The Logic of Separation: Genocide, War, and the Modern Mind
In my last blog, I discussed the consequences of monotheism with its emphasis on divine ontology and transcendence, the belief that is God is a divine being distinct from us. Here I want to briefly discuss the consequences of an externalized deity that becomes replaced by ideological absolutes. The twentieth century did not merely witness violence—it industrialized it, systematized it, and justified it through the very logic of separation that monotheism and mechanistic science had normalized. Two world wars transformed technological prowess into unprecedented slaughter, where poison gas, machine guns, aerial bombardment, and finally atomic weapons demonstrated what becomes possible when humans are viewed through the lens of tactical abstraction rather than sacred interconnection. The Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide—these were not aberrations but logical extensions of a worldview that had already divided reality into hierarchies of value: spirit over matter, soul over body, chosen over damned, civilized over primitive, Aryan over Jew, productive over unproductive.
The reduction of human beings to statistical aggregates began not in death camps but in the theological imagination that saw persons as either saved or damned, sorted into binary categories by external divine judgment. This categorical thinking migrated seamlessly into modernity’s systems of classification: workers reduced to labor units in industrial capitalism, populations transformed into demographic data for state management, entire peoples designated as expendable obstacles to ideological progress. The Nazi bureaucracy that organized genocide with railroad timetables and punch-card efficiency was the mechanistic worldview applied with horrifying consistency. When IBM machines sorted prisoners by categories for extermination, technology was merely executing the logic that had long since separated humans from their cosmic and relational ground.
The crucial insight is this: when the cosmos becomes dead matter governed by blind laws, and when God is pushed outside this mechanical system into irrelevant transcendence, humans lose their sacred inviolability. If the universe itself has no inherent meaning or purpose, if matter is merely inert stuff to be arranged according to will, then human bodies—also matter—can be treated as raw material for ideological or economic projects. The gas chambers were built on the same philosophical foundation as the factory assembly line: both treat living beings as units to be processed efficiently toward predetermined ends.
The violence of the twentieth century was not a failure of the mechanistic paradigm but its fullest expression. When relationship is severed—when humans are disconnected from cosmos, from divine immanence, from each other—what remains is pure instrumentality. People become means rather than ends, resources rather than relations, problems to be solved rather than sacred mysteries to be honored. Auschwitz and Hiroshima were not contradictions of mechanistic modernity; they were its terrible fulfillment, the revelation of what becomes possible when separation becomes absolute and power becomes asymmetric beyond all accountability.
The Death of the Old God and the Crisis of the Self
Carl Jung, observing the wreckage of European civilization in the aftermath of twentieth century catastrophes, declared that religion as the Western world had known it was finished. This was not a prediction but a diagnosis. The transcendent God of monotheism, the external divine authority who existed outside space and time, had become psychologically and spiritually untenable. The old container could no longer hold the energies of the modern psyche.
But Jung recognized that this death created a profound crisis. For centuries, the ego—that conscious sense of individual self—had been stabilized by its relationship to external religious authority. The ego knew its place: subordinate to God, dependent on divine grace, oriented toward supernatural salvation. When that external referent collapsed, the ego found itself unmoored, forced to discover a new center of gravity.
Jung proposed that the evolution from ego toward “Self”—the deeper, archetypal center of the personality that includes both conscious and unconscious dimensions—represented the psychological task of modernity. The modern person must make a transition from dependence on external religious authority to relationship with an inner source of meaning and integration. The Self, in Jung’s understanding, is not the isolated individual ego but a center that connects the person to the collective unconscious, to archetypal patterns, to something larger than the merely personal. It represents a movement from outer authority to inner depth, from imposed dogma to discovered meaning, from the God “out there” to the sacred “in here.”
Yet Jung’s modern man remained caught in a dangerous liminal space. Having lost the old God but not yet fully individuated into relationship with the Self, modern consciousness became vulnerable to collective possession by political ideologies, mass movements, and technological utopianism. The twentieth century’s totalitarian nightmares—Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism—filled the vacuum left by the death of God with new absolute authorities demanding total submission. The archetypal energies once channeled through religious containers erupted in destructive shadow forms: the charismatic leader as savior, the party as church, the state as cosmic order, the enemy as demonic other.
