in its classical literature, and indeed in all previous theological discussion, until the end of the 19th century. The whole stage in which the human drama was conceived as being set has been totally transformed into an epic of evolutionary process of which humanity is an integral part. No wonder the Anglican theologican, Austin Farrer, urged Christian theologies ‘to undergo a rebirth of images’, to express its insights in order to remain viable.
Let’s just reflect a little bit on the relation of humanity and of God to this world as I’ve just described it. We are accustomed in our mutual interactions to use material things in ways which both express our minds or intentions and which simultaneously affect what is in our minds or fulfill our intentions. Thus a signed order form both expresses the desire of the one who signs it to purchase, say, a book, and also itself sets a sequence of events in motion which leads to the possessing of the book. A deed of covenant both expresses the mind and attitudes of benevolence of an individual to some project and itself contributes to the realization of that project. Analogously in the Christian understanding of God’s relation to physical reality, the world of matter is seen as both expressing and revealing the mind of God its creator and as effecting God’s purposes.
These two aspects of our and of God’s relation to the material world were acutely analyzed over 70 years ago by Oliver Quick in connection with his study of the Christian sacraments. For a brief time he was Regius Professor, Oxford. He died prematurely. Oliver Quick pointed out that in human experience we make this distinction by recognizing its frequent arbitrariness between those outward things or realities which occupy space and time and are in principle perceptible by bodily senses, and those inward things or realities which do not satisfy those conditions. He went on to emphasize that the material objects which constitute part of our outward reality can have two different relations to our inward mental life. They can be instruments that take their character from what is done with them, or they can be symbols that take their character from what is known by them: instruments doing, symbols knowing. This useful working distinction in human experience has a parallel in two ways in which God may be regarded as related to the world. The world may be viewed as the instrument whereby God is effecting some cosmic purpose by acting on or doing something with it. Or the world may be viewed as the symbol in and through which God is signifying and expressing his eternal nature to those who have eyes to see; that is, revealing God’s self within it.
So let’s look at these two aspects; first of all, the world and its processes as instruments of God’s purposes. A ………….. aspect of the scientific account of the natural world in general is the seamless character of the web that has been spun on the loom of time. The process is continuous from its cosmic beginning at the hot big bang to the present, and at no point do modern natural scientists have to invoke any non-natural causes to explain their observations and inferences about the past, including the origin of life. The processes that have occurred can be characterized as those of emergence, for new forms of matter and a hierarchy of organization of these forms appear in the course of time. To these new organizations of matter it is, very often, possible to ascribe new levels of what can only be called reality. In other words, new kinds of reality may be said to emerge in time, notably on the surface of the earth new forms of living matter, that is, living organisms, have come into existence by this process. That is what we mean by evolution.
What the scientific perspective of the world, especially the living world, inexorably impresses upon us is a dynamic picture of the world of entities and structures involved in continuous and incessant change and in process without ceasing. The scientific perspective, and especially that of evolution, impels us to take more seriously and more concretely than hitherto, the notion, of the immanence of God as creator; that God is the immanent creator creating in and through the processes of the natural order. I would urge that all this has to be taken in a very strong sense. If one asks where do we see God as creator during, say, the processes of biological evolution, one has to reply that the processes themselves, as unveiled by the sciences, are the action of God as creator.
God gives existence in divinely created time to a process that itself brings forth the new; thereby God is creating. This means we do not have to look for any extra supposed ‘gaps’ in which, or mechanisms whereby, God might be supposed to be acting as creator of the world. I mentioned last week a musical analogy about listening to Beethoven’s music and thinking his thoughts as you listen to the music, and Beethoven being the music while you’re listening to it. It reminded me of another quotation of T S Eliot’s from The Dry Salvages, also the Four Quartets, when the music is heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts. We are listening to God the creator as the sciences unveil the processes of evolution and creativity. There is no need to look for God as some kind of additional factor supplementing the process of the world. God, to use language usually applied in sacramental ecclesiology, is ‘in, with and under’ all that is and all that is going on.
