Natural Selection and Reproductive Success:
The Catholic Religion as a Culture of Life
by Dr. David Pence - 2010
The Catholic Religion as a Culture of Life
by Dr. David Pence - 2010
Our earth orbits on its axis at a thousand miles an hour while revolving around the Sun at about 70,000 miles an hour into an unchartered space which is mostly empty. Continual solar storms and less frequent meteorite and comet showers meet us on our way. For now the solar winds are kept at bay by the earth’s magnetic field. Collisions with heavenly bodies though are sure to happen and such incoming bodies in previous events probably broke off a section of the earth forming the moon 4.1 billion years ago as well as causing the dinosaur extinction in a separate event 65 million years ago. Today, various national space programs keep active vigilance for potential impact events in our own era.
Influenza like epidemics and hot spot continental volcanoes are inevitable biological and geological events which will count their victims in the millions. If this isn’t enough, we know that we will never see our sun dissipate because before that happens it will expand and the heat it radiates will be incompatible with life on earth. That is scheduled in a few billion years but other catastrophic events are much more likely to end “life as we know it” before the inevitable solar expansion and earth death is realized.
No one can accuse the modern day materialists of honey coating reality. If the material universe simply follows the laws of physics and chemistry then the uncertainty about our most improbable beginnings will be definitively resolved by the certitude of our demise.
Short term and long term we inhabit a universe dominated by hostile external forces as treacherous as any animistic milieu of the ancient tribes. It is an existential circumstance we cannot fundamentally alter. So that’s the situation—we are in a deadly contest not at all of our own making. We are fighting for life. If we cooperate to improve our capacity for protective vigilance, there are some deadly contests we might win for future generations but ultimately even as a species united there are some challenges we cannot conquer as humans. Like Sisyphus of ancient myth, we can roll the rock only so far but ultimately the constraints of the material universe will frustrate a final victory. The physical laws limit our ultimate destiny. Before we whine too much about the impersonal nature of Physical Law, we do well to remember this law also serves as “a limit” on those hostile forces inimical to life against which we wage our daily battle.
Our preparation and willingness for deadly contest is itself evidence of another peculiar characteristic of the material universe –some of it is alive (or to be more personal; some of us are alive). That which is alive “works at being itself” (Sachs,2001). We are living beings and we are fighting for life—make no mistake about that. The stars are pretty but those nuclear reactors are really very dangerous. The empty night sky is awesome but it is overwhelmingly a lonely cold which resembles Hell as much as any fiery furnace. There are a few regions of space where we do not see the usual picture of a lonely hydrogen molecule tending toward the motionless temperature of Absolute Zero. Instead we witness the effects of deadly massive aggregates of matter… as if there are some ways of getting too close that signify death not life. Black holes come by their name honestly. It is a remarkable truth that life is only possible within a certain narrow range of density and temperature. And while 99% of the material universe including our sun is Hydrogen and Helium— a very different election of elements is necessary for life. The material concentration of chemical elements needed for living beings is a very unlikely event—and this is without even mentioning Darwin’s last sentence in Origin of Species “the grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.” Even without that early breath of life, indeed, before cellular life was ever manifested, the setting of the periodic table of elements as one atheist cosmologist put it— “looks like a put up job” (Berlinski, 2008). The order of the material elements and the capacities of carbon to form structural and energy storage bonds were both written into nature long before there was any appearance of life or DNA. Now before one is struck by an acute attack of theophobia (a fear of mentioning God’s name or purpose especially in the setting of natural history or physical science) remember that all we are doing here is locating ourselves in the present situation of a fierce struggle for life in a hostile but law abiding universe upon a rare spaceship earth with many dangers of its own and yet uniquely set aside for life. We are asking a thoroughly Darwinian question—how best shall we adapt in this battle for existence so that we can reproduce our next generation equipped to fight their portion of the ongoing struggle.
How shall we organize ourselves for this multigenerational journey? How do we shape a Culture of Life. For we know that any manner of change, physical, psychological or cultural that gives even a slight advantage for survival and reproduction will tend to be naturally selected and continued throughout future generations. If that is true for a single gene coding for an isolated protein how much more true for a sophisticated socially transmitted behavior like a common language or shared religious culture. The subtitle of Origin of Species defined natural selection as “The preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.” Darwin’s simple assertion put it this way: “It follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving and thus be naturally selected.” (Darwin, 1851)
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) the great agnostic sociologist of religion argued against a “Voltairian” hostility toward religion. He taught that such an enduring institution as religion was fundamentally tied to the nature of reality and man. Mary Douglas, a contemporary anthropologist, agrees (especially in her Purity and Danger). Both of them argued that an honest social scientist must enter into the most elementary forms of religion to find in ritual actions, taboos, separations and narratives a communal way to organize the cosmos and a proper way to relate to it. Both the agnostic sociologist and the Catholic anthropologist recognized that religion provides a way to experience, interpret and act in life as an intergenerational community. They understood an intergenerational continuity of symbols and practices to be historically a significant adaptive strategy for countless human communities. Even when they studied primitive communities it was not to deride religion as a prescientific phenomenon which the modern rationalist has outgrown. They believed by studying religion stripped down they could find its most essential and true elements (Durkheim’s greatest work is called The Elementary Forms of Religious Life).
Let us here consider a model not stripped down at all—the intergenerational form of religious life known as the Roman Catholic Church. Let us be good social scientists like Douglas and Durkheim and enter fully into our subject to tell it from the inside. Let us apply our Darwinian lens that judges behavior in terms of adaptation in the struggle for existence and success in reproducing a successor generation capable of repeating the adaptation-reproduction motif. {1}
What follows is a Durkheim-Douglas- Darwinian account of Catholic culture “from the inside.” I am asking the reader to adapt the sympathetic wonder of a young anthropology field worker who comes upon this civilization and has it explained on a single island by a local patriarch. Only later will the budding anthropologist find that the Eucharistic culture he discovered on the island which seemed quite whole indeed was also being lived at the same time on every continent in its same elementary form by radically different social and language groups. This elementary form of worship, code of morality and comprehensive narrative have persisted through two millennia culminating in a current explosive growth in Africa and Asia while still dominating South America and being robustly renewed by immigration in North America. It represents a kind of cultural convergence in that many human communities of different ethnic, linguistic and geographic backgrounds find this cultural strategy to be the best answer for organizing communal order and mating. Adapt to multiple and diverse environments, battle for survival, successfully reproduce—welcome to a Darwinian Culture of Life-welcome to the Catholic Church.
It is obvious who the headman is. He wears a prominent headdress called a miter and carries a shepherd’s staff. Around him is a brotherhood of men who like the headman (called a bishop) are not married. The men in the celibate brotherhood are called fathers by the people. Men and women mate for life and begin their conjugal life with a public ceremony of commitment after a questioning of them and the gathered community. The new couple is forbidden from blocking insemination which they call “the marriage act.” Losing one’s seed as an unmarried man is forbidden and considered disgraceful. Abortion and infanticide are forbidden. Caring for the young and educating them is considered the prime duty and right of the married couple. Fatherhood and motherhood are highly honored social roles eclipsed only by the male priestly brotherhood which renounces married life in eschatological [3] preparation for a battle ahead. This authoritative fraternity in obedience to a father is a daily reminder of the battle formation necessary to keep safe the life of the sacred including the marital and familial bonds of the laity. Unlike most mammals in which many fewer males than females mate, the Catholic custom is radically democratized and diversified by an insistence on monogamy with no exceptions even for the head male of the protective pact(be he king, president or tribal chief). While the priests deny themselves marriage, their celibacy guarantees a sexual ethic which limits the claims of the strongest and richest males to multiple mates. This allows a radical democratization of male mating not seen among any other mammals.
