I’d like to start
my project on theological anthropology and science by looking briefly
at perhaps the most thoroughgoing theory of humanity
found within the Christian world. It is rooted in the Thomistic
philosophical tradition and intimately linked with the Catholic
church, which makes it quite influential. To be more accurate, my sources are the Catholic Encyclopedia
and two blog articles by Professor Edward Feser, a philosopher of the
Aristotelian-Thomistic school. Of course, one has to hold in mind the
immense variability of Catholic thinking – it is, after all, a
truly global community of faith with over a billion members and a
long philosophical tradition we are talking about.
This is by no means going to be an exhaustive analysis of the
anthropological views present there. What I am describing might best
be understood as a moderately conservative standard Catholic approach
to the questions of human origins and of human nature as well.
Generally speaking,
there has been in the Catholic church a tradition of seeking harmony
between theology and science, between faith and reason. Unlike in
some other brands of Christianity, different categories of
information and different fields of study are taken as having
implications on one another. Well-established scientific facts have
been accepted, although not always initially welcomed, in the
Catholic teaching. Thus, when discussing human origins, the Catholic
church has not resorted to a crude ”literalism” with regard to
the Book of Genesis which contains the Biblical accounts of how
humans, among other things, came to exist. As far as I’m concerned,
it has been relatively easy for Catholics to admit that there is, as
results in modern biology affirm, a gradually evolved component in
what we in everyday speech call humans.
It is important to
stress that we talk about a mere ”component” here. In his message
to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, Pope John Paul II
said:
In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points…
Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies – which was neither planned nor sought – constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory…
[T]he elaboration of a theory such as that of evolution, while obedient to the need for consistency with the observed data, must also involve importing some ideas from the philosophy of nature.
And to tell the truth, rather than speaking about the theory of evolution, it is more accurate to speak of the theories of evolution. The use of the plural is required here – in part because of the diversity of explanations regarding the mechanism of evolution, and in part because of the diversity of philosophies involved. There are materialist and reductionist theories, as well as spiritualist theories. Here the final judgment is within the competence of philosophy and, beyond that, of theology…
Pius XII underlined the essential point: if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God…
As a result, the theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.*
The solution opted for by the Catholic church is to see humans as products of both evolution and direct divine act of creation. In Thomistic anthropology, the fundamental trait that makes this move possible is the dualism of body and soul, that is, the view that humans are both bodily and spiritual beings. In a theological or metaphysical sense, humans are human souls, spiritual beings temporarily infused in material bodies – and in Catholic view it is the spiritual being that counts, for it is everlasting and directly created by God. The bodies, known to biology as members of Homo sapiens populations, are by no means a necessary prerequisite for human existence.
Now, this
theological anthropology has been considered in relation to both
evolutionary biology and the Book of Genesis, as can rightly be
expected. The authentic Catholic teaching affirms that all humans are
ultimately descendants of a single couple, referred to in the Bible
as Adam and Eve. It was to them God gave the very first human souls,
and they were thus the first properly human beings on Earth. In
reaction to problems posed by the evolutionary history of mankind, it
has been suggested that these individuals probably belonged to some
larger biologically human-like population, but nevertheless it was
exclusively them who received human souls straight from God. Ever
since, God has infused into each of their descendants a new human
soul. This is known as the Flynn-Kemp proposal.
Being a soul-bearer
and thus metaphysically human is not a genetically transmitted
property, but is instead grounded in a sovereign decision of the
Creator. Every descendant of Adam and Eve apparently gets a human
soul, despite the possibility that there might still have been some
of those non-soul-bearing pre-humans involved early in the lineage.
For God, it is being a child of the first, chosen pair that matters.
The metaphysically non-human part of our ancestral population is
supposed to have died out eventually, leaving only hominids with
human souls. The Flynn-Kemp proposal is not meant to be taken as a
verified account of what actually happened in human prehistory: it is
a hypothetical scenario used to point out that human evolution does
not necessarily contradict the (Catholically interpreted) story of
Adam and Eve – and the Original Sin, of which I shall not say more
for now.
Metaphysically human
and biologically human – in authentic Catholic view they are
not quite the same thing, but it seems that the historically known
Homo sapiens populations are considered human in both senses.
