Moving With the Grain of Universe: Becoming One With the Body of Christ

In this life, reality comes to us through the senses in such a way that we are distanced from that which is outside of us, our possessions and our parents as well as God Himself. Though God isn’t truly outside of us, He seems that way to us and allows us to be separate from Him in this way as we grow up. As St. John of the Cross once said: God distances Himself from us in the manner of a wise and loving mother who steps away from her child as he is learning to walk, letting that child fall occasionally. In the case of God, there is no true distancing as there is with a human mother, but He fosters an illusion of separation while we learn a proper sort of independence.

Even with our relationships with Creation, those with our tools and those with our loved ones, there also is no true separation. As Michael Polanyi, surgeon and scientist and philosopher, pointed out in various writings, including Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, our tools become extensions of our bodies as our brains adjust to treat them as such. You can see this in the fluid movements of surgeon or carpenter or cook. That scalpel or file or spatula is an extension of the human arm and their brain is aware of its possibilities and its dimensions in a way very similar to the brain’s awareness of that arm’s possibilities and dimensions.

Those who wish for friendship with Jesus Christ have an analogical relationship to the Body of Christ though we mortal men be more like the tool than the arm or the brain. Yet, each and every human being who willingly belongs to Christ is a living and self-aware extension of the Body of Christ. The resurrected can be more perfectly a part of the Body of Christ even as they are more perfectly human beings.

The relationship of a friend of Christ to the Body of Christ isn’t a matter of an over-excited religious imagination but rather a very real relationship as is the relationship that great mathematicians and metaphysicians have to abstract — but real — domains of truths. As is necessary in such a case, I speak analogically but it’s not wholly analogical. There’s a relationship that we can’t speak of directly in words or grammatical structures available to us and which won’t exist until we stretch and try to describe greater truths which seem so out of focus no matter how we squint the eyes of our minds. (See Abstract Mathematics and the Real Presence for a closely related discussion.)

A modern Christian has a strong tendency to shout out news of his personal salvation while talking as if the reality of salvation is but a dream with no connection to reality. My salvation is real when that claim helps me feel better but salvation is a pious illusion when that claim threatens to get in the way of my effectiveness in this real world which has no seeming connection to any real Heaven. (See A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism for a short discussion of the schizophrenic nature of much modern thought.)

As I’ve stated before, pre-modern Christians had a view of Heaven, of the next life, which was consistent with beliefs about the cosmos, the earth and all that encircled it. On the other side of the moon’s orbit lay ethereal stuff, pure stuff and not the dirt and flesh and blood of the earth. Hell, the place of damnation, lay below the surface of the earth. When modern empirical knowledge took this relatively simple view of the cosmos-universe from us, we Christians simply etherealized Heaven, giving up our ability to speak of Heaven or the resurrection or salvation in concrete terms. Heaven and the resurrection and salvation have become dream-like and unreal to many in the modern world, including many children raised as Christians.

In any case, we Christians need to pull ourselves together, to learn to think of Creation — all of Creation — as a unity though having different phases. We need to develop words and concepts to help us think of Heaven in concrete terms that make sense as speculations of a Creation in which this universe is but a phase. When we do so, then we can begin to see that the Body of Christ was first conceived in this universe and still grows in this universe even as that Body has reached a mature stage in Heaven, that is, the world of the resurrected. That Body is mature in Heaven but not yet complete Membership remains open to all who wish to share true life, the life of God Himself.

Heading Towards a More Exact Understanding of Human Nature

Sometimes I’ve written entries which point to various scientific evidence that our soul-like characteristics are actually founded on matter and arise first of all, but not only, from such physical processes as hormonal flows or brain-cell activity. Soul-like characteristics seem to be matters of relationships rather than strictly of physical activity or physical states, so the hormonal flows that restructure a new mother’s behavior and perceptions work towards the benefit of her child. The hormonal flows and brain changes work to generate and strengthen maternal love.