The Church as the Church is not confused with the civil government which is considered a lesser but important form of social agreement. The men in the Church are taught they have a civic obligation to defend the common life of their tribe, island community or country. The Christian knight and the Catholic soldier are the embodied personalities of this teaching. The priests are a protective brotherhood for the sacred things. The laymen join with other men of the island or nation who are not Catholics in a similar fraternal bond to form the protective bond of “citizenship.” This protective wall of the city creates a space for the priestly temple in which the ultimate battle against Evil is ritually waged on the sacred mountain of liturgical life.
The central orienting axis of the community is the weekly worship of the Father God. This focusing event points the entire community to the East where the sky is always new because of the unidirectional daily turn of the earth. Oriented in space, the community then engages in a dialogical act of “speech thinking” {4} which serves to relate them in time to person and purpose. Though living on a tiny island, the community orders their personal relationships in terms of a much larger previously ordered web of relationships which embed this particular local church in the story of the world they call “Salvation History”. The bishop is the principal narrator of the received story of the group and the principal celebrant of its prescribed liturgical action. The bishop is not allowed to add or detract from the central creed which is recited word for word at the weekly liturgy. His role as narrator of the story is to apply its lessons while safeguarding the core message of the “good news” which is considered definitively given. The brotherhood (called priests) celebrate with him on the altar where the unordained are not allowed. In the bishop’s absence, a priest acts his role in the liturgy. Priests also hear the confessions of the people who enter a screened area, tell their transgressions, resolve to sin no more, are given some kind of restitutive penance and then are absolved and cleansed to once again partake in the ritual meal.
The central narrative which explains both nature and history is a blending of an eternal loving communion in the midst of a bloody vicious contest. Both the basic truth about reality and the manner in which the truth is transmitted is radically interpersonal and dialogical. God the Father has lived eternally (which means outside of time—no beginning and no end) in communion with the Son and the Holy Spirit. These are three persons who share a single nature and are known as both one God and the Trinity. They are bound together in freedom and love and opened their love relationship to create immaterial beings known as angels. Some of the angels rebelled (these Spirit Beings are known as Satan or Lucifer and his demonic fallen angels). They were cast from Heaven which more than a place is a loving relationship of the Trinitarian God and the faithful angels led by Michael.
Here the young anthropologist is confronted with every college boy’s problem with religion. This talk of angels especially with names, especially with definitive personalities irrevocably dedicated to good or evil --- the plausibility of the tale seems here to lose its grip. So we return him to the classroom for a conversation in the spirit of Durkheim and Douglas – to consider for now the system from the inside but testing it against what we know about the physical universe.
The Catholic scholar notices the modern atheist who sees no contradiction in asserting there are millions of individual forms of intelligent life in other solar systems while dismissing as supernatural fantasy an immaterial form of angelic life engaged in our own biosystem. With no bias against immaterial Being or moral significance, Catholic culture seems a simpler (more parsimonious as scientific theoreticians like to say), richer and yes, more adaptive cosmology.
It was in the midst of a great battle between living but immaterial beings that the physical universe appeared some 13.7 billion years ago. The separation of the four fundamental forces in a high temperature event cast most of matter into an ever expanding oblivion (in some mysterious way a portion of this may well become the lonely material prisons of the fallen angels and the isolated realms of those asleep in the death of what Catholics call “Hell”-a separation from the communion of life and love with God.) The explosive material event which began as a great singularity of order and then tended toward disorder and entropy is not considered by Catholics the beginning of Creation for the first created beings are the immaterial beings known as the angels. Catholic thinking is grounded in material realities but is not limited to the material universe as we see it. The Big Bang poses no problems for Catholics (in fact this singular manifestation of matter was championed by a Jesuit priest, Father Georges Lemaitre,(1894-1966). He was doubted by Einstein who objected specifically because such an explanation of the beginning of the material universe sounded too much like Genesis. The theory was ridiculed by Frank Hoyle the Berkeley astronomer who coined the “big bang” as a term of derision.) Catholic cosmology is like speculative quantum theories in that it clearly understands that the matter we see is not all that there is. It is less speculative however because it is grounded in the realism of analogical language. It is more parsimonious because it posits a singular kind of causality and approaches the universe as a unified truth which can be known. The Catholic framework entails fewer but much richer categories integrating such real phenomena as love, morality, personhood and purpose in a narrative of the deadly struggle for life.
In the Catholic worldview the material universe appeared in the midst of a great moral conflict and its overriding purpose cannot be understood apart from that struggle of life vs death. (If some anthropologists have trouble with notions of a struggle between Good and Evil than little will be lost in understanding the conflict in the more traditional biblical language of Life vs Death. Certainly no good Darwinian should be troubled by this presentation of categories and no physicist would be so anthropomorphic to deny such a struggle for life might very well precede the appearance of humans in the last million years or cellular life four billion years ago.)
Election and the Anthropomorphic Principle
The God of the Catholics is no disinterested agent. Like you, me, tadpoles and lions, He is a living Being. When others hem and haw about the multiple improbable events which must occur for the planet earth to be so singularly suited for human life, the Catholics with the Jews (from whence they come) share a strong sensibility of an election-- a setting aside of an environment for life. Darwin thought that a breath or two was needed from God before natural selection could do the rest of the work in shaping life. Catholics combine their own deep liturgical sensibility with findings in chemistry and physics of the last half century to argue the plausibility that not only life but the physical setting of life has been set aside by God. This kind of election of the material setting for the earth’s biosphere amidst the rest of matter moving toward disorder and cold is ubiquitous in the biblical narrative. (Levenson,1988) The garden set apart from the rest of the earth, the ark amidst the 40 day rainfall, the many mountaintops of encounter between God and man, the setting aside of the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple in Jerusalem and the election of the Jews as a chosen people. This deep sensibility of being set apart from the rest of matter in a special way is reinforced by the liturgical nature of Catholic culture. The altar is set higher and apart from the regular ground. The celibacy of the priesthood is a kind of setting apart. Baptismal water, Holy Chrism(a highly reduced hydrocarbon) and consecrated bread and wine are set apart in service of the sacramental order which organizes the life cycle of every Catholic from birth to death. The initiation rite is a baptism to set aside the new Christian from the confusion and slavery of profane existence. This day to day experience in Catholic culture that some days, some spaces, and some men are set aside for a sacred encounter render the puzzle of the “rare earth” no such puzzle at all. It too (in some mysterious but definitive way) has been set apart. This is precisely the way anthropologist Mary Douglas explains liturgical practices—they provide a lived out dramatic ritualistic “ accounting of reality”. The Church who sets aside space and time to encounter God understands that God set aside a space in time for man to develop as a creature able to know and love. There are many puzzles in natural history and physical science that the Catholic learner shares with the honest atheist scientist. The hundreds of coincidences needed for us to be here noticing our peculiar good fortune is not one of those puzzles. What atheist Fred Hoyle said with a cynical shrug we say with praise and thanksgiving—“it looks like a put up job”. It is a dramatic example of the parsimony of a shared Catholic culture which not only answers multiple questions with a singular explanation but initiates a different way to relate to the truth of things. It is highly consonant with the personal epistemology of the scientific imagination (Polanyi,1958) not the make believe ideology that lab experiments are the singular portal to scientific knowledge.