So much for God in relation to the world as an instrument of God’s purposes. What about the world as a symbol of God’s purposes? We have to ask, what does this process signify? What does it mean? At each emergent level in evolution, matter in its newly evolved mode of organization manifests properties which could not in principle be discerned in the early levels from which the new emerges. In a sense, therefore, one could say that the potentialities of matter have been, and still are, being realized in the cosmic development. Sometimes, again to be musical, I say it is like unfolding all the potentialities of a simple tune in a fugue. In particular, matter organized in a way we call human, is capable of activities which we describe as those of conscious thought, of self-reflection, of communication with other human beings, and all the interrelations of personal life and ethical behaviour, of creativity, in art and science; that is, the apprehension of values and, indeed, of all the individual and social activities that characterize and differentiate humanity from the rest of the biological world.
Matter has evolved into humanity, and it seems we cannot avoid concluding, even from the most materialistic viewpoint, that this demonstrates the ability of matter to display, in humanity, functions and properties for which we have to use special terms, such as ‘mental’ or ‘spiritual’ or ‘personal’. We have to employ these special terms because these properties are uniquely and characteristically human. Such an affirmation of, for example, the reality of human conscious and self-conscious activities, is not dependent on any particular philosophy of an entity, say, called ‘the mind’ or one called ‘the body’. This is a problem that philosophers still grapple with; but it seems that by taking seriously the scientific perspective, we cannot avoid arriving at a view of matter which sees it as, in human beings, manifesting mental, personal and spiritual activities. Furthermore, we can now posit in a way the significance of Jesus the Christ in this evolutionary perspective. The significance adumbrated over a hundred years ago in Lux Mundi when J R Illingworth wrote:
‘In scientific language the incarnation, that is of God in Christ, may be said to have introduced a new species into the world, the divine human being transcending past humanity as humanity transcended the rest of the animal creation and communicating God’s vital energy by a spiritual process to subsequent generations. ‘
Now Jesus’ resurrection convinced the disciples, notably Paul, that it is the union of his kind of life with God which is not broken by death and capable of being taken up into God. For Jesus manifested the kind of human life which, it was believed, can become fully life with God, not only here and now, but eternally beyond the threshold of death. Hence Jesus’ imperative ‘Follow me’ constitutes a call for the transformation of humanity into a new kind of human being, becoming. What happened to Jesus, it was thought, could happen to all.
In this perspective, Jesus the Christ, the whole Christ event has, I would suggest, shown us what is possible for humanity. The actualization of this potentiality can properly be regarded as the consummation of the purposes of God already incompletely manifested in evolving humanity. In Jesus there was a divine act of new creation, because the initiative was from God within human history, within the responsive human will of Jesus, inspired by that outreach of God in humanity which we designate as God as Holy Spirit. Jesus the Christ is thereby seen, in the context of the whole complex of events in which he participated, as the paradigm of what God intends for all human beings, now revealed as having the potentiality of responding to, of being open to, of becoming united with God. In this perspective Jesus the Christ represents the consummation of the evolutionary creative process which God has been effecting in and through the world, and indeed wasn’t this all said by Irenaeus in the 2nd century, when he wrote ‘The word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who of his boundless love became what we are, to make us what even he himself is.’
Now, to think about the sacraments. I’ve been suggesting, following that treatment of Oliver Quick, but now interpreting in the light of the cosmic evolutionary epic, that the world of matter in its relation to God has both the symbolic function of expressing God’s mind and the instrumental function of being the means whereby he effects his purpose. The created world is seen then by Christians as a symbol because it is a mode of God’s revelation, an expression of his truth and beauty, which are the spiritual aspects of his reality. It is also valued by them for what God is effecting instrumentally through it; what God does in and through it. But these two functions of matter, the symbolical and the instrumental, also constitute the special character of the use of matter in particular Christian sacraments. There is in each particular sacrament a universal reference to this double character of created reality: created physical reality and meaning can be attached to speaking of the created world as a sacrament, or at least as sacramental.
William Temple, in what I think is one of the greatest theological books of the 20th century, ‘Nature, Man and God’ has a percipient chapter called ‘The Sacramental Universe’. However, it must be recognized that this sacramental character is only implicit and that it is obscure and partial, both because of human beings’ limited perception and sensitivity, and because of evil. The significance of the incarnation of God in a human being within the created world is that, in the incarnate Christ, the sacramental character of the world was made explicit and complete. In this sense it seems legitimate to regard the incarnate life of Christ as a supreme sacrament, for in this outward historical life there is both uniquely expressed and uniquely operative that purpose of goodness which is the purpose of God himself in all life; and that all love and all nature should fulfill.