It doesn’t bother me at all to think my stuff is ‘just’ the stuff of my body. It’s stuff that God made for His purposes. And, in its perfected form (think of the risen Christ), it’s sufficient for life without end as a companion to the Lord Jesus Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas had this to say about the relationship between a human being, his body, and his soul:

My soul [in Thomas the organ for thought] is not I; and if only souls are saved, I am not saved, nor is any man. [From the Commentary to 1 Corinthians 15 by St. Thomas Aquinas as quoted by Hannah Arendt in "The Life of the Mind" (page 43).]

Aquinas’ major mistake in regards to understanding human nature was thinking an immaterial entity was necessary for human (mostly abstract) thought, but he never made the mistake of placing core human attributes, which we share to some extent with other animals, in the soul. It is the physical man who loves, has faith, and has hope even if Aquinas thought those to be refined by association with the higher thoughts of the ‘soul’.

We’re creatures, embodied objects of God’s love. It bothers me not at all, surprises me not at all, to see growing empirical evidence indicating that our substance is that of our body and that, unlike even Aquinas’ moderate views, we probably are not some sort of pasting together of physical substance and some soul-stuff. It seems to me better to be this stuff that sits and types rather than some mysterious stuff with radically different properties than anything the biological me can even detect. Who would I be if I were not this flesh-and-blood me? My soul is not me. My soul is even less than St. Thomas thought. The soul is a set of aspects of this biological me, aspects coming from my relationships to God and my fellow-men and to this world created by God. And so, I retract my claim — my soul is part of me but it comes into being when the flesh-and-blood me responds actively to God and God’s Creation.

We shouldn’t be overly disturbed by the various scientific findings that tie us ever more tightly to this flesh-and-blood which is us. So, I’ll continue to make note of some of those findings, noting also that we do possess those aspects and characteristics which are considered by man to belong to the soul. In fact, we are heirs to a profound understanding of important aspects of human nature that was developed in the Bible, in the writings of Virgil and Shakespeare, in the music of Bach and Beethoveen. What we did was to fool ourselves into thinking that we have an invisible and undetectable substance that somehow controlled our flesh-and-blood substance. This was a dangerous understanding. Errors of such magnitude will always cause loss of faith in our human selves and even in our Creator when they’re seen as errors. Errors of this sort have likely played a role in the loss of faith in this age where we have good reason to know that science gives us certain kinds of truths and those truths which must be accepted on faith are presented by most Christians as being tied to ideas in conflict to those lesser but verifiable truths of science. Our children and neighbors will either think us to be crazy or lying.

Let me discuss a couple of recent empirical findings about human nature, starting with The right side of fair play:

Now, Daria Knoch and colleagues at the University of Zurich have discovered that this desire for justice is influenced by a small part of the brain – the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or DLPFC – which constantly suppresses our more selfish urges.

Note that word ‘influenced’. Think also back to those poor sons or daughters of alcoholics who also had an overly strong taste for the elixir of life. When we’re concerned for another human being, we freely admit there is something to this inheritance of traits which have a bearing upon our behavior and characters but some of us are insulted when evolutionary biologists or geneticists say something similar. At the same time, we must remember We do have a substantial amount of moral freedom. It takes effort and patience and often a humble willingness to seek help for us to exercise proper moral control over our tendencies, but we can do much even when we lose the battle. With conscious awareness, we can sometimes overcome our selfishness, probably even when our DLPFC isn’t doing its job.

Some believe that we human beings are in a war of sorts against fallen souls when we’re actually in a struggle to discipline the different parts and aspects of our organic selves to higher moral standards. The explanations of evolutionary biology and the books of Moses are different but the reality is the same, even when it concerns male promiscuity as in this article: Of voles and men: exploring the genetics of commitment where we read

Love is all around us and love is in the air, and if I know my mainstream science reporters, today they will have you believe that love is in our genes too. A new report suggests that variation in a gene called AVPR1A has a small but evident influence on the strength of a relationship, the likelihood of tying the knot and the risk of divorce. It’s news for humans, but it’s well-known that the gene’s rodent counterpart affects the bonds between pairs of voles.

