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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Juan Luis Segundo is widely known as a liberation theologian but his use of evolutionary categories to develop a theology of grace is little appreciated. Challenging the pessimistic logic of the second law of thermodynamics, Segundo defines evolution as an ecological project which results in the creation of what is new. Displaying a logic that is dialectical but not linear, the evolutionary project has as its telos the continual manifestation of freedom (or whatever is analogous to it) in a universe which, because of the high visibility of suffering, appears tragic and seemingly futile. In the human sphere, freedom is manifested wherever action integrates random elements like suffering and negativity to function efficaciously as love. The sign or mark of evolutionary change which accompanies creation of what is new, freedom is not the cause of love but is manifested gratuitously within it. Love is essential to God's eschatological will to create a world that is good. Wherever it is found, love enjoys ontological causality in the eyes of God and contributes to realization of the eschaton. There, definitively manifested in glory, the blossoming of freedom that accompanies love will be revealed for what it has been all along: substance of a new creation that is the eschatological materialization of grace.
1 Translated by John Drury (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984–88), this is the five-volume English version of Segundo's three-volume Spanish original, El hombre de hoy ante Jesús de Nazaret (Madrid: Edlciones Cristiandad, 1982).Google Scholar
2 For a classic exposition of this view, which unlike many popularized versions of evolution is not anthropocentric, see Monod, Jacques, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (London: Fontana/Collins, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 See Segundo, Juan Luis, The Humanist Christology of Paul (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), 215Google Scholar, n. 202.
4 Segundo, Juan Luis, Infierno: ¿futuro o presente? (unpublished manuscript, Parish of San Juan Bautisto, 1983), 40–41.Google Scholar
5 See Segundo, Juan Luis, The Historical Jesus of the Synoptics (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), 158–61Google Scholar, and Segundo, , Humanist Christology of Paul, 123–24.Google Scholar
6 For Segundo, creation, like all action in an evolutionary context, is a slow and demanding project. It is work. This is no less true of “the infinitely slow process that goes to make up divine creation” (Segundo, Juan Luis, Evolution and Guilt [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1972], 139).Google Scholar
7 As subsequent paragraphs will reveal, ecological science is not synonymous for Segundo with the Gaeia hypothesis or popular schools of thought usually associated with ecology in North America. In fact, Segundo is suspicious of these and prefers to rely on the relatively unknown categories of Gregory Bateson. See Segundo, Juan Luis, Faith and Ideologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), 285–86Google Scholar, and Segundo, Juan Luis, An Evolutionary Approach to Jesus of Nazareth (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 109.Google Scholar For the origins of the categories on which Segundo relies, see Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972)Google Scholar, and Bateson, Gregory, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Bantam, 1979).Google Scholar
8 For philosophical and scientific grounds for this, see Toulmin, Stephen, The Return to Cosmology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 271–72.Google Scholar
9 Segundo, Juan Luis, Reflexiones críticas (Madrid: Ediciones Christiandad, 1982), 324.Google Scholar The original Spanish wording reads: “el equilíbrio profundo que liga … a todos los seres del universo en una red ecológica.”
10 See Segundo, , An Evolutionary Approach to Jesus of Nazareth, 29–36 and 108–10.Google Scholar
11 See ibid., 42-66, esp. 45-48 and 51-52.
12 Ibid., 51 (italics mine).
13 Ibid., 130, n. 85. Segundo is here quoting Gregory Bateson.
14 A homeostatic mechanism is any device, whether mechanical, electronic, organic, or cosmic, for maintaining continuity in the face of change. Examples include mechanisms like thermostats, codes like DNA, organic regulators like glands, and, in the moral realm, the conscientious capacity of love (see Segundo, , Faith and Ideologies, 308–14Google Scholar).
15 Ibid., 311.
16 Of course the economy of energies needs a criterion—wise and efficacious for whom? This question would have to be addressed in a separate essay. For Segundo, as for other liberation theologians, the criterion is the needs of those who are debilitated, suffering, or marginalized, what Latin American liberation theology calls a preferential option for the poor.
17 See Segundo, , Faith and Ideologies, 308–10.Google Scholar
18 Ibid., 8.
19 Ibid., 309-10 and 314-15. Data from the nascent science of chaos seems to dovetail with Segundo's analysis. The apparently infinite diversity of individuals within a species, e.g., the fern, corresponds to what Segundo calls the surfacing of freedom. Each individual represents a free form, a new manifestation or unique expression of what it means to be fern. An even more striking example occurs in snowflakes (see Gleick, James, Chaos: Making a New Science [New York: Penguin, 1987], 303–17).Google Scholar
20 See Segundo, , An Evolutionary Approach, 45–46.Google Scholar For Bateson's account of this phenomenon, see Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 448-66, esp. 453.
21 See Segundo, , An Evolutionary Approach, 45–46 and 71–79.Google Scholar
22 See ibid., 64.
23 Examples of the affinity of chance for gratuitousness include the indeterminacy of electron fields and the reproductive process of sexual beings. Examples of the manifestation of freedom (or what is analogous to it) over long periods of time include the emergence of appropriately structured biological organs, the appearance of new individuals and species, the discovery of clean energy sources, the altruistic behavior of love.
24 Segundo, , An Evolutionary Approach, 79Google Scholar (italics in original). As Segundo shows, the most challenging example of entropy is death (see ibid., 71-79, and Reflexiones críticas, 324).
25 Segundo, , An Evolutionary Approach, 72.Google Scholar
26 Segundo, , Evolution and Guilt, 113.Google Scholar
27 See Segundo, , An Evolutionary Approach, 36 and 41.Google Scholar
28 Ibid., 37 (italics in original).
29 Ibid. See also 38-41.
30 Ibid., 40 (italics in original).
31 Ibid., 39.
32 For a description of this, see Segundo, Juan Luis, Grace and the Human Condition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1969), 32.Google Scholar
33 Segundo, , An Evolutionary Approach, 40Google Scholar (italics in original). For Segundo, who uses Bateson's categories to clarify E. F. Schumacher's notion that people need to start viewing the processes of nature as quasi-sacred, this respect is akin to love. Only love can prevent us from dichotomizing reality, thereby legitimating the notion that “things” can be treated “non-personally” and placed at the service of “persons.” As Segundo sees it, love results from a willingness to integrate scientific and rational (purposive) modes of knowledge with the sphere of meaning and values (see Segundo, , Faith and Ideologies, 257–70Google Scholar).
34 For Segundo's assessment of some of these, see An Evolutionary Approach, 12-15 and 38-41.
35 Ibid., 129, n. 65.
36 See Segundo, , Faith and Ideologies, 285–86.Google Scholar
37 Segundo, , Humanist Christology of Paul, 114–15.Google Scholar
38 As Segundo shows, the discrepancy between intentions and results also shows up in actions aimed at evil. Thanks to Sin (the built-in inefficacy of action), no sin (willed and culpable evil) can be entirely efficacious. Grace can never be definitively undermined. Whatever damage we might do to evolution in the meantime, we can never destroy God's project in an absolute sense.
39 Insofar as that distance is visible both socially and individually, Sin can find an analogy—and accomplice—in the heart of each individual (Segundo, , Humanist Christology of Paul, 147Google Scholar). When it does, Sin can be turned into sin(s), i.e., moral evil or guilt, although it does not have to be.
40 As Segundo points out, paying one's debt to Sin ought to be (but is not always) done with an ecological wisdom similar to that of Jesus. The “secret” of such wisdom is that “his [Jesus'] freedom never agrees, in bad faith, to be in complicity with an entropy greater than that required for the efficacy of his history project” (Segundo, , An Evolutionary Approach, 91Google Scholar).
41 It must not be inferred that what Segundo means by Sin is thus a light-hearted matter. On the contrary, it is utterly serious, since Sin represents the potential for considerable destruction. Adverting to the “Shandaic” side of Sin is intended to point out that entropy is something with which one inevitably must learn to live—and die.
42 Of course, in the human sphere, where entropy is capable of being co-opted into the service of sin(s), the emergence of quality is not automatic. It depends on the exercise of love (e.g., solidarity, altruisms, friendship, community).
43 Segundo, , Humanist Christology of Paul, 159.Google Scholar
44 See ibid., 143 and 216, n. 212 and 213, and An Evolutionary Approach, 104.
45 Segundo, , Humanist Christology of Paul, 152.Google Scholar
46 Ibid. (italics in original).
47 It is worth noting that Segundo's starting point is not what Edward Schillebeeckx has called the scandal of suffering, the oppressive senselessness of its excess (Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord [New York: Seabury, 1980], 725).Google Scholar I believe this is a by-product of Segundo's evolutionary categories, which incorporate suffering into a philosophical base more systematic—and theoretical—than that of Schillebeeckx. This raises the question whether suffering can reach what scientists call a critical mass, a weight so oppressive as to exclude the possibility of its ever being incorporated into works of love. In fairness to Segundo, I think it must be admitted that the only answer possible in light of God's eschatological promise is no. Evil will not have the final say, no matter how massive it becomes, precisely because the resurrection of Jesus shows that, in the end, love is “ontologically stronger.” As Segundo emphasizes, “one single performance of the good means more than all the abhorrent ‘alien’ stuff that has accumulated” (Humanist Christology of Paul, 204, n. 127). Yet in light of what Schillebeeckx calls the excess of suffering in the world today, one cannot help asking what consolation this response would bring to victims of terminal illness, starvation, or torture.
48 See Segundo, , Reflexiones críticas, 322.Google Scholar
49 See Segundo, Juan Luis, Berdiaeff: Une réflexion chrétienne sur la personne (Paris: Montaigne, 1963), 148.Google Scholar Although Segundo agrees with those who hold that evil cannot be rationally explained, he does not allow that to serve as an excuse for abdicating the responsibility to reflect on it intelligently, i.e., with the use of scientific categories.
50 See Segundo, , Humanist Christology of Paul, 160.Google Scholar
51 Unfortunately, in assigning God and human beings this task, Segundo suggests that God could have created a different kind of world but chose to make a seemingly futile one (see Segundo, , Reflexiones críticas, 265Google Scholar, and Humanist Christology of Paul, 137). To the extent that such an emphasis falls back on traditional understandings of God as (sole and “all-powerful”) creator, it represents an unfortunate discrepancy in Segundo's theology.
52 Segundo, Juan Luis, Our Idea of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973), 139;Google Scholar inclusive language substituted.
53 In The Christ of the Ignatian Exercises (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987), 91Google Scholar, Segundo writes what may well sum up his entire theology of grace: “We cannot truly love someone unless we share a common project with that person, a project that is important both to that person and ourselves” (italics in original).
54 See Segundo, , Humanist ChristoJogy of Paul, 209Google Scholar, n. 161.