Understanding that humans are not the highest form of personal life and that the universe’s ultimate cause has a personal character evokes a response from man which is other than reaching for a dissecting microscope. If at the heart of reality is a communion of persons then our deepest response to reality cannot be devising a verifiable experiment but seeking an authentic way to either love or battle with this being. Life does not call forth experiment but dialogue(Buber,1937). To know a personal being fully entails love and to love an Authoritative Personality means to thank and seek to obey. The anthropologist observing the man at prayer or the community at common worship sees not a people in search of answers but a community living a definitive response to the order of things. The man at worship is always seeking to better know the will of God as well as discover the multiple “secondary causes” explaining natural history and physical science. His act of worship however is not an act of questioning. Worship in itself is an act of deeply affirming a truth already found.
Worshiping God is knowing Him in a deep and participative way that eludes microscopy but is quite similar to the biblical phrase which describes how a man “knows” his wife. The Catholic view of reality ties knowing (the Latin root of “science” is to know) to both love and contest. As man discovers the truth about existence he finds a hierarchy of beings and reality to which he responds. If a man really knows a predator, he will flee or hide from it or fight. If man knows his woman he will love and reproduce. If man knows God he comes to worship, thank and obey Him. Reality is complex and multifaceted. Catholic culture provides a rich glossary of responses to this great Chain of Being. Talk about adapting to reality!
In the Christian narrative, the earth is set aside for life and man. When he finally appears as the culmination of material life forms, man is deceived by the satanic angel and rebels against God. Man then as we meet him in our recorded history is a creature fallen. Once he was more than what he is now. Fallen man is a brutal man. If he obliterated the Neanderthal creatures (who themselves might be fallen men) and drove the mammoths into extinction this is no surprise to the Catholic historian.
But what was a surprise was what Christians call the “good news”. The Living God intervened to set aside the Jews as his people and from the Jews a virgin was elected to bear the man-God. This woman Mary is greatly honored wherever Catholic culture flourishes. She is considered the ideal woman and every Catholic man must make some space in his heart to honor all women who remind us of the Marian form. She is the iconic personification of the temple for the Spirit. The long developmental march of the female form in both plants and animals has prepared the way for her flowering---the interiorization of the female from the development of the plant pistil to internal fertilization, long gestation, hidden ovulation, extended interpersonal nurturing and the capacity to “ponder these things in her heart”—all lead to the Virgin who was to be the Mother of God. Jesus was born of Mary after she consented to conception by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, the third person of the Trinity. Jesus lived as a traditional Jew until his adulthood when at age 30 he began his public life. He drew Twelve Jewish men (the “men of Galilee”) into an apostolic body headed by Peter. On the night before he died he cleansed them by washing their feet (this prompted the departure of the traitor Judas). He initiated them into a blood covenant of the priesthood which entailed a promise that they too would shed their blood for him and that they would feed initiated Christians with the Bread of Life—Christ’s own Body changed in substance but not appearances at every Catholic Mass.
That evening (remembered on the Thursday before Easter every year as Holy Thursday) the apostles ran from Christ’s side as he was arrested and crucified the next day on Good Friday. The following Sunday He rose from the dead (on the first Easter) and appeared to a woman follower and then the apostles. He stayed with them forty days and then ascended to be with his Father in heaven. Ten days later he sent the Holy Spirit to the Apostles hiding in an upper room. The Holy Spirit filled them with courageous zeal and they went forth to preach the good news of Christ. The men of Galilee who had watched Jesus ascend into heaven now stood together in the middle of Jerusalem’s public square and through the voice of Peter they began proclaiming the wondrous deed that had been done. They addressed themselves in public on that first Pentecost to the “viri Judaeorum” the men of Jerusalem. Three thousand were baptized on that day of courage. Most of the apostles were eventually martyred for their witness. All of them attested to the truth of Christ’s resurrection and all said He would come again. They had power to heal and cast out the evil demons from people. The anticipated Second Coming of Christ would be marked by a great struggle and a final casting out of Satan, his angels and human followers from any dominion over the earth. At the weekly liturgy, Catholics reenact Christ’s last days and his death. The priest drinks the wine promising he too will shed his blood for the people. The people if they are in a state of grace (sharing in God’s life by being baptized and not being in a state of serious sin) receive the bread which is the Body of Christ allowing them to know him in an even more intimate way than reading about him or praying. At the Mass the priest and people participate in a deep communion with the three Divine persons of the Trinity. They pray for the whole world that all men might come to know Christ and see clearly the many deceits of a world ignorant or hostile to the main characters of the Divine drama.
Most groups which produce “social capital” by internal bonding have a diffident if not hostile approach to members outside the group. The Christian gospel orders that the hungry be fed and the thirsty given drink at the risk of damnation for the ungenerous Christian. The Catholics are told to love—love God and love your neighbor (and the neighbor is defined in the parable of the good Samaritan as an unknown victim of street crime.) That is what the social capital theorists call strong internal social bonding and thick external social bridging. (Putnam, 2000). It is what Catholics call an anthropology of accord or “the two great commandments”.
The whole community is trained to focus on the bishop as the living embodiment of the apostles who were with Christ. He forms his priestly brotherhood around him to maintain the narrative of Christianity through the ages. This is done by keeping Catholic time through feast days and liturgical seasons that tell and retell the story of salvation history and the good news of Christ. The people are gathered in “protective vigilance” awaiting his second coming while being on guard against the enemies of the group and life.
The well read anthropologist immediately recognizes this “attention structure” from the final chapters of EO Wilson’s Sociobiology and the original work of M. Chance. The theory of attention structure in higher primates explains the hierarchal disproportion of attention and cue setting paid to the highest status males. This allows group cohesiveness in the face of the continual threat of predators especially when the favored group response is group defense by all males. (Emory,1981) In forest settings every monkey for herself whether running or hiding did not necessitate this centripetal protective attention structure so necessary for collective group action. Savannah primates and wolf packs are hints of the male cooperative group. What is merely hinted at among animals (the actual record for male group defense among animals is pretty dismal) is a distinguishing characteristic of humans. The Roman phalanx, the Greek Hoplite formation, the Samurai code and the Germanic warrior blood oath are all formations of male covenants honoring loyalty and courage to the internal group in the face of danger. {This sociobiological insight of the social role of the male gender in humans is not part of the public domain because of the censorious effects of the systematic implanting of feminist ideology chips in the brains of male academics. It is however the daily praxis of Catholic liturgical and hierarchical life}
In a complementary vein certain comparative primatologists see the capacity of the human mother to pass on shared attention and internal identification as a fundamental human characteristic which allows the sophisticated social learning needed for human culture and cognition (Tomasello, 1999). Human nature then is identified with the unique attentive and imitative capacities of the infant/child learned at the mother’s breast and the group’s centripetal capacity for shared attentiveness to a male leader. The Catholics far from condemning the natural law of protective duty are formed as an ecclesial community by a brotherhood obedient to the Father and a cult of motherhood. The Church herself is called our Mother but her internal structure is built on an adult male relationship so she also identifies herself as Apostolic.