Jung understood that the death of the old God was necessary but insufficient. Mere disenchantment leaves the psyche exposed to darker enchantments. The modern person requires not just liberation from external religious authority but a new relationship to the sacred—one that honors depth, mystery, and connection while refusing the old patterns of dependence and projection.
Teilhard’s Vision: A New God for a Converging World
Writing from within the Christian tradition but with the eyes of a scientist who had witnessed both world wars and studied four billion years of evolutionary history, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin arrived at a complementary insight: humanity needs not the death of God but the birth of a new understanding of divine reality adequate to what we now know about the cosmos and ourselves.
The old God—static, external, unaffected by the world—could not satisfy minds aware that the universe is a fourteen-billion-year story of emergence, that consciousness evolved from matter, that humans are the cosmos becoming aware of itself. Teilhard proposed that we need a new God: not a deity outside evolution but the divine heart of evolution itself, the “Omega Point” drawing all reality toward greater complexity, consciousness, and unity. God is not behind us as creator of a finished product but ahead of us as the future toward which creation moves, present within each moment as the energy of creative transformation.
This requires, Teilhard insisted, a new faith—not faith in doctrines imposed from outside but faith in the world itself as the theater of divine creativity. Faith in the evolutionary process that brought forth stars, planets, life, consciousness, and love. Faith in matter not as something to be escaped but as the very medium of spiritual emergence. Faith that the universe is not falling into meaningless entropy but rising toward what Teilhard called the “noosphere”—a planetary sphere of consciousness and relationship.
Most radically, Teilhard called for a new faith in one another. If humans are evolution becoming conscious of itself, if we are the universe’s capacity for self-reflection and creative choice, then our relationships with each other are not peripheral to spirituality but central to it. Love—which Teilhard identified as the core energy resisting entropy and building complexity—is not merely a human emotion but the fundamental force of cosmic creativity expressing itself through human connection. To have faith in one another is to recognize that divinity emerges not from isolated individuals achieving salvation but from the web of relationships through which consciousness expands and deepens.
The transcendent God of monotheism fostered vertical relationships: individuals looking upward to external authority, seeking salvation from outside, depending on supernatural intervention. Teilhard’s vision requires horizontal relationships: humans recognizing the sacred in each other, co-creating emergence through collaboration, trusting that divine creativity works through the network of connections rather than descending from above.
This represents a fundamental theological revolution. Where Christianity taught original sin and human corruption requiring external rescue, Teilhard proposed original blessing—the recognition that humans carry within themselves billions of years of cosmic creativity, that we are not fallen from perfection but rising toward unprecedented complexity and consciousness. Where monotheism established asymmetric power between transcendent deity and dependent creatures, Teilhard’s vision suggests participatory co-creation: humans as agents of evolution, partners in the ongoing emergence of divine reality.
The Crisis of Transition
We remain caught between these worlds. Jung’s diagnosis was correct: the old religious forms have died for those with eyes to see. But we have not completed the transition to either Jung’s individuated Self or Teilhard’s evolutionary faith. Instead, we oscillate between nostalgia for the old certainties and despair at their absence, between fundamentalist returns to rigid authority and nihilistic assertions that nothing matters.
The violence and chaos of our age reflect this unresolved crisis. Political authoritarianism surges because populations trained in religious dependence seek new external saviors. Technological utopianism promises salvation through artificial intelligence because we still crave rescue from outside rather than trusting our own emergent wisdom. We reduce humans to data because we have lost the old God’s guarantee of human sacredness but have not yet discovered the sacred within the evolutionary process itself.
The twentieth century revealed that separation becomes slaughter, that severing humans from their cosmic roots produces catastrophe. Jung showed that the old religious containers have shattered. Teilhard pointed toward what must emerge: a new understanding of divinity as immanent creativity, a new faith in the world and in each other as expressions of that creativity, a new trust in relationship rather than external authority.
