Time, History, Historians in Thomas Berry's Vision
John Grim
Yale University
As a storyteller Thomas Berry is capable of guiding his readers through a powerful and gripping plot which can be narrated innumerable ways. He also shares with these ancient artisans an intuitive sense of rhetorical expression, a boundless insight into the pervasive character of story, and a trickster's glimpse into the transformative nature of life.
The story which Thomas tells so well is one of relationship between older traditional stories of creation and the contemporary scientific story of origins. In some ways the origin story is like a changeling which finds its way into the birthing place of cultures. Once there, it becomes the most accepted explanation of reality and energizes people who hold it dear. Its truth or falsity is not a question; rather, its presumptions subtly direct the search for knowledge and its assumptions guide the understanding of what is observed. As the story of who and what we are—our cosmology in a word—it both builds our present and orients us to our future. Spontaneities are generated in the telling, and people feel the fit of their views.
One aspect, then, of cosmology is the manner in which a people explain the diversity of human events in relation to the larger crucible of cosmic time. Within this context, I wish to explore some of the thoughtful influences that Thomas Berry has encountered in his training and career as a cultural historian. These historical influences have helped to shape his views on a a range of values and meanings whose personal and social force are transmitted in a culture's self-reflection. These concerns for the underlying hermeneutic of cultural activity have consistently occupied Berry's thought. His study of cultural-historcal development has made me aware of the primal creation story transmitted by every organized society. As a cultural historian he has especially observed this plot weaving itself in and out of the creative expression of a people's religion.
The historical response that human communities have made is as varied as the issues that have confronted them. In the modern response Berry has discerned a lessened capacity for spiritual understanding. He wrote in his Religions of India:
Modern man has become increasingly conscious of the agonies inherent in the human condition. Intellectual and mechanical progress have not cured man of the inner limitations to which he is subject. Indeed, we are more highly sensitized to the human condition than the peoples who have precede us. Other peoples, knowing that they could do little to alter the human condition externally, built up a spiritual capacity to sustain themselves as they worked toward final triumph over this condition. Modern man seeks to remove the painful elements of the human condition by the control he exercises over the natural world and over the inner functioning of his own physical and psychic organism. But in neither case has modern man eliminated the personal agonies or the larger terrors inherent in his historical situation. In personal agonies or the larger terrors inherent in his historical situation. In many ways he has only aggravated his life tension while lowering his spiritual capacity to absorb the afflictions inseparable from his existence as man (p.5).
Historical thought, Berry seems to indicate, involves a deep pathos for it not only opens us to an awareness of the pain in our limitations but also confronts us with the error of our facile solutions. His recurring concern is to clarify the role of religion in human communities. The search for meaning in history is a cardinal feature of his historical investigations. His critique of modern culture targets its overly facile solution of the anguish in the human condition merely at the level of techniques of physical and psychological control. His search has led him to rethink the relation of the spiritual imagination to emerging views of the inner world of matter. His reconsideration of this basic question in western cosmology draws upon a range of significant intellectual influences some of which provide the level of entry into this archaeology of Thomas Berry's thought.
Sacred Meaning in Time
Primary and pervasive influences on Thomas Berry's historical thought are a complex of attitudes towards time that are found in the Bible: the periodization of history, the coherence and meaningfulness of reality, and the exhortatory quality of visionary experience. These aspects of human creativity are not exclusive to western biblical traditions. For example, the Chinese Confucian tradition developed distinctive historical modes in its reflections on its primal, formative period. Moreover, American Indians also established diverse and remarkable oral traditions largely derived from exhortatory preachment based on vision experiences. Thomas Berry has repeatedly emphasized in his teaching that it is possible to find in every culture's oral and written texts organized scrutiny of the meaning of time. But for Berry the multiform human activity called "history" contains a crucial component that derives from the biblical sense of sacred purpose in temporal events.
Periodization in history appears to be an organizational technique found in several Near Eastern texts. Records of the Pharonic periods indicate recognition of eras associated with the Pharaoh's name or reign-name. But historical reflection not only upon past events but upon their enduring effect on the present seems to be an archaic Hebrew development. Periods such as "Exodus," or "Judges" are immediately recognizable as specific referents to meaningful events in Hebrew history. These period concepts gave rise to unique historical ideas regarding the interaction of past, present, and future. For example the concept of the "coming Messiah," and the apocalypse surrounding his coming sharpened the Hebraic sense of future and lifted it from the continuum of time typical in the Mediterranean region. Time, then, was not only organized in period names but was also accorded significance in itself as the means whereby the cosmic purpose manifested itself.
