"Evolutionary Spirituality" is based on the work of holistic philosopher Ken Wilber. Wilber explains his approach most fully in his monumental Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (1995). There he makes the case that the universe is on a continual journey of development and increasing complexity... and he means the whole universe. Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality has a remarkable grid showing parallel developments over time in terms of physics, biology, social forms, and even neurology. When applied to spirituality, this evolutionary approach has to do with the development of religious thought and practice in human cultures, which happens to reflect on a macro level the kind of mental/spiritual development undergone by individuals.

We — that is, both as infants and at the dawn of civilization — begin in an Archaic stage, and progress to the Magical, then to the Mythical, then to the Rational, then to a stage called Vision-Logic, and onward into ever more refined and subtle levels of consciousness.

1) The Archaic stage, in stone-age societies and infant individuals, has to do with a basic, physical and emotional level of consciousness, which identifies completely with the universe in an undifferentiated and narcissistic way.

2) The Magical, which we see in tribal societies and small children, manifests the emergence of differentiation between human consciousness and the world, but which lacks much ability to distinguish between the inner world of the imagination and the objective world.

3) The Mythic stage, found in pre-adolescents and feudal cultures, emerges when the mind asserts itself as the "lord" of consciousness. This ascendancy is symbolically and narratively expressed in terms of laws, well-defined social roles, and moral absolutes. The Mythic often projects a male sky-god who enforces the rules and needs appeasement.

4) The Rational stage, attained by teenagers and the Modern world of nation-States, reflects the differentiation of sacred from secular, and the further specialization of roles and fields as independent ways of knowing with their own standards of truth.

5) The next stage, of (some) adults and so-called post-modern globalism, is called Vision-Logic, and attains a multi-perspectival outlook in which the different "truths" pertaining to different fields of observation can be accepted and balanced.

6) The Integrative stage is the one some say is emerging socially right now. Instead of just accepting and understanding different perspectives, in this stage we knit them together, integrating them into a coherent and inclusive vision.

And there are still further stages which we see in particularly evolved individuals. But as a general rule, the guiding principle of the stages is an expansion of the sense of self to encompass more and more of reality. Each stage encompasses the former stages and then moves beyond them to a broader and more universalistic point-of-view. As individuals we grow through the stages as we get older, with our development perhaps stopping at one stage or another. Human culture also evolves through the stages as the bulk of humans on the planet advance to and activate each one. For instance, the Mythical Age was when most people on the Earth had their consciousness fixed in the values formed by the Mythical way of perceiving things.

At the same time, there are individuals alive on the Earth from all stages at any given time. Wilber somewhere refers to spiritual adepts like Jesus and Buddha as emissaries from the future because they show more "evolved" consciousness than the vast majority of their contemporaries. The point of this evolutionary view is to encourage movement, as individuals and by extension as a culture, through the stages to higher and higher levels of consciousness. (Wilber admittedly claims a lineage through Hegel, with this idea of the evolution of Spirit.)

Evolutionary Spirituality can be a helpful tool in interpreting where we are and where we might be headed. For example, the current impasse in the main-line churches may be understood as a collision among people who see things according to two or three different stages of consciousness. Conservatives, it may be argued, have a Mythical to Rational perspective, while liberals have a Rational view which is trending towards the broader perspective of Vision-Logic. But to the former, the latter group looks like hopelessly libertine heretics undermining the foundations of the one true religion; and to the latter the former appear as mindless inquisitors trying to hold on to an obsolete and oppressive religious system. In fact, each group is seeing the same things through different preconceptions and understandings.

The Church has always been equipped to embrace many levels of consciousness and spirituality. Even when the majority of believers were mired in Mythic or even Magical conceptions, the higher levels were manifest in places like, at its best, monasticism. The levels have perhaps been more differentiated denominationally (since the Reformation), with the Rationalist propensity coalescing in Protestantism, and much of the Magical remaining with Rome, and the Mythic split between the two (in the West).

One of the points Wilber makes is that spiritual adepts have always proceeded further in the stages than the majority of people. Thus we can see in the various summaries of spiritual growth produced by mystics through the ages an outline of where we should all be headed. His "integral" methodology basically finds the points of agreement across a wide spectrum of traditions and teachings, and generalizes from these places a common human vision. For instance, looking at the "mystics" in each tradition, he finds remarkable similarities between the teachings on spiritual practice and development in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam (Sufism), and Christianity. In other words, he sifts out the elements particular to each tradition, choosing instead to focus on what they all share.

At the same time, Wilber admits there are light and dark sides to each stage. (Wilber has written a whole book, called Boomeritis, on the dark side of the Vision-Logic stage; ie. the dopey excesses of his own Baby Boomer generation.) The Rational stage did give us democracy and human rights, along with Hiroshima and Auschwitz. The Mythical was a decided advance over the superstitious Magical, but is also created the conditions for the Crusades and the Inquisition.

The evolutionary approach to spirituality itself does present several dangerous pitfalls.

1) Evolutionary Spirituality can degenerate into the smug, self-righteous superiority of those who think of themselves as "evolved," and others as "backward." At its worst, this mentality has been used repeatedly to degrade, exploit, and even exterminate those viewed as "less evolved." The great example of this is Darwin himself, who showed enthusiasm for such practices as genocide and euthanasia. Darwin gave us the biological theory of evolution, but also the idea of the survival of the fittest, and its excrable political manifestation, Social Darwinism. If those who consider themselves "evolved" let it go to their heads we end up unspeakable crimes against the Earth, animals, and humanity.