In the sacraments of the church these two ultimate sacraments, the created order and Christ as God incarnate, regularly come together and are brought into focus in time and place. At the Last Supper, which developed into the church’s Eucharist, Jesus identified the mode of his incarnation and reconciliation in God and humanity, his body and blood, with the very stuff of the universe, when he took the bread, blessed, broke and gave it to his disciples saying, ‘This is my flesh for you’ and similarly the wine, saying, ‘This is my blood of the new covenant.’ It seems to me that it is a legitimate extension and development of the ideas and symbolic references which are implicit in these features of this original historical act, to affirm that in this act of Jesus a new value was explicitly set upon bread and wine, molecular as they are, an integral part of the natural world, corn and grapes, and a product of human co-operation with nature, bread and wine. His words and these acts seem to me to have involved a revaluation of the things themselves, a new value assigned to the world of matter by God’s own act in Jesus the Christ. Furthermore, the stuff of the universe is in this act manifest as the vehicle, presence and means whereby the self offering, self emptying of the creator in the very act of creation with its concomitant self-limitation of God is made explicit, as involving a perennial divine suffering; for the bread and wine symbolize the broken body of divine suffering and the outpouring of the divine life.
The cruciform Eucharist makes explicit the cruciform nature of the created order. A further development seems natural to me, in the light of what I’ve been saying about the universal reference of sacramental acts. That to which a new value was imputed was not only those particular elements of bread and wine used in this way, but the whole created material world. For sacraments in general have significance only as a part of a whole whose true relation to God is being represented and realized. This value was implicit, though not available to human observation, in the act of creation. It remained a potentiality of matter only partially realized in humanity. It was the ground of the incarnation, the root of it being possible at all, for it was in God’s own world that God as Word, as logos, was incarnate in a human being: that world of which God the logos, the Word, was already in the formative crucible, even the historic Last Supper. He was still largely incognito to his disciples, but to Christians he is now, mercifully, no longer unknown. So in Christian thinking the sacraments as a whole, especially the Eucharist, manifest continually the ultimate meaning of matter as a symbol and an instrument of God’s purposes.
The participants in the Eucharist consciously and humbly offer their lives in service to God and humanity in unity with the self-offered life of Christ, which is believed to be present in and with the elements of bread and wine, in the context of a total communal act. Thus, in this act, Christians believe they are participating in that reformation and new creation of humanity which the coming of Jesus initiated through his incarnation and self-offering. It is cogently represented by the bread and wine offered with sacrificial reference both at the original Last Supper and at every Eucharist of the church since then. The union with the offering of Christ is not self-directed but, as we say, for others, and it’s worth noticing that what Christ took, and what is used in the Eucharist, is the product of human action on nature: bread, not corn, wine, not grapes. So the whole life and work of human beings may be regarded as offered in this act, which is so closely associated with the historic initiation of the new humanity in Christ.
Of course, many themes interlock and interweave in this central act of Christian worship, and all of them have immense significance for our attitude to the stuff of the cosmos of which we ourselves are part. For the Eucharist of the Christian church, like a parabolic mirror, focuses many parallel rays into one point of time and space. In particular, from the earliest times, its liturgy contained overt references to God’s creative activity, though this insight has been somewhat obscured over the intervening centuries. For the ‘words of institution’, of Jesus, ‘This is my body; this is my blood’, took place within the context of the Jewish meal time blessing over bread and wine, the cup of blessing. Those blessings took the form of a thanksgiving to God for creation, and the early liturgies, the Didache and others, all have a thanksgiving for creation as the first initial part of the Eucharistic prayer, and indeed I’m glad to say that at only the last minute Prayer G in the Anglican new Book of Common Worship, filtered in through a reluctant Synod by the Bishop of Oxford, is a marvelous prayer which many of us who were scientists and ordained scientists wanted to see in the liturgy. It eventually got in by the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit and the machinations of Synod (perhaps they can be identified sometimes) – a very beautiful prayer recalling the ancient liturgies, where thanksgiving for creation was the first thing in the great Eucharistic prayer.
‘Blessed are you, Lord God, our light and our salvation. To you be glory and praise for ever. From the beginning you have created all things and all your works echo the silent music of your praise. In the fullness of time you made us in your image, the crown of all creation. You gave us breath and speech that with angels and archangels and all the powers of heaven we may find a voice to sing your praise.’
And then it goes on into the Sanctus and the Benedictus.
