Suffering and Sacrifice in an Unfinished Universe: The Energy of Love

Abstract

Transhumanism is a cultural and philosophical movement that advocates human enhancement through technological means. Seeking to eradicate suffering and death and transcend the limits of biology, transhumanists celebrate the power of technology to transform human life. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was intrigued by computer technology and its potential to link humankind on a new level of a global mind. He has been labeled a forerunner of transhumanism; however, his theological vision is not about enhancement but transformation. He recognized that suffering and death are invaluable to the emergence of unitive love, exemplified in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Teilhard’s vision helps us realize that suffering in nature may appear as erratic and absurd; however, in light of God’s kenotic love, suffering is oriented toward freedom and the fullness of love.

1. The Lure of Transhumanism

The twentieth century was one of the most violent centuries marked by war, mass extermination, nuclear power and ecological destruction. Yet, it was one of the most productive centuries in terms of scientific discoveries and technological advancements. Computer technology emerged in the midst of profound suffering, between World War II and the Korean War, through the work of British cryptologist Alan Turing who devised a simple test to determine if a machine could think like a human (Turing 1950). The development of micro integrated circuits and the notion of artificial intelligence led to an exponential rise in information by the late twentieth century. The possibilities of altering, enhancing or reshaping biological life in such a way that suffering and pain could be eliminated became apparent. Transhumanism refers to technologies that can improve mental and physical aspects of the human condition, such as suffering, disease, aging and death. It is based on “the belief that humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolution’s blind process of random variation […] favoring the use of science and technology to overcome biological limitations” (Bostrom 2005, p. 3). The World Transhumanist Association (WTA) was formed in 1998 at Oxford by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce, a philosophical and cultural movement centered on human enhancement through technologies. The pioneer inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil for example, anticipates that technology will eventually lead to digital immortality, in which the bodily presence of human beings will become irrelevant (Kurzweil 1999, p. 234). This futuristic “post-biological” computer-based immortality is one also envisioned by Hans Moravec, who claims that the advent of intelligent machines (machina sapiens) will provide humanity with personal immortality by mind transplant. That is, the mind will be able to be downloaded into a machine through the “eventual replacement of brain cells by electronic circuits and identical input-output functions” (Moravec 1988, pp. 110–11). Daniel Crevier argues that artificial intelligence is consistent with the Christian belief in resurrection and immortality—Christ was resurrected in a new body, he states, so why not a machine (Crevier 1994, pp. 278–80)?

Bostrom gleaned the term “transhumanism” from the writings of Julian Huxley, who asserts in his book, Religion without Revelation, “The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual one way, an individual there in another way—but in its entirety, as humanity… realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature” (Huxley 1979, p. 195). Peter Harrison and Joseph Wolyniak point out, however, that “transhumanism” has a much longer history and can be traced back to Dante’s Paradiso and, ultimately, to the Pauline epistles (Harrison and Wolyniak 2015, p. 465). In addition to Paul’s writings, Ron Cole-Turner states that the concept of transhumanism is also found in several biblical writers who indicate that human beings are destined to go beyond the form and limits of our current humanity (Cole-Turner 2015, p. 40). Basil of Caesarea, for example, expounds on the meaning of theosis, or “becoming god,” indicating that the Spirit of God utterly transforms the individual: “From this comes knowledge of the future, understanding of mysteries, apprehension of hidden things, distribution of wonderful gifts, heavenly citizenship, a place in the choir of angels, endless joy in the presence of God, becoming like God, and, the highest of all desires, becoming God” (St. Basil the Great 2001, p. 44). These texts link the future of humanity, individually and collectively, with the future of Jesus Christ, who was raised from the dead and glorified eternally in the presence of God; so too all other human beings are promised a gloriously transformed future beyond death itself. Drawing on the Christian tradition, Dante invented the word trasumanar to describe the glorious transformation that awaits human beings, as they are taken up into the eternal presence of God (Cole-Turner 2015, p. 151). Hence, transhumanism as a concept originates in the Christian vision of human and cosmic transformation.

