The Unbearable Wholeness of Being ( Ilia Delio)
The Unbearable Reduction of Being
[My two-star Amazon review (NDA) of "The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love" by Ilia Delio.]
A fan of my Amazon reviews and my book "Electrical Christianity" recommended Ilia Delio's "The Unbearble Wholeness of Being" to me last week. I had never heard of Delio, and being curious about a book with such an alluring title, I downloaded the Kindle edition. I was eager to read the Franciscan theologian's discourse on Being.
The book, billed as a "blend of science, Jesuit spirituality, and spiritual-mystical insights," creatively applies key philosophical ideas from Pierre Tellhard De Chardin (1881-1955), and "widens his thoughts in dialogue with twentieth-century thinkers" such as Raimon Pannikar, Paul Tillich, and Ken Wilber. The goal of the author was to provide a spiritual-cosmological vision that can liberate modern man from the clutches of scientific materialism and the postmodern malaise.
I read De Chardin's classic "The Phenomenon of Man" and Tillich's acclaimed "The Courage to Be" some forty years ago, and neither author particularly impressed me. I've read five of Wilber's books, but I'm hardly a fan of his "Integral" philosophy, which I find less than integral. Given my disregard for Delio's philosophic sources, I was curious to see if she had managed to transcend them and create an impressive treatise on integral, evolutionary theology.
The core of Delio's thesis is that "love is the fundamental energy of evolution." And in direct contrast to renowned biologist Richard Dawkins, who argues that genes are selfish, Delio, a la Ken Wilber, contends that the holonic nature of existence makes them intrinsically communal. Delio cites bees and ants and anecdotal evidence of animal behavior to bolster her argument that evolution is about ever-increasing interdependence and cooperation. For Delio, "Love is a consciousness of belonging to another, of being part of a whole." For her, eros and philia (love expressed in communal life) are the evolutionary engines driving the cosmos to ever-greater wholeness and consciousness. In contrast to Neoplatonism, which sees the many flowing from the One, Delio envisions the One flowing from the many via love-energy.
I don't share Delio's perspective that love is the engine of evolution. The fundamental principle of life is survival, not love. And life resorts to both selfish and cooperative measures to perpetuate itself. If an individual became a pure altruist and exclusively practiced the "totally other-centered" divine love that Delio apotheosizes, he would not survive. Everything is contextual, and the fact that everything is interrelated, which even Ayn Rand, author of "The Virtue of Selfishness" preaches, hardly means that divine, or selfless, love is the fundamental principle of life and the engine of evolution.
Delio, like many of her fellow Christian theologians, brings the Holy Trinity into creation. She writes: "The Trinity is not a separate divine community of persons into which creation must fit; rather the whole cosmotheandric [or Divine Being and created reality] process is the Trinity."
My perspective on the cosmotheandric process and and the Holy Trinity differs from Delio's. "Holy" means outside of time and space, outside of the cosmos and creation; therefore the Trinity is ever distinct from the world. Jesus alluded to this when he said, "My Kingdom is not of this world." Delio errs by implicating the Father (timeless, spaceless Awareness, or Divine Presence), the Holy Spirit (uncreated Light-energy, or Divine Power) and the Son (the unmanifest Divinity in an immanent context) in creation. Delio not only errs by "cosmotheandricizing" the Trinity, but she doesn't grasp what the Trinity is really about.
Anyone interested in my perspective on the Trinity should refer to my Amazon review of Cynthia Bourgeault's book "The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three" or my book "Electrical Christianity: A Revolutionary Guide to Jesus' Teachings and Spiritual Enlightenment."
Regarding Being, Delio writes: "Being is a co-inherence of divine, cosmic, and anthropic being mutually coexisting, so that one cannot be separated from the other... God does not transcend order. Rather, the essential order represents the unified whole of all that is, including God."
I couldn't disagree more. If God, the Divine Being, were not "hypercosmic," beyond, or outside the cosmos, there could be no Christian Heaven, no Divine Domain of Eternal Life. To reduce God to a Being contingent upon, or inseparable from, cosmic and human existence is anathema to me.
If you resonate with Delio's core arguments: that "love is the fundamental principle of evolution," that the Trinity is inseparable from the cosmotheandric process, and that God is not a transcendental Being, but is inextricably co-inhered with the cosmos and man, then you will probably find her book inspiring and uplifting. But if you're like me, and don't agree with her arguments, then you won't.