So we come, oddly enough, to a kind of convergence between scientific perspectives and sacramental ones. I am suggesting on the grounds I’ve been outlining that there is a convergence between on the one hand the implications of the scientific perspective on the spiritual capacities and capabilities of matter, which are manifest in human beings, and on the other hand a sacramental view of matter which Christians have adopted as the natural consequence of the meaning they attach to Jesus’ life and the continued existence of the church. For Christians have had to understand matter: firstly, in the light of their conviction that matter was able, in the person of Jesus, to express the being of God who is nevertheless regarded as supramental, suprapersonal, supraspiritual, so that God’s mode of ‘Being’ lies beyond any sequence of superlatives we can list. And secondly, they have come to understand matter in the light of their understanding of the sacramental acts of Jesus, made in the context of his death and resurrection and in which the continuing life of Christian humanity originates.
Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, it looks as if Christians starting, as it were, from one end with their experience of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, acting on the stuff of the world, have developed an insight into matter which is consonant with that which is now evoked by reflections on the scientific perspective of matter becoming humanity. In the Eucharist, a conjunction occurs of a group of baptized Christians who are committed to fulfilling God’s purposes in the world and are consciously acting corporately in communion with each other, the conjunction of that with the elements of bread and wine which are present because of our communal continuity with the last supper of Jesus. We thus have, in such events, unique though temporary configurations of Christian people in relation to other Christians and of bread and wine taken, blessed, broken and given because of the intention of the historical Jesus. The assertion that God gives himself uniquely to human beings in this situation can be expressed as the assertion that in this unique configuration of events and matter, there emerges in accordance with the divine purpose a new potentiality of the stuff of the universe, and that this new potentiality is characterized by God being able to act in and through those events in ways denoted by such terms, amongst others, as ‘presence’, the ‘real presence’ of Christ, and ‘sacrifice’.
Let me summarize in another way what I have been trying to say. The world is created and sustained in being by the will of God, the will of perfect love. The Son, the logos, is the all-sufficient principal and form of this created order. At every level this order reflects in its own measure something of the quality of the divine. To quote Charles Raven:
‘From atom and molecule to mammal and man, each by its appropriate order and function expresses the design inherent in it, and contributes so far as it can, by failure or success, to the fulfillment of the common purpose.’
The process of creation has been unfolded by the sciences as one in which new qualities and modes of existence continuously emerge out of simpler forms of matter by the operation of God-given natural laws. The level of organization which is reached in humanity represents not only a new summit in this evolutionary process, but a new departure in a way in which change is initiated. For that mode of organization of matter which constitutes humanity is characterized by activities and purposes which are only describable in terms of mind, self-consciousness and free will. Human beings are nevertheless incomplete and unfulfilled and tragically aware of their lack of fulfillment, of their own potentialities. Thus it can be said that in humanity matter has become aware of itself, of its past, and of its unfulfilled potentialities. The Christian claim, and here it differentiates itself from secular humanism, then amounts to the affirmation that this whole process is but the outworking of the creative purposes of God in the world and goes on to assert further that this process has culminated in a manifestation of God as a complete human being within the creative world. Only thus could God express explicitly God’s character as creative love. All other levels of created being up to this point were inadequate for this purpose but implicit in manifestations of a God still incognito. Thus, on the one hand, that which God has brought into existence at the start of the cosmos is seen through the sciences to be the matrix and necessary condition for the appearance of mind, self-consciousness and values all that characterizes the human person; and on the other hand, the Christian revelation affirms that this character of the stuff of the cosmos is so fundamental that God expresses being in and active through the culmination of this process in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In Jesus we see really what ‘person’ is, what being a person should amount to.
The two enterprises converge in a view of the cosmos which can therefore, I think, properly be called sacramental, a term that recognizes simultaneously both the duality in our experiences represented by our familiar body-mind subjective dichotomies and the observed fact that in our experience and in the evolutionary development shown by the sciences, that all the higher qualities of existence which characterize personal and mental life are in fact qualities of matter in particular forms and appear only when matter is so organized, namely as human persons. The term bluntly recognizes the duality necessary in our talk about ourselves and about the character of the evolutionary process, but it also recognizes the mental and spiritual features of existence are always embodied in organized matter which constitutes us and the observable cosmos.
