A Potpourri . . . To Be Is To Give, And Other Matters
By GEORGE A. KENDALL
The most fundamental question for all of is: What are we for? What is life about? What is selfhood about? Are we here to aggrandize ourselves with things like power, wealth, brilliance? Or are we here to give ourselves?
We think that by working to add to the self, we increase it, but in reality we shrink it as it turns inward on itself, becoming a kind of black hole approximating more and more to an infinitesimal point, closely approaching nothingness.
But paradoxically, when we regard the self as a gift given to us only so that we may in turn give it, we receive it back with increase. What we need to understand is that the gift is the fundamental reality here. Everything we have and are is a gift, given to be given and not really complete until it is given. That is what all community is about — people giving themselves to one another and receiving the gift from others, and growing richer in the spirit as they do so.
This is the basis for the Church’s distinction between the amor Dei, the love of God, and the amor sui, the love of self. To be is to love. We are nothing but become something because God loves us in spite of our nothingness.
God gives Himself to us, and that gift elicits our love for Him and for His creation, especially for our neighbor. To be, to be something and not nothing, is to share in God’s being, and that is love. When God loves us, He calls us out of nothingness into somethingness by giving Himself to us and calling us to give ourselves in return, and in doing so we become something.
The Greek Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas says that God is the eternal act of self-giving love. St. Thomas says He is the pure act of existence. If they are both right, then to be is to love. All creatures are made to participate in this eternal act of love in proportion to their particular nature. There is no other way to be.
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The elites who are so busy these days trying to overthrow the Ten Commandments like to portray Catholic moral teaching as motivated by a hatred of the body. As so often happens when they try to interpret what is going on in the world, they are turning things upside down.
The truth is, it is precisely the hatred of the body which is behind the attack on Christian morality today, especially Christian sexual morality. The anti-Christian movements which are so powerful today and which may eventually achieve total power if they are not stopped, are grounded in Gnosticism and its rejection of the material world.
Gnostics see us as in our essence purely spiritual beings with no essential connection to the material world, though the modern versions tend to replace purely spiritual beings with autonomous individuals who need to assert their autonomy with no conditioning by matter.
This is mostly what existentialism is about. They think in terms of a pure, unlimited self which needs to be freed from all limitation by matter, and especially from limitation by the body — a self which actually creates itself. Hence they want a morality which is disconnected from anything they would consider “merely biological.”
Practically speaking, that means there is something that can be considered the genuine human person, and it is not affected one way or another by what the body does. So you cannot expect that “person” to be bound by the structure of the body. The body may be anatomically a man or a woman, designed for relations with the opposite sex, but that doesn’t really matter, because it is the sovereign “person” that decides whether it is a man or a woman, or perhaps gets the body carved up into a crude approximation of the shape of the opposite sex.
The body is accidental, and is basically an obstacle to the self-realization of the person. We may do whatever we like with it, even destroy it if the sovereign self so decrees.
For Christians, a human being is a composite being, an incarnate spirit, and any act of that being is an act of the whole being, the composite, not just an act of one of the components. We can’t have purely spiritual acts which don’t involve the body, or purely bodily acts which don’t involve the spirit. Anyone who thinks otherwise hates the body.
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I’m beginning to suspect that the things we are learning about DNA are going to end by upsetting the apple cart known as Darwinian evolution. Darwinism, in which I am including the contemporary updating known as neo-Darwinism, attributes changes in species to the occurrence of random mutations, some of which are favorable to the continued existence of the individual organism and the species, hence are passed on to future generations, and end up being preserved in the species.
But we know things now that don’t fit well into this picture. For one thing, a significant change in an organism usually requires simultaneous changes in a number of genes within the DNA molecule — a compound event far less likely to occur than the simple modification of one gene. In addition, some of the genes in a DNA molecule are switched off and do not affect genetic expression, while others are switched on and do affect genetic expression.
There is a lot of uncertainty about what causes some genes to be switched on or some to be switched off, but there is reason now to suspect that DNA itself adapts in response to what happens to an organism or what the organism needs to adapt to its environment.
I once watched a documentary about dogs which tried to explain how there can be so many breeds of dogs so different from each other — all the way from St. Bernard’s to Chihuahuas, for instance. This is commonly attributed to selective breeding, yet the narrator pointed out that dogs have any number of characteristics, such as floppy ears, that are never found in wolves, from which they are believed to be descended, and you can’t select for a trait that is not found in nature.
The narrator’s answer was that dogs are by nature social animals. In a pack, they tend to try to please the biggest and strongest member (the alpha male). When they are with humans, they want to please us. Hence they adapt to our needs and expectations.
So if the humans they are with want dogs to herd sheep, they begin, over generations, to acquire the characteristics and skills of sheepdogs. This, in the narrator’s view, is accomplished by a process of switching genes on and off in a way that produces the characteristic pattern of sheepdog traits and behaviors.
Some implications: First, we are talking, not about genetic mutations, if that means changes in the structure of genes, but about changes (mutations, if you like) in genetic expression. Somehow, when a species has to deal with changes in its needs, the DNA can respond by changing the on or off pattern of its genes but not the genes themselves, to bring about changes in genetic expression which are heritable (what sort of mechanism is involved is something I wouldn’t venture to speculate on).
That means that the changes that modify a species are not random at all, but related to the needs of the species and hence purposive. It is as if the DNA is a program which can modify itself (change its settings?) in response to changes in the situation. Underlying and transcending the individuals and generations of the species, this program goes on and on and keeps looking for better solutions to the problems of living, solutions which require changes in its programming which can lead the species to change so much as to become a new species.
I seriously doubt that the simplistic model provided by Darwinism (and neo-Darwinism) can contribute much to understanding this process, which strikes me as mysterious, to say the least. Could a reality from beyond be guiding it?
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(© 2016 George A. Kendall)