Unlike Christian transhumanism, Bostrom seized upon Huxley’s secular transhumanism to advance technology as the savior of modernity in its quest to transcend pain, suffering and death. He writes: “In the postwar era, many optimistic futurists who had become suspicious of collectively orchestrated social change found a new home for their hopes in scientific and technological progress” (Bostrom 2005, p. 4). He began the World Transhumanist Association as a cultural and philosophical center of human betterment through technology. In an interview with Joel Garreau, Bostrom attributes the writings of Frederick Nietzsche as a vital inspiration to his life’s work (Garreau 2005, pp. 242–43). He cites Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a source of inspiration in his desire to accelerate the trajectory of human evolution and bring about a more peaceful, benevolent and powerful species through technology. Nietzche’s concept of the Ubermensch, commonly translated as either “superman” or “overman,” proposes that man is something to be overcome. He was one of the first philosophers to consider Darwin’s theories in the realm of human values and devoted his work to human morality and how individuals would react to the “death of God” and the onset of nihilism in industrialized society. He issued a call for a human who could create new values in the face of meaninglessnes and thereby overcome nihilism. The transformation of man into the overman takes place through the creative will: “Creation—this is the great redemption from suffering… All feeling suffering in me and is in prison: by my willing always comes to me as my liberator and bringer of joy” (Nietzsche 2003, p. 111).

Although transhumanism seems prima facie to align with Nietzsche’s superman, Nietzsche did not seek to eliminate pain and suffering. On the contrary, he recognized that suffering and the energies of transformation evoked by suffering are necessary and define the superman; the pain of life is part of the creative process so that to reject suffering is to numb the impulse of life. According to James Milne, “The ultimate man for Nietzsche who seeks health and comfort as an end, evades suffering and has nothing to create, no emotional energy to discharge or express” (Maxwell Milne 2010, p. 50). While Bostrom was inspired by Nietzsche’s superman, technological transhumanism espoused by the WTA could actually thwart the capacity to realize an inner creative power, diminishing human personhood rather than enhancing it.

2. Teilhard’s Transhumanism

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and scientist who devoted his work to the study of human origins. A man of deep faith, Teilhard sought to bring together Christianity and evolution, indicating that science and religion are two forms of knowledge that must be brought together to understand the world as a whole. Eric Steinhart described Teilhard de Chardin as a forerunner of transhumanism because of his ideas on computer technology and the future of humanity. Teilhard intuited the convergence of human and machine intelligence as completing the material and cerebral sphere of collective thought, a level of evolution that he called the “noosphere,” from the Greek nous or mind (Steinhart 2008, p. 22). The noosphere is a psycho-social process essentially linked with the biosphere in which it has its root, yet is distinguished from it. It is a new stage for the renewal of life and not a radical break with biological life (Teilhard de Chardin 1959, p. 307). Teilhard envisioned the noosphere like “the living membrane which is stretched like a film over the lustrous surface of the star which holds us” (Teilhard de Chardin 2002, p. 32). Just as Earth once covered itself with a film of interdependent living organisms, which we call the biosphere, so mankind’s combined achievements are forming a global network of collective mind (Murray 1966, pp. 20–21). Hence, the noosphere is a sphere of collective consciousness that preserves and communicates everything precious, active and progressive contained in this earth’s previous evolution. It is the natural culmination of biological evolution and not a termination of it, destined for some type of superconvergence and unification (Kenny 1970, p. 110).