At the historical crisis of the human life of the Jesus who was God incarnate, at the moment before the love that moves the sun and the other stars culminated in the self-offering of the cross, Jesus himself gave a new significance through that characteristic act of humanity and of his priesthood, his need to eat, her need to imbibe the matter of the world to live. Eventually that common meal became the symbolic meal of the new humanity stemming from Christ. One might almost say, of a new level of actualization of human potentialities, for the church believes that in the Eucharist God acts to recreate both the individual human being and society, to bring to fruition the purpose of God’s creation manifest in the incarnation. In the Eucharist, in the sacrament, God expresses the significance of the created material order, and through it is achieving the divine purpose for that order of protons, atoms, molecules, proteins, amoeba, animals and human beings.
Questions:
You are regarding the creation, the creative processes as very positive, moving in the loving purposes of God towards humankind and then thereafter into sacrament so that we can look back from that point and see a whole wonderful progression, and my question is really about where sin and evil come into this. If one looks at the thing in the way that you’ve been, in terms of the process, then the evil seems to therefore be built into the thing from the beginning as well as the good in the process, so would you think that is right, or where does it all ‘go wrong’, if you see what I mean?
Well, I wouldn’t say ‘going wrong’ because I did indicate last week it’s very hard to conceive of a process in which it is going to have emergent new forms without the death of the individual, without pain, to an order to which an individual organism can react to its environment and survive, and a lot of what we call natural evil seems to be implicit in the possibility of having a creative world at all, so that’s one side of it. As for moral evil, this is the great mystery, if you like, of why God allowed free will in human beings to come into existence at all. I think most Christians’ response to this is to see that our position of free will must be because in some sense, and one, like St Paul at this stage, is ‘speaking as a fool’, trying to think of what God’s intentions are, because God wills the bringing into existence of a community, a society of free-willing people who have freely chosen to become members of the kingdom of God. Otherwise we would be automata and there couldn’t be morality without free will.
We can’t do good and evil without free will. To do good you must have the capacity to do evil. So this is why I did hint last time, and this last week one brief moment, about the cost to God of creation, the self-limitation of God in which he allows to come into existence a world with this character, is costly to God. People talk about ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’, a pregnant phrase in the Book of Revelation which is pretty obscure to us, most of it. But ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ is a pointer to the self-offering, costly character of God’s creative work. We tend to think, as Christians, of Jesus on the cross, but that act of self-offering love at great cost was a manifestation of the self-offering kind of love that created the world all along, and that God all the time suffers in, with and under the world so that – and you get this in Romans 8 – the creation ‘groaning and travailing until now’: the sense of the cost to God – we might even say to God herself – in bringing forth the new.
I think we have to take on what Holmes Ralston calls ‘the cruciform character of nature’, that there is, as it were, new life, new possibilities through self-limitation, and suffering is a door to the new and to higher potentialities and possibilities. This is a character imprinted from creation from the beginning, manifest explicitly, we would say as Christians, in the life and death and passion of Jesus, and we see God not just as creating a world ‘out there’, but God involved in the very processes of the world and suffering in, with and under them. This has been an insight of 20th century theology. The 20th century has had enough of suffering and people have had to take it on board in a new way. ‘Natural evils’ are inimicable to human and biological life, some of which are more understandable in the light of our understanding of evolutionary processes in the past; but ‘moral evil’, that which is due to human beings, is the price of having good in the world, I think.
If indeed, then, free will is closely linked in with moral evil in your mind, and sacrifice is also a part of the process and obviously a part of the mind of God from the foundation of the world, then do you think that free will has been present in the system right through, even though perhaps not conscious, but aspects of the animal kingdom, perhaps aspects of the inanimate world making some sort of choices in the process in addition to humankind?
I wouldn’t find that coherent, because it seems to me that all the terms we use of mental and personal life and apply to human beings are a genuine new emergent in human beings, and although there are in the higher mammals and porpoises - the more intelligent vertebrates - signs of all sorts of qualities which are not unlike those of human beings in their relationships, I think to extrapolate back to say there was free will right the way down the system or mentality right the way down the system is, I think, a kind of category mistake. If these qualities are emergent in human beings, and I see no sense in applying free will to a cell or an atom or even a worm or a bacterium, it is not that which they are capable of in their very nature or organization.
New questioner:
The idea of Christ as a new level of evolution I find attractive. How does it relate to the idea that Christ related back to the origin of the universe? In the Creeds we have Christ related back as one of the three persons of God – ‘light from light’ and so on, right back in the beginning, and there seems to be a tension between the two.