The question is whether we can complete this transition before the logic of separation completes its destructive work. Can we move from ego to Self, from transcendent deity to evolutionary emergence, from dependence to participation, from isolation to interconnection? Or will we continue clinging to the corpse of the old God while the world burns, unable to trust the deeper sources of meaning and connection available within ourselves and between us?
The twenty-first century is leaning on our answer.
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Your essay offers a clear and important reflection on how deeply the idea of separation has shaped both our theology and our modern systems. Its tracing of dualism—from an externalized deity to mechanistic thinking and social fragmentation—is both compelling and necessary. It helps name something many of us have felt but struggled to articulate: that the way we imagine reality quietly shapes the world we create.
What I especially appreciate is the essay’s call to move beyond rigid binaries toward a more relational understanding of existence. In that sense, it resonates strongly with the perspective offered in my book, 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸: 𝘈 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘓𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘙𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘐𝘵𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧. There, a similar insight unfolds: that separation is not the deepest truth, but a phase in how Life has learned to perceive itself. The challenge before us is not simply to reject past frameworks, but to widen them.
Where this essay critiques division, 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 points toward coherence—toward seeing reality as a field of relationships in motion, where meaning emerges through connection rather than imposition. It suggests that what we often experience as conflict or scarcity may, at a deeper level, be disruptions in flow rather than fundamental lack.
In this light, the invitation is not to abandon faith, but to deepen it—to rediscover trust not in distant abstractions, but in the living, relational process we are already part of. Such a shift does not diminish the sacred; it brings it closer, making it something we participate in rather than stand apart from.
This essay is a valuable contribution to that larger Turning.
Everyone wants something larger, finer, better for mankind.
Scattered throughout the apparently hostile masses
which are fighting each other,
there are elements everywhere which are only waiting
for a shock in order to re-orient themselves
and unite.
All that is needed is that the right ray of light
should fall upon these men as upon a cloud of particles,
that an appeal should be sounded
which responds to their internal needs,
and across all denominations,
across all the conventional barriers which still exist,
we shall see the living atoms of the universe
seek each other out,
find each other
and organize themselves… 1
On that day, after harnessing the winds,
the waves, the tides and gravity,
we shall harness — for God — the energies of love.
And then, for the second time in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire. 2
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Sources:
1- “Building the Earth” (1937)
2 -“Toward the Future” (1936)
Yes, we need a “theological revolution”, but that’s only the first step. Get the metaphysics right, and suddenly we find that our liturgies, our prayers, our meditations, our spiritual practices need a complete overhaul. Fortunately, there is one all-round revolutionary who has gone before us, and left us a detailed guidebook to assist us on the way. I refer to Beatrice Bruteau and her magnificent book The Holy Thursday Revolution, first published 20 years or so ago. It’s a great source of regret to me that, like so much of her work, this book seems to have been forgotten Ilia, I am aware of the excellent collection of essays you edited in 2015, in honour of her work, so I am ever hopeful that you, the Centre, or someone will take up the challenge to explore and promote the idea of a Holy Thursday Revolution Implementation Group! Or, at least, an online course based on her book.
Share your essays on Substack. You would reach a very wide audience.
Yes, she would and there is a need for this.
I totally agree! There’s a much wider audience that would respond with respect and appreciation.
About twenty-five years ago I began reading and studying Church theology in hopes of forming a deeper relationship with God. Sadly, the more I read the less I knew. Someone suggested that I look into the modern-day mystics, and you were mentioned by name. You and the others have brought me into the Divine Presence and changed everything that I thought God might be. Now at eighty-years of age the Presence is my daily companion and the essence of my becoming. I continue to pass your essays on to more than a hundred people and hunger for what you have yet to come. I sincerely thank you for your vocation and insights into what we are becoming and your beautiful vision of our future.
Dear Sister Ilia,
Once again, you have given us a highly significant thought-provoking essay. I find its general orientation and its final paragraph’s question of extreme value and concern. You write:
“The question is whether we can complete this transition before the logic of separation completes its destructive work. Can we move from ego to Self, from transcendent deity to evolutionary emergence, from dependence to participation, from isolation to interconnection? Or will we continue clinging to the corpse of the old God while the world burns, unable to trust the deeper sources of meaning and connection available within ourselves and between us?”