[My two-star Amazon review (NDA) of "The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love" by Ilia Delio.]
A fan of my Amazon reviews and my book "Electrical Christianity" recommended Ilia Delio's "The Unbearble Wholeness of Being" to me last week. I had never heard of Delio, and being curious about a book with such an alluring title, I downloaded the Kindle edition. I was eager to read the Franciscan theologian's discourse on Being.
The book, billed as a "blend of science, Jesuit spirituality, and spiritual-mystical insights," creatively applies key philosophical ideas from Pierre Tellhard De Chardin (1881-1955), and "widens his thoughts in dialogue with twentieth-century thinkers" such as Raimon Pannikar, Paul Tillich, and Ken Wilber. The goal of the author was to provide a spiritual-cosmological vision that can liberate modern man from the clutches of scientific materialism and the postmodern malaise.
I read De Chardin's classic "The Phenomenon of Man" and Tillich's acclaimed "The Courage to Be" some forty years ago, and neither author particularly impressed me. I've read five of Wilber's books, but I'm hardly a fan of his "Integral" philosophy, which I find less than integral. Given my disregard for Delio's philosophic sources, I was curious to see if she had managed to transcend them and create an impressive treatise on integral, evolutionary theology.
The core of Delio's thesis is that "love is the fundamental energy of evolution." And in direct contrast to renowned biologist Richard Dawkins, who argues that genes are selfish, Delio, a la Ken Wilber, contends that the holonic nature of existence makes them intrinsically communal. Delio cites bees and ants and anecdotal evidence of animal behavior to bolster her argument that evolution is about ever-increasing interdependence and cooperation. For Delio, "Love is a consciousness of belonging to another, of being part of a whole." For her, eros and philia (love expressed in communal life) are the evolutionary engines driving the cosmos to ever-greater wholeness and consciousness. In contrast to Neoplatonism, which sees the many flowing from the One, Delio envisions the One flowing from the many via love-energy.
I don't share Delio's perspective that love is the engine of evolution. The fundamental principle of life is survival, not love. And life resorts to both selfish and cooperative measures to perpetuate itself. If an individual became a pure altruist and exclusively practiced the "totally other-centered" divine love that Delio apotheosizes, he would not survive. Everything is contextual, and the fact that everything is interrelated, which even Ayn Rand, author of "The Virtue of Selfishness" preaches, hardly means that divine, or selfless, love is the fundamental principle of life and the engine of evolution.
Delio, like many of her fellow Christian theologians, brings the Holy Trinity into creation. She writes: "The Trinity is not a separate divine community of persons into which creation must fit; rather the whole cosmotheandric [or Divine Being and created reality] process is the Trinity."
My perspective on the cosmotheandric process and and the Holy Trinity differs from Delio's. "Holy" means outside of time and space, outside of the cosmos and creation; therefore the Trinity is ever distinct from the world. Jesus alluded to this when he said, "My Kingdom is not of this world." Delio errs by implicating the Father (timeless, spaceless Awareness, or Divine Presence), the Holy Spirit (uncreated Light-energy, or Divine Power) and the Son (the unmanifest Divinity in an immanent context) in creation. Delio not only errs by "cosmotheandricizing" the Trinity, but she doesn't grasp what the Trinity is really about.
Anyone interested in my perspective on the Trinity should refer to my Amazon review of Cynthia Bourgeault's book "The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three" or my book "Electrical Christianity: A Revolutionary Guide to Jesus' Teachings and Spiritual Enlightenment."
Regarding Being, Delio writes: "Being is a co-inherence of divine, cosmic, and anthropic being mutually coexisting, so that one cannot be separated from the other... God does not transcend order. Rather, the essential order represents the unified whole of all that is, including God."
I couldn't disagree more. If God, the Divine Being, were not "hypercosmic," beyond, or outside the cosmos, there could be no Christian Heaven, no Divine Domain of Eternal Life. To reduce God to a Being contingent upon, or inseparable from, cosmic and human existence is anathema to me.
If you resonate with Delio's core arguments: that "love is the fundamental principle of evolution," that the Trinity is inseparable from the cosmotheandric process, and that God is not a transcendental Being, but is inextricably co-inhered with the cosmos and man, then you will probably find her book inspiring and uplifting. But if you're like me, and don't agree with her arguments, then you won't.
