Ilia Delio on the Evolution of Complexity-Consciousness Towards Second-Axial Consciousness

Discussion

Ilia Delio:

"the argument of my book: Its simplest claim is this: revelation unfolds within evolution, and evolution is the rise of what Teilhard called complexity-consciousness, matter growing more complex and, with it, more aware. As consciousness deepens, religion must change as well. Religion is not a fixed deposit dropped from heaven. It is an axial development, and it changes over time.

We can trace its arc through three broad stages of human awareness.

The first is pre-axial consciousness. Ewert Cousins called its bearers “first earth persons.” Identity lived in the tribe, not the individual. Myth did not merely explain reality; it constituted it. Ritual kept the harmony of heaven, earth, ancestors and clan. To be cut off from the group was less a social fact than a kind of annihilation.

The second is first-axial consciousness. Karl Jaspers named the period between roughly 800 and 200 BCE the Achsenzeit, the Axial Age. Across China, India, Israel, Greece and Persia, something new appeared: the reflective individual. The Hebrew prophet stood against the king in the name of a higher justice. The Buddha stepped outside caste to ask about suffering. Socrates followed the argument against his own city. The world’s great religions were born in this period, and they bear its stamp. They are religions of the individual soul, of conscience, of personal salvation. Monotheism is their crowning achievement: one transcendent God, standing above the world as its ground and judge.

The third is Second-Axial Consciousness. Cousins and Thomas Berry saw it coming, and Teilhard de Chardin saw it before them. It began to stir at the turn of the twentieth century, with relativity, quantum physics, evolution and the first global communication networks, giving rise to a new global consciousness and ecological sensibility. It is only now beginning to unfold.

The second-axial person is not the solitary individual of the first Axial Age. The new person is embedded in networks of relationships, ecological, social and digital. Identity is relational all the way down. We do not first exist and then relate; we exist by relating. This is not a return to the tribe. The freedom and conscience won in the first Axial Age are not lost. They are carried forward into a larger whole, a planetary “we” in which, as Teilhard put it, union differentiates. The more deeply we belong, the more fully we become ourselves."

(https://iliadelio.substack.com/p/toward-the-future-what-theology-beer?)