George Vaillant, MD, is a psychoanalyst, a research psychiatrist, the director of the Study of Adult Development at Harvard, and the author of five other books, including Aging Well and Adaptation to Life, a classic text in adult development. (See also book 323 by Bruce Hood.)

What convinced me to buy this book was in part it’s back-cover description: “In Spiritual Evolution, George E. Valliant, MD, lays out a brilliant defense of man’s inherent spirituality. He shows that our spirituality resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he writes, and we are destined to become even more so. Drawing on a range of psychological research and neuroscience, as well as on history and literature, Spiritual Evolution is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical mediation on what it means to be human. It will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving.” Another enticement was this quote; “George Vaillant is a poet, a visionary, and a scientist. This book is a culmination of a fifty-year project that revolutionized our view of human development and now may revolutionize our view of religion and spirituality” (Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD, author of Authentic Happiness). Praise for Spiritual Evolution on Amazon.com was a third intriguing part.

It took him 12 years to write this book. In Ch 1 (Positive Emotions) he says “Positive Emotions – not only compassion, love, and hope but also joy, faith/trust, awe, and gratitude – arise from our inborn mammalian capacity for unselfish parental love. They emanate from our feeling, limbic, mammalian brain and thus are grounded in our evolutionary heritage. All human beings are hardwired for positive emotions, and these positive emotions are a common denominator of all major faiths and of all human beings. Thus, this is, in some respects, a revolutionary book. I shall argue that the positive emotions are not just nice to have; they are essential to the survival of Homo Sapiens as a species. In Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio, a sensitive clinical neurologist and arguably the wisest student of emotions on the planet, convincingly argues that the mind and the body are one.” [For clarification, he mentions mammals because reptiles have no limbic system (so no emotions). Descartes’ error refers to his philosophy of a mind-body duality (that many contemporary philosophers reject). And both this book and book 313 speak so very highly of Antonio Damasio that I’ve ordered a trilogy of his works (to add to my stack of to-be-read books).

In Ch 1 Vaillant says “This book defines spirituality as the amalgam of the positive emotions that bind us to other human beings – and to our experience of “God” as we may understand Her/Him. Love, hope, joy, forgiveness, compassion, faith, awe, and gratitude are the spiritually important positive emotions addressed here.” Three forms of evolution – genetic, cultural, and individual – are crucial for his argument: the genetic led to the development of our huge human neocortex, the cultural is both more rapid and flexible than is the genetic, and the individual refers to the maturity one may reach in one’s lifespan. He discusses each in depth in Ch 3 (Three Evolutions).

Chapter 2 (The Prose and the Passion) describes the brain and its evolution in detail, with an emphasis on the limbic brain where our emotions are hardwired and the lexical brain where we think about emotions. He draws upon recent work in neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and animal behavior. He describes how, following Freud, psychiatry has focused far too strongly on the negative emotions of patients with problems, so studies like his of positive emotions are quite new. In this book George Vaillant’s simple words make very powerful points, such as: “The blind faith of the kitten’s or the human infant’s separation cry evokes unselfish love in almost all of us. Unconditional love may be no more than mammalian parental love transformed by maturity and cultural evolution to encompass more creatures than our own babies. Advocates of the “selfish” gene often bridle at what they regard as a Panglossian notion that unselfish social behavior could be inherited.”

Chapters 4-10 cover seven positive and innate emotions: Faith, Love, Hope, Joy, Forgiveness, Compassion, Awe and Mystical Illumination. In each chapter I found his discussion of these emotions to be profoundly well described. These seven chapters each strengthens his overall argument that the essential positive emotions “emanate from our feeling, limbic, mammalian brain and thus are grounded in our evolutionary heritage.” Here are a few excerpts: On Faith, “In Hebrew and in Latin, faith is not a singular state but an active verb. We do faith; we do not have faith.” … Basic trust, like God, is not a noun: it is an experience.” On Love, “We do not learn how to love from religious education. We learn love from our genes, from our biochemistry, and from the people who love us and let us love them.” … “No wonder some regard God and love as synonymous.” On Hope, “Those without faith have no past. Those without hope have no future.” … “Hope comes from viscerally feeling, not from cognitively knowing, that we matter, that we shall overcome someday.” On Joy, “Joy is all about connection with others; happiness is all about drive reduction for the self.” … “Happiness is a state of mind, an intellectual appraisal.” … “Like love, compassion, and forgiveness, it is hard to distinguish joy from spirituality.” Above I have chosen but a very few “short excerpts” taken from the depths he explores for positive emotions. I have read and reread these seven chapters because each is rich with deep insight and truth.

The last chapter, Ch 11 (The Difference between Religion and Spirituality) is more than a summary. George Vaillant also discusses his many years learning from AA, stressing that spirituality is what makes it far more successful than psychiatry. About spirituality he says “In this chapter, I reach for the conclusion that hope has come to seem inevitable: that the human capacity for positive emotions is what makes us spiritual, and that to focus on the positive emotions is the best and safest route to spirituality that we are likely to find.” In his discussion of five ways that cults and religions differ from spirituality, his second may be the most insightful: “Second, religion arises from culture; spirituality arises from biology. Religion and cults are as different from spirituality as environment is from genes. Like culture and language, religious faith traditions bind us to our own community and isolate us from the communities of others.” To me, the five differences he describes reflect his very wise and mature level of spirituality. “Spirituality engages you to learn from your own experience” by which God lives within us. … “After long study and experience I have come to the conclusion that (1) all religions are true; (2) that all religions have errors in them. Gandhi’s ideal for religion was to retain the spiritual baby and to detoxify the religious bathwater.” … “The Golden Rule and ‘love and service’ reflect safe credos for all of our planet’s six billion inhabitants.” … “On a global basis, religion ‘causes’ many thousands of deaths a year, but for literally billions of people religion provides a conduit for the positive emotions to enter and remain in consciousness.” I take his last quote to imply one can reach mature spirituality within religion only if one avidly seeks such maturity. As Paul said in verse ten of his well-known ode to love in 1 Corinthians 13: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” To me this verse speaks about the transformation to mature spirituality – the individual or third form of evolution that George Vaillant describes so well in this outstanding book. I give it my very highest recommendation. Think six stars!