The Not-Yet God with Ilia Delio and Robert Ellsberg

The roles are reversed in this special episode that kicks off our next season of Hunger for Wholeness. In this one-part, special episode our esteemed host Ilia Delio is interviewed by Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Ilia’s latest book The Not-Yet God. Thanks to Robert Ellsberg and Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, for permission to share this recording. You can purchase The Not-Yet God (or any of Ilia’s books) by visiting OrbisBooks.com.

ABOUT ILIA DELIO

Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD, is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and an American theologian specializing in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. Her ground-breaking work is the premise of our podcast the Hunger for Wholeness, produced in partnership with the Fetzer Institute. 

On Hunger for Wholeness, Ilia interviews special guests who are also giving a new voice to the dialogue between science, technology and religion. This season, they include the likes of theologian Bruce Epperly, author and speaker Fr. Dan Horan, futurist Kevin Kelly, and many more.

Transcript

Robert: Welcome back to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. In this season, we are delighted to share conversations with another lineup of distinguished guests such as Theologian Bruce Epperly, author and speaker Father Dan Horan, futurist, Kevin Kelly and many more. We look forward to exploring how their unique visions of wholeness can help create a new myth, a deeper horizon of seeing for dealing adequately with life's most pressing issues. To open this season, we have a very special episode in which Ilia Delio is interviewed by Robert Ellsberg of Orbis Books. Their conversation addresses the groundbreaking work in Ilia’s recent book, The Not-Yet God, as well as some other key themes from her intellectual career. Be sure to listen to the end to get a special discount code for our listeners to purchase Ilia's books, including the Not-Yet God. We hope you enjoy.

Robert Ellsberg: Hello, I'm Robert Ellsberg. I'm the publisher of Orbis Books. Very glad to be joined today by one of our most brilliant and illustrious authors. Sister Ilia Delio. I think she's just published with us, her 10th book, if I'm keeping count correctly, it is called The Not-Yet God, with the subtitle, Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole. Sister Ilia Delio is a Franciscan and sister of Washington DC. She is the Josephine Connolly endowed Chair in theology at Villanova. She's the founder of the Center for Christogenesis. She is both a scientist and a theologian, and as she has written in her memoir, she found the way of kind of reconciling those two ways of thinking or being, through her discovery of the Jesuit scientist, mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and he has figured in most of the books that she's done for us as well as this one.

This one also brings in Carl Jung as a new character on the stage. I think it was 15 years ago her first book appeared in the mail, Christ in Evolution, and that was the beginning of an amazing journey. I think that each of her books has become bolder and more visionary as she has really developed and found her own voice and a very wide audience around the world. In the introduction to this book, you write that you consider putting a warning label at the beginning to say, "Warning, this book may be hazardous to the stability of your soul and may cause undue anxiety or outright bursts of emotion." if we could get the Vatican to say that or something, that would probably make this a best seller. Maybe you could begin by describing what this book is about, what do you mean by the not yet God and how this book might not just disturb us, but enrich or inspire us.

Ilia: Thank you, Robert. It's a delight to be here with you and to share why I wrote this book. And you're right, my work has been on a trajectory of ever deepening a vision of—what Teilhard once asked, the God of evolution, who will give evolution its own God? And I've taken that question very seriously and this is a warning label because I do think the God that we have grown up with, which is often depicted for those maybe who are more astute, maybe not so much, but the guy in the sky God, the big grandfather who is watching over us and is in control of everything and who knows what's happening in our lives. And you know, I think while that God may be very comforting for people, it is really not the God of either the Bible or actually the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ as a God of love and therefore a daring love, an adventurous love, a love that pushes the limits into revolution and evolution.

And so the warning label is to say that whatever your concept of God, I'm sure it's probably going to be challenged in this book. And it's not meant to be challenging. I do feel that our world, I want to put it this way, I think we need a new God for a new world. I think a lot of our problems today come from, I don't want to say bad theology because there's a lot of good people doing a lot of good things, but our theology is old, it's outdated. The metaphysical principles, some of the core doctrines, they haven't been really revised sometimes since the fifth century. And so, we're dealing, sometimes we're working with fifth century concept or patristic concepts in the 21st century that is running on the engines of technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and so I think it's time to revisit this name God. And I think if we could have an open heart and mind to do so, I think it could be the revolution we need in our own world to catalyze this world into something of greater flourishing life.

Robert Ellsberg: Say a little bit more about how evolution and quantum physics, first of all, has changed our understanding of reality, why that calls us into question traditional ways of thinking about God.

Ilia: Yeah. So while our philosophical foundation for theology has stemmed largely from Greek metaphysics, primarily Plato and Aristotle, and then the way they were packaged by Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure and others, has sustained us for many centuries, not many centuries, I should say many years. But I do think modern science needs to be taken seriously as a philosophical foundation as well as scientific insights. I think quantum physics is a radical game changer in philosophy. It is telling us that being our existence is not static, it's not fixed, it's not animistic, it is rather a sea of infinite potentials. So what we're saying is that the core of reality is infinite potential and the role of consciousness or awareness is what brings anyone potential into reality. So there's a much closer affinity through modern science between mind and matter. And I think a lot of theology up to the 20th century left mind out of the equation.

We, in a sense, grew to understand these doctrines in a way that it was more out of authority and obedience rather than a sense of a conscious awareness of a deep reality at the heart of our lives. Not to say that we don't find that in the mystics, et cetera, but it's the way that these doctrines have been formed that sort of left mind out. And we find the same thing today, I find it still in the way even the liturgy some priests still continue to preach as if we're kind of mindless and that we need to be told what to believe and how to believe and what God is and how God is. Carl Jung had very novel ideas on the mind that I think there were brilliant. His insight on the depths of the psyche are really expansive and revolutionary.

And I think one thing about Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin, they never really met, but they were in correspondence with each other. So apparently, they had exchanged some correspondence and Carl Jung had Teilhard's human phenomenon on his side table the week that he died. And he was very intrigued by Teilhard's notion of evolution. And in that human phenomenon, Teilhard says that evolution is basically the rise of thought. And so, he places thought as the core hermeneutic or the core lens of what evolution is about, or we might say the rise of consciousness. And so we can begin to see a parallel between what Carl Jung was exploring and the way Teilhard sees that evolution as the unfolding this dynamic energetic matter that continues to complexify or deepen its relationality is accompanied by deeper or higher levels of consciousness. And so both of these thinkers, then invite us to rethink what is the meaning of this name God? What does God mean in a world of dynamic energy in a world where matter itself is coming into being; that there's no being, that being itself is becoming, and that becomingness is both a rise of materiality and a rise of consciousness.

And so it's really, I think quantum physics and evolution are game changers. They turn everything around about what we know about ourselves, about the world, about matter itself. And so I have a hard time taking core doctrines articulated in the Patristic era to the medieval era and continuing to use those doctrines as if matter hasn't changed, as if our understanding of matter has not changed really significantly. And it's created, I think, a gap for us. And whether it's a conscious gap or not, I think we're living out of two sides of the brain, and we've learned to be sort of cognitively dissonant. You know, religion is on one side and then the world is on the other side, so to speak. And we live in this tension of how religion and world might interact. And I think beginning to see how mind and matter are actually one whole in movement, they begin to realize that what God is and what we're about are in a sense one hole in movement, and that these are not two separate entities.

Robert Ellsberg: Say a little bit more about what Carl Jung has contributed to your way of thinking about this, your dialogue with Teilhard.

Ilia: Yes. Well, I have to admit, I am definitely a novice, if not a postulant when it comes to Carl Jung. I'm a newbie here, so I do not want to—there's some very profound Carl Jung scholars out there, but I was deeply intrigued by his red book. He is an iconoclastic thinker and I think he had a freedom to read scripture and read it through a lens of what his own studies of psychiatry and what he was beginning to learn about the mind. I think Jung was very novel in this way of seeing, reading the scriptures through understanding what the mind is about, or let me say the levels of consciousness. And so one of the things I find—several things I find really refreshing about Jung is, first of all, the way in a sense we begin to realize the complexities of the mind. That we are not just simply—we use this language of mind and matter kind of simply, but his notion of the mind of the ego, the self, the dark side, the anima, the animos, those light sided dark sides within us.

And then there's been some studies by Lothar Schäfer and Diogo Ponte to show that there's a deep resonance between quantum physics and the unconscious. In other words, the unconscious what Jung identified can be likened to this realm of superimposed potentials or superimposed possibilities. And so I do think that it's, for me, it's helpful to think about that level of unconsciousness as the openness to the infinite realm of possibilities. Therefore, God, the name God, points to that transcendent ground, that horizon of infinite possibilities, which takes then the platonic idea of God as that place of ideas or ideal forms and now locates it within us, that we ourselves have that openness to infinite possibilities within us because we're participating in this cosmic plenum or this cosmic wholeness of infinite life or infinite potential.

Robert Ellsberg: I'm thinking it's kind of interesting that Teilhard was frightening to the Vatican because the idea of evolution didn't seem consistent with the whole foundation of original sin. There was this flaw passed on from our four parents, Adam and Eve from the beginning. But it would seem like by way of Jung, with his understanding of the shadow or the dark side, that maybe that is another of language for bringing that in and not falling into a kind of optimistic, no sense that everything's just progressing, getting better and better.

Ilia: Yes, for sure. I mean, I don't think I know that Teilhard has been seen in that light as this kind of naive optimist, like it's all a great day. I mean, again, he did live through profound suffering so as being stretcher bear in World War I, he himself had heart ailments and being ostracized by the Jesuits and silenced by the Vatican and all that kind of stuff, so he does know dark suffering. I think when he says that, I think what he's just basically saying is that original sin as it was conceived, you know, his Augustinian sense of a single couple monogenism, that it's inherited guilt, these ideas are not consonant with modern biology. And so, that we as sin, he did speak of a type of sin where he doesn't place a lot of emphasis on sin. But I do think it's sort of one person say glitches. And I don't think there's some serious sin, but I think we can choose against the good—we can act out of.

And here's maybe putting it this way, I think I write about this in the book, the unreconciled self. In other words, if we have this darkness and lightness within us, and this is Jung's idea of individuation. We have to do that hard work in a sense of finding those places of unreconciled within us, which are the dark places of our own violence, our own fracturedness, and reconcile them. He says, because what's not reconciled within is then destined to live without as a fractured choice for being in the world. And I think that's something Teilhard would he never talked in those terms, but I don't think he would oppose that at all. You know, we have to recognize that there's something about us that resists the movement towards greater love or towards more wholeness as a world community. And it's not something in the world, it's us. You know, there's something about us that's fractured and incomplete and unfinished and unresolved and coming to terms with that.

Robert Ellsberg: Well, that leads me to the kind of question about what the implications of this kind of new immersion theology are for the way we live in the world, the life of the church, or what holiness means in terms of this kind of new consciousness.

Ilia: Yeah, that's a great question. I do think I do spend some time speaking about the mystics because I do think the mystics live out this kind of deep conscious spirituality. I think I used Catherine of Genoa at the beginning, "My me is God," Meister Eckhart… They had this deep sense of unitive consciousness with God that there's no God there who's not here. And I think that kind of power of God, the one who calm to that power of God within as Jesus of Nazareth did, that person is free and daring in their actions in the world. In other words, they are not like questioning, what should I do if I meet a leper along the way or should I help the poor? There's an impulse from within because they're driven by a consciousness of love and a consciousness of godness that they do new things in the world.

And I think sometimes we still continue to live religion too much with authority outside us. What the church says, what Pope Francis says, what the bishops say, and our attention is always away from our inner selves and towards what the authority or the powers of structures are asking of us or telling us. And that actually has diminished our own capacities, our own divine capacities. So one thing I am saying in the book, kind of following the Jungian approach is that we have a divine nature. That my me is God, means that my me is God—and so, that's something that church does not really preach to us. It's like God is here, God is in control, God is watching us. And you know, this approach says no, that God that's there is here, that God is the fullness, the fullness of love, the fullness of those possibilities.

So God in a sense becomes not God, to be God for us. That's what the incarnation is about. The whole book is really about incarnation, updated quantum physics and evolution and what does this mean for our world? I was thinking about this the other day and I think, believe it or not, this is going to come really strange. Sounds really strange, but I think the most spiritual people in some ways today and in fact almost religious, are people developing technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, like stretching, what can we become? And the whole of the New Testament is that question. What can we become? And Jesus says where God says what I promise is a new heaven and a new earth. Like the whole of New Testament is about forward movement. It's about creativity. It's about becoming a new type of person for a new type of world. And the people who are doing that best are the ones who are liberated in a sense from religious authority.

This is an age old argument that sometimes where too, too focused on doing the right thing when it's about the key to life in this world is creativity. That's what the whole engine of evolution, I think is based on. And I think Jesus was about creative love, not just love, but creative love, love that does new things, love that sees from a new center. I think technologists are about creativity. Look what we can become. Look what the possibilities of us are. Right now, of course I'm teaching a course on technology and the human person and everyone's like frightened by this, oh my gosh, robots like interacting socially with us. What's going to happen if we download our brains and we're frightened by it.

I think that same scenario, we're frightened by our own creations can be transposed even into the realm of spirituality. We don't want to go too far in becoming transformed in love, we're frightened by what the world might be. So I think we tend to stay at the comfortable center, the mediocre center, because it's something we can at least have some control over, when in fact, the whole New Testament really is about tapping into that divine dimension of our lives, that God dimension and living out of that potential to become a new person for a new world. And by doing that, by living from those energies of love, it's God who in a sense becomes truly God. God is always in a sense the symbol, the horizon of that fullness of life. But that horizon needs to be actualized in love for it to become a reality, right? What we call the reign of God, a world where God is shining through all things. We have it within us, but I think there's nothing about our theology or the church that really empowers us to live out of this infinite dimension within us.

Robert Ellsberg: So that gets to what you mean by the title, The Not Yet God?

Ilia: Correct, yes. And I do think, and I spend the last few chapters on this; Teilhard grappled with this. And again, I want to just emphasize that he wrote as a scientist, so many people are like, oh, well his writings are kind of—they are, they're difficult because he wasn't a systematic theologian. He didn't write with philosophical tools. You know, he was a scientist who was about the experience of the whole, the experience of concrete material, the experience of the world, the experience of the human person. And what he came to realize, and I think he was a mystic for sure, and he was young, I think in my view, he came to realize the mystery—what we use as language of the Christ, you know, still, I think we attach it to Jesus. Jesus is the Christ. You know, the one that the early church recognized, but both Jung and Teilhard broadened that Christ into the dimension of all people.

In other words, very much like Panikkar, the Christophany, the Christic dimension, meaning that divine love is incarnate, is the potential for life in all persons throughout every aspect of life. So the christic then is this fullness in love. Teilhard speaks of the Christ as God becoming more than God in us. And we are becoming more than human in God. It's taking Athanasius into a new level in evolution. And I do think that there's something here. It's not about a religion, in fact, more and more I think what Teilhard saw is that Christianity, the principles of Christianity meet the demands of evolution, and that's why he called it a religion of evolution. It's not about religious rightness, it's about the spiritual power of wholeness. And he sees then that this whole evolutionary movement is becoming increasingly personalized. In other words, consciousness is rising as it is today through the internet.

In other words, he sees the Christ as the form. It's a personalizing form of evolution, whereby God is in a sense rising up even though still darkly through this form of the christic. So I do think, both Teilhard and Jung see that God is the name of the dynamism of divinity. In other words, divinity I take is the overflow of life itself. God is life. Divinity is that overflow of life, that overflow of life is love, and love seeks to be actualized in embodied form. Love is personal, it's communicative, it's relational. And so to say God is love is just an abstract idea. That's just an abstract concept. And what we're talking about is the actualization of this infinite potential for life, the way we tap into that in our own lives, and then bring it into personal relationships. In other words, we'd world the world, we build the world, we make the world the world that it is, instead of just inheriting it. We're not passive recipients of the world. We are the world in its worlding, and that worlding can become a God infused world.

Robert Ellsberg: A lot of this in some ways hearkens back to St. Paul and the kind of cosmic Christology, that's right there long before the Aquinas or scholastic theology, so it's sort of in the DNA of our tradition in some ways.

Ilia: It is, and Teilhard actually did, not frequently, but he did look to the Pauline writings to support his views on Christogenesis and the rising Christic. So I think John and Paul might say, if we were to look to scripture, what scripture areas influenced Teilhard's thinking. I think he's Johannine and he's also Pauline in his thinking.

Robert Ellsberg: Where do you think you're going to go from here? You said you are thinking of another book already. Where is this taking us?

Ilia: I think Teilhard's notion of a personalizing universe. So let me just say this. I look at the—as we all do, right? We look at the events of the world today, the tragedy of war, war continues, innocent lives just wiped out. Global warming is not going away. It's getting warmer actually, and the environment is deteriorating because of it. So, I am deeply concerned that we have so many conferences, so much knowledge, so many books, and this is our reality. And I think, what is the missing piece here? What are we missing? And I do think we need to let go in some ways, allow our theology to be updated. In other words, science made huge paradigm shifts from the Middle Ages into modernity, into post modernity. The shift from the Newtonian age into the post Einsteinian universe was enormous and has had immense consequences for us.

We have not had that same kind of shift, certainly in theology or even religion more broadly speaking. And without it, I think we will continue to spiral downwards, quite honestly. I think we are facing a rather dire future. And this is where technology is really doing—It's speeding up, because I do think there's something there that's saying, unless we get out of where we are, we're not really going to make it far into the future. But we have the capacity—technologists are saying we have the capacity to really change what we are in this way by extending ourselves into artifacts. Whether or not we agree with it, that's another story. It's actually the principle of what's driving technology that's important right now. We're too reticent. As much as I admire Pope Francis and I really do for his efforts, they are entirely too small. We're too behind. The church is too much behind where actually the world is going.

And so, I do find a great anxiety among people. I think there's a great tension going on and things are not really improving. And I do think we have the capa—this is going back to Jung. We have the capacity. In other words, we do have within us all that's needed to become a new type of people. But it will mean change in our lives. When you become something new, a really radically new type of person, it's a new way of seeing the world, a new way of being in the world. We might change where we're living or how we're living or what we're doing, but we need that radical change. We can't keep talking about these things because it's not getting us anywhere. And it's not just solving the problems of poverty and global warming.

These are not problems to be solved so much as their habits of engaging the world or not, not engaging the world. And I think we have to take a rain check on God. I think maybe it's just time to de-theologize pull back and maybe learn from technology. I think we keep avoiding technology like it's a no-no. I think we have much to learn from how technologists are building sociable robots, how they're building GPT. And we may not agree with this, but they are doing something that taps into the potential of human imagination and creativity. That's what's so amazing about the human person. We have a capacity for infinite potential within us, but we have to tap into it. We can't be overly reserved about it or worry about like, what's going to happen to us. It's going to happen anyway.

Robert Ellsberg: What was it Einstein who said that the dropping of the atomic bomb showed that our technical reason is advancing at a rate that is so beyond the development of our moral imagination, that we are hurtling toward disaster.

Ilia: That's exactly it. Einstein, he was a philosopher in his own way, and deeply insightful, and that's exactly right. And I do think technology without a larger ethical and moral context can be dangerous. It can lead us into a very blind future. It doesn't know where it's going, quite honestly, and that's where Christianity—what's our aim? What's our collective aim? What's our big picture together across religions or no religions? What do we hold valuable together? That's the thing. And then how will we move towards that? And what Jung and Teilhard is saying, we have within us what it takes to move towards that. And institutions therefore, are at the service of that human potential and not the other way around. Teilhard asked the value of the creed or a confessional creed is its evolution activation. Does our confessional beliefs activate us to evolve. And I have to admit that they really don't. I mean, as much as I like the Trinity and the nice seeing creative, it just doesn't get us out there, and I worry that we just do things for the wrong reasons sometimes.

Robert Ellsberg: Well, we're running out of time now, so I really want to thank you, Ilia. And as for the warning, I mean, some people might have experienced anxiety watching this, but I think a lot of people feel very in inspired because if it's destabilizing for a certain kind of view of faith or for a lot of people for whom that traditional view is not plausible or not sustaining or helpful or inspiring, and I think there'll be many who will be excited as it can measure by the popularity of your books and your speaking. So thank you, Ilia Delio. I think one of the really visionary thinkers of our time. Her new book is called The Not-Yet God from Orbis Books. Thank you very much.

Ilia: Thank you, Robert.

Robert: A special thanks to Robert Ellsberg in Orbis Books in Maryknoll of New York for permission to share this recording, visit orbisbooks.com to browse and order titles by Ilia Delio. Use code HW44 and get a 25% discount off of Ilia's books, including The Not-Yet God through March 30th, 2024. Next week, join us for a discussion with theologian Father Ron Rolheiser. Support for Hunger for Wholeness comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems, consider getting involved at fetzer.org. I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.