Eyre Lines

This is the third in a set of reactions to “How I found God in Everyone and Everywhere”, a collection of essays edited by Andrew Davies and Philip Clayton, for which there is currently the “Cosmic Campfire” book group, a crossover between Homebrewed Christianity and the Liturgists, studying the book over the next few weeks. If you haven’t yet read my first post, you should probably read that first!

The third essay is from Ilia Delio OSF. Dr. Delio pursued a career in neurobiology to postdoctoral level, and then joined an order of Carthusian nuns (the order of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross -what’s not to love for a mystic?), transferring later to the Franciscans. In the process she studied theology, and gained a doctorate in that as well. She talks of living “two lives”, one for science, one for religion, both “hardline”, but of eventually integrating the two.

This speaks to me in several ways. The first is that I am a scientific rationalist with a mystic sometimes awkwardly cohabiting the same mind, “tacked on”, as it were, by a peak mystical experience in my teens which I was unable to discount, and by many subsequent, largely lesser experiences which were confirmatory of the first one. Unlike Dr. Delio, I don’t think I can claim that the two are well integrated, just that they have learned to talk with each other reasonably politely. Ideas which offer the possibility of a synthesis to my internal dichotomy are therefore really attractive to me…

The second is that she displays wonderfully the choice which faces very many mystics, whether to go off and explore mysticism as deeply as possible, which in the Christian traditions is generally achieved by joining a monastic order or becoming a solitary contemplative, or whether to descend from the mountaintop and immerse onseself in the real world. Both Dr. Delio and myself opted for the second (her in the move to the Franciscans), though unlike her I attempted to pursue science and religion at the same time, which certainly didn’t improve my scientific credentials and which also meant that I didn’t go on to study religion formally.

She has some wonderful lines which demand going away and meditating on them for a while – “Only in communion can God be what God is, and only in communion can God be at all”. “God is not conceivable except in so far as he coincides with evolution  but without being lost in (sort of a “final cause”) the centre of convergence of cosmogenesis. God is dynamically interior to creation, a divine energy which is imperceptible, gradually bringing all things to their fullness”. I find those beautiful and poetic, and sufficiently vague as not to try giving an unreasonable precision to a numinous experience.

I’ll pass quickly over her finding Trinity in father, son and the love between them as I expect to rant a bit about trinity and mysticism when talking about Richard Rohr (the third is incapable of being a person, for me, and the concept of a relationship between that loving relationship and, respectively, the father and the son other than is already implicit in the relationship just does not make sense to me – how do you have a relationship with a relationship? – so although this works for me as a threeness, it does not work as Trinity).

There are, however, aspects of her attempt to bring science and mysticism together, using a lot of philosophical terms, which grate on me. Teilhard de Chardin’s thinking, which she draws on considerably, talks of God very much in terms of telos (final cause) and ontology (formal cause). To me, for there to be any telos, any purpose to the universe, demands that there be a purposer, so that any deduction of God from the point of view of final cause is assuming its conclusion – not that this is specifically what Dr. Delio is saying, but when I read between the lines… (Note, I also think that there are some very difficult problems inherent in this position when contemplating things from the point of view of a physicist, notably in respect of entropy, the “arrow of time”, quantum phenomena and uncertainty). Again, in the case of ontology, I am exceptionally sceptical that the way things actually are is something which we can ever claim to know; to put it briefly, all I think we can do is hypothesise that if something were the way things actually are, then we would see certain results, and if we do indeed see those results, then the hypothesis has some utility; if it predicts events we did not previously know would happen, then it is worth working on further. Donald Hoffman gives a really good account of why we should not assume that we can know anything ontological in this article.

I also have huge misgivings about any idea of God as an absolutely fundamental underpinning of everything which is, which is what trying to find God in ontology results in. Teilhard wrote, among many other things “Le Milieu Divin” (the Divine Milieu), suggesting that we think of God as the “ground of all being”. One trouble with concepts of that sort is that, for a scientist, it looks like adding to or subtracting from each side of an equation the same term, or multiplying or dividing both side in the same manner. The first thing a scientist is going to do is remove that term, because it has become redundant to any solution of the equation. It is equally entirely unclear to me why there needs to be a “ground of all being”. Finally, this kind of thinking results in a God-concept far too much like a mechanistic law of nature, and this utterly fails to capture the personal nature of the mystical experience – I cannot think that God is less than personal, in some way (although I accept that this may be more a function of my psychology than it is of the actuality of existence…) I have similar problems when she says “God is the name of absolute love” – love is an emotion, an affection, a psychological disposition, not a person. I am entirely comfortable saying that whatever it is that is God is not less than loving (I’d say “perfectly loving” there, except that that seems to me to overspecify).

But I like it when she quotes Teilhard as talking of evolution as “cosmic personalisation”…

This has just been my reaction to the essay as published; I have every intention of exploring Dr. Delio’s work further, because it is entirely possible that my qualms are misguided because we are only skimming the surface of her thought, and she does produce some wonderfully evocative phrases.

I just prefer to view them as poetry rather than as science…