Teilhard did not anticipate the perfection of being through artificial means, however; for him evolution is progression toward more being. He distinguished “more being” from “well being” by indicating that materialism can bring about wellbeing while spirituality and an increase in psychic energy or consciousness brings about more being (Grau 1976, p. 275). He imagined psychic energy in a continually more reflective state, giving rise to ultrahumanity. He insisted that technology is a means of convergence and the noosphere is the deepening of mind so that humankind does not dissipate but continually concentrates upon itself. With computer technology, the human acquires more being through interconnectivity with others. In this respect, the noosphere is not the realm of the impersonal, but conversely it is the realm of the deeply personal by bringing together diverse elements, organisms and even the currents of human thought into a greater unity. Teilhard believed that science could not achieve the ultimate meaning humans seek nor could it bind us together. We do not need more information, he indicated, what we need is to be more deeply connected heart to heart (Teilhard de Chardin 1969, p. 75). Teilhard’s noosphere is not concerned with super-intelligence or super-information but the deepening of love (Teilhard de Chardin 1964, p. 120). A theogenic process of love at the heart of cosmic evolution is far different from the transhumanist goal of individual perfection through technological means. Love, in Teilhard’s view, is the core energy of the universe.

3. Suffering and Noogenesis

To appreciate Teilhard’s ideas on transhumanism is to situate it within the wider framework of his evolutionary worldview wherein suffering and sacrifice are integral to an unfinished universe and. God is rising up through the power of love. To begin with, he was aware of a contradiction in Darwinian evolution where, apart from the mind, nothing can be said of matter. Thus, he opted for Henri Bergson’s creative evolution and maintained a dual-aspect monist position whereby mind and matter are two aspects of the same fundamental reality, not “two substances” or “two different modes of existence, but two aspects of the same cosmic stuff” (Teilhard de Chardin 1959, p. 56). From the Big Bang onward, he argued, there is a “withinness” and “withoutness,” or radial energy and tangential energy, respectively (Teilhard de Chardin 1959, pp. 56–64). Consciousness is the withinness or “inside” of matter, and attraction is the “outside” of matter; hence, matter is both attractive (tangential) and transcendent (radial). The complementarity of mind and matter explains both the rise in biological complexity and the corresponding rise in consciousness. He indicated that intelligent life cannot be considered in the universe any longer as a superficial accident, but must be considered to be under pressure everywhere—ready to burst from the smallest crack no matter where in the universe—and, once actualized, it is incapable of not using every opportunity and means to arrive at the extreme of its potentiality, externally of complexity and internally of consciousness. The universe orients itself toward intelligent, conscious, self-reflective life.

Teilhard understood the science of evolution as the explanation for the physical world and viewed Christianity as a religion of evolution; the material world is dynamically oriented toward spirit. The human person is integrally part of evolution in that we rise from the process, but in reflecting on the process we stand apart from it. He defines reflection as “the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as an object… no longer merely to know, but to know that one knows” (Teilhard de Chardin 1959, p. 165). The human person is evolution become conscious of itself. To this idea, he adds, “the consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself” (Teilhard de Chardin 1959, p. 221).

In light of evolution, Teilhard could not accept the Church’s monogenetic position on original sin (Human generis para. 37), since it belies evolution as the process by which the human person develops. He wrote: “Original sin, taken in its widest sense is not a malady specific to the earth nor is it bound up with human generation. Rather original sin is simply the law of imperfection which operates in mankind in virtue of its being in fieri,” that is, the human person is still in the process of being created; we are creatures in evolution (Teilhard de Chardin 1969, p. 51).