2) Evolutionary Spirituality needs to remember that each stage builds upon and embraces each former stage. It is not a matter of rejecting the former stage in order to proceed to the next, but of broadening the horizon to include both what has gone before and what is to come. But there is in evolutionary thinking the simplistic reductionism which fails to perceive nuances of perspective, but rather sees things as dualistically black or white. Thus each stage has to be unequivocally "better" than the previous one. The former stage has to be caricatured as almost totally evil, ignoring for the most part all positive elements and figures.

3) Related to this problem is that it is easy to ignore and even justify the dark side of each new stage. There is a certain naturalness to this, as the proponents of each new stage feel a need to be uncompromising and certain about the benefits of what is emerging. But I have seen the dogmatic conviction that the Rational stage was an unqualified improvement over the Mythic lead to an absurdly benign and beneficial view of science — as if the horrors of the 20^th century were not a product of the "higher" Rational stage. Anything apparently evil in the Rational has to be blamed on some invented vestige of the Mythic. There is a tendency to make no allowance for ambiguity; it if doesn’t fit the scheme then it is either denied or invisible.

4) Evolutionary thinking can degenerate into a quite linear view of an evolution that only ever proceeds in one direction. Experience and history tell us that it is more complicated than that, with people and cultures moving back and forth, in and out of the stages, and sometimes holding more than one view simultaneously.

(5) The evolutionary way of seeing things is arguably open to the theological charge of chiliasm, the idea that God’s Kingdom emerges on Earth prior to the End of History. One Modern manifestation of a kind of chiliasm is the Myth of Progress, which says that people will bring about the Kingdom of God (or a perfect, utopian society by some other name) on Earth over time by their own efforts and intentional development. But whether all evolutionary views are inherently chiliastic, and even whether chiliasm is in fact always heresy, may be debated. In any case it is a separate and complicated issue I reserve for another time.)

It should also be said that the very existence of the Rational stage can be problematic. It is hard to find any mystics who passed through a stage analogous to the Rational level as we have known it in its implementation over the past five centuries or so. Then again, some seem to think that the Rational is represented in many spiritual systems as the Dark Night of the Soul, a dry time when spiritual perception is eclipsed.

In his recent book, The Death of the Mythic God, Jim Marion makes the case that the decline of the main-line churches is due to the fact that people today have little use for the Mythic understanding of God which is preached therein. On one level, this makes sense. It would explain the disconnect between the traditional Presbyterian church I now serve and its own community, with which it has otherwise a great deal in common. Maybe it is true that people don’t come because they can’t swallow theologies based on the Mythic God, like penal-substitutionary atonement and biblical literalism. On the other hand, the churches that preach the Mythic God without qualification are booming. And many main-line churches have generally not taken the Mythic God literally for a couple of generations. In fact, the case could be made that it is not the Mythic understanding of God that is alienating Modern people, but the Rational. (This leads to the critique voiced by Radical Orthodoxy, which is my next planned essay.)

Evolutionary Spirituality will be a useful tool for the church to the degree that it avoids the problems I suggested above, all of which can be gathered under the category of idolatry. The key to navigating the stages of spirituality, perhaps, is learning to reject the evil and embrace the good, as they are manifest in each stage. What criteria might we use to make this determination? We need some touchstone to discern what is leading to an advance in our spiritual consciousness, and what is crippling us and dragging us down.

For Christian theology the criterion is the Word of God, Jesus Christ. And the methodology is the critique of idolatry. This is in accordance with much of the best of Christian spirituality. Whatever leads us towards Christ is a positive development, and whatever leads us away from Christ into idolatry is an obstruction or regressive.

Evolutionary Spirituality does have one strong thing going for it. When, in the Dark Ages, Irish monks were fanning out across Europe, converting the newly arrived Germanic tribes-people to Christianity, their methodology was based on monasticism and a rather extreme asceticism. I used to wonder how they ever managed to convince generations of Europe’s most talented young people to forsake the joys and accomplishments of ordinary existence — including political power, accumulation of wealth, and marriage — to undertake such rigors for the sake of this strange new faith. Part of the answer, I believe, is that the missionaries knew that their movement was the future. They knew that the status quo was doomed, that these tribes could not go on with their old religions and social orders. And they were offering their hearers an opportunity that only comes along once in several millennia: to be on the ground floor of a new era. They were right. Even today, 1500 years later, we still remember the names of many of these young people who joined the faith at the inspiration of those Irish monks.

This is what we can glean from Evolutionary Spirituality. It is a way for the church to speak to people not as representatives of a dying and dysfunctional past, but as visionaries who are blazing a trail that will be the future of humanity.

Those Irish monks were navigating the collapse of the Magical thinking that characterized the tribal peoples of Europe. They offered a viable alternative in the more advanced Mythic views found in Christianity. Perhaps we can say that our own historical situation, the simultaneous collapse of both Modernity and Christendom, is also the implosion of the Rational stage of consciousness. We see the emergence of the Vision-Logic stage in the "green" views of many who are starting to think more holistically, globally, and universally. Even more advanced mystical views and practices are more common and available now than even a couple of decades ago.

But the church, even the Irish mission, has never been about simply bringing about the next stage. It always looks still further ahead/above/within to the fulfillment of creation’s purpose and end.