I think you’ve touched on something very profound here. I’ve been very perturbed in recent years in reading a lot of theology where the word ‘Christ’ has become almost just the surname of Jesus. But actually it was a title, Jesus the Christ, and that’s why I tend to say that, meaning Messiah, the anointed one, Christos. We have to be careful here. The human Jesus of Nazareth is an historical figure; but was incarnate in Jesus was simply God: the God who was already present in the universe. That which was there all the time is now made known to us in Jesus and that ‘Word’ present in the universe, life of the universe, has now been made human flesh. ‘We have seen his glory as of the only begotten of the Father’, says the writer of the Fourth Gospel. People talk about the pre-existence of Christ and they tend to think of the pre-existence of Jesus of Nazareth as if Christ equals Jesus. What the traditional doctrine is saying is that what pre-existed was God’s presence in the created world and God’s intentions of bringing that world to fruition in a particular way, so that what was ‘light of light and and very God of very God’ was God’s own self present in the world, God the Word, which we sometimes call the second person of the Trinity. These words can be very misleading, because the modern sense of ‘person’ is the center of consciousness, whereas ‘person’ – I’m not going into the whole history of this – was the mask of an actor, the dramatis personae. Many Christians are confused tri-theists, thinking of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit as a kind of sort of triumvirate. This is really jejeune, and not adequate to the significance of what we are trying to say. What we’re saying is that there is an aspect of God’s fundamental being which is expressed in and through the universe. The self-expression of God is in the universe. The Word is the self-expression of God and that was present in the universe, that was there, that which was God from God, light from light, very God of very God, and is made flesh (John 1:14) in Jesus. We see it then in the historical Jesus of Nazareth, a human being who now becomes the lens through which these rays of the divine presence in the universe are focused to an intensity so that we can all perceive it. That’s what the church gradually began to realize. Those cryptic code words in the ancient creeds point us towards all sorts of things, but we mustn’t be misled by them. Jesus did not pre-exist, but God the Word pre-existed and that was what was made flesh in Jesus.
And this God may be present or is present in us also?
God is there available to be present in us if we are open to God, yes.
The title ‘Nature as Sacrament’ made me think about ecology and creation spirituality, because I think there is a new awareness of the sacredness of the earth which is very linked with the fragility of the earth and with the damage that we can do the earth. I wonder if you would like to comment on that and also on the insights of people who I think of as involved in creation spirituality, like Père de Chardin and Matthew Fox with his idea of original blessing.
Thank you for mentioning that. I could have made a lot more of this. It is significant, for example, that the Eastern Orthodox churches have been more exercised socially about the ecological situation than the Western churches because of their earthiness, their sense of the sacramental presence of God in and with the universe. They don’t believe in the supernatural. They believe only in this earth with the divine energies imprinted and impressed on them. So to that extent all the world is potentially sacred insofar as it is the vehicle of God’s presence and activity, and I think we do have actually if we spread this out and follow on, the basis of a proper ethic and responsibility for the natural world in a way that we’ve not realized before. I agree with that very much. I’ve met Matthew Fox and I know his views. I’m happy that he talks about original blessing and, like him, I’m rather skeptical of the rather baneful influence of Augustine in certain respects on our understanding of human nature and of the world. Teilhard de Chardin – I like his aspirations; his marvelous book ‘The Mass of the Universe’. There is, shall we say, a certain looseness in his French poetic prose which makes one sit up and think at times, but if one takes it as a devotional literature, I find it very helpful. Yes, it does link up with exactly what I’m saying. There are all sorts of implications for how we treat the stuff of the world, and implications for art, of course, and for the creativity of human beings using the stuff of the world in sculpture, or visually, or with sound and so on. It links up with many other things as Van Balthazar, the Catholic theologian, has developed in his theology of beauty and so on. It has enormous ramifications, but it is a positive view of the world. It’s not a world as a great baneful slough of despond. It is alive with potentiality and possibilities of divinity.
The scientists are all the time looking for the elementary laws that govern the universe, and those laws have to be persistent and consistent throughout time. If one projects back then and looks at the big bang, those laws were inherent at the moment of big bang as they will be in the future, and therefore all the potential of matter was existing at the time of big bang, but over time the unexpressed potential has gradually become more and more expressed, and we have seen that evolve through the activity of what we call energy. Energy is the fibre that makes these things happen and makes change happen within the framework of those laws. If we look at the theology we are taught about the love which is bringing together disparate things in unity and that we all look upon everything else as being equal in love, and I just wondered whether there is a convergence now of the concept of what energy is and what love is from the spiritual love and the material energy, whether we’re seeing something bringing these two thoughts together that eventually they will be expressed in future time in a unity which we actually understand.