For Teilhard, there is no first Adam. The name disguises a universal and unbreakable law of reversion or perversion in a universe that operates according to law, chance and deep time (Teilhard de Chardin, pp. 40–41). In an article on evolution and original sin Daryl Domning states: “In the late 18th and early 19th centuries it [original sin] was undermined by geology’s discovery of deep time, followed by the Darwinian revolution in biology. Simultaneously, the work of biblical scholars confirmed that Genesis had been misread in too literal a fashion. Yet no substitute has been agreed upon for the classic notion of original sin and its mysterious inheritance by all the descendants of Adam” (Doming 2001, pp. 14–21). Teilhard clearly rejected the Augustinian notion of original sin as inherited guilt but one could identify in his writings an Irenean sense of propensity for sin and development toward the Christic self. Additionally, one could see in Teilhard something of Frederick Tennant’s idea of sin, based on Darwinian evolution. Like Tennant, Teilhard did not deny the reality of sin; in an evolutionary universe, however, it is not possible to speak of an origin of sin from a single human couple (monogenism). According to Tennant, human nature evolved from animal tendencies of “impulse and emotion.” These tendencies, prior to free will and consciousness of law (natural or divine), were ethically neutral, indifferent and non-moral, that is, prior to the appearance of will and conscience in human evolution, such tendencies should not be moralized or considered sin (Brannan 2007, p. 193). The appearance of a higher consciousness in evolution, however, from pre-hominid to human, shifts the emphasis from natural tendencies to moral behavior, as self-consciousness is reached. In Tennant’s view, our natural animal bias is constantly at war with our acquired human conscience (Brannan 2007, p. 194).

The key to Teilhard’s position is how he understood creative evolution. On one hand, he contends that suffering and evil are integral to an unfinished universe. The philosophical “problem of evil,” he wrote, is “merely an optical illusion of the mind, an artifact of an outmoded understanding of the world” (Faricy 1966, p. 556). His rejection of original sin seems to give a positive role to evil in the world but the key for Teilhard is actually the process of evolution itself. Although the alienation of sin is not due to a fall from God, it does reflect an incomplete consciousness of God’s presence and power. Because the human person is incomplete and in the process of formation, disorder is inevitable, disorder exists within the wider field of God’s loving presence and therefore is neither final nor fatal. To understand how sin and evil are enfolded in the emerging love of God is to appreciate Teilhard’s view on God and the world in evolution.

4. God in Evolution

Teilhard understood the science of evolution as the explanation for the physical world and claimed that God is integral to the process of evolution. He did not accept Darwinian evolution as the complete explanation of unfolding life, primarily because mind is absent from Darwin’s description of nature. He posited a principle in nature that is wholly other than nature, distinct yet intrinsic, autonomous and independent, an immanent principle deeply influential on nature’s propensity toward complexity and consciousness (Teilhard de Chardin 1959, pp. 257–60). He named this principle Omega and identified it with God. God is within everything that exists and the future of everything that exists.

Teilhard’s God–world relationship is one of creative union. He postulated a genuine “complementarity” between God and the world, forming a naturally interrelated and complementary pair. God is different from the world in nature but personally linked to it in a relationship of mutual complementarity (Panikkar 2010, p. 191). The heart of creative union is God’s self-involving love. Creation is a kenosis of divine love, an emptying of divine self into another. God becomes “element” and thus draws all things through love into the fullness of being. We take hold of God in the finite; God is sensed as “rising” or “emerging” from the depths of matter, born not in the heart of matter but as the heart of matter (King 1981, p. 103). Without creation something would be absolutely lacking for God, considered not in the fullness of divine being but of divine union.

Teilhard’s doctrine of creative evolution, with its radical incarnational position, places God at the heart of evil and suffering. He posited an understanding of theogenesis (literally, the birthing of God) whereby God is born in evolution through the unitive power of love. He writes: “As a direct consequence of the unitive process by which God is revealed to us, he in some way ‘transforms himself’ as he incorporates us” (Teilhard de Chardin 1965, p. 53). As we come to a higher consciousness of unity, God rises up in us; in a sense, God becomes God in us: “All around us and within our own selves, God is in process of ‘changing,’ as a result of the coincidence of his magnetic power and our own thought” (Teilhard de Chardin 1965, p. 53).

Teilhard’s light-filled insights can obscure the idea that, if God is rising up in evolution, then pervasive evil and suffering are not outside the realm of God. Rather, evil and suffering express the “dark side” of God, that is, if God and creation form a whole and creation is incomplete, then God is incomplete or not yet fulfilled in creation; hence God is hidden in the chaos of creation seeking to come to light. Theogenesis, as Carl Jung proposed, is the reconciliation of opposites by which God emerges to light. Divinity and humanity must find one another on a higher level of consciousness in evolution, a process of resolving opposites (as Hegel realized) and opening the future to the presence of God as the power of love.