AND

Humans have our own version of the vasopressin receptor, with its very own unmemorable acronym – AVPR1A. Like its vole counterpart, it’s preceded by an important stretch of DNA that is rife with repetitive sequences. These are known as “repeat polymorphisms”; they are short genetic leitmotifs that vary in number from person to person. According to earlier research, these variations in this sequence can affect human behaviour and are linked to altruistic tendencies, the risk of autism and the age at which people first have sex.

We can now add the strength of relationships to that list.

BUT

Vasopressin is far [from] the only molecule involved in forming relationships, even in voles and there is still much we don’t know about the other players involved.

On the morning of June 7, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI “received participants in the sixth European Symposium of University Professors, which is being held in Rome from June 4-7 on the theme: Broadening the Horizons of Reason. Prospects for Philosophy.” [Vatican Information Service press release of June 7, 2008.] I discussed this address in Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening the Horizons of Reason. In that address, Pope Benedict said:

Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man.

What we are seeing in all these scientific research results is the empirical foundations of that more exact understanding of man. What we modern men need to do is to take these mountains of empirical knowledge, some of it so raw as to be facts or data and not yet knowledge, and make sense of it in light of our higher-level understandings of human nature and our small treasure of revealed truths, especially those which tell us of the relationship between creature and Creator. In an age where too many men are able to use modern empirical knowledge to more brutally exploit others or to simply kill them in large numbers, we have a chance to use this “more exact understanding of the nature of man” to do some good, to help us shape our own moral characters and those of our children. We have a chance to help us shape ourselves and our children to better serve God.

Restricting God’s Thoughts to Freshman Mathematics

[This entry has also been posted to my other blog, Acts of Being.]

Those who belong to that school of thought labeled Intelligent Design typically describe themselves as Christian, sometimes Jewish, and sometimes there is only an impression of a vague Theism. In any case, most of these thinkers would likely claim to believe in a Creator who is an all-powerful and all-knowing God. Yet, they think to understand the Lord’s work and His thoughts using what can be readily learned in less than two years of modestly difficult college work — a little calculus and some probability and statistics, a little chemistry and some astronomy and physics.

Do these thinkers imagine God’s thoughts and the possibilities open to Him as a Creator to be so limited? Math is hard. Physics is hard. Philosophy and literary studies are hard. Understanding God’s acts of Creation is all of that plus one hell of a lot harder. Anyone who thinks the Creator’s thoughts and acts can be understood by simply applying a few equations from Probability Theory 101 is deluding himself and insulting God.

Teaching Intelligent Design

Here’s a story about a new attempt to allow teaching of Intelligent Design and some other controversial hypotheses in public schools in Louisiana: New legal threat to school science in the US.

So far as I can tell, many of those trying to push Creationism or Intelligent Design into the schools are driven to do something irrational by legitimate fears for their children. From the 1960s on, many parents have seen that rapid societal and cultural changes had made it more difficult to raise children to be morally mature adults and to nurture some sort of faith in them. Many of those parents, and their friends at church and elsewhere, have felt their own beliefs under assault. Many scientists who don’t seem to be particularly harsh individuals, many other intellectuals of the sort which once appreciated at least in theory the problems of modern ‘alienation’, seem to have no sympathy for those who belong to particular cultures in a rapidly changing world, one where most changes work to increase activity of all sorts in the modern marketplaces and often by destroying that which is local and particular.

I advocate and will always advocate the idea that this world is part of God’s Creation and we honor our Creator by studying His world and trying to understand it in empirical terms. This includes what we we now call ‘science’ but also nearly all forms of organized knowledge gathering and analysis. But I sympathize with those who have good reason to fear some aspects of a world in which technical expertise is in far greater supply than wisdom, in which profits trump respect for the teachings of Grandpa and Grandma.