Thomas Berry points out that the act of reflection on this larger purpose in events is exemplified in the second chapter of the Book of Daniel in which the prophet interprets the dream of Nebuchadnezzar. In this episode the Babylonian King has a disturbing dream which he has not told to his Chaldean diviners bun nonetheless demands their interpretation. Daniel comes forward and not only tells the dream but provides the historical interpretation:
"You saw, O king and beheld, a great image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of this image was of fine gold, its breast and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay… You, O king … you are the head of gold. After you shall arise another kingdom inferior to you, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over the earth. And there shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things; and the iron which crushes, it shall break and crush all these. And as you saw the feet and toes partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom… A great god has made known to the king what shall be hereafter. The dream is certain and its interpretation sure" (Daniel 2:31-45).
In his explanation of the dream the biblical author draws on the traditional Mediterranean understanding of the pattern of periodization. But unlike the earlier sequencing of events Daniel establishes the body parts of the dream image as historical ages and a frame for interpreting world events. Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the hunan statue as a myth of larger meaning which represents four future kingdoms. The statue's body parts demonstrate the degeneration of history from world empire do divided kingdoms., He draws from the mythic realm of the dream-story an interpretation which demands of the hearer some acknowledgment of the divine workings. That is, the purely mythic intent of larger meaning in the dream is situated in Hebraic theology, affirming God's entry into human history.
Moreover, the text emphasizes the prophetic insight that divine revelation might also appear among peoples other than the Hebrews. Earlier prophets such as Amos and Isaiah had clearly understood that the mystery of the divine could move through other peoples. While this choice of a people other than the Israelites may be inscrutable, the divine will is presented as demonstrating an inner consistency conforming to the original covenantal relation with the Israelites which was itself understood as an entirely gratuitous choice.
The coherence and meaning of history as presented in biblical texts contains a fundamental insight into the Hebraic tradition in its relation with the divine. The unfolding of events was not seen as random but as a whole that could be presented as a story. The deeper significance of the story lay in its ability to motivate the Israelites at crucial moments in their history as well as in its power to provide an interpretive context for diverse historical events.
The quality of story in the biblical presentation of space and time has influenced Thomas Berry. The coherence of space and time is evident in the broad cosmology found in the story of Genesis. As an origin story it presents a parallel treatment of space pointing towards a sense of inner directedness. That is, the original creation over the seven primal days as well as the pristine garden find parallel in the sacred space of the promised land. Sacred space is joined with sacred time in Genesis to develop in the Hebraic mind a paradigm of an inner, divine direction within the human experience of space and time.
The divine intrusion into history is evident when Daniel acknowledges that the Lord has made His revelation known to the king. Acknowledging the possibility of divine entry into human events also opens the question of how one experiences that revelation of divine will. Entry into the revelatory experience is often presented as an ecstatic, visionary, or unusual psychic state in the Bible. In this altered state the earliest prophets especially were initiated into the forceful language that carried over into the later prophets in a less poetic but more reflective and didactic style. The exhortatory style that marks prophetic insight is a strong influence on Berry's thought. Coupled with it is a final feature of biblical attitudes towards time in the apocalypse.
The apocalyptic fervor evident in Daniel follows from the concern for messianic expectation coupled with a sense that there is a divine plan for bringing time to some ultimate and final upheaval. The tenor of divine intrusion into history finds its most dramatic vehicle in apocalyptic writings. The cataclysmic end of time in which judgement falls upon each individual spills over into the christian document of John's Revelation. Here the thousand-year period, or millennium, establishes the absolute presence of final judgement for all. In many ways the biblical theme of the millennium, according to Berry , is the actual mythic idea underlying the modern technological fixation on progress. Often the mythic idea of progress is used for its religio-inspirational dynamics to undermine critical investigation of so-called progressive activities.
The culmination of apocalyptic thought in the Book of Revelation, like that in Daniel, follows from a long development in biblical reflection on divine meaning in time. The promise given to the patriarchs had found resonance throughout early Israelite history as the journey to the promised land. Prophetic consciousness reimaged that imminent time as "the day of the Lord" which variously promised punishment for covenantal abuse or prosperity for the remnant faithful. It is with the apocalyptic writings that the historical attitude culminates in the sense of a faithful remnant finding salvation despite the impending collapse at the end of time. Accompanying this historical attitude is a developed sense of directed events moving towards a predetermined end.