Of course, this is the way that Teilhard talked a bit. He talked about tangential energy and radial energy and most of us who were scientists really rather demurred from that. He had very critical reviews of him because he was using the word energy. The word energy in science is really a very precise word. Gradually over the 19th century we hammered out exactly what one meant by energy and there turned out to be various forms – chemical, mechanical, gravitational, electrical, and they all seemed to be forms of a single kind of entity called energy which has actually very precise definitions. The mathematics of it is all very precise, so that when the scientists use the word energy: e= mc², energy being transferred into matter and so on, in Einstein’s equation, which gives us nuclear power and some of the light we’re getting today. So the word ‘energy’ has in the scientific world a very precise meaning which is actually related to work – ergs and so on. But in ordinary popular parlance, energy is related to personal energy and personal characteristics, and so they can be enormous confusion between these two spheres, and I would rather not bring that word energy to relate to love in that way. I mean, you might bring personal energy – the dynamic activity of a human being – to relate to love, but the word ‘energy’ is part of the world made up basically of matter: energy-matter in space-time.
This is the physical basis, background, but it is certainly true, and I do like the way you’ve put it, that it does seem there’s no explanation for why the laws of the universe, the regularities, should be what they are. They could have been otherwise, and they certainly have a form whereby matter, as they say now, ‘complexifies’, becomes more and more complex. They need not have been of that kind. They could have just gone on producing lakes of liquid ammonia just like the rings of Saturn or whatever it is – clouds of gas, derelict, lifeless deserts, as it were, but they have been of a form that in this planet, and perhaps on some other planet in some other galaxy, capable of becoming living forms and you and me, so that whatever the laws are that God’s given to the world, they are of a precise kind which have this inherent creative capacity to produce new complex forms. That I find exhilarating and I liked the way you put it, but I think it might be misleading to use the word energy to make the bridge between that and love. It is an ambivalent term and has different meanings in different contexts, but in science it is a very precise meaning – energy and matter are interchangeable. etc. But ‘energy’ in ordinary life is used quite differently, and so I think one has to be a bit careful there really, and that’s one of the reasons sometimes people don’t find Teilhard de Chardin quite so helpful as he might be, because he uses the tangential and radial energy in a very special kind of spiritual way which actually sounds scientific but isn’t scientific at all. It looks as though he’s tried to get the authorization of science for his theological ideas. That’s why some people are a bit hesitant about Teilhard de Chardin in spite of his poetic and devotional force.
We don’t have a formula to express how this was created and what it means, and to each one of us it means something different, but it’s all to do with beauty.
The language and the models you’re using will be different but it’s got to be coherent and that’s what thinking is about. Because the data are different in science and theology, religious experience, experience of humanity, it doesn’t mean to say that the processes of thinking about them shouldn’t be just as strict and coherent and careful; but admittedly, as somebody once said, science is easy and theology is hard!
There seems to be an interesting dichotomy on the surface, a little bit related to what the last questioner’s been saying, that we’ve been talking about the way in which Christ (or Jesus) has helped us to understand that creation and ongoing creation may well be through suffering. How would you relate that to the shorthand perception so often of evolution as the survival of the fittest and of the more modern perception of the Selfish Gene? This seems to be an opposing type of view of the nature of the evolutionary process.
I’m not questioning natural selection. Talk about ‘the selfish gene’ is somewhat misleading because a creature survives not only because of its genetic inheritance but also because of its behaviour patterns and what kind of community of creatures it’s in. Survival of a creature depends not only on its genetic inheritance but also on many other factors, and it’s really a bit misleading to talk of ‘the selfish gene’ in any case. What survives often depends on the co-operation between creatures and the care of the young and many other factors which are not just ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ as it were, and so this word ‘selfish gene’ can be misleading. It does seem that some communities – and human beings par excellence – have survived by means of their ability through intelligence to co-operate together in societies even though they visually are not very far-sighted, their hearing is not as good as that of most wild creatures and physically they’re weak and can’t run as fast as jaguars or anything else! So there are those who say that the selfish gene – and the idea that self-sacrifice is always on a basis of ‘gain theory’ that you die only for those who are genetic kin, so your genes survive – but what seems to override this is genuine human altruism, what you might call virtue. People begin, through the apprehension of the transcendent, begin to be willing to die for ideas and people who are not genetically related to them, not their families, not their tribe, and I suppose Jesus par excellence is an illustration of that. We have to be careful about this use of ‘selfish gene’ language, I think, in describing the evolution of moral awareness which seems to transcend anything that comes in the long run from biology.
