Human sperm about to penetrate egg; just one moment in time during a continuous process (Wikipedia)
Some of my best friends are Catholics, living and dead. And I’m not merely referring to the likes of Dorothy Day, Jim Douglass, or the Berrigans, folks whose sociopolitical views parallel my own. Instead, I’m thinking of the admirable inclination of many Catholic thinkers (especially, but not exclusively, the Jesuits) to deploy finely tuned rational arguments while confronting some of the most difficult theological conundrums.
Admittedly, I’m convinced that their enterprise is altogether hopeless—employing reason in support of religion strikes me as exactly analogous to constructing a skyscraper whose measurements are accurate to the fifth decimal point, atop a quaking bog—but I also find their efforts courageous, stimulating, and sometimes downright brilliant.
One of my favorite examples is Augustine of Hippo, roughly 1,700 years ago, confronting a problem that would not otherwise have occurred to me. In The City of God, book 22:20, Augustine asks:
“To whom, in the resurrection, will belong the flesh of a dead man which has become the flesh of a living man? For if some one, famishing for want and pressed with hunger, use human flesh for food – an extremity not unknown, as both ancient history and the unhappy experience of our own days have taught us – can it be contended, with any show of reason, that all the flesh eaten has been evacuated, and that none of it has been assimilated to the substance of the eater, though the very emaciation which existed before, and has now disappeared, sufficiently indicates what large deficiencies have been filled up with this food?”
And here is his answer, in brief:
“That flesh … shall be restored to the man in whom it first became human flesh. For it must be looked upon as borrowed by the other person, and, like a pecuniary loan, must be returned to the lender. His own flesh, however, which he lost by famine, shall be restored to him by Him who can recover even what has evaporated. And though it had been absolutely annihilated, so that no part of its substance remained in any secret spot of nature, the Almighty could restore it by such means as He saw fit. For this sentence, uttered by the Truth, “Not a hair of your head shall perish,” forbids us to suppose that, though no hair of a man’s head can perish, yet the large portions of his flesh eaten and consumed by the famishing can perish.”
If one of the great Church fathers can concern himself with such a seemingly recondite question (and acquit himself so well), I would like to pose a few of my own, intending—believe it or not—to be neither snotty, sarcastic, nor wise-ass, but honestly hoping for a bit of enlightenment, à la Augustine. All are variants on a single theme; namely, the question of “ensoulment,” the acquisition by mere organic matter of something presumably divine, an event that would appear to necessitate qualitative discontinuity in a world that otherwise is overwhelmingly continuous:
- If, as the Church insists, “ensoulment” occurs at the moment of conception (thereby rendering abortion equivalent to murder), when, precisely, does this ensoulment occur? As I have written previously, even fertilization is a gradual and continuous process, lacking any biologically demonstrable discontinuous thunderclap; hence, the exact time of such a momentous “moment” is, to say the least, unclear.
- In the event that a human being is cloned (something technologically feasible, if not now, then certainly in the immediate future), what’s the deal with the soul of said newly cloned individual? Since he or she will have been generated via asexual reproduction of a diploid cell taken from, say, the skin or liver of a traditionally produced and thus already ensouled person, is said clone soulless? Or would he or she share the same soul as the “donor”? If, as seems likely, the clone is entitled to a separate soul, what is the derivative moment of ensoulment: When a bit of ablated tissue is initially removed from the donor? When the first such cell divides mitotically? At baptism? (Note: No fair protesting that this problem is simply one reason why cloning is undesirable; Augustine presumably deplored cannibalism, yet he didn’t let this stop him from exploring its theological implications.)
- A related question concerns the soul(s) of monozygotic twins, individuals produced when a fertilized egg divides into two separate but genetically identical entities, which then develop into “identical twins.” Presumably, the original fertilized egg was singly ensouled at the “moment” (sic) of fertilization, but what then? Did that soul then divide in two along with its corporeal fellow traveler—in which case each member of an identical twin pair is left with one-half a soul—or does a new soul pop into existence at the “moment” the fertilized egg happened to split? (Again, just as with fertilization, there is no such identifiable moment in mitotic division.) If so, how is it decided which fertilized egg gets the original soul and which one gets the newer, freshly generated one? Or perhaps, since God knows everything, He anticipated the subsequent splitting of a fertilized egg destined to become a pair of identical twins, in which case that egg was initially endowed with two souls (twin souls for what will become twin people), albeit briefly, until the forthcoming split. And finally,
- Since evolution is now accepted by the Vatican, with the exception of something divinely special having occurred when it came to the appearance of human beings, at what point, specifically, in the evolution of Homo sapiens, were our ancestors touched by God and thereupon endowed with souls? At some point in our descent—or ascent—one or more pairs of not-quite-human but very hominoid parents (presumably lacking souls) gave birth to one or more offspring who would have been just barely human (and would therefore necessarily be endowed with souls). When was that achieved, and by what divinely applied criteria? Biologists have no trouble recognizing that transitions between species are often gradual, involving almost imperceptible gradations. But since the Church is not prepared to grant the existence of fractional souls, I would honestly like to see how they deal with this dilemma.
Any modern-day Augustines out there?