5. The Franciscan Connection

Teilhard was not a trained theologian; however, his ideas are consonant with key themes in Franciscan theology, primarily his Christocentric vision, grounded in a metaphysics of love. He discovered the work of John Duns Scotus late in life through the Franciscan priest, Father Allegra, and was inspired by Scotus’ doctrine of the primacy of Christ. According to Scotus, the primary reason for the incarnation is the love of God and not the sin of Adam; whether or not sin ever existed, Christ would have come because Christ is first in God’s intention to love. Love is also central to the work of Bonaventure whose theology, according to Ewert Cousins, complemented Teilhard’s Christocentric vision. Bonaventure and Teilhard both perceived Christ as the dynamic hidden center of the cosmos.

The centrality of the Word of God characterizes the Franciscan school where the doctrine of the incarnation was not viewed as an isolated event but integral to the possibility of creation itself. As a result of the relationship between creation and incarnation, Franciscan theologians held that a world without Christ is an incomplete world, namely, the whole world is structured Christologically (Hayes 1996, p. 6). As the consummation of the created order, the incarnation is willed for its own sake and not for a lesser good. It is not sin that is the cause of the incarnation, but simply the excess love and mercy of God. (Hayes 1992, p. 82). Zachary Hayes writes: “God created toward an end. That end as embodied in Christ points to a Christified world” (Hayes 1997, p. 90). The universe is not meaningless or purposeless; rather, it has a future that involves the radical transformation of created reality through the unitive power of God’s love (Hayes 1996, p. 12).

Franciscan theologians place an emphasis on love as the fundamental reason for the incarnation; the arc of divine love spans from the inception of Jesus’ life to the culmination of his life in death and resurrection. This emphasis on the power of divine love endures through the fragile sufferings of life, undergirding the whole span of creaturely life in evolution, and symbolized by the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Nature as such is cruciform: “isolated, independent existence must be given up in order to enter into broader and potentially deeper levels of existence” (Hayes 1997, p. 91). In an essay on creation and kenosis, environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston stated that death is what makes life possible. There is a struggle throughout nature for survival and yet there is a capacity to evolve despite suffering and death. Life seeks more life, as Rolston writes:

This whole evolutionary upslope is a calling in which renewed life comes by blasting the old. Life is gathered up in the midst of its throes, a blessed tragedy, lived in grace through a besetting storm… The cruciform creation is, in the end, deiform, godly, just because of this element of struggle, not in spite of it. There is a great divine ‘yes’ hidden behind and within every ‘no’ of crushing nature… Long before humans arrived, the way of nature was already a via dolorosa. In that sense, the aura of the cross is cast backward across the whole global story, and it forever outlines the future.

(Rolston 2001, pp. 59–60)

Rolston points out is that suffering is not absurd to nature; rather, it is key to the whole transformative process. Suffering makes nature wild and unpredictable and yet out of this wildness comes amazing beauty and new creation. The whole evolutionary upslope is a via dolorosa, not an endurance of weakness but an invitation to more love in a world striving to become more whole in God. Rolston writes: “In the flesh and blood creatures, each is a blood sacrifice perishing that others might live… In their lives, beautiful, tragic and perpetually incomplete, they speak for God; they prophesy as they participate in the divine pathos… They share the labor of the divinity” (Rolston 2001, p. 57). Suffering and death are integral to a world grounded in love.

