The Coming of Evolutionary Thought
Having been born into a world where, from the scientific point of view, evolution is a given, we may not fully appreciate what a radical development it was for human beings to realize for the first time that things are evolving and that although history may repeat itself in the short term, on a cosmic scale it has an ever forward-moving direction. In earliest human societies, change was so slow that life could remain pretty much the same over spans of time measured in thousands of years. The first technological advances—things like sharp edges, fire, and the wheel—took tens of thousands of years to develop. And people had pretty much the same way of life, the same tools to do the work of life, and the same cultural traditions for generation upon generation. Life certainly gave every appearance of being cyclical, as seen most obviously in the seasons. A cycle of planting and harvesting might bring bounty or it might bring scarcity, but one thing was sure: planting season would come again and with it would come either good fortune or ill. No wonder a people caught in this endless, capricious loop would seek to appease the gods who held power over their fate. And so on it went for the first many thousands of years of human civilization.
But however slowly the increments of change occurred over the course of the early millennia of civilization, the rate of change in human knowledge and technological advance is an exponential one rather than one of simple accretion. When knowledge and technology are limited, their doubling does not change things very much; but as the doubled knowledge doubles again, and that in turn doubles, the rate at which change becomes apparent speeds up considerably over time. So whereas major changes took thousands of years in the very ancient world, by the middle of the second millennium AD, a major societal shift required only a century or two—such as happened when the printing press revolutionized western culture in the relative eyeblink of a few hundred years. Yet still, when major shifts took a few hundred years to happen, you would live pretty much as your grandparents had, and your grandchildren would live pretty much the same kind of life you did. Life tended to be short and hard with very little to suggest it would ever be otherwise here on this earth, and so the religions of humankind focused on a better life after death and on death as release from the pain and suffering that characterized so much of human existence. This earth didn't seem to have much to offer in the way of a future.
When we consider that the religions of the world formulated their doctrines in a cultural context which did not know that all was evolving, we can more easily understand why relatively little ultimate importance was placed on this life. Disconnected from the ongoing evolutionary advance, life becomes little more than a way station for those whose main hope rests in otherworldly dimensions. Under non evolutionary assumptions, this fleshly life on earth finds its main significance (particularly for those in traditional Western religions) as a testing ground for heaven, a time and place for us to make decisions of eternal import. And having once formulated their dogmas and practices around belief in a nonevolving world, adherents of such faiths were predisposed to see the new idea of evolution as the denial of everything they held sacred. As evidence for evolution has continued to mount over the past century, people of faith have had only two choices: revise their dogmas or deny evolution. Today, we can readily see the warring of these two responses to evolution in American religion and politics. In some groups Darwin is nothing short of the Antichrist!
Yet in the scientific discourse the idea of evolution was not new with Darwin. Decades before Darwin brought the theory of physical evolution into the public eye, there was debate between “evolutionists,” who observed species' tendency to develop over time, and the “immutabalists,” who believed that the species and their characteristics were fixed. In fact, as far back as the mid-1700s, the French naturalist and mathematician Comte de Buffon suggested that species change over time and that the earth was considerably older than Bishop Ussher's then largely accepted 6,000 years. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, along with other such evolutionary pioneers as Comte de Buffon's student Jean-Baptiste Lamarck5 and geologists Charles Lyall and James Hutton were among those whose evolutionary thinking paved the way for more detailed treatment in The Origin of Species.
If evolution was not an entirely new concept in the world of scientific thought when Darwin published his book The Origin of Species, neither was it altogether new in philosophical and theological thought. In the philosophical world, the ancient idea of a fixed or cyclic view of nature had already given way at least a hundred years earlier to a view of history as forward moving, setting the stage for Darwinian ideas of evolution. For example, the philosopher Leibniz speculated in the 1600s that over the long course of history the species of animals had transformed many times and “a cumulative increase of the beauty and universal perfection of the works of God, a perpetual and unrestricted progress of the universe as a whole must be recognized, such that it advances to a higher state of development.”6 In that same century the German mystic Jakob Boehme departed from his Lutheran roots to espouse an evolutionary cosmology. By the eighteenth century, German thinkers like Kant, Goethe, and Fichte were developing evolutionary philosophical systems, and that trend continued into the nineteenth century with Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer who were all suggesting an evolving manifestation of spirit in the world of materiality. Schelling wrote: “History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute.”7
In the world of Christian spiritual thought, the evolutionary perspective was not universally dismissed, even among the most orthodox. Although he may have been ahead of his time, nineteenth century Scottish theological writer and revivalist Henry Drummond was quick to see the spiritual significance of evolution when he wrote in Natural Law in the Spiritual World:
We have Truth in Nature as it came from God. And it has to be read with the same unbiased mind, the same open eye, the same faith, and the same reverence as all other Revelation. All that is found there, whatever its place in Theology, whatever its orthodoxy or heterodoxy, whatever its narrowness or its breadth, we are bound to accept as Doctrine from which on the lines of Science there is no escape.8
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the theosophical writers were among the first to present comprehensive evolutionary perspectives on the spiritual path that encompassed what were, at the time, the latest scientific understandings of the physical dimensions of evolution. One can't read Alice Bailey's theosophical treatise, The Consciousness of the Atom, without being struck by its prescient grasp of the essential unity of the evolutionary process from the sub-atomic to the cosmological levels. Within the framework found in the evolutionary writings of the early twentieth century theosophists, we find some of the earliest articulations of how inward spirit co-evolves with outward form. For example, C.W. Leadbeater wrote:
The whole process is one of steady evolution from lower forms to higher, from the simpler to the more complex. But what is evolving is not primarily the form, but the life within it. The forms also evolve and grow better as time passes; but this is in order that they may be appropriate vehicles for more and more advanced waves of life.9
Rudolf Steiner, whose Anthroposophy was an outgrowth of the theosophical movement, expressed a similar concern for the interior dimensions of evolution when he pointed out that Darwinian thought was valid but incomplete if we left out the spiritual essence of the evolutionary process in humankind. “From epoch to epoch,” he wrote, “progressive evolution leads humanity, in respect to the path of higher cognition, to ever changing modes, just as outer life likewise