For males the obedience to God the Father extends to a willingness to sacrifice one’s own kin (the sacrifice of Isaac). God the Father gave up his only Son so His Son might cross into death (the dominion of Satan) and “descend into hell” after his crucifixion to end the Devil’s reign. The celibacy of priests is a kind of sacrifice of one’s son for the Father. Except in early Rome when military service and sacrifice to gods were linked, the Catholic Church has encouraged young men to aid in the defense of whatever homeland they belonged to. This is part of communal life and Christian manhood. The Church has accepted that there are two swords and the sword of the state requires the hand of her citizens. Military duty is considered a legitimate rendering unto Caesar. The priests, bishops and pope are generally to be exempt from any national wars but will not be so spared in the final battle. They are actually meant to take the first bullets. The first priesthood was founded on an act of communal execution: capital punishment inflicted by Levites on the men of Israel who worshiped a golden calf when Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments. Again we see the protective and practical nature of the Catholic code written into the central narrative, the weekly liturgy and the yearly calendar. The celebration of masculine sacrifice (honoring Christ’s death for humanity as the central event in human history) and the celebration of both virginity and motherhood in the cult of Mary provides the Catholics with the personalities of protection, fertility, and fidelity needed for cross generational communities of mutual aid. In direct opposition to the Freudian myth of the killing of the father or the patricidal founding myths of the Greek gods, the Christian narrative cultivates obedience and piety as the proper relationship to God in heaven and the father and mother of the family on earth.{2} In this it is mindful of the linking of cosmological order and proper human relations in the ordered piety of Chinese tradition taught by Confucius. For Catholics its profound resonance is with a communal hierarchy which defines the Trinitarian structure of reality.
The role of patterned public gatherings of Catholics in ritual remembrance, communion and anticipation is essential to the culture. Whether a small and hidden gathering in a hostile state or a growing public mass in a fractured society---the public gatherings are a time to express what Confucians called li—being in the proper place at the proper time in the proper way enacting the proper action. The communal gathering is also analogous to the collective sensing of social position known in bacteria as quorum sensing. Colonies of bacterium will act in certain ways only with the “knowledge” of a certain critical mass of fellow bacteria—“quorum sensing”. The Jews could only start a synagogue if a quorum of adult men (a minyan) were present. Christ did not leave his oral message and the testimony of eyewitnesses to isolated individuals. He established “The Twelve” –a most pregnant numerical heft restoring all of Israel’s tribes in a new Kingdom. Likewise for Catholics, public worship is a testimony to God but also a social thermometer which enables the Christian community at prayer to assess how best we might act in the broader civic arena. It is not cynical or impure to understand that one’s stance and language in a given nation is quite dependent on the practical knowledge gained by the quorum sensing inherent in public worship. Indeed there is a Christian tradition that the Coming of the messiah will happen only when a critical number of righteous worshipers balance the fallen angels and an analogous Jewish teaching that if a quorum would simply properly keep the Sabbath, the Messiah would respond to this sweet and proper summons. These are cosmic notions of religious li. They constitute necessary mechanisms for optimal group assessment of proper defensive and offensive actions toward hostile social forces aimed against” the favored race” who has learned this new communal adaptive behavior.
It is a dangerous world out there. We must be tied to each other in a great web of trust. We must love each other and not steal from one another or lie to or kill each other. We must cooperate with the Giver of Life and be open to many offspring. We must be faithful and sacrificial in our marriages which are meant to educate our children in the Way of life. We must be drawn together in communal vigilant protection aware of the constant predator and in preparation for the good King. We do this in every local community from Africa to the Americas as a diocese under a bishop. The bishops meet together under the pope to keep our narrative, our prayers and
our honor code in unison so we are capable of great collective acts. The pope and the bishops keep correcting each other to draw men more deeply into the example of the sacrificial Christ—for these men must lead until He comes again and their leadership must be continually reforming itself by the cultivation and imitation of the lives of saints. For there will come a time that it will take more than human ingenuity and cooperation to continue the culture of life. Thus the deepest love relationship which defines the church is not in the fecundity of marriage but the filial obedience of the Son to the Father and the brotherhood of friends he ordered that night before he died to love one another as the Father loved him. This priestly love constitutes a vivifying power even greater than procreation. This priestly love is a physical community of persons signifying the ultimate reality of the Trinity’s Love. At the same time this fraternity of sons act for the Church and humanity incorporating us in a single Body of Christ. This adaptation of a singular form for an entire species (the ultimate in cultural convergence) is the unique human strategy setting it quite apart from the great diversity organisms like insects who seem to respond to every new tropical shade cover by breaking off to form a new species.
By participating in the converging love of the Body of Christ, others can be incorporated and saved from the inevitable death all humanity faces if we settle for the material paradigm. It is love-- this new thing and yet this very common experience of such great joy--which draws us to the vocabulary of life eternal. Did we think our great loves had no connection to the fundamental structure of reality and our final destiny? Love is the ultimate reality--- not simply a pleasant accident of pheromones and adrenalin. But love comes at a great cost because love was once rejected and the universe was torn asunder. We must be ready than for a great battle and the final restoration of a higher form of union capable of permanently sustaining life in this hostile and cold universe. To be prepared. To be vigilant. To be focused in a communal manner ready to fight against death while fostering life. To accept the always reforming shape of hierarchal patriarchy while looking for the final coming of the true alpha male. This is the culture of Life and Love. This is the dynamic orthodoxy of Catholic culture.
Influenza like epidemics and hot spot continental volcanoes are inevitable biological and geological events which will count their victims in the millions. If this isn’t enough, we know that we will never see our sun dissipate because before that happens it will expand and the heat it radiates will be incompatible with life on earth. That is scheduled in a few billion years but other catastrophic events are much more likely to end “life as we know it” before the inevitable solar expansion and earth death is realized.
No one can accuse the modern day materialists of honey coating reality. If the material universe simply follows the laws of physics and chemistry then the uncertainty about our most improbable beginnings will be definitively resolved by the certitude of our demise.
Short term and long term we inhabit a universe dominated by hostile external forces as treacherous as any animistic milieu of the ancient tribes. It is an existential circumstance we cannot fundamentally alter. So that’s the situation—we are in a deadly contest not at all of our own making. We are fighting for life. If we cooperate to improve our capacity for protective vigilance, there are some deadly contests we might win for future generations but ultimately even as a species united there are some challenges we cannot conquer as humans. Like Sisyphus of ancient myth, we can roll the rock only so far but ultimately the constraints of the material universe will frustrate a final victory. The physical laws limit our ultimate destiny. Before we whine too much about the impersonal nature of Physical Law, we do well to remember this law also serves as “a limit” on those hostile forces inimical to life against which we wage our daily battle.
