Signs of Sacrificial Solidarity

"Hacking as an act of faith" is a front page feature in today's Baltimore Sun. Reading between the lines, I find it brings out something I alluded to in my last post, Faiths of Our Fathers.

In that post I said:

One of the most fundamental aspects of our [human] nature is that we value our communal solidarities so highly.

When Catholics or Evangelicals, or secular humanists, or anyone else, bond into communities, there have to be some meaningful signs given by each member of communal solidarity, which generally amount to the making of some sort of personal sacrifice on behalf of the community.

Personal sacrifices on behalf of one's community, made as meaningful signs of solidarity, play a noticeable role in the Sun article, which is about how a legendary computer hacker managed to turn what many would say is a force for evil into a force for good.


Johnny Long, known online as just "j0hnny," with a zero, not an "O," had a split life. He was a lifelong Christian who nonetheless dismissed fellow Christians as "culturally and socially inept." And he was a hacker: someone who devotes himself to figuring out how to defeat security schemes and break into computer systems.

Long thought he'd hit the heights when he was invited to address the famous DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas in 2003. Yet, though his speech went fine, the adulation he received from his fellow black-shirted hackers left him feeling ... nothing at all, just empty inside.

Even though Long is married with kids — "he's also funny, self-effacing and a hands-on dad to his three kids. He takes in stray cats, houses a Korean exchange student, mentors dozens and wants to be a ninja (he has a brown belt in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu)," says the article — something was missing: meaning.

After stewing about the emptiness he felt, about the apparent meaningless of his life, he took action.

The first thing he did was to make it crystal clear to others in his hacker community that he is (surprise!) a professing Christian.

The reaction to that surprised him: a big collective yawn. No one seemed to care one way or the other about his religious convictions.


Meanwhile, his hacker career began to hit the stratosphere:

Within a month, a publisher had called and asked Johnny to write a book (Volume 1 of Google Hacking for Penetration Testers was published in 2005, and Volume 2 hit the shelves last year). That led to a dozen more book projects.

He became a talking head on CNN, MSNBC and CNET. Within a year, there were more than 80,000 users registered on his site — johnny.ihackstuff.com — up from 500.

Here's where it gets interesting. Long was still without a sense of purpose in his life when he went with his wife Jen to Uganda, "a small country obliterated by AIDS," on a church-sponsored trip to do missionary work. There, the AIDS Orphans Education Trust, or AOET, put him to work turning discarded computer parts into a functioning online network that was sorely needed by the charity, an organization that treats and educates AIDS orphans.

Long was, actually, miffed about this. He had envisioned "romantic notions of [doing] manual labor. He wanted to work side-by-side with his wife and feel the nightly satisfaction of aching muscles and a hard day's work." Leveraging his computer expertise wasn't his first choice.

Even so, it turned out, "for a while, [the success of his cobbled together network] was enough for Johnny. He'd done something, he'd made a difference, he'd put his skills to work in a way he never had before. And he was feeling pretty good."


Once home, though, he found the feeling was fading.

At home, he started pining, then thinking. How could he get that feeling back, but from here?

Then he struck on it: He would hack charities.

Through a web site, www.hackersforcharity.org, he would "get hackers from around the world to volunteer their time and used gear to various charities that seriously need technical help, whether it's through securing their sites or finding ways to pair children with sponsors online, like Johnny is working on for AOET."


Here's what I find really interesting about Johnny's story, though. When Johnny and Jen Long wanted to go to Uganda — it was the first time for Johnny; Jen had been there before — they didn't have enough money to finance the trip. This was just after Johnny had "come out" to his fellow hackers as a Christian, and they had generally been nonplussed. Then ...

Johnny wrote a letter about his desire to go to Uganda and ... sent it to The Hacker Foundation, an organization that connects technology projects with the resources needed to get them off the ground.

His missive was immediately posted online and asked its readers to "forego that triple-venti white chocolate mocha, and send [Johnny and Jen] a few bucks instead." Roughly 24 hours later, $4,800 had been raised — $600 more than they needed for the trip.

And so, in May of this year, Johnny, Jen and a half dozen others from the church set out for the Jinja district of Uganda ... .

As soon as Johnny gave members of his hacker community a way to make personal sacrifices in order to show solidarity with him, the community pricked up its ears!


Maybe giving up a triple-venti white chocolate mocha wasn't a big sacrifice, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that, in coming to Johnny's aid, several thousand hackers were proving how powerful the spirit of shared sacrifice can be in cementing a community in their mutual search for good works that can be effected in the world.