Biology might be the original basis of it, just as science may have begun as magic, and ethics may have begun as ‘selfish gene’ protection by parents looking to sacrifice themselves for their offspring and so on. But I think it is strictly a genetic fallacy to think that ethical values, although they may have emerged out of biological patterns, are explained by them, just as science isn’t explained by its origins in magic. I don’t think it’s adequate to explain our sense of values, which have for human beings an overriding sense of obligation, which is not explicable in genetic terms.
I think in popular science the ‘selfish gene’ approach, particularly, for example, in the Attenborough nature programmes, is very heavily promulgated and maybe one of the things that we as Christians need to be trying to do broaden the concept of what natural selection means; that it is not an entirely selfish process. It has other characteristics to it, such as some of the ones we’ve been talking about.
Yes, it’s a misapplication of the word ‘selfish’. To be selfish is only possible to free-willing moral beings, but when a bacterium through its interaction with other bacteria produces more progeny because it’s acquired a mutation, that’s not being selfish or unselfish, it’s just multiplying more rapidly than the rival ones. It’s not a moral decision at all. It’s just a total philosophical category mistake. Genes are neither selfish nor unselfish; they’re just bits of matter which multiply or don’t multiply according to their conditions and environment, and the term ‘selfish gene’ has been very misleading to the understanding of what biology is about. Also, of course, it’s been misapplied to saying that we’re nothing but our genes, that we’re just all dancing at the end of strings which are called our genetic constitution. If we really believed that, we wouldn’t have any more law courts, because all human responsibility would be diminished and extinguished if we were entirely the result of our genes.
Certainly the range in which we can act is influenced by our genes and some people for physiological and hormonal reasons have a much narrower band than other people, which we have to take into account, but most of us know that we are free to do some things and not other things, even within the range of what we inherit physically with our own temperaments, and I think it’s a reductionist fallacy to see ourselves as captives of our genes. Certainly our genes influence the kind of people we are and the range in which we can act, but free will still operates and overrides that in many ways. But you’ve touched on a very important aspect of modern culture, which I think is becoming almost a disease, to attribute everything to our genes. I think it should be resisted, not only by Christians, but anybody who values human responsibility and human dignity.
The Dean:
Thank you, Arthur, for giving us another evening of profound thought and I particularly enjoyed your disciplined use of terms and language, which I think has been very helpful. Next Wednesday Arthur will be talking about science and the future of Christian beliefs – some critical issues. So we look forward to seeing you and him next week. Thank you very much.
May I conclude by reading Thomas Trehearne’s Centuries. He was a mid-17th century writer who was not very well-known until a handwritten notebook of his was discovered in a bookshop in London. What I’m going to read now were a series of meditations he sent to a lady he was trying to be a spiritual mentor to. He was a contemporary of George Herbert and all that golden age of the Church England. They were called Centuries because there was a series of hundreds of these little pieces:
‘The world is not this little cottage of heaven and earth, though this be fair it is too small a gift. When God made the world he made the heavens and the heavens of heavens and the angels and the celestial powers. These also are parts of the world. So are all those infinite and eternal treasures that are to abide for ever after the Day of Judgement. Neither are these some here and some there but all everywhere and at once to be enjoyed. The world is unknown until the value and glory of it is seen, till the beauty and serviceableness of its parts is considered When you enter into it, it is an unlimited field of variety and beauty where you may lose yourself in a multitude of wonder and delights. But it is a happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own felicity and find God in exchange for oneself, which we then do when we see him in his gifts and adore his glories. You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars and perceive yourselves to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than sole, because men are in it who are everyone sole heirs as well as you; till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold and kings in scepters. You never enjoy the world, till your spirit filleth the whole world and the stars are your jewels, you are as familiar with the ways of God of all ages as with your walk and table; till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made; to love men so as to desire their happiness as the first equal to the zeal of your own; till you delight in God for being good to all. You never enjoy the world, till you more feel it in your private estate and more present in the hemisphere considering the glories and the beauties there than in your own house; till you remember how lately you were made and how wonderful it was when you came into it and more rejoice in the palace of your glory than if it had been made but today morning.’