6. Suffering, Evil and Theogenesis

If suffering and death are part of nature’s creative life, and God is the power within nature to evolve, then does God suffer? Teilhard believed that without creation, something would be absolutely lacking to God, considered in the fullness not of his being but of his act of union. He wrote: “As a direct consequence of the unitive process by which God is revealed to us, he in some way ‘transforms himself’ as he incorporates us” (Teilhard de Chardin 1965, p. 53). As we enter into higher consciousness of our deep interconnectedness and shared life, God rises up in us; God, in a sense, becomes God in us. In this way, God rises up in matter through higher levels of consciousness and the unitive power of love. In Teilhard’s words: “All around us and within our own selves, God is in process of ‘changing,’ as a result of the coincidence of his magnetic power and our own thought” (Teilhard de Chardin 1965, p. 53). God is creating the world and the world is creating God by giving birth to God, a movement from unconscious matter to self-conscious matter, from unreflective matter to self-reflective and transcendent matter. Divinity is not lost in materiality; rather, God becomes God through unitive life or, in Teilhard’s words, union differentiates. Identity and distinction are based on a union of opposites (divine–human, heaven–earth) and mutual complementarity.

Like Teilhard, Carl Jung viewed God (and Christianity) as a patient in analysis for whom consciousness needs to be brought into its unconscious darkness in a self-transformative process, one of individuating and becoming whole. According to Peter Todd: “It is precisely this expanded and higher consciousness which Jung believes God acquires through incarnation in humankind” (Todd 2013, p. 5). The inextricable relationship of God and world is the full meaning of the divine Word incarnate. God is not a singular monad but plural—Trinity—and thus an open system of self-engagement. The self-engaged God is the Word of God incarnate, the Christ. For Jung, the evolution of God and the evolution of humanity cannot be separated. As we rise into higher consciousness, so too does God.

Teilhard’s theogenesis is fundamental to his views on evil in evolution. According to Robert Faricy, Teilhard thought that “at every level—preliving, living, reflectively conscious—it is impossible that there not be some disorder or lack of organization in a multiplicity that is progressively moving toward a higher degree of organization” (Faricy 1966, p. 556). However, plurality and the chaos of disorder are open to the creative presence of divine love, which is seeking to emerge within evolution. All life is capable of moving from evil and suffering which, in some way, express the “dark side” of God, the hidden God of chaos and disorder, but it is an earth-shaking passage, a death to the isolated self and a transformation through suffering into a light-filled union in love. Jung wrote: “One should make it clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means nothing less than a world-shaking transformation of God” (Todd 2013, p. 6). God becomes human and the human becomes God, incarnate through consciousness and love. Through ongoing incarnation, which is a continuous movement through suffering and death into new life, God is completed by humankind in directed evolution. Todd states: “It is as an archetypal and cosmic reality rather than a purely theological concept” (Todd 2013, p. 8). God incarnate in the cosmic Christ is the fulfillment of natural evolution. “This transformation in consciousness,” Todd writes, “is the divinization or resacralization of the world” (Todd 2013, p. 8). As God rises up through higher levels of consciousness, the human evolves from an incomplete or disordered whole where darkness and fear linger, to a new level of completion and thus a new vision, a new light of knowing and acting in the world. Teilhard develops an understanding of personalization as the process of evolution itself: God becomes God in union with another because only in union with another is true personality to be found (Todd 2013, p. 5).

7. The Cross as Symbol of Unitive Consciousness

Teilhard did not develop a theology of the crucified Christ, yet one could identify areas of his writing where the cross plays a profound role. In his Divine Milieu, he makes it clear that he espoused no cheap optimism, but a wrenchingly honest acknowledgement of our human predicament and an unfailing fidelity to seeing God in every aspect of the earth, even in our human suffering. He wrote:

Ah, you know it yourself, Lord, through having borne the anguish of it as a man: on certain days the world seems a terrifying thing: huge, blind, and brutal… At any moment the vast and horrible thing may break in through the cracks—the thing which we try hard to forget is always there, separated from us by a flimsy partition: fire, pestilence, storms, earthquakes, or the unleashing of dark moral forces—these callously sweep away in one moment what we had laboriously built up and beautified with all our intelligence and all our love. Since my human dignity, O God, forbids me to close my eyes to this… teach me to adore it by seeing you concealed within it.