Why would they be that? In Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, it is
held that human souls are manifest in certain intellectual powers
that only humans among all animals possess. Rationality is a property
of those with a rational (human) soul, and a suitable material
platform for it is a Homo sapiens brain. The soul is in union
with the brain, which in turn makes rationality manifest through
bodily organs in human speech and agency. In proper
Aristotelian-Thomistic terms, the organic body is matter and the soul
is its form, making it a human body instead of bare matter.
There has, of
course, been a lot of philosophical debate over the very concept of
soul. Some hold that rational thinking can be shown to be immaterial,
thus implying a soul, on purely philosophical grounds. Even if we
assumed that souls are real and an integral part of a properly human
being, one critical question could be raised at this point. Should
only those members of Homo sapiens populations with manifest
rationality be considered properly, metaphysically human? This is not
necessarily what Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology suggests. I at least see an
option of insisting that,
by virtue of being descendants of Adam and Eve, all modern
human beings are granted human souls by God. In the case of severely
mentally disabled and thus manifestly non-rational people it might
just be something wrong with the neural system, for example, that
inhibits the soul from manifesting rationality in the way it could
were it united with a properly functioning material body. Similarly,
one could speak of infants whose brains have not yet reached a stage
of development sufficient to manifest their rational souls, or
something like that.
But the
possibilities of detecting rational souls empirically are still
unclear, and that makes me suspicious. Consider the following
arguments:
If a human soul
necessarily manifests itself in outwardly observable rationality when
in union with a Homo sapiens body, some of the members in
modern Homo sapiens populations have no human souls.
If a human soul does
not, when in union with certain bodies of matter, necessarily
manifest itself in outwardly observable rationality, any natural
object might have a human soul.
It is integral for
at least the Aristotelian brand of Thomism that humans are clearly
distinct from other creatures by virtue of their rational souls. The
above counterarguments could apparently be refuted only by verifying
that the modern biologically human populations are in fact
descendants of one single couple somewhere back in time. (Preferably,
they should have been of a distinctively hominid kind; I think a pair
of some Cretaceous proto-mammals wouldn’t suit the purposes of
Catholic teaching). It would also be required that these first
parents were chosen by God as the first bearers of rational human
souls, and that God had committed himself to ensouling the
descendants of that couple and not any other creatures or
objects in nature. If these truth claims can’t be verified, one is
left uncertain about where human souls are located in the observable
reality – which, of course, has implications on who shall be
granted the privilege of being called humans.
What about the Book
of Genesis, then? So far, I am a bit unaware of where exactly it is
stated there that the first human beings were ensouled by God. There
are two accounts of creating humans. In Genesis 1 (New International Version) it reads:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
And in Genesis 2:
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Some interpretation
of the first passage might imply that ”in his [Gods] own image”
means ”with a rational soul”, for it is indeed held in Catholic
teaching that God is a spiritual, rational being. As for the other
one, it might be suggested that ”the breath of life” is in fact
the human soul. The version of the text found in Catholic
Encyclopedia has ”living soul” instead of a ”living being” –
clearly an exegetic problem there, which I shall leave for others to
address. Even if we assumed that the passage speaks of a living soul,
we would be left with a problem, since there is no mention in Genesis
of anything being breathed into the woman, created soon afterwards.
The Bible clearly
does not necessarily support the view that two pre-human animals were
given rational souls and thus made the only human beings in their
population. The Catholic readiness to ignore the part where man as a
bodily creature is actually shaped from dust seems like a mere ad
hoc -rationalization of the passages to fit the overwhelming
scientific evidence for the evolutionary origins of humanity. But I
have in principle no problem with such moves. At least this kind of a
Catholic interpretation takes different fields of study seriously,
and that is basically what I am trying to do as well.
I will not make any
strong conclusions as to the credibility of the Thomistic
anthropology described here, for I am not really that familiar with
its underlying philosophy. Suffice it to say that so far, this
approach to the concept of humanity has not convinced me, and further
investigations need to be made. In the meantime, I have several
different topics to discuss, so I’m not sure how soon exactly I
might be getting back to this one.
*The original message to the Academy can be found here in French, Italian and Spanish. The English translation is from Edward Fesers blog.
Further readings:
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