The biblical features of periodization, coherence and meaning in history, together with the exhortatory quality of visionary experience, all find expression in Thomas Berry's writings. He speaks of foru periods in human cultures: the tribal-shamanistic, the traditional civilizational, the scientific-industrial, and the ecological. While there is a time-developmental unfolding of these human cultural periods, the listing arises from his reading of the dominant cosmological expressions in the historical record rather than a simple evolutionary sequence. Emphasizing the coherence and meaning in history has brought Thomas to one of his most singular insights regarding the cosmological stories of a people:
It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story–the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it–is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the New Story. The Old Story sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with a life purpose, energized action. It consecrated suffering, integrated knowledge, guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were.
The coherence and meaning of time as expressed in a people's story respond to one of Thomas's major concerns regarding the manner in which humans invent themselves. Discovery of such a universe story is akin to the exhortatory quality of biblical visionary experience. When the story disintegrates, then, the human community experiences disfunction most acutely in its relation to the larger universe. In such moments the language of apocalypse communicates the feeling of loss and the sense of impending doom, while employing the exhortation needed to recover relatedness to the larger world. In the following passage, Berry sets the exhortatory fervor of apocalypse within the context of the modern dilemma:
If the supreme disaster in the comprehensive story of the earth is our present closing down of the major life systems of the planet, then the supreme need of our times is to bring about a healing of the earth through the mutually enhancing human presence to the earth community. How to achieve this mode presence is not always clear. That is why a new type of sensitivity is needed, a sensitivity that is something more than romantic attachment to some of the more brilliant manifestations of the natural world. A sensitivity that understands the larger patterns of nature, its harsh and deadly aspects as well as its life-giving aspects, and is willing to see the human diminish that other life forms might flourish.
Through historical features derived from a biblical context coupled with his insights into human cultures and the biological community of the earth, Thomas Berry calls for that sensitivity which is a new inventing of ourselves. Moreover, the context of this "reinvention at the species level," as he expresses it, is presented as a sacred and meaningful act. Recovery of our unique relation to the larger story of who we are means reaching into our genetic relatedness to the earth. The apocalyptic tone of Berry's thought, then, is evoked by our distance from an intimate understanding of the earth community as integral to any understanding of our own cosmology. His historical consciousness of the importance of cultural cosmologies prompts him to draw on biblical features that stress sacred realities. He points towards new historical genres emerging in these times in which human activities are studied for their bioregional effect as well as in their relation to cosmological thinking.
If biblical patterns have shaped broad outlines of Berry's thought, it is Augustine of Hippo who has significantly formed his sense of the struggle in history.
The Historical Self and the Crisis of Choice
I shall consider two aspects of Augustine's thought–his presentation of the city of man and the city of God as the dynamic arena of universal history, and the emergence of the historical self who must choose a future. These features of Augustine's thought appear in his City of God where he contrasts the two alternatives that continually confront the human: the ephemeral city of man and the eternal city of God:
In regard to mankind I have made a division. On the one side are those who live according to man; on the other those who live according to God. And I have said that, in a deeper sense, we may speak of two cities or two human societies, the destiny of one being an eternal kingdom under God while the doom of the other is eternal punishment along with the Devil…For the moment, therefor, I must deal with the course of the history of the two cities from the time when children were born to the first couple until the day when men shall beget no more. By the course of their history, as distinguished from their original cause and final consummation, I mean the whole time of their world history in which men are born and take the place of those who die and depart (City of God, 15, 1).
In Augustine's words, we find the basis for a universal history which investigates each and every human incident to position it in one city or the other. These conceptions of the enduring good of the city of God and the facile, ephemeral character of the city of man echo Platonist ideas. But the dramatic entrance of the divine into human history emphasized in the biblical heritage gives to Augustine's historical scrutiny a drive that is absent in classical thought.
Yet the use of the metaphor of the city underscores Augustine's awareness of classical thought which regarded civilization as an act of the gods. The classical city is an organization of huans, a social binding, fixed by loyalties that reach across ties of language and kinship into the numinous, ancestral presence. In his two cities, however, Augustine distinguishes the loyalties and binding powers of the two cities. He does so according to their capacity for building the present. His most rigid criterion is that whcih wuld endure after the end of time–building the city of God. He distinguishes critical tools for identifying discrete forces within the seemingly singular development of the city. Thus, Augustine articulates the individual self as that unique, moral realm built of classical intention and biblical conviction. The reflective Christian self appears to grapple with the momentous issues framed in his historical view of time. Augustine brings to bear upon this issue an argument regarding time which he had articulated in the Confessions:
So in whatever way this mysterious preperception of future things goes on, it is not possible for a thing to be seen unless it is something existing. What exists now is not a future thing but present. Therefore, when future things are said to be seen, the things themselves which do not yet exist, that is, the future things are not seen, but rather their causes or signs perhaps which now exist. And so they are not future things, but things now present to those who are seeing, from which they foretell future things as conceived by their mind. Again, these conceptions exist now, and those who predict such things see them as present within themselves.
