A cosmic view of religion william halstead
Saint Augustine spoke of love as the “gravity of the soul.” Medieval writers thought of love as the highest good. The ancients thought of love as a sublime power, the attractive force of the cosmos. “Driven by the forces of love,” he said, “the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.” Elsewhere he wrote: “ Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces… the physical structure of the universe is love.” Although many scientists and non-scientists balk at the idea of cosmological love, Teilhard thought from a different level of consciousness, one much closer to the medieval writers who had profound views on cosmos, nature, and world soul. He described love as the primal energy of the universe, the energy of attraction, union and transcendence. The fundamental law of attraction in the universe, he wrote, is love. The Jesuit scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, spoke of love as a cosmological force. The only thing that remains is the ego and left on its own, the ego will absorb everything into its bottomless pit because without love, the ego cannot be transformed into the fullness of life. Without real relationship there is no basis for unity without love, there is no one or nothing to live for. When the other does not belong to me and I do not belong to the other, then the other becomes an object before me she or he is at the whim of my control. When we do not belong to another, then we tend to have power over another. Summer at the shore is a good reminder that every person belongs to another person in one way or another.īelonging to another may be the very definition of life itself. The young man’s yamulka kept falling off from the frenzied movement but his beaming smile told me that love is so much deeper and joyful than the little annoyances of life. They were quite enthralled with the sun and the sea enrapping them with beams of light and life they kept jumping up and down, trying to get the best pose. Yesterday, as I was walking along the shoreline a young Jewish couple was having their picture taken by the ocean, as if they might have been newly engaged or simply deeply in love. Some are small families with infants in strollers, the men quite loquacious and the women listening while pushing baby strollers, as the ocean breezes draw this stream of varied peoples down the boardwalk on a summer’s day.
Many are walking two by two, talking about important but mundane topics: family, friends, relationships, children, love lost and love found.
Down the block, in the next neighborhood, orthodox Jews are strolling the boardwalk, men with yamulkas and women in black skirts and babushkas. I am at a retreat house run by Redemptorist priests. As I write, I am sitting by the ocean in Long Branch New Jersey, listening to relentless waves lapping up the shoreline. Britain voted to leave the European Union on Monday and the stock market plunged to historic lows.
Just yesterday a terrorist attack in Istanbul claimed the lives of innocent people here in the United States we are still reeling from the violent slaughter of lives in Orlando, Florida. The world is showing itself to be a very fragile place.