Thanks for your kind words and gentle provocation Antoine. Let me try a brief volley back to you. Forgive me if this misses the mark of what you’re now considering.
Yes, covenantal, but more than only that also. Here I would suggest you return to what GJDS recommended to you above, in exploring the divine energies, as viewed in St. Gregory of Palamas, and at the Fifth Council of Constantinople. To this I would also add McLuhan, as a still contemporary Catholic thinker, who in fact completes in a different way what Teilhard started with his “noosphere” in the notion that we live in a “global village”. This enabled also thinking along the lines of Francis Heylighen in Belgium, later with the “global brain”, drawing on earlier ideas involving “cybernetics”. And it allows you to withdraw from contemporary “secular thinking” further by going to the ATM – Aristotle, Thomas, McLuhan, which completes the Four Causes with the Four Effects, and requires grappling with the so-called “laws of media”, an entirely different approach to “homo communicans” than traveling a “homo sapiens” route with biologists.
“I think the available data back Robin Dunbar’s claim that animism and shamanism preceded the Biblical Faith.”
Specifically, it seems, from a “secular historical” perspective, which curiously you seem willing to adopt, as Teilhard also did. Here I do not see that the Roman Catholic contribution has moved forward yet beyond Teilhard’s fissure, nor that the dangers of it have been made apparent beyond a thin slice of pro-Teilhardian contemporary Catholics.
Dunbar + Harari as “secular” role models (if they aren’t then who are yours instead?) from a person’s “theological anthropology” is bound for Catholic failure and likely eventual censor. Same goes for Jared Diamond. That’s (sometimes quasi-) “scientific anthropology”, not “theological anthropology” or “Biblical anthropology”.
“the important question arises of whether or not the creatures sharing animistic and shamanic forms of religiosity in the time before God’s covenant with humanity, can be considered to share in this covenantal relationship and “be in the image of God”.”
No, I disagree. That’s the wrong end of the rope to start with.
“people showing animistic and shamanic beliefs after Genesis 9:3-6 fully share in God’s covenantal relationship.”
This seems to flip your reference point (foreground/background) around a single passage in Scripture as history. Yet there is another interpretation available, which curiously now exists as a parallel to this one, whose “alternative” to what it seems you are suggesting, is given in the title framed as a question: “Genesis: History of the Semitic Peoples or Not?” (Genesis: History of the Semitic Peoples or Not?) Thus, you seem to be looking “outside of Scripture” to fit a story into Scripture regarding non-Semitic peoples?
“indigenous people today often also share moral principles equivalent to the basic rule of morality and law formulated in Genesis 9:3-6, and even the 10 Commandments. This can be considered evidence that Genesis 9:3-6 means the revelation of a covenantal relationship between God and humankind, and a universal archetype of morality God engraves in the collective conscious and unconscious of humanity, that is, in each human person coming into existence after this covenant proclamation: After Genesis 9:3-6 the status of “being in the image of God” holds for all human beings, be they ‘in-the-Garden’ or “outside-the-Garden”.”
Where I live (Canada), this is quite sensitive, but also not as underdeveloped a topic as people who have little contact with Indigenous peoples seem to realise. Not a few Indigenous Canadians have converted to Christianity since contact with the European “settlers”, which remains strong among some of Canada’s First Nations, while others have maintained their pre-contact religious traditions and resisted Christian encroachment.
Is it a marriage of “origin stories” across cultures that you’re looking for in that exchange, Antoine, rather than either a genetic explanation or genealogical hypothesis? This would seem to be a different starting point that the one you are taking with quantum transmission of “original sin” (in contrast with “ancestral sin”), but please forgive my abstract culture thinking innuendo of another possible language & framework of engagement if it sounds too “postmodern” for you. (It actually manages not to slide into ideologically “postmodernist” at its core.)
As for the notion of “collective conscious and unconscious of humanity”, it makes sense in the shadow of “secular sociology” (e.g. Durkheim’s “collective consciousness”) and “evolutionary psychology” (pick your poison), which I would caution stringently to avoid as much as possible. I would be curious to hear more of your anthropology references from the Catholic perspectives now available. Agustin Fuentes so far sounds worrisome in quite a different way than Teilhard was. Who else are you drawing on for your philosophical and theological anthropology that buffers against the “religiously agnostic anthropology” of Harari, Diamond, Pinker, Harris, Boyd & Richerson, Tooby & Cosmides, De Waal, Cavalli-Sforza, et al.?
You’re not after all convinced by “cliodynamics” are you? https://www.sott.net/article/161508-Transforming-history-into-science-Arise-cliodynamics
Jesuit-educated, ex-Catholic Steve Fuller’s review of Harari’s book provides a curious interpretation
Thanks for your provocative engagement.
). None of us is becoming even the figurative body, just hopefully better functioning parts of it, each in our calling (and callings can change over a lifetime, but that is another discussion).