So it becomes clear to me why Johnny Long's "coming out" as a Christian at first provoked such a massive yawn: there was no way his fellow hackers, most of whom were presumably not practicing Christians, could show solidarity with him through personal sacrifices they could envision themselves making.

Only when Johnny figured out how to ask for visible signs of sacrificial solidarity from them did his Christian orientation begin to "work" for them. And, though they weren't themselves Christian, they responded.


I'm beginning to believe that signs of sacrificial solidarity lie at the heart of all human community and at the heart of my (Catholic-Christian) religion. I believe they lie at the heart of the latter because they lie at the heart of the former.

• Remember, the whole Christian belief system revolves around Christ's cross, on which Jesus of Nazareth made the perfect and ultimate sacrifice: he died once, scourged and in shame before his own community, so that all of humankind could live forever.

• Remember, the Holy Communion which is the high point of every Catholic Mass celebrates and even recapitulates Jesus's sacrifice. As the bread and wine of communion become Christ's body and blood, we recollect how and why he died for us, and then we consume that consecrated body and blood for our spiritual nourishment.

Just before the rite of Holy Eucharist begins, it is no coincidence that we Catholics put money in the collection plate, in a way that makes it clear that we are making our own signs of sacrificial solidarity: we publicly give up some of the money which nominally sustains our lives. There'll be one less triple-venti white chocolate mocha for us because we put a dollar or two in the plate.

• Remember, in my last post I talked about how the sign of sacrificial solidarity made by a soldier who takes up arms against an enemy on behalf of his or her country and possibly has to kill an enemy combatant. What is being sacrificed here is much more than a chocolate mocha: a soldier's very innocence (if not life or limb).

The principle is the same, though, even if the stakes are higher. Communal solidarity, even at a national level, demands personal sacrifices. These personal sacrifices, whether tangible or intangible, are vouchsafed by visible signs made before the eyes of the community. The soldier's uniform is just such a tangible sign of an intangible sacrifice.

When those who are not in the military and aren't making personal sacrifices put yellow ribbons on their car bumpers in support of the troops, they are doing what little they can to join in the shared sacrifice.

I think signs of sacrificial solidarity, whether they are in a religious context or a secular one, come close to defining what is truly special about human nature.

Faiths of Our Fathers

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, continues to interest me. It argues that Catholics such as I should be open to a pro-choice position concerning abortion because the church, prior to the seventeenth century, objected to early-stage abortions only because they were said by St. Augustine and others to pervert the only non-sinful use of sex: procreation by married couples.

St. Augustine and, later, St. Thomas Aquinas, held that a fetus could have no truly human soul until the later stages of pregnancy, when it was fully formed.

When scientific inquiry in Europe ramped up during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientists at first incorrectly found reason to think the embryo was, contrary to Augustine and Aquinas, fully formed from the moment of conception — just very, very tiny. Ergo, it could have a God-given soul after all, and early-stage abortions were wrong.

Since that time, two key things have happened. The sexual mores of Catholics have changed, and procreation is no longer seen as the only legitimate function of sex. The intensification of conjugal love and even the taking of physical pleasure in the sex act are now seen as legitimate uses of sexuality.

Sex can be appropriate today, many Catholics believe, as long as there is "mutual agapic respect" between consenting adults. Agape, a Greek word for love, is synonymous with Christian love. As long as erotic love is subsumed within agape or Christian love, Dombrowski and Deltete argue, it is not necessarily sinful — even if the adult partners are not married or are of the same sex.

Also, science has rectified its original supposition that the tiniest embryo is a fully formed, potentially soul-bearing "homunculus." We now know (for example) that the ability of the fetus to undergo experiences — e.g., to suffer — begins only when the cerebral cortex has been fully "wired up," which happens no earlier than the 24th week of fetal development. It looks as if Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were right about "delayed hominization" after all.

Dombrowski and Deltete argue that today's liberalized sexual mores and the latest evidence concerning fetal development combine to offer us Catholics a reasonable way to support a woman's "right to choose."


Dombrowski and Deltete go on to argue, in their chapter on "Catholicism and Liberalism," in favor of what they term a "liberal" form of societal governance. To them, "liberal" governance is what makes for political and social "justice," a state of affairs which I think boils down to an active appreciation by all in the society of pluralism. Though we all tend to identify with communities having "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" (see pp. 106ff.), we all are supposed to see that "the only way to have one 'comprehensive' view reign supreme over others is to force it down people's throats ... " (p. 107).