To me, phrases like “clinging to the corpse of the Old God while the world burns” are extremely off-putting. You claim that the old God is dead. My suspicion is that the vast number of people praying in the pews are praying to the “old God“ with the firm belief that he is fully alive. Instead of all the rhetoric about monotheism, might it not be more helpful to simply suggest that in light of our current knowledge of evolution (unknown to previous generations), we now realize that our god-on-high, through his love, which he expresses through the evolutionary process itself, has actually chosen to reside within us and all of creation? From within us he radiates his loving energy of love so that, entangled with our efforts, his love continues to transport the world forward towards greater complexity, consciousness and fulfillment of his love.
I further suggest that it might be helpful to relate our newer understanding of the God-in-all wrought through the reality of evolution to our more traditional awareness of our mutual inter-abiding with God in the Body of Christ as so beautifully expressed by the mystic Paul, (Rm.12:4-5):
“12:4 Just as each of us has various parts in one body, and the parts do not all have the same function:12:5 in the same way, all of us, though there are so many of us, make up one body in Christ, and as different parts we are all joined to one another.”
For me, the inter-abiding imagery of the Body of Christ with its suggestion of interdependent participation with each other for fulfilling Christ’ vision, more aptly expresses our true reality than your last paragraph phrase that we ought to transition “from dependence to participation “.
Tho rarely highlighted in the Church’s tradition, liturgy, or preaching the essence of your message is existent there, at least in nascent form. For example, witness phrases from today’s (Sunday 3/22/2026 scripture readings): “I will put my spirit in you that you may live”(Ez. 37:14).
And, (Rm. 8:8-11):
“If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead, will give life to your immortal bodies also, through his Spirit dwelling in you.”
And then there is of course Paul’s famous dictum:
“5:4 and perseverance develops a tested character, something that gives us hope,
5:5 and a hope which will not let us down, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. (Rm.5:4-5)”
Sr. Ilia, my answer to your essay’s probing last question is that the transition from the God-Above to the God-Within might more readily be served by enlightening people to the complementary between Teilhard’s God of evolution within us and Paul’s mystical scripture words attesting to the same. This might contribute to a preaching thrust that emphasizes the Church’s mostly silent message about Christ in us, rather than a divorce which could be construed from your essay, whether intended or not. With such emphasis on Christ-in-us, would it not naturally follow that as Christ’s love expands through us in the ongoing evolution of the world, God’s love itself has more fully evolved? One could then orthodoxly preach that as God’s love evolves throughout his creation, God evolves because God is ever-expanding Love personified.
With great appreciation for your work,
Respectfully,
Bill Eidle
Dear Ilia, I am astounded and so grateful for this inspired synthesis which speaks so deeply to me in ways which I find difficult to articulate; But which brings me peace and a deeper understanding of my own journey these last 81 years! May you continue to be blessed and supported. Your insights are ‘bread and wine’ for a hungry and thirsting world. With love and gratitude. Joy
Beautifully expressed, thank you. But in fact the paradigm was already on offer, in the example of Yeshua of Nazareth and some of the Hebrew prophets, as well as mystics down the ages, if the church had been willing to relax its tight control on the false picture (which of course gave it its power).
The puzzle, for me, is how to belong in community in a church which continues to cling to the old paradigm – not to become isolated, not to abandon some beloved people, while aware that what the church is expressing in most of what it says, is a total off-put for most concerned people now (and requires a constant proviso and demur by me).
That is my puzzle too. I don’t have the answers, but I suspect they lie in localised action through small group gatherings, support for the process of synodality at Parish, diocese and global levels, along with a renewed sense of evangelisation based on new theological paradigms.
Once again, Ilia crosses all my T’s and dots the i’s! Bravo! If even 10% of the hierarchy had her vision it would spark a transformation. Sadly, I don’t see it.
(Fr.Bill)
Thank you so much for this. You wonderfully hold together, wonderfully marry to each other, the death of ‘God’ and the decline of humanity leaving this current liminal space in which new creations may evolve. I look forward so much to knowing more of your thoughts and hunches concerning what we might be doing and practising in our various heres and nows.