(Teilhard de Chardin 2001, p. 112)

This passage is key to Teilhard’s view in which suffering and sacrifice are intertwined, a position consonant with Jürgen Moltmann, for whom the death of Jesus is the revelation of God as love. In the mystery of the cross, we find God deeply immersed in suffering. The letting go of the Father and the surrender of Son gives rise to the Spirit who is the bond of love and the breath of God open to the future. The cross signifies a God who is radically in love with the world and this love bears the ultimate sacrifice of God’s Son for the world. Love is the Godness of God, which is why the cross is the most revealing statement about God. Moltmann writes: “All that can be said about God is said in the cross” (Moltmann 1993, p. 205). The power of divine Love is shown in the powerlessness of the cross. In the words of Cardinal Walter Kasper: “God need not strip himself of his omnipotence in order to reveal his love… Only an almighty love can give itself wholly to the other and be a helpless love” (Kasper 1999, pp. 194–95).

The incarnate God revealed in Jesus Christ is not remote to the sufferings of the world; rather, God is immersed in a suffering world. While God cannot suffer ex carentia since God cannot lose what pertains to God’s integrity, God suffers ex abundantia: out of the divine plenitude God suffers out of love for us. God shares our pain and bears our burdens out of the divine fullness of love (Gregory 2000, pp. 235–36). God empowers the world through the suffering of love. Hence, “there is no suffering that is not God’s suffering; no death which has not been God’s death in the history on Golgotha” (Moltmann 1993, p. 246). This freedom in love is shown in the way Jesus freely and actively chose death in the face of evil, as an act of resistance not a passive victimization. Nor did God require a sacrificial death. Jesus died because of the way he lived, because of the pattern of fidelity and commitment of his life and his liberating message. The death of God in Jesus is the revelation of divine love, incomprehensible in presence and power but the hope and source of the world’s becoming. Jesus signifies a new structure of existence, a new unitive consciousness of God’s presence and of being in love. In Karl Rahner’s words, Jesus is the great “yes” to God’s gift of grace. He lived out of a deep center of love, an inner freedom of love that drew him to offer his life in sacrifice on the cross. This breakthrough in love is an evolutionary leap into a new theocentric reality.

8. Love is Our Deepest Reality

While the Christian claim of risen life means that death is integral to the fullness of life, the inability to develop an evolutionary theology with praxiological significance has created a space for technology to supplant religious aims. While the promises of transhumanism are alluring, the lines between being oriented toward God and playing God can become blurred. Technology is value-neutral insofar as it can either improve life, such with biomedical enhancements, or destroy life as with weapons of mass destruction. The consequences of confusing technology with divinity can be staggering, not only for the human person but for planetary life. Alfred Kracher claims that when the artificiality of an algorithm replaces the surprises of natural richness, we lose something of human life. We lose the sense of what it means to be created, dependent, contingent and finite. Kracher continues: “A planet ruled by predictability where all contingency is eliminated is also a planet dominated by unchecked evil” (Kracher 2008, p. 84). Harmony requires wildness—the unpredictability of nature, the contingency that makes the world what it is—a sense of astonishment, wonder and awe (Kracher 2008, p. 84). Nature is entangled with the wild kenotic love of God.

Teilhard lived at the dawn of the computer age and realized that computer technology could deepen biological life. However, he did not anticipate the perfection of being through artificial means; rather, evolution is progression toward more being or, what he called, the “ultrahuman,” a person of higher consciousness linked with other minds and hearts through the electronic brain. Materialism has the potential to achieve wellbeing, he noted, but spirituality and an increase in consciousness can bring about more being (Grau 1976, p. 275). Without centering all life in God, the electronic realm of the noosphere has no directed purpose or aim. Without religion as part of our technological agenda, we are left vulnerable, subject to the whims of a small powerful elite.

