Introduction

Introduction To Art in the Theoevolutionary Church.

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The transfiguring goal for Friedrich Nietzsche in his early writings was the creation of great men, a republic of genius. Although that is important it is not nearly enough. Renewal requires the religious goal of our evolution to Godhood in the cosmos, which brings a far more exalted renewal of consciousness, and contains the power to revive religion, philosophy and art in the enlarged modern world.

It is not tragic music, as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer thought, which expresses “the immediate language of the will,” it is evolution. It is not the Will To Power but the Will To Godhood that activates life, which evolution then shapes, that is the real source for a renewal of mythopoetic power. Evolution is the super-epic for art, glorifying the struggle to attain Godhood. Art can bring religion to life but it is not religion.

Religion and philosophy can recognize evolutionary religion as what we need, politics can help create it, and art and religious rituals can affirm it. Our evolution can even be democratic, with a federal system respecting and protecting the independent parts of the whole, maintaining the separate variety which advances evolution best, only now with cooperative competition in evolution, as we gradually evolve beyond the human sub-species toward Godhood.

The Twofold Path brings together inward traditional religion with outward material-supermaterial evolution. The Twofold Path offers conservatism and synthesis to religion, and science, and allows the new to work along with the old, without the damage of revolution, and most importantly offers the divine evolutionary path to real Godhood.

Early Nietzsche could not see his way out of the loss of both religion and science other than through the rebirth of art-myth as a guide to truth, along with creating individual great men as the goal of culture. Nietzsche thought that this loss of myth was the result of the reasoning of Socrates which supposedly destroyed myth, and also after the “historical sense” and the abstract pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake in modern times further destroyed myth and religion. Kant helped this destruction along by showing the limits of knowledge, and Schopenhauer by adding the Will as the superior force to all knowledge.

I did not erect theological materialism on the ruins of Christianity, as modern thinkers did with science and the humanities, I wanted to renew the building, not tear it down. This rebirth was done through the Twofold Path, where the God-Within, the Father-Within, is seen as the first glimpse, or the mirror of the Godhood reached through material and supermaterial evolution. But this was a revelatory insight and not done simply to retain Christianity, and not done because I in fact do respect the conservative thinkers who see the great value for life in traditions.

Theological materialism and the Theoevolutionary Church revive both religion and science after modern life could not retrieve them as a satisfactory guide to truth. This brings along the religious-cultural goal of evolving increasingly great men, and also the sacred goal of attaining real Godhood in evolution in the Outward Path, the God first seen and mirrored in the Inward Path of the great religions.

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Theological materialism and the Theoevolutionary Church suggest that we don't need duality in the art world any more than we do in theology or philosophy. With evolution the incomprehensible infinite of the Romantic becomes the clarity of the Classical. Beauty becomes truth and truth beauty. This is the goal affirmed in the art philosophy of  Evolutionary Realism.

It is more than admiration for the infinite which causes our art passions to be exited, as Burke said (which Jung called the numinous mystery), it is more essentially the Spirit-Will-To Godhood, the zenith of the instincts, that excites our passions, which can be fulfilled only in our material-supermaterial evolution to Godhood. Here the infinite becomes clarity, beauty becomes truth. This is also how we counter Kant and say that reality can be known.

Certainly we are imperfect, as the Christians demand, but our evolution to Godhood can bring perfection, which means we should not permanently dwell on our imperfections seen only in the Involutionary Inward Path, it is in the Evolutionary Outward Path where we can reach perfection in Godhood.

There is a sacred totality here: we arrive at health by fusing self, society and Godhood with the Spirit-Will activating life to evolve to Godhood. Evolutionary therapy, art, political philosophy, the sciences, etc., can fuse in this mission. In this holistic view religion is the way out of the problems seen in these now separated areas. It is perhaps this religious perspective that is the “total art work” that we have been searching for in the West since the Ancient Greeks, which art can only affirm.

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The philosophy of the Theoevolutionary Church is whole because it has its roots in ancient religions, the tribal, the classical, the romantic, but also affirms the Enlightenment, which gave rise to the science of sociobiology now seen as an aid in our evolution to Godhood, the God first mirrored inwardly in the great religions.

This is not only religion adapting to preserve itself, which is indeed a noble Burkean action, this is a deeper and more accurate understanding of Godhood. The TC at last brings the sacred and profane together since Godhood is not a non-material spiritual being opposite the material world, Godhood is the zenith of the material world reached by material and supermaterial evolution. 

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The revealed religions tell us that no object is divine, and therein lies the problem. Godhood is a living supreme object, or objects, Godhood is supermaterial being at the zenith of natural evolution, not an abstract symbol or word, not a non-material being.

