Faith, Hope, Love - and Human Evolution

Symbolic Functions of the Earth Constitution

Some 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution has produced the human phenomenon. The evolutionary process has come to consciousness of itself in us. Time and eternity appear to have welled up at the heart of human existential existence. We are aware of ourselves as an eternal present simultaneously actualizing a future that is “Not Yet.” We become aware of ourselves as homo viator, creatures on the way, whose very being is openness to a future that we participate in creating.

The slow, organic determinism that appears to characterize the evolution of life over the past 3.8 billion years on Earth has burst into self-awareness and freedom within human beings. Our self-awareness and freedom lead us to ask “whence?” “Wither?” What are we called to do with our freedom and self-awareness? Why has the cosmos gifted us in these astonishing ways?

With self-awareness and freedom, we realize that we are not finite, limited, “finished” creatures--not trapped in a definitive nature and place within the scheme of things, as Pico della Mirandola pointed out so beautifully in his 15^th century “Oration on the Dignity of Man.” We are replete with unrealized potentialities, not limited, but in-finite, open to growth, evolution, actualizing our forever inexhaustible potential. Our infinite possibilities can be envisioned as a “utopian horizon” symbolizing this ontological openness. I have elaborated dimensions of this dignity in relation to our limitless futurity in my newest book, Human Dignity and World Order.

The authentic response to these questions and realizations has been called “faith.” Faith, in this setting, is not belief in some set of dogmas or the adoption of a certain metaphysical point of view. Faith is an openness to the evolutionary call of the “Not Yet.” Human beings are in the process of becoming. This is our dignity. It is also our great hope and danger. We can fail. We can stumble and fall. But our very openness to the ontological call to perfection, to growth, and deep self-realization, allows hope to permeate our lives. And when we have faith and hope, there is also love.

The future (gifted to us by the so-called groundless-ground of Being) is where our human essence lies. As the Existentialist movement often pointed out—there is no predetermined “human essence” that establishes what a human being is; rather “existence precedes essence.” We are tasked to create our own “essence” through the orthopraxis of an authentic existence in which, as Heidegger put it, human life involves that “potentiality-for-being for the sake of which every Dasein exists.” Our very becoming as human beings means that our meaning and our reality lie, in significant measure, in our futurity. We are temporalized being (Sein) that has concretized itself in human form (Dasein).

Perhaps every religion or spirituality the world has encountered over the past 6000 years or so of historical existence has embraced, in one way or another, the most basic trinity of dimensions that we confront within human existence: the material world, the mind, and the mysterious ground of existence or the whole. The three Abrahamic religions focus on humanity, the cosmos, and God (as creator and ground). In Buddhism we have the “Trikaya,’ the Triple Body of Buddha, that includes Nirmanakaya (the human level), Sambhogakāya (the cosmic level) and Dharmakaya (the groundless-ground level). Classical Hinduism gives us Brahman (the divine dimension), Atman (the human dimension), and Jagat (the world).

These three, however they are named, are ultimately one. They are not three substances or different realities, but one integral, dynamic reality with three manifestations. In the West, they are often called mind, body, and spirit. How do we finite, self-aware, free creatures relate to this evolving trinity?

We live as mind (self-aware and free) within a material world (our bodies and the struggle for food, clothing, and shelter), both of which flow from a mysterious source, a groundless-ground, both immanent and transcendent. And this trinity is not static. As Teilhard de Chardin observes: in this “vision man is seen not as a static center of the world—as he long believed himself to be—but as the axis and leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer.” Mind, body, and spirit, holistically engender our openness toward a transformed and redeemed human future.

The mysterious source is “everywhere and nowhere.” It is a circle, as Nicholas of Cusa put it, “whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is nowhere.” Perhaps the most fundamental idea stemming from 20^th century physics is that the cosmos is evolving. It is not a static, fixed reality. There is an upsurge, a creative evolutionary impulse, a nisus in the cosmos bringing about an unknown future. That same impulse and nisus manifests in us as children of the evolutionary process. We embrace a longing for a fullness of life, for a fulfillment, that is significantly different from the Buddhist “tanha” or desire that needs to be transcended. Our desire for the fullness of life signifies a healthy incarnation of the cosmic evolutionary impulse.