Our preparation and willingness for deadly contest is itself evidence of another peculiar characteristic of the material universe –some of it is alive (or to be more personal; some of us are alive). That which is alive “works at being itself” (Sachs,2001). We are living beings and we are fighting for life—make no mistake about that. The stars are pretty but those nuclear reactors are really very dangerous. The empty night sky is awesome but it is overwhelmingly a lonely cold which resembles Hell as much as any fiery furnace. There are a few regions of space where we do not see the usual picture of a lonely hydrogen molecule tending toward the motionless temperature of Absolute Zero. Instead we witness the effects of deadly massive aggregates of matter… as if there are some ways of getting too close that signify death not life. Black holes come by their name honestly. It is a remarkable truth that life is only possible within a certain narrow range of density and temperature. And while 99% of the material universe including our sun is Hydrogen and Helium— a very different election of elements is necessary for life. The material concentration of chemical elements needed for living beings is a very unlikely event—and this is without even mentioning Darwin’s last sentence in Origin of Species “the grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.” Even without that early breath of life, indeed, before cellular life was ever manifested, the setting of the periodic table of elements as one atheist cosmologist put it— “looks like a put up job” (Berlinski, 2008). The order of the material elements and the capacities of carbon to form structural and energy storage bonds were both written into nature long before there was any appearance of life or DNA. Now before one is struck by an acute attack of theophobia (a fear of mentioning God’s name or purpose especially in the setting of natural history or physical science) remember that all we are doing here is locating ourselves in the present situation of a fierce struggle for life in a hostile but law abiding universe upon a rare spaceship earth with many dangers of its own and yet uniquely set aside for life. We are asking a thoroughly Darwinian question—how best shall we adapt in this battle for existence so that we can reproduce our next generation equipped to fight their portion of the ongoing struggle.
How shall we organize ourselves for this multigenerational journey? How do we shape a Culture of Life. For we know that any manner of change, physical, psychological or cultural that gives even a slight advantage for survival and reproduction will tend to be naturally selected and continued throughout future generations. If that is true for a single gene coding for an isolated protein how much more true for a sophisticated socially transmitted behavior like a common language or shared religious culture. The subtitle of Origin of Species defined natural selection as “The preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.” Darwin’s simple assertion put it this way: “It follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving and thus be naturally selected.” (Darwin, 1851)
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) the great agnostic sociologist of religion argued against a “Voltairian” hostility toward religion. He taught that such an enduring institution as religion was fundamentally tied to the nature of reality and man. Mary Douglas, a contemporary anthropologist, agrees (especially in her Purity and Danger). Both of them argued that an honest social scientist must enter into the most elementary forms of religion to find in ritual actions, taboos, separations and narratives a communal way to organize the cosmos and a proper way to relate to it. Both the agnostic sociologist and the Catholic anthropologist recognized that religion provides a way to experience, interpret and act in life as an intergenerational community. They understood an intergenerational continuity of symbols and practices to be historically a significant adaptive strategy for countless human communities. Even when they studied primitive communities it was not to deride religion as a prescientific phenomenon which the modern rationalist has outgrown. They believed by studying religion stripped down they could find its most essential and true elements (Durkheim’s greatest work is called The Elementary Forms of Religious Life).
Let us here consider a model not stripped down at all—the intergenerational form of religious life known as the Roman Catholic Church. Let us be good social scientists like Douglas and Durkheim and enter fully into our subject to tell it from the inside. Let us apply our Darwinian lens that judges behavior in terms of adaptation in the struggle for existence and success in reproducing a successor generation capable of repeating the adaptation-reproduction motif. {1}
What follows is a Durkheim-Douglas- Darwinian account of Catholic culture “from the inside.” I am asking the reader to adapt the sympathetic wonder of a young anthropology field worker who comes upon this civilization and has it explained on a single island by a local patriarch. Only later will the budding anthropologist find that the Eucharistic culture he discovered on the island which seemed quite whole indeed was also being lived at the same time on every continent in its same elementary form by radically different social and language groups. This elementary form of worship, code of morality and comprehensive narrative have persisted through two millennia culminating in a current explosive growth in Africa and Asia while still dominating South America and being robustly renewed by immigration in North America. It represents a kind of cultural convergence in that many human communities of different ethnic, linguistic and geographic backgrounds find this cultural strategy to be the best answer for organizing communal order and mating. Adapt to multiple and diverse environments, battle for survival, successfully reproduce—welcome to a Darwinian Culture of Life-welcome to the Catholic Church.
It is obvious who the headman is. He wears a prominent headdress called a miter and carries a shepherd’s staff. Around him is a brotherhood of men who like the headman (called a bishop) are not married. The men in the celibate brotherhood are called fathers by the people. Men and women mate for life and begin their conjugal life with a public ceremony of commitment after a questioning of them and the gathered community. The new couple is forbidden from blocking insemination which they call “the marriage act.” Losing one’s seed as an unmarried man is forbidden and considered disgraceful. Abortion and infanticide are forbidden. Caring for the young and educating them is considered the prime duty and right of the married couple. Fatherhood and motherhood are highly honored social roles eclipsed only by the male priestly brotherhood which renounces married life in eschatological [3] preparation for a battle ahead. This authoritative fraternity in obedience to a father is a daily reminder of the battle formation necessary to keep safe the life of the sacred including the marital and familial bonds of the laity. Unlike most mammals in which many fewer males than females mate, the Catholic custom is radically democratized and diversified by an insistence on monogamy with no exceptions even for the head male of the protective pact(be he king, president or tribal chief). While the priests deny themselves marriage, their celibacy guarantees a sexual ethic which limits the claims of the strongest and richest males to multiple mates. This allows a radical democratization of male mating not seen among any other mammals.
The Church as the Church is not confused with the civil government which is considered a lesser but important form of social agreement. The men in the Church are taught they have a civic obligation to defend the common life of their tribe, island community or country. The Christian knight and the Catholic soldier are the embodied personalities of this teaching. The priests are a protective brotherhood for the sacred things. The laymen join with other men of the island or nation who are not Catholics in a similar fraternal bond to form the protective bond of “citizenship.” This protective wall of the city creates a space for the priestly temple in which the ultimate battle against Evil is ritually waged on the sacred mountain of liturgical life.
The central orienting axis of the community is the weekly worship of the Father God. This focusing event points the entire community to the East where the sky is always new because of the unidirectional daily turn of the earth. Oriented in space, the community then engages in a dialogical act of “speech thinking” {4} which serves to relate them in time to person and purpose. Though living on a tiny island, the community orders their personal relationships in terms of a much larger previously ordered web of relationships which embed this particular local church in the story of the world they call “Salvation History”. The bishop is the principal narrator of the received story of the group and the principal celebrant of its prescribed liturgical action. The bishop is not allowed to add or detract from the central creed which is recited word for word at the weekly liturgy. His role as narrator of the story is to apply its lessons while safeguarding the core message of the “good news” which is considered definitively given. The brotherhood (called priests) celebrate with him on the altar where the unordained are not allowed. In the bishop’s absence, a priest acts his role in the liturgy. Priests also hear the confessions of the people who enter a screened area, tell their transgressions, resolve to sin no more, are given some kind of restitutive penance and then are absolved and cleansed to once again partake in the ritual meal.