Simply put, technology cannot fulfill our deepest capacity for love. From a Christian perspective, the crucified Christ stands as symbol of the world’s openness to its completion in God. God suffers in and with creation so that we do not suffer alone. Suffering is a door through which God can enter and love us in our human weakness, misery and loneliness. As we suffer loss, so too God experiences our loss, remaining ever faithful in love. This compassionate, loving presence of God is our hope that suffering and death are not final but are a breakthrough into the fullness of life up ahead.

Teilhard was aware of the dark side of evolution with its massive extinctions, extreme violence and profound loss of species; yet he realized evolution is a process of convergence, unity and higher consciousness. Hence, while he described suffering and evil as part of the evolutionary flow of life, he did not attempt to explain away these realities, but saw them as part of the creativity of love. Suffering is the catalyst for the entire cosmic process. Teilhardian scholar Richard Kropf states:

Because [suffering] occurs on all levels of existence, from the rending of the earth’s crust and the pain of the smallest sensitive creatures, to the psychological agonies suffered by humans, it also must mean that all these levels of the universe are also destined for and ordered toward a higher, transfigured, or even resurrected existence.

(Kropf 1984, p. 172)

Suffering does not have the last word on life but evokes an inner power to create, transcend and see the world with new eyes and act in a new way. In this way, Teilhard’s transhumanism is closer to Nietzsche than to Bostrom. Evolution is a long history of incompletely individuated selves seeking completion. Carl Jung understood the cross as an integral part of theogenesis, in a way that complements Teilhard’s insights (Jung 1976, pp. 745–46). Charlene Burns sums up Jung’s idea by saying:

The death of Jesus in the crucifixion is the collective self acknowledging once and for all the bankruptcy of all religious violence. The sacrifice of the collective self signifies the in-breaking of a higher level of consciousness which now makes it possible to realize the vision of a world in which humanity responds to the violence of existence with compassion rather than ego-inflation.

(Burns 2006, p. 286)

Like Jung, Teilhard’s doctrine of theogenesis includes the dark side of God in creation, the God who is not yet born into the light of consciousness but who is seeking a place of birth. Love triumphs over evil not as an antithetical power but precisely as the transformation of evil and suffering into the creativity of unity and love. As part of God’s creation, evil contains within it the potential for the good to be realized. This transformation is a death and resurrection process where mind and heart are transformed by the power of love into new being and life. Suffering in love is an evolution of the heart open to the infinite fullness of divine life.

Freedom in the midst of suffering may be each person’s greatest source of future life. We can choose whether or not to surrender to the presence of God’s indwelling Spirit, not out of weakness but out of trust that “it is not I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). In this mystery of trust and surrender is the presence of hope that I will not die because God’s love is pulling me into a new future. My hope comes precisely in leaning into God, trusting that God suffers with me and in me. By surrendering to God, I am one with the Son in unity with the Father, and I am one with the Father in surrender of the Son, and thus I am caught up in the breath of God’s love and this love is always new. Hence, despite my loss, I live on the cusp of new life because I live in and from the freedom and power of God’s love.

This deeper truth of suffering can lead me beyond a sense of loss to compassionate suffering; that is, a willingness to turn outward toward the suffering of others. The key to creative suffering is a deep awareness of God’s hidden presence. Only when I know that I belong to another am I really able to share with others in their suffering. Rather than abolishing my suffering (à la transhumanists), it becomes instead a source of love for others in their suffering and thus a creative source of solidarity.

Suffering into a higher freedom of compassionate love is the only way to evolve to a more unified world. It requires loving by way of sacrifice and letting go of our precious need to isolate ourselves and control the limits of nature. We are challenged to reject that which separates us from one another and realize that suffering and sacrifice are necessary for the ongoing evolution of life. To resist sacrifice or ignore pain is to suppress the vitality of life and its impulse to evolve. When we are beaten down and defeated, our tendency is to give up and declare life a failure. But if we search within, we will find God challenging us to get up and awaken to the sounds of a new future because the radical presence of God, amidst the chaos of the world, is the power of the future.