While Augustine is typically locating the perception of time on the human mind, his emphasis on the activation of human imagination and intuitive powers whereby we know and investigate time is unique. He counters the fatalistic views of history predominant in the classical period by posting both the presence of the salvific city of God and the creative human act in the historical process. One may take the view that Augustine, by stressing the Incarnation as radically changing human history, is redemption-oriented, or the alternative view–equally supported by passages from his writings–ghag, because of his stress on the fulfillment of creation in the end of time, he is more creation-oriented. Either viewpoint rests on both the agnostic interpretation of human history as struggle between the cities and the act of historical divination in which one reads the future presence of the sacred in its present causes.
These influences appear in Thomas Berry's emphasis on the human as the bearer of that larger historical time which he identifies with the four evolutions–of the universe, of the earth, of life on earth, and of human cultures. By activating personal discovery of these cosmic processes, one recovers a true sense of self-understanding. Most importantly, Thomas draws from Augustine the sense of building future time through awareness of the past. By entering into these profound meditations on time within ourselves, we are able to intuit the close interrelationship of cultural and genetic impulses. These primal, fecund and unconscious forces erupt into human society on the level of dream of vision revelation whose interpretation requires activation fo human imagination and intuition. Thus, Augustine's remarkable achievement of integrating individual self-awareness into larger cosmic processes remains a significant influence in Berry's thought.
Poetic Wisdom and the Age of the Nations
As the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Catholic University (under the direction of Frederick Engel-Janosi), the New Science of the Nature of the Nations of Giambattista Vico was obviously a pivotal point in Thomas Berry's historical thought. The directions that Vico's insights gave to Berry drew on earlier historical models put forward by Aristotle and Augustine; but the "new science of nations" remains a unique contribution to historical analysis. It established patterns of insight which have remained seminal in Thomas Berry's own perspective. Two cardinal ideas, which had a formative influence on Berry, demand our attention: the ages of the nations and the barbarism of reflection.
The basic structure of Vico's "new science' is an investigation of the human institutions that gave birth to the various gentile nations. Vico was specifically interested in the human character of those institutions which by extension involved him in the issue of the role of providence in history. Vico postulated that the working of providence in biblical history was different from its working in the gentile nations. For this reason, Vico did not investigate the Hebraic events in which providence played a direct and immediate role; he focused rather on the gentile history in which providence worked through natural custom. Vico speculated that a natural or "poetic" wisdom marked certain individuals who founded the institutions giving rise to nations. The principles that enabled humans to rise from barbarism to civility also caused nations to continue their development through successive ages.
Combining the search for principles with his insights into "poetic wisdom" Vico discovered that humans imagined themselves into their historical uniqueness through the institutions that they created. Vico sensed that human societies moved with a natural regularity through a course of development that originated in religion. Eventually societies folded back upon themselves and this "recourse" brought societies back through the same historical ground until they stagnated in a "barbarism of reflection." Having presented a schema of several key ideas in Vico's work it is helpful to give his observation on the ages of the human:
This New Science studies the common nature of nations in the light of divine providence, discovers the origins of institutions, religious and secular, among the gentile nations, and thereby establishes a system of the natural law of the gentiles, which proceeds with the greatest constancy throughout the three ages … These are: (1) The age of the gods, in which the gentiles believed they lived under divine auspices and oracles, which are the oldest institutions in profane history. (2) The age of heroes, in which they reigned everywhere in aristocratic commonwealths, on account of a certain superiority of nature which they held themselves to have over the plebs. (3) The age of men, in which all men recognized themselves as equal in human nature, and therefore there were established first the popular commonwealths and then the monarchies, both of which are forms of human government.
In harmony with these are three kinds of nature and government, three kinds of language were spoken … Along with these three languages–proper to the three ages in which three forms of government prevailed, conforming to three types of civil natures, which succeed one another as the nations run their course–we find there went also in the same order a jurisprudence suited to each in its time (Bergin and Fisch translation of The New Science of Giambattista Vico, pp. 3, 6).