The central narrative which explains both nature and history is a blending of an eternal loving communion in the midst of a bloody vicious contest. Both the basic truth about reality and the manner in which the truth is transmitted is radically interpersonal and dialogical. God the Father has lived eternally (which means outside of time—no beginning and no end) in communion with the Son and the Holy Spirit. These are three persons who share a single nature and are known as both one God and the Trinity. They are bound together in freedom and love and opened their love relationship to create immaterial beings known as angels. Some of the angels rebelled (these Spirit Beings are known as Satan or Lucifer and his demonic fallen angels). They were cast from Heaven which more than a place is a loving relationship of the Trinitarian God and the faithful angels led by Michael.
Here the young anthropologist is confronted with every college boy’s problem with religion. This talk of angels especially with names, especially with definitive personalities irrevocably dedicated to good or evil --- the plausibility of the tale seems here to lose its grip. So we return him to the classroom for a conversation in the spirit of Durkheim and Douglas – to consider for now the system from the inside but testing it against what we know about the physical universe.
The Catholic scholar notices the modern atheist who sees no contradiction in asserting there are millions of individual forms of intelligent life in other solar systems while dismissing as supernatural fantasy an immaterial form of angelic life engaged in our own biosystem. With no bias against immaterial Being or moral significance, Catholic culture seems a simpler (more parsimonious as scientific theoreticians like to say), richer and yes, more adaptive cosmology.
It was in the midst of a great battle between living but immaterial beings that the physical universe appeared some 13.7 billion years ago. The separation of the four fundamental forces in a high temperature event cast most of matter into an ever expanding oblivion (in some mysterious way a portion of this may well become the lonely material prisons of the fallen angels and the isolated realms of those asleep in the death of what Catholics call “Hell”-a separation from the communion of life and love with God.) The explosive material event which began as a great singularity of order and then tended toward disorder and entropy is not considered by Catholics the beginning of Creation for the first created beings are the immaterial beings known as the angels. Catholic thinking is grounded in material realities but is not limited to the material universe as we see it. The Big Bang poses no problems for Catholics (in fact this singular manifestation of matter was championed by a Jesuit priest, Father Georges Lemaitre,(1894-1966). He was doubted by Einstein who objected specifically because such an explanation of the beginning of the material universe sounded too much like Genesis. The theory was ridiculed by Frank Hoyle the Berkeley astronomer who coined the “big bang” as a term of derision.) Catholic cosmology is like speculative quantum theories in that it clearly understands that the matter we see is not all that there is. It is less speculative however because it is grounded in the realism of analogical language. It is more parsimonious because it posits a singular kind of causality and approaches the universe as a unified truth which can be known. The Catholic framework entails fewer but much richer categories integrating such real phenomena as love, morality, personhood and purpose in a narrative of the deadly struggle for life.
In the Catholic worldview the material universe appeared in the midst of a great moral conflict and its overriding purpose cannot be understood apart from that struggle of life vs death. (If some anthropologists have trouble with notions of a struggle between Good and Evil than little will be lost in understanding the conflict in the more traditional biblical language of Life vs Death. Certainly no good Darwinian should be troubled by this presentation of categories and no physicist would be so anthropomorphic to deny such a struggle for life might very well precede the appearance of humans in the last million years or cellular life four billion years ago.)
Election and the Anthropomorphic Principle
The God of the Catholics is no disinterested agent. Like you, me, tadpoles and lions, He is a living Being. When others hem and haw about the multiple improbable events which must occur for the planet earth to be so singularly suited for human life, the Catholics with the Jews (from whence they come) share a strong sensibility of an election-- a setting aside of an environment for life. Darwin thought that a breath or two was needed from God before natural selection could do the rest of the work in shaping life. Catholics combine their own deep liturgical sensibility with findings in chemistry and physics of the last half century to argue the plausibility that not only life but the physical setting of life has been set aside by God. This kind of election of the material setting for the earth’s biosphere amidst the rest of matter moving toward disorder and cold is ubiquitous in the biblical narrative. (Levenson,1988) The garden set apart from the rest of the earth, the ark amidst the 40 day rainfall, the many mountaintops of encounter between God and man, the setting aside of the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple in Jerusalem and the election of the Jews as a chosen people. This deep sensibility of being set apart from the rest of matter in a special way is reinforced by the liturgical nature of Catholic culture. The altar is set higher and apart from the regular ground. The celibacy of the priesthood is a kind of setting apart. Baptismal water, Holy Chrism(a highly reduced hydrocarbon) and consecrated bread and wine are set apart in service of the sacramental order which organizes the life cycle of every Catholic from birth to death. The initiation rite is a baptism to set aside the new Christian from the confusion and slavery of profane existence. This day to day experience in Catholic culture that some days, some spaces, and some men are set aside for a sacred encounter render the puzzle of the “rare earth” no such puzzle at all. It too (in some mysterious but definitive way) has been set apart. This is precisely the way anthropologist Mary Douglas explains liturgical practices—they provide a lived out dramatic ritualistic “ accounting of reality”. The Church who sets aside space and time to encounter God understands that God set aside a space in time for man to develop as a creature able to know and love. There are many puzzles in natural history and physical science that the Catholic learner shares with the honest atheist scientist. The hundreds of coincidences needed for us to be here noticing our peculiar good fortune is not one of those puzzles. What atheist Fred Hoyle said with a cynical shrug we say with praise and thanksgiving—“it looks like a put up job”. It is a dramatic example of the parsimony of a shared Catholic culture which not only answers multiple questions with a singular explanation but initiates a different way to relate to the truth of things. It is highly consonant with the personal epistemology of the scientific imagination (Polanyi,1958) not the make believe ideology that lab experiments are the singular portal to scientific knowledge.
Understanding that humans are not the highest form of personal life and that the universe’s ultimate cause has a personal character evokes a response from man which is other than reaching for a dissecting microscope. If at the heart of reality is a communion of persons then our deepest response to reality cannot be devising a verifiable experiment but seeking an authentic way to either love or battle with this being. Life does not call forth experiment but dialogue(Buber,1937). To know a personal being fully entails love and to love an Authoritative Personality means to thank and seek to obey. The anthropologist observing the man at prayer or the community at common worship sees not a people in search of answers but a community living a definitive response to the order of things. The man at worship is always seeking to better know the will of God as well as discover the multiple “secondary causes” explaining natural history and physical science. His act of worship however is not an act of questioning. Worship in itself is an act of deeply affirming a truth already found.
Worshiping God is knowing Him in a deep and participative way that eludes microscopy but is quite similar to the biblical phrase which describes how a man “knows” his wife. The Catholic view of reality ties knowing (the Latin root of “science” is to know) to both love and contest. As man discovers the truth about existence he finds a hierarchy of beings and reality to which he responds. If a man really knows a predator, he will flee or hide from it or fight. If man knows his woman he will love and reproduce. If man knows God he comes to worship, thank and obey Him. Reality is complex and multifaceted. Catholic culture provides a rich glossary of responses to this great Chain of Being. Talk about adapting to reality!