We cannot find Godhood by going inward in ascetic contemplation, we can find only the mirror of Godhood inwardly. The inward God is a good start but is not the place to stop, even if the experience is blissful. We need to evolve in the material and supermaterial world to reach the Godhood we first saw inwardly.

This defines the Twofold Path of the Theoevolutionary Church, which is the way out of the Great Spiritual Blockade of religious history. The Twofold Path is different from what the world believes, but we go forward anyway. We need to progress from the conformist mumblings of present religion and be nourished by new inspiration. All the fields from science to poetry can come together in the Twofold Path.

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A new/old religion, a new worldview, a new philosophy and psychology rising, with evolution as the common ground, is preserved in the religion and philosophy of the Theoevolutionary Church, with the Twofold Path, which does not take away the old religions, or take away the nationalism, group separateness and uniqueness of each group. A world based on the evolution of all groups, all races, all people, while preserving ethnic distinctions and national identities as significant in the ongoing evolutionary dynamics. All the parts are seen as independent yet part of the nobler whole, with the parts working together in cooperative competition, since competition is healthy for evolution, guided by an international religious-scientific center. Persuasion rather than coercion is the method of this religious philosophy in the world. We all can affirm the evolutionary mission, bringing forth beauty and intelligence and character as evolution proceeds. Wisdom is shared among the whole of planetary life, each contributes, knowing they are part of the greater sacred mission of evolving to Godhood in the cosmos.

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Of course it sounds like grandiose delusions or inflation to say so, but to look into the abyss and see that the God defined in the past is not there, or is there only inwardly in the human mind, leaving humanity without solace in the cosmos, this calls forth a remedy, the healing balm of religion and art, which Nietzsche saw as the deepest origin of ancient culture. That is, revitalized religion, bringing God back redefined as Godhood reached by way of material evolution.

This is the new myth-religion-art brought forward by nature itself through human beings, to help make sense of existence, to make existence bearable, to help man reach the goal of nature itself, which is to evolve to Godhood.  This turns our gaze away from the horrible to the sublime as ancient religions once did.

This myth-religion-art is desperately needed once again, and no less than this is the mission and task of the religious philosophy of the Theoevolutionary Church.

Human nature and human culture should not be mutilated by grafting the incongruous Inward Path of mystic religions on the deeper and far stronger Outward Path of material evolution, like a superficial veneer over a natural oak. We need to go back, but religiously, to our neglected deeper roots and give the material world a better chance to evolve to Godhood.

We do this not by rejecting the Inward Path to the God Within, or Father Within, which is a mirror or virtual glimpse of real Godhood evolved to in the cosmos in the Outward Path. Human nature and conservative human history tell us that we need Ordered Evolution not radical revolution.

In the Twofold Path the Inward Path is synthesized and fulfilled in the Outward Path which can heal us and create religious, psychological and cultural wholeness. Biology, science, art and social philosophy can legitimately join religion.

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 Our main access to religion seems to be through feeling, reason follows after feeling, but feeling is driven by biology, and biology is activated by the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood within biology. This whole sequence is affirmed in the Twofold Path and in the theological materialism of the Theoevolutionary Church.

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How do we make sacred our modern, non-sacred, moral and aesthetic values without losing our extraordinarily successful technological and economic development? How can we keep an anthropocentric culture working within a theocentric culture? By affirming that the material world evolves to Godhood, that is how. The Inward God is a mirror of Outward Godhood reached through material and supermaterial evolution.

Modernism and traditionalism need not reject one another as they have done, we can have a transformation of the sacred, not a rejection, the inward God first seen in the great religions is realized in outward Godhood, bringing the new into the old. The great division between the spiritual and the temporal does not exist when the spiritual is seen as supermaterial. Science can join religion.

The West can lead the way in this because we have for centuries been bringing Biblical faith together with Greek philosophical inquiry, along with the Roman heritage, whereas the East has been religious traditionally without this sort of Western tension, at least until the few short decades of Marxist totalitarianism, and even that has a nondemocratic Asian ethos to it. We can now add a third stage in the development of Christianity, from Neoplatonism to Catholic Scholasticism to the theological materialism of theTheoevolutionary Church.

The present attacks on the West by the trendy followers of the Traditionalist School (ie. Guénon and Evola), led by French and Russian intellectuals, goes against this rapprochement of tradition and the modern world. Many western intellectuals in this movement are in effect supporting the East over the West. Yes, the West has problems, with big enemies from within and without, yes, southern Russian was probably the home of Indo Europeans, but it is Western culture that evolved the great developments of science and evolution. Modernism in search of theology can find it in the rebirth of religion grounded in our sacred evolution to Godhood. 

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