Here is the role of faith. Authentic faith is not belief in some religious or metaphysical doctrines about the nature of reality. Rather, as Raimon Panikkar affirms, it is “orthopraxis,” right action on the part of free, self-aware creatures to participate in the cosmic evolutionary process and to integrate this authentically into our daily lives. Right action or orthopraxis is not determined ahead of time. There is no blueprint for what we should be doing. Rather, for orthopraxis to operate in our lives, we must be open to the “call,” to the impulse of the nisus. We must open our awareness to the influx of transcendence, in-finity, within the processes of our daily lives.

Infinity is not a static reality, some sort of substance that is the opposite of finitude. Rather, infinity is the bottomless abyss that opens human life to freedom and self-awareness. Without infinity, the cosmos would be a dead, determined, mechanism—the antithesis of life—and so would we. Instead, in us the cosmos becomes alive with possibility and hope, alive with ever-ascending evolutionary potentialities, alive for movement into an unknown and undetermined future.

This creative energy of infinity has emerged in human life in a transcendent and advanced form. It has shifted the evolutionary process of slow, mostly blind, and seemingly random, evolutionary movement to a higher key, with a profound liberation into self-awareness and freedom. It has delegated the nisus toward a transformed future, in significant measure, to us, to humanity, as Hans Jonas as so eloquently pointed out. We now understand that we are cosmic evolution become conscious of itself and under a demand to actualize a world of ever-greater harmony, love, justice, and freedom, a world (expressed in classical terms) of “truth, beauty, and goodness.”

The gravity and magnitude of this responsibility can be overwhelming. Yet at the same time, this immense responsibility that has been delegated to us, becoming the source of our faith, hope, and love. The quest itself has redemptive power insofar as it activates faith, hope, and love in our lives. God, the classical tradition always maintained, is love. And insofar as we integrate our lives into the cosmic nisus for ever greater harmony, love, justice, and freedom, we are coming into harmony with the divine groundless-ground of existence.

No thought of “afterlife,” or “eternal soul,” is involved here. Harmony with the groundless-ground through an open, listening, receiving faith-orientation is itself salvation and orthopraxis. We are not finished creatures; we are not constrained ahead of time to specific beliefs and practices as many religious dogmatisms would have us believe. Orthopraxis does not require performing dogmatically prescribed rituals or prayers. Orthopraxis requires openness to the evolutionary impulse toward ever greater faith, hope, and love. The end or goal, what may be realized in the future, is presumably open and unknown even to the groundless-ground of existence. Life is not a prescripted drama with the dénouement already determined by the playwright. It is a cosmic adventure, the outcome of which we help to create.

The Constitution for the Federation of Earth serves an important function in this quest to harmonize our praxis with the groundless-ground of existence. Our existence in the modern world is fragmented by both an economic system that is premised on the egoistic accumulation of private wealth by persons and corporations and by a global political system of militarized sovereign nation-states who see their survival within a dangerous world in terms of acquiring ever more dangerous and destructive weapons and war-powers. The Earth Constitution represents a broad public initiative to overcome these two self-destructive poles of the modern world by uniting humanity within a global democratic social contract predicated on world peace, human rights, and environmental protections.

The key liberating principle offered by the Earth Constitution is the unity in diversity of humanity within the context of a democratic earth federation predicated on conscious evolutionary development toward an ever greater united and liberated human future. The cosmic call to humanity for an orthopraxis of faith, hope, and love would be immeasurably enhanced by this ascent beyond war and greed to the freedom and harmony of planetary democracy. As Sri Aurobindo envisioned this in the mid-twentieth century, the cosmic evolutionary nisus needs an ascent to human unity so that the evolutionary telos toward “higher-mind” can continue to expand and evolve within human life.