Though the quotation opens up several crucial ideas in Vico's social analysis, I will limit my comments to two major points of influence on Thomas Berry's thought. First, Vico sets out to establish principles which provide insight into the entire sweep of human history. His ages are the core of these historical principles which indicate the sequence of irreversible developments into which the "wise poets" of societies imagine themselves and their social institutions. Moreover, when a society moves into the next age there occurs a concomitant change throughout the institutions of that society. Therefore, language in the age of the gods is a divine language; so also government in the heroic age is government by aristocratic men. Thus, thought itself in the age of humans is marked by a unique human mental disposition entirely different form earlier ages. These aspects of Vico's history are central to Thomas Berry's articulation of those cultural ages he calls tribal-shamanistic, traditional-civilizational, scientific technological, and ecological. From Vico, Berry has even culled his concern for paradigmatic change from age to age so that even the primal symbols found in every age–the cosmic tree, for example–are seen as having undergone fundamental change. This insight into paradigmatic alteration germinates understanding of the creative role of imagination and intuition in human history. Building on Augustine as Vico did before him, Berry has himself creatively reworked these masterful insights into human history. One of Vico's most provocative ideas that provides Thomas Berry with an incisive critique of contemporary cultures is the "barbarism of reflection," our second major point.
The "barbarism of reflection" implies overrefinement: the institutions of an age become overly precious, as it were, and unable to sustain the poetic wisdom and imagination that established them. Vico arrived at this insight thorough the historical need to account for history after the Christian Church had been established and direct providential action entered into gentile European history. He posited a historical recourse in which the nations recreated the ages in the Christian context. Providence allowed the true religion, according to Vico, to generate the authentic new ages according to the natural custom evident in earlier history. If people were unable to make the needed transitions to a new age, providence would allow them to fall into a second barbarism different from the barbarism of sense before civility itself began: Vico wrote of these in this second barbarism:
…such people, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will… In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense (The New Science, p. 381).
While Thomas Berry would hold back from attributing the natural grace of an animal to those in the barbarism of reflection, he takes from Vico this insight into those who collapse thought into self-serving ends. The challenge of history, then, is to be able to image ourselves into the new roles demanded by the story we have of ourselves. If the ages of Vico become the emphasis on story in Thomas Berry's thought, Vico's "poetic wisdom" can be seen as the paradigm waiting for implementation.
A Global Scene in Developmental Time
Thomas Berry has drawn a great deal from modern historians. The dialectical tension in his thought harks back to Hegel's insights into the movement of Spirit in history, much as Hegel's sense of a "cunning in history," in which Spirit accomplishes its ends through the irrational human passions, resonates back to Vico. In this same vein, Marx's class struggle finds voice in Berry's focus on segments of human societies who are caught in traditional stories and, unable to find the energies to create their own future, oppress paradigmatic forces of change.
The formation of history as an academic discipline under Leopold von Ranke in the nineteenth century provides another realm of influences on Thomas Berry. The work of Ranke's student, Jacob Burckhardt, is especially important. Burckhardt's research in the Renaissance established a method of investigating cultures in their historical specificity through imaginative participation in their creative acts. This appreciation of the arts of a historical period, a perspective also developed by Whilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce, is manifest throughout Berry's work.
A more contemporary historian, Erich Vogelin, provided an emphasis which recapitulated for Berry much of his previous training in biblical materials. Vogelin reintroduced the Bible as a central historical document in western historiography. Biblical themes provided Vogelin with abiding insights into western history. More specifically, Vogelin presented Berry with the historical concept of the "second Exodus." Vogelin determined that prophetic consciousness in Israel had arrived at an isight he terms "metastasis," signifying the radical change in being–beyond the limits of existing social conditions–needed to conform to covenantal obligations. In effect the dimension of the change demanded by the Israelite prophetic challenge was a movement beyond the established law of the Exodus experience. Thus, the metastatic experience involved an enduring tension between historical realities and cosmological beliefs. Vogelin's insight finds expression in Berry's call for "reinvention of the human at the species level." It is a call for reaching beyond the historical-mythic myopia of our times, our context, in order to implement our cosmological understanding of who we are as well as respond to the urgencies of our ecological malaise.
We may now turn to two modern thinkers who have deeply affected Thomas Berry: Christopher Dawson, the distinguished British historian in whom Berry found a strong affirmation of the centrality of the study of religion in cultural history; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin whose cosmic vision sees human history as the current manifestation of the evolution of the universe.