See Proving the Existence of Zeus for my position on Intelligent Design Theory.

See Debating Popular Intelligence Design for a good discussion of one of the major intellectual confusions behind those who accept the Creationist or Intelligent Design arguments.

Sin and Survival

In reading a short article on the web about bears rubbing against trees (it’s marking by both males and females and not scratching a different itch), I saw a comment about females marking partly to protect their young: a male bear will sometimes kill a female’s young to bring a mother back into heat and mate with her.

Behavior of that sort is truly ‘sometimes’ even for bears which are typically one of the less social of social mammals — especially the males and most especially the big males who need lots of food and wander over large territories. Still, I’ve read articles by wildlife biologists who have observed males socializing with cubs while the mother looks on without objecting.

Yet, brutal behavior remains a factor, behavior that I would call immoral even for non-human social mammals. This leads towards a very difficult problem, one not handled well by any view of evolution that I’m aware of:

Some of our less desirable instincts and tendencies were necessary for the survival and reproductive success of our ancestors. A male who left more young left more young even if he did it by occasionally killing the young of another male.

This is a real problem for mainstream Christian interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve and, in general, for mainstream Christian understandings of human nature. Put a bit simplistically:

If our ancestors had been sinless, they wouldn’t have survived, or at least wouldn’t have left as many descendants as their nastier neighbors.

Most modern Christians claim to accept some version of evolutionary theory and accept that we share common ancestor with the chimpanzee, a creature capable of as much nastiness as a man. Presumably, that ancestor was as nasty as his two major descendants. At what point in the evolution of humanity would we expect a ‘sinless’ Adam and Eve to have arisen? From nasty animal to sinless ancestors of all men to fallen man? Not plausible.

A real problem for those who think our ancestors were some sort of sinless Platonic archetypes who fell into a state of sin by their own (culpable) fault. In fact, the evidence is growing that we were born into a world, a phase of Creation, which is a battleground between order and disorder. We are creatures born as true citizens of this world.

Is this viewpoint in conflict with the story of Adam and Eve, with the Bible as a whole? As most Christians understand that story and that book, yes. However, my reading of the story of Adam and Eve would lead me to believe it wasn’t a story of a fall into a state of sin but rather a story of an awakening of man into an awareness of his state. Try reading those chapters in the book of Genesis and the following chapters giving the ‘genealogy’ of human technology — the founding of cities and crafts and so forth. Read those verses and keep your mind open. Do you really find anything supporting those many sermons and homilies and books of theology about the fall of Adam and Eve? Or was it a moral awakening which occurred in conjunction with a sudden awareness of at least divinity if not of the true God?

I Wish I’d Said That…

Actually, I have said some things very similar to some of Pope Benedict’s gentle but firm admonitions on his visit to the United States. Let me provide a couple of quotes. A Catholic news-site, Catholic World News, quotes Pope Benedict in his talk to the American Catholic bishops:

America’s brand of secularism poses a particular problem: it allows for professing belief in God, and respects the public role of religion and the Churches, but at the same time it can subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator. Faith becomes a passive acceptance that certain things “out there” are true, but without practical relevance for everyday life. The result is a growing separation of faith from life.

and also:

Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death? Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted.

I’ve made similar statements, but I’ve gone far beyond Pope Benedict in arguing that a lot of the problem comes from inadequate Catholic responses to modern empirical knowledge and sheer Catholic ignorance about the simple fact that a human theological system, even when built to explain revealed truths, includes a lot of human speculation and also includes — implicitly or explicitly — a lot of the content of empirical knowledge during the time when that system was first built. Far too many Catholics, scholars and priests and laymen, are lazy even when hardworking. That is, they want to just coast on fundamental matters and not have to think hard about those fundamental matters. They want to believe that God created a world which was fully understood in all important ways by men who lived centuries ago. God’s story ended a long time ago and we only have to finish off by celebrating the Sacraments for a few centuries longer. Such thinkers learn by way of textbooks the thoughts of St. Augustine and those of St. Thomas Aquinas. Such a way of reading profoundly creative thinkers distorts their thoughts so that even the word ‘the’ in those works becomes a lie. As a specific example, it has a way of converting complex human speculations, such as Augustine’s understanding of man’s sinful state, into ‘revealed truths’, such as the doctrine of ‘original sin’.

How can an ordinary laymen, or even the ordinary priest, live his life in the secular aspects of his life when he can’t make sense of that longer part of his life in terms of his Christian beliefs? If the Catholic Church and her separated sisters have no anthropological or moral teachings that make sense of our evolutionary heritage or our various genetic or cultural constraints, what is that ordinary layman or non-scholarly priest to do when he has to make sense of the pain of the good son who claims he feels like a woman? What sense can Satan-mongers make of all that is known of the relationship between specific brain structures and addictions or even the plausible possibility that obsessions — including those to kill or rape — might involve brain-seizures? What is there in the talk from the pulpits or in those CCD books or those books by or about ancient saints that can make sense of a claim that a microscopic hunk of cells should be treated with the respect to a human being?

If we can’t express our beliefs in the language we speak during our hours outside of churches and prayer-group meetings, then the domain of those beliefs will begin to seem more like dreams or fairy-tales than reality.

Easter Vigil: March 22, 2008

[As is my custom, I use the RSV rather than the translation used in the missal used for the Roman Catholic Mass in the U.S.]

The Easter Vigil Mass is celebrated after sunset on Saturday of Holy Week. It begins with a lighting of a fire which is used in turn to light the Easter candle. The Easter candle is carried to the altar at the front of the church in a solemn procession during which the Exsultet is sung, beginning with the verse:

Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God’s throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!

After the Easter candle is set in a place of honor, the mass moves on to the Liturgy of the Word, the reading and hearing of appropriate chapters or verses from Sacred Scripture. There are seven Old Testament readings followed by a reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and then Matthew’s account of the Resurrection.

The first Old Testament reading, [Genesis 1:1-2:2], is the account considered by some to be a description of God’s Creation of this world. There’s a reason why this reading is important on this night. The Lord of Creation has been resurrected. If we don’t know what Creation is, we can’t know what that means. If we don’t know what Creation is, we certainly won’t be able to have a rational idea of Heaven. And, in this modern world, where we know the empty reaches of space from documentaries and sci-fi movies, we don’t know where we might find Heaven, the world where Christ waits for those who belong to Him.

Let’s see if a meditative journey can help us to find the world of the resurrected as our Christian ancestors once found it in the heavens that we now know as outer space. Then we’ll have rational terms for discussions and descriptions of Heaven as those earlier Christians did.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. [Genesis 1:1-2]

Stanley Jaki, a Benedictine priest and scholar with wide-ranging knowledge and credentials, has shown in Genesis 1 Through the Ages [Thomas More Press, 1992] that the word translated as ‘created’ in the above verses actually means ‘cleave’ in the sense of separate. For most purposes, we can mentally translate the word ‘create’ in the book of Genesis as ‘shape’ or maybe ‘organize’.

We Christians believe God did create from nothing all that is not Him, but we can’t see or describe that event, even in our imaginations. Science tells us the same though some individual scientists would like to find an equation to describe a creation event — logically impossible since mathematics doesn’t describe existence as such. The so-called Big Bang is not a creation event but rather a transition from some prior state of being.

God shaped this world out of some very strange stuff which He had created as the basic stuff of all Creation. That basic stuff lies on the other side of the Big Bang, though maybe far on the other side. Many other phases might lie in between the rawest levels of Creation and our universe. If God shaped this world out of that stuff, we can have faith that He can shape Heaven — the world of the resurrected out of that same stuff.

In the beginning, God shaped this world from the basic stuff of Creation. God had created the basic stuff of Creation from nothing. God has also shaped a world in which Christ and those who belong to Christ will live with Him for time without end. We know this world of the resurrected exists because the risen Christ has visited this mortal world and given marvelous signs of His perfected body, a body St. Paul called a ‘spiritual body’ in 1 Corinthians 15, a wonderful discussion of these issues. Those who belong with Christ, those who will live with Him for time without end, will have spiritual bodies, much like that of the resurrected Christ. It’s perhaps even more fitting to say that our resurrected bodies will be us in the most complete sense.

Christ is the Lord of Creation. So long as we have faith in Christ and in His God, we can be confident that Christ’s promises will be kept. But we need a vision of the world in which those promises will be kept, else those promises will become no more than feel-good illusions to us and our children. We can gain such a vision if we have the courage and faith to mediate upon Holy Scripture in light of what we modern human beings know about this universe, this phase of Creation.

Priests, Ministers, Monkeys, and Truth

If I were to speak of my main goal in my work at this website and my other website, Acts of Being, I would say this:

I’m trying to build a vocabulary and stock of concepts that would allow Christians to speak truthfully to the greatest extent allowed by our current stock of knowledge (early in the 21st century).

Recently, I heard a homily by a new priest. While wishing to remain respectful of a man with some very good qualities, I have to say I was horrified at the way he dealt with a situation. He was speaking of a young girl who came to him and announced sadly, “Somebody told me we’re descended from monkeys and that means we’re no good,” or words to that effect. His response, as far as I understood his incoherence at that point, was to tell her she wasn’t descended from monkeys.

I could have been listening to a fundamentalist preacher who’d stepped out of the pages of a Flannery O’Connor novel. That’s not all bad. One of the points she was making in her novels was: those fundamentalist preachers had remembered some truths (such as the all-encompassing demands of faith) which had been forgotten by more liberal clergymen as well as by the skeptics of our age. Admitting that, I’d say that a Catholic priest should be educated well enough to realize that we are descended from monkeys (and also to know that St. Augustine admitted the possibility of a descent from some non-human species back in The City of God, 1400 years before the birth of Darwin). It’s the duty of a faithful clergyman, Protestant or Catholic, to deal truthfully and openly with the world as God made it and to be able to understand that world and the Biblical messages as part of the same story.

C.S. Lewis and the World God Didn’t Create

Hermann Melville once noted that Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Sage of Cambridge, had some good things to say but gave the impression that he would have had some good advice for the Almighty if he’d been present at the moment of Creation. I get that same impression from the writings of C.S. Lewis — especially his fictional writings.

I can almost imagine Lewis saying:

Not bad, Lord, but you need to get rid of those bones in the sands of Africa and forget about this four-dimensional space-time business. Then you could add a few wise wizards who cast spells with literary style and a host of evil scientists scheming to corrupt all of Creation. A much better world it would be.

On the other hand, Lewis wasn’t in rebellion against the most important of Christian truths as was Emerson. Lewis also didn’t seem to be aware that he was in rebellion of a sort against God as Creator.

Before going on, I will say that I have few serious problems with Lewis’ expressions of the revealed truths of Christianity though I don’t consider him to be particularly profound in any aspects of theological or philosophical thought. He was a good popularizer of some difficult ideas, a good teacher. In fact, his appreciation of the goodness of the material world, of sacramentality, and the Sacraments, didn’t really fit well with his pessimistic views of those fields of thought and research, physics and evolutionary biology, which have been so much more fruitful in modern times than the fields that Lewis preferred. I don’t celebrate that, being a novelist and a philosopher and theologian who specializes in studying the created world. I have a foot in each camp, that of Einstein and Darwin and also that of Lewis and Tolkien — more appropriately, that of Melville and Flannery O’Connor. I’ll also say that Lewis was far from unique among Christians in rejecting the modern project of empirical knowledge-gathering and advocating a return to a magical view of reality.

Don’t tell God what to do!

Some readers of this blog may appreciate an entry on my other blog: Einstein and Bohr: Don’t tell God what to do!.