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.

Why Are We Complacent to the Point of Self-destruction?

More exactly, why did God create us to be such creatures? There is little doubt that we are such creatures and that this is one major cause of the problem pointed to by St. Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:3.

When people say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child and there will be no escape. [I use the Catholic Edition of the Standard Revised Version as published by Thomas Nelson & Sons for Ignatius Press.]

Our environments can switch rapidly from, say, a benign climate to conditions which cause famine, starving some and weakening the sick so that minor diseases become fatal. New disease organisms can sweep through large regions of the earth, killing many. Human predators can gain an upper hand on peaceful communities, enslaving or impoverishing prosperous communities. Why do such changes occur?

One of the true lessons coming from modern empirical knowledge, mathematics and physics and biology and history, is that complex and unpredictable events occur whenever two independent systems interact. This occurs even if the two systems are themselves simple and fully determined. The standard example is two pendulums of different length (different periods of movement) which are tied together. The resulting motion will be fully determined (by assumptions based upon physics and mathematics as we know them) and yet unpredictable.

When we consider living creatures, the two independent systems which interact are the living creature (sometimes assumed falsely to be defined fully by its genes) and its environment. That living creature can be a human being trying to feed his children in a world suddenly short of work or a virus seeking to survive and prosper in its way. To reduce living creatures and their contexts to a simple creature/environment interaction is clearly a great oversimplification of the sort which is necessary for making basic points.