In the Christian narrative, the earth is set aside for life and man. When he finally appears as the culmination of material life forms, man is deceived by the satanic angel and rebels against God. Man then as we meet him in our recorded history is a creature fallen. Once he was more than what he is now. Fallen man is a brutal man. If he obliterated the Neanderthal creatures (who themselves might be fallen men) and drove the mammoths into extinction this is no surprise to the Catholic historian.
But what was a surprise was what Christians call the “good news”. The Living God intervened to set aside the Jews as his people and from the Jews a virgin was elected to bear the man-God. This woman Mary is greatly honored wherever Catholic culture flourishes. She is considered the ideal woman and every Catholic man must make some space in his heart to honor all women who remind us of the Marian form. She is the iconic personification of the temple for the Spirit. The long developmental march of the female form in both plants and animals has prepared the way for her flowering---the interiorization of the female from the development of the plant pistil to internal fertilization, long gestation, hidden ovulation, extended interpersonal nurturing and the capacity to “ponder these things in her heart”—all lead to the Virgin who was to be the Mother of God. Jesus was born of Mary after she consented to conception by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, the third person of the Trinity. Jesus lived as a traditional Jew until his adulthood when at age 30 he began his public life. He drew Twelve Jewish men (the “men of Galilee”) into an apostolic body headed by Peter. On the night before he died he cleansed them by washing their feet (this prompted the departure of the traitor Judas). He initiated them into a blood covenant of the priesthood which entailed a promise that they too would shed their blood for him and that they would feed initiated Christians with the Bread of Life—Christ’s own Body changed in substance but not appearances at every Catholic Mass.
That evening (remembered on the Thursday before Easter every year as Holy Thursday) the apostles ran from Christ’s side as he was arrested and crucified the next day on Good Friday. The following Sunday He rose from the dead (on the first Easter) and appeared to a woman follower and then the apostles. He stayed with them forty days and then ascended to be with his Father in heaven. Ten days later he sent the Holy Spirit to the Apostles hiding in an upper room. The Holy Spirit filled them with courageous zeal and they went forth to preach the good news of Christ. The men of Galilee who had watched Jesus ascend into heaven now stood together in the middle of Jerusalem’s public square and through the voice of Peter they began proclaiming the wondrous deed that had been done. They addressed themselves in public on that first Pentecost to the “viri Judaeorum” the men of Jerusalem. Three thousand were baptized on that day of courage. Most of the apostles were eventually martyred for their witness. All of them attested to the truth of Christ’s resurrection and all said He would come again. They had power to heal and cast out the evil demons from people. The anticipated Second Coming of Christ would be marked by a great struggle and a final casting out of Satan, his angels and human followers from any dominion over the earth. At the weekly liturgy, Catholics reenact Christ’s last days and his death. The priest drinks the wine promising he too will shed his blood for the people. The people if they are in a state of grace (sharing in God’s life by being baptized and not being in a state of serious sin) receive the bread which is the Body of Christ allowing them to know him in an even more intimate way than reading about him or praying. At the Mass the priest and people participate in a deep communion with the three Divine persons of the Trinity. They pray for the whole world that all men might come to know Christ and see clearly the many deceits of a world ignorant or hostile to the main characters of the Divine drama.
Most groups which produce “social capital” by internal bonding have a diffident if not hostile approach to members outside the group. The Christian gospel orders that the hungry be fed and the thirsty given drink at the risk of damnation for the ungenerous Christian. The Catholics are told to love—love God and love your neighbor (and the neighbor is defined in the parable of the good Samaritan as an unknown victim of street crime.) That is what the social capital theorists call strong internal social bonding and thick external social bridging. (Putnam, 2000). It is what Catholics call an anthropology of accord or “the two great commandments”.
The whole community is trained to focus on the bishop as the living embodiment of the apostles who were with Christ. He forms his priestly brotherhood around him to maintain the narrative of Christianity through the ages. This is done by keeping Catholic time through feast days and liturgical seasons that tell and retell the story of salvation history and the good news of Christ. The people are gathered in “protective vigilance” awaiting his second coming while being on guard against the enemies of the group and life.
The well read anthropologist immediately recognizes this “attention structure” from the final chapters of EO Wilson’s Sociobiology and the original work of M. Chance. The theory of attention structure in higher primates explains the hierarchal disproportion of attention and cue setting paid to the highest status males. This allows group cohesiveness in the face of the continual threat of predators especially when the favored group response is group defense by all males. (Emory,1981) In forest settings every monkey for herself whether running or hiding did not necessitate this centripetal protective attention structure so necessary for collective group action. Savannah primates and wolf packs are hints of the male cooperative group. What is merely hinted at among animals (the actual record for male group defense among animals is pretty dismal) is a distinguishing characteristic of humans. The Roman phalanx, the Greek Hoplite formation, the Samurai code and the Germanic warrior blood oath are all formations of male covenants honoring loyalty and courage to the internal group in the face of danger. {This sociobiological insight of the social role of the male gender in humans is not part of the public domain because of the censorious effects of the systematic implanting of feminist ideology chips in the brains of male academics. It is however the daily praxis of Catholic liturgical and hierarchical life}
In a complementary vein certain comparative primatologists see the capacity of the human mother to pass on shared attention and internal identification as a fundamental human characteristic which allows the sophisticated social learning needed for human culture and cognition (Tomasello, 1999). Human nature then is identified with the unique attentive and imitative capacities of the infant/child learned at the mother’s breast and the group’s centripetal capacity for shared attentiveness to a male leader. The Catholics far from condemning the natural law of protective duty are formed as an ecclesial community by a brotherhood obedient to the Father and a cult of motherhood. The Church herself is called our Mother but her internal structure is built on an adult male relationship so she also identifies herself as Apostolic.
For males the obedience to God the Father extends to a willingness to sacrifice one’s own kin (the sacrifice of Isaac). God the Father gave up his only Son so His Son might cross into death (the dominion of Satan) and “descend into hell” after his crucifixion to end the Devil’s reign. The celibacy of priests is a kind of sacrifice of one’s son for the Father. Except in early Rome when military service and sacrifice to gods were linked, the Catholic Church has encouraged young men to aid in the defense of whatever homeland they belonged to. This is part of communal life and Christian manhood. The Church has accepted that there are two swords and the sword of the state requires the hand of her citizens. Military duty is considered a legitimate rendering unto Caesar. The priests, bishops and pope are generally to be exempt from any national wars but will not be so spared in the final battle. They are actually meant to take the first bullets. The first priesthood was founded on an act of communal execution: capital punishment inflicted by Levites on the men of Israel who worshiped a golden calf when Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments. Again we see the protective and practical nature of the Catholic code written into the central narrative, the weekly liturgy and the yearly calendar. The celebration of masculine sacrifice (honoring Christ’s death for humanity as the central event in human history) and the celebration of both virginity and motherhood in the cult of Mary provides the Catholics with the personalities of protection, fertility, and fidelity needed for cross generational communities of mutual aid. In direct opposition to the Freudian myth of the killing of the father or the patricidal founding myths of the Greek gods, the Christian narrative cultivates obedience and piety as the proper relationship to God in heaven and the father and mother of the family on earth.{2} In this it is mindful of the linking of cosmological order and proper human relations in the ordered piety of Chinese tradition taught by Confucius. For Catholics its profound resonance is with a communal hierarchy which defines the Trinitarian structure of reality.