The Earth Constitution unites humanity so that we can collectively determine a redeemed human future of peace, freedom, justice, and environmental protection. By uniting humanity into such a collective moral and intelligible framework, the Constitution opens us up to an ever-fuller realization of faith, hope, and love. It represents the cosmic nisus, arising out of the groundless-ground of existence, that makes possible faith, hope, and love. The nisus itself manifests both intelligibility and love, two human self-realizations structurally embodied within the Constitution.

As such the Constitution becomes symbolic of a redeemed and empowered human future. The constitution already functions as a model for a future planetary federation and a blueprint on how to bring this to reality. And here we find that the Constitution embraces a third function: it is symbolic of human liberation. Human liberation, as we have seen, does not mean some final set of arrangements or ideas that give us a final harmony with the divine ground. Rather, human liberation is precisely the opening of humanity to the adventure of the cosmic evolutionary process itself.

Just as the cross of Christianity is a symbol, and the image of the sitting Buddha is a symbol, and the ying-yang of Taoism is a symbol, so the Earth Constitution is a symbol for a redeemed human relationship with the evolutionary upsurge of the groundless ground through cosmic and conscious dimensions of orthopraxis. The Earth Constitution Mandala makes this symbolism clear. The Constitution actualizes the truth of our common humanity. It inserts this truth within governmental arrangements premised on the unity in diversity of all peoples. It provides a structure for that freedom which is necessary if human beings are to survive and flourish on planet Earth.

Working for the promotion and ratification of the Earth Constitution is itself orthopraxis. Philosopher/theologian Paul Tillich affirms that symbols “participate” in that to which they point. He says that symbols open up levels of reality as well as depths of the soul that are otherwise closed to us. A human being is redeemed through faith, hope, and love expressed in orthopraxis (right or true action in life). The symbolic function of the Earth Constitution opens up for us an ever-greater intuition of the oneness of our common humanity, of the dignity of human freedom, and of the essential imperative to organize our vision of the future according to its practical-utopian demands.

The three dimensions of existence, which form one holistic reality, manifest in the modes of body, mind, and spirit, come alive within our Earth Constitution orthopraxis. That is: within our vocation to promote an integrated and liberated future of humanity and the Earth within the context of the evolutionary cosmic nisus. Philosopher Karl Jaspers relates that the cosmic mystery, which will always and everywhere remain an absolute “Mystery,” can only come to awareness and relationship to us through “cipher-symbols.” As for Tillich, symbols open up for us relationships to the groundless ground of existence and thereby redeem and confirm our free actions expressed in our spiritual lives.

The orthopraxis of promoting the Earth Constitution opens us up to deeper and more comprehensive levels of faith, hope, and love. These point beyond themselves to the cosmic evolutionary process itself and our distinctly human ways of participating in this. It opens up for us our responsibility to the open and undetermined future of the human project in relation to our environing cosmos.

We are freeing ourselves from the egoistic greed of capitalism and the suicidal militarism of sovereign nation-states. But the Earth Constitution provides more than a mere (but necessary) “freedom from.” It provides the positive fullness of a “freedom for.” The Earth Federation, predicated for the first time on true human dignity and freedom, will unleash our creative expressions of faith, hope, and love toward a transformed and open-ended authentic human flourishing.

In promoting the Constitution, we are in the process of becoming whole again—moving cleanly on our way. We once again become open to the immense possibilities for the fullness of life there on the “utopian horizon” of our “Not Yet.” The Earth Constitution symbolizes this transformation, this liberation. It crystallizes, enlivens, and empowers our faith, hope, and love.

Works Cited

Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle.

Constitution for the Federation of Earth: at www.earthconstitution.world.

Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, “On Learned Ignorance”.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time.

Karl Jaspers, Truth and Symbol.

Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility.

Glen T. Martin, Human Dignity and World Order: Holistic Foundations of Global Democracy.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man.

Raimon Panikkar, Mystery and Hermeneutics.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man.

Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith.