Louis M. Savary - Teilhard de Chardin On Love: Evolving Human Relationships

I N THE MIDDLE AGES, the great scholastic theologians debated whether Gods essence was being or goodness. The Dominican school, following Thomas Aquinas, argued for essential being while the Franciscan school, following Bonaventure, claimed that God was essentially good. The import of this debate was far-reaching, since understanding the nature of God influenced everything from how God acted to the role of God in creation and human destiny. One of the major questions in the thirteenth century centered on the nature of God: Did God create according to divine will or divine freedom? The Franciscan school, in particular, placed the emphasis on divine will, since in the New Testament God is revealed as good: No one is good but God alone (Luke 18:19). Medieval scholars defined love as the highest good, since love goes out of itself toward another for the sake of the other. Love is what God is, as we read in the New Testament: God is love (1 John 4:8, emphasis mine). The emphasis on love marked Franciscan theology, as well as the theology of the Victorines and Cistercians, who preceded the Franciscans and influenced them. Bernard of Clairvaux taught that love and knowledge were intertwined, amor ipse notitia est, and his teaching was influential on the School of Chartres, where the Canons of St. Victor developed a sophisticated understanding of cosmology, theology, and the mechanical arts along the lines of the platonic cosmos and the essential role of love.

Love fell off the radar with the rise of modern science and took a turn for the worse in the modern age. The history of modernity and the rise of modern philosophy can be interpreted as the death of love in the cosmos. Modern knowledge was based on the turn to the subject and the power of knowledge. Love turned inward and became associated with feelings and the emotional life while knowledge was expressed in the will to power. However, in the twentieth century, Pierre Teilhard de Love draws together and unites; in uniting, it differentiates. Love is the core energy of evolution.

Taking a position highly consonant with Franciscan theology, Teilhard began to develop a philosophy of love. His ideas are closely related to the fourteenth-century Franciscan theologian, Duns Scotus, who wrote on univocity, individuation, and the primacy of Christ, all grounded in a core doctrine of love. Teilhards ideas take their immediate impetus, however, from modern physics where relativity, mass-energy equivalence, and wave-particle duality gave him a new understanding of nature and the inherent interconnectivity of nature. Reflecting on the primacy of love-energy in evolution, he wrote that union precedes being because love is the core energy of evolution and love is intrinsically relational: What comes first in the world for our thought is not being but the union which produces this being. Teilhards philosophy of love is thoroughly consonant with our interconnected universe, as science now understands it. He emphasized union-in-love as core constitutive existence. To be is to be self-gift. Isolated existences, even on the molecular level, give themselves up for greater union. Hence, unitive being is relational and always toward more being. On the level of evolution, Teilhard claimed, life is constantly directed toward more life and ultimately toward a future fullness of life, or better yet, a future fullness of unity in love.

The implications of Teilhards philosophy of love are enormous for evolving life because how we understand nature, creation, humanity, and God impacts our values and choices. Lou Savary and Patricia Berne have provided a valuable contribution in this book by clearly explaining Teilhards doctrine of love on every level of life, from God to friendship, marriage, parenting, and human community. Their book is less a scholarly exposition on a Teilhardian doctrine of love than a masterful illumination of love as the core energy of evolving life. Each chapter clearly explains Teilhards insights and then provides practical ways of incorporating these ideas into daily life. I think Teilhard would have been very pleased with this book because he struggled throughout his life to make his ideas clear and cogent. Lou and Patricia have followed Teilhards dreamto make known to the world the power of love.

Love is the energy that can transform the darkness of our age into the light of hope by empowering us to work toward a future fullness of life together. How we love is how we live, and who we love shapes our relationships, communities, our connection to the Earth, and the future of the Earth. We are, in the most basic sense, the sum of our loves. Teilhards philosophy of love borne out in the evolution of God, self, and future Earth is a vital doctrine for our time. It awakens us to the essential goodness at the heart of all life and kindles within us the desire to work toward a more unified world. We are born out of love, we exist in love, and we are created for the fullness of love. It is time to change our focus from knowledge to love, letting go of the need for power and control and recognizing our intrinsic need for others. Lou and Patricias book invites us to shift our horizon of life, for in the evening of life we will be judged on love alone.