The role of patterned public gatherings of Catholics in ritual remembrance, communion and anticipation is essential to the culture. Whether a small and hidden gathering in a hostile state or a growing public mass in a fractured society---the public gatherings are a time to express what Confucians called li—being in the proper place at the proper time in the proper way enacting the proper action. The communal gathering is also analogous to the collective sensing of social position known in bacteria as quorum sensing. Colonies of bacterium will act in certain ways only with the “knowledge” of a certain critical mass of fellow bacteria—“quorum sensing”. The Jews could only start a synagogue if a quorum of adult men (a minyan) were present. Christ did not leave his oral message and the testimony of eyewitnesses to isolated individuals. He established “The Twelve” –a most pregnant numerical heft restoring all of Israel’s tribes in a new Kingdom. Likewise for Catholics, public worship is a testimony to God but also a social thermometer which enables the Christian community at prayer to assess how best we might act in the broader civic arena. It is not cynical or impure to understand that one’s stance and language in a given nation is quite dependent on the practical knowledge gained by the quorum sensing inherent in public worship. Indeed there is a Christian tradition that the Coming of the messiah will happen only when a critical number of righteous worshipers balance the fallen angels and an analogous Jewish teaching that if a quorum would simply properly keep the Sabbath, the Messiah would respond to this sweet and proper summons. These are cosmic notions of religious li. They constitute necessary mechanisms for optimal group assessment of proper defensive and offensive actions toward hostile social forces aimed against” the favored race” who has learned this new communal adaptive behavior.
It is a dangerous world out there. We must be tied to each other in a great web of trust. We must love each other and not steal from one another or lie to or kill each other. We must cooperate with the Giver of Life and be open to many offspring. We must be faithful and sacrificial in our marriages which are meant to educate our children in the Way of life. We must be drawn together in communal vigilant protection aware of the constant predator and in preparation for the good King. We do this in every local community from Africa to the Americas as a diocese under a bishop. The bishops meet together under the pope to keep our narrative, our prayers and
our honor code in unison so we are capable of great collective acts. The pope and the bishops keep correcting each other to draw men more deeply into the example of the sacrificial Christ—for these men must lead until He comes again and their leadership must be continually reforming itself by the cultivation and imitation of the lives of saints. For there will come a time that it will take more than human ingenuity and cooperation to continue the culture of life. Thus the deepest love relationship which defines the church is not in the fecundity of marriage but the filial obedience of the Son to the Father and the brotherhood of friends he ordered that night before he died to love one another as the Father loved him. This priestly love constitutes a vivifying power even greater than procreation. This priestly love is a physical community of persons signifying the ultimate reality of the Trinity’s Love. At the same time this fraternity of sons act for the Church and humanity incorporating us in a single Body of Christ. This adaptation of a singular form for an entire species (the ultimate in cultural convergence) is the unique human strategy setting it quite apart from the great diversity organisms like insects who seem to respond to every new tropical shade cover by breaking off to form a new species.
By participating in the converging love of the Body of Christ, others can be incorporated and saved from the inevitable death all humanity faces if we settle for the material paradigm. It is love-- this new thing and yet this very common experience of such great joy--which draws us to the vocabulary of life eternal. Did we think our great loves had no connection to the fundamental structure of reality and our final destiny? Love is the ultimate reality--- not simply a pleasant accident of pheromones and adrenalin. But love comes at a great cost because love was once rejected and the universe was torn asunder. We must be ready than for a great battle and the final restoration of a higher form of union capable of permanently sustaining life in this hostile and cold universe. To be prepared. To be vigilant. To be focused in a communal manner ready to fight against death while fostering life. To accept the always reforming shape of hierarchal patriarchy while looking for the final coming of the true alpha male. This is the culture of Life and Love. This is the dynamic orthodoxy of Catholic culture.
David Pence, of Mankato, is a physician and teacher.
~
This paper was written for an animal behavior class taught by a “selfish gene” advocate. The subject matter was allowed as an explanation of religion as adaptation but it was written with First Things in mind. If Christianity is the one true myth, it is also the one true successful adaptation to the fullness of reality.
1) In any peer reviewed scientific journal an author must disclose any relationships with the study subject so we should honor that convention also. Let me admit that I am fed by the subject, sustained at the core of my being by the subject and have in fact been promised future rewards for maintaining a filial posture to the subject.
2) The first three of the ten commandments order—a) undivided worship of God, b)a speech code forbidding using His name in vain and c) a communal temporal discipline establishing a Sabbath every seven days as a day free of work, dedicated to rest and worship. This applied to slaves as well as free men and has been called the first emancipation proclamation. The next seven commandments deal with relations among humans and the first of those commandments also established a posture of piety. Honor thy Father and thy Mother was a commandment directed at the adult males of the community.
3) Eschatology is a study of the last things and the final time but in religion it has more than a temporal significance in that how one conceives of the final end of man helps define the task and purpose of both individual and communal life.
4) This is a phrase of Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig(1886-1929). The social nature of language formation (Lev Vygotsky:1896-1934) and the role of oral group speech acts in defining communal identity(Walter Ong: 1912-2003) are rich intersecting deposits to be mined in some as yet unopened shaft where educational theorists learn from liturgical religious traditions. It is here that college professors will be reminded why the university campus and the oral face to face classroom will never be replaced by online courses. For it is only in authoritative dialogue which characterizes both revelation and teaching that we incorporate personal knowledge which allows us to know and love more deeply.
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1) In any peer reviewed scientific journal an author must disclose any relationships with the study subject so we should honor that convention also. Let me admit that I am fed by the subject, sustained at the core of my being by the subject and have in fact been promised future rewards for maintaining a filial posture to the subject.
2) The first three of the ten commandments order—a) undivided worship of God, b)a speech code forbidding using His name in vain and c) a communal temporal discipline establishing a Sabbath every seven days as a day free of work, dedicated to rest and worship. This applied to slaves as well as free men and has been called the first emancipation proclamation. The next seven commandments deal with relations among humans and the first of those commandments also established a posture of piety. Honor thy Father and thy Mother was a commandment directed at the adult males of the community.
3) Eschatology is a study of the last things and the final time but in religion it has more than a temporal significance in that how one conceives of the final end of man helps define the task and purpose of both individual and communal life.
4) This is a phrase of Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig(1886-1929). The social nature of language formation (Lev Vygotsky:1896-1934) and the role of oral group speech acts in defining communal identity(Walter Ong: 1912-2003) are rich intersecting deposits to be mined in some as yet unopened shaft where educational theorists learn from liturgical religious traditions. It is here that college professors will be reminded why the university campus and the oral face to face classroom will never be replaced by online courses. For it is only in authoritative dialogue which characterizes both revelation and teaching that we incorporate personal knowledge which allows us to know and love more deeply.
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