From Christopher Dawson Thomas Berry derived readiness to elucidate meaning through broad chronological survey, a sense of religion's improtance in cultural history, and the importance of an international scope for historical analysis. Dawson saw the religious traditions as the connecting link between the great historical epochs. He observed that:
… the problem of Religion and Culture–the intricate and far-reaching network of relations … unite the social way of life with the spiritual beliefs and values, which are accepted by society of the ultimate laws of life and the ultimate standards of individual and social behavior; … these relations can only be studied in the concrete, in their true historical reality. The great world religions are, as it wore, great rivers of sacred tradition which flow down through the ages and through changing historical landscapes which they irrigate and fertilize (Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, p. 12).
Dawson had the historical prescience to understand the deeply meaningful web of relations that human societies establish through religion. He realized that these relations could span historical periods, giving them a continuity often overlooked by historians of ethnic or national specificity. Thomas Berry took Dawson's insight seriously and expanded his studies into the Asian sphere. He developed an in-depth understanding of the Chinese spiritual traditions of Confucianism and Taoism. Moreover, he taught himself Sanskrit and Pali so that he might gain textual familiarity with the scriptures of India. His books on Buddhism and The Religions of India were one result.
It is most appropriate to conclude this overview by situating Thomas Berry's thought as a cultural historian to the work of Teilhard de Chardin. As a paleontologist Teilhard found himself drawn towards the vision of a unific evolutionary process in which the human stood as an arrow pointing the way of universe devopment. This was for Teilhard the most fitting historical context with which to understand human events. "In every epoch," Teilhard wrote in The Phenomenon of Man:
… man has thought himself at a 'turning point of history.' And to a certain extent, if he be thought to be on a … spiral, he has not been wrong. But there are moments when this impression of transformation becomes accentuated and is thus particularly justified. And we are certainly not exaggerating the importance of our contemporary existences in estimating that, pivoted upon them, a turn of profound importance is taking place in the world which may even crush them…
Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with work and business, our earth with a hundred new radiations–this great organism lives in final analysis, because of and for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath a change of age lies a change of thought. Where are we to look for it, where are we to situate this renovating and subtle alteration which, without appreciably changing our bodies has made new creatures of us? In one place and one place only–in a new intuition involving a total change in teh physiognomy of the universe in which we move–in other words, in an awakening (pp. 212, 214).
Teilhard's "new soul," his "change of thought," and the "awakening" contain the germs of the historical perspective developed so profoundly by Thomas Berry. Here is also the tensional nature of the revelatory extent which might "crush" those who acknowledge it. In elaborating this tensional character of awakening, Thomas Berry has drawn out the inner workings of mythic forces and concomitant sensitivities to broad institutional changes. Berry gives creative historical analysis to the new cosmology that Teilhard called for.
Reinvention As Shared Dream Experience
It is less amazing that so many diverse currents of thought should coalesce in Thomas Berry's thought than it is remarkable that the convergence should have such consistency, continuity, and clarity of insight. In recent years, Berry has reiterated a sentence that provides some means for reflection on the directions he sees as urgent. His intention, he says, is to bring audiences to consider the following challenges a most fitting for our times "to reinvent the human at the species level, reflectively, within the community of life systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience."
In each phrase there is a face to the historical picture I have elaborated. Reinvention is an act of purposeful search that acknowledges the historical action of human communities making themselves. Societies do not simply stumble forward in simplistic discovery of unknowns; rather, we have always invented ourselves according to preconceived notions drawn from our story of who we are. To undertake this reinvention reflectively refers to the responsible, critical capacity whereby humans realize that the remaking of the human demands recognition of our existence as species. We share traits that organize us, that allow us to see ourselves as different and unique from other life forms. Now we must extend our reflective powers beyond ourselves to the community of life systems in order to adequately understand the integral connection we have to this larger community. The time-developmental context of historical reflection has largely presented us with a picture of the isolated human community. Now we need to reopen the investigation to see how human life has interacted with the larger life community on the land. In order to implement this new genre of investigation we must be clearer regarding our story in all its aspects–personal, ethnic, national, global, and cosmic.
Finally, the reinvention that Thomas Berry foresees is a celebratory act. It draws from the human all of the numinous excitement associated with dream life. But within this call for shared dream experience is knowledge that older, primal communities have never lost–to share a dream is to respond to a kinship with a person. To dream with the majesty of the red oak is to share kinship; at some level, one becomes that person and allows that being to find personal expression in oneself. This remarkable character of Thomas Berry's thought, then, may not lie only in its lineage of historical reflection but in the more subtle rustle of red oak leaves along his beloved Hudson River.