As an example of a "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral view," take Catholicism. As another, take Evangelical Protestantism. Yet another might be "secular humanism," an outlook of which many atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers are accused by Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. The list of comprehensive views is a long one. Each, according to Dombrowski and Deltete, ought to recognize that the path to mutual pluralistic "justice" runs through the setting aside of one's own party's "reasonable" positions concerning disputed matters, such as abortion rights, in recognition that other "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" can also claim to be reasonable ones.


That wholesale embrace of pluralistic "justice" is a taller order, I think, than Dombrowski and Deltete admit.

I think the reason has to do with human nature. One of the most fundamental aspects of our nature is that we value our communal solidarities so highly.

When Catholics or Evangelicals, or secular humanists, or anyone else, bond into communities, there have to be some meaningful signs given by each member of communal solidarity, which generally amount to the making of some sort of personal sacrifice on behalf of the community.

Not all signs of communal sacrifice need to be in any way illicit. That said, they can be and often are at least quasi-illicit.

Take, for example, the sign of sacrificial solidarity made by a soldier who takes up arms against an enemy. Killing is generally seen as a violation of one of God's commandments — or, for nonbelievers in God, of one of the basic principles of morality and ethics — yet when a soldier kills an enemy combatant, that's not seen as a sin. One reason for the exception is that the soldier's sacrifice of his personal innocence in wartime is an unmistakable sign of his solidarity with the nation as a whole.

Another, more debatable example might be that of a protester against abortions who kills an abortion doctor. As Dr. Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor shows, Wicklund as an abortion provider lived in constant fear of assassination at the hands of true believers who think abortion is murder.

Again, I think killers of abortion providers are sacrificing their personal innocence in order to give an unmistakable sign of their solidarity with other "right-thinking" folks.

Their actions are clearly (a) immoral and (b) irrational. But that's my point. Human nature so values signs of sacrificial solidarity with one's own party or group that considerations of rationality or even basic morality can easily get shunted aside.


We Catholics are far from immune. That's why I think Dombrowski and Deltete's arguments that Catholics ought to reevaluate their positions on abortion fall mostly on deaf ears. Many — dare I say most — Catholics today take it that, even if Dombrowski and Deltete are right from a strictly philosophical point of view, such a view is an intrinsically "deracinated" one.

"Deracinated" is a word Dombrowski and Deltete use often. Stances such as that of Dombrowski and Deltete that Catholic traditionalists and communitarians oppose, the traditionalists and communitarians call "deracinated" ones. To deracinate is to pull something up by its roots. Certain philosophical positions that have been advanced, traditionalists and communitarians complain, tend to pull Catholics right out of the soil of their tradition.

For example, many Catholics feel they are being deracinated by views such as that of Dombrowski and Deltete that make abortion seem less than absolutely wrong.

Consciously or not, such Catholics probably feel that entertaining a pro-choice stance constitutes a break with the faith of their fathers. ("Faith of Our Fathers" is a hymn we Catholics sing often in church. Every community organized around "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" could adopt the same hymn!)

Accordingly, if only as a sign of sacrificial solidarity, many Catholics consent to give up any personal, individual attempt to reason abstractly about the morality of abortion. Their assumption is that the church has done all the abstract reasoning that is required, and it is simply the duty of themselves as Catholics to follow their church's lead and oppose abortion.

Signs of sacrificial solidarity — ways of upholding the "faiths of our fathers" at some (possibly great) personal sacrifice to ourselves — mean so much to us that "deracinating" philosophical arguments like that of Dombrowski and Deltete don't often stand much of a chance.

The Great Thought Divide

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, is a must-read for Catholics such as myself who are locked into neither a pro-life position nor a pro-choice stance, but are honestly trying to decide whether abortions are in and of themselves sinful. Dombrowski and Deltete argue they are not.

There are two horns to their argument. Horn One: virtually no Catholics still believe, as St. Augustine did, that sexual sin is anything sex-related which fails to uphold procreation — not bodily pleasure, not even conjugal love — as the sole acceptable basis for sex between two marriage partners. That abortions make a mockery of the biblical procreation mandate ("Be fruitful and multiply") was the reason Augustine found abortions sinful, for he did not believe — and neither did St. Thomas Aquinas — that an embryo or fetus possesses either sentiency or a rational, God-given soul until some point late in pregnancy.

Horn Two: if "delayed hominization" — the position of Augustine and Thomas — is correct, then modern abortion foes who explicitly or implicitly assume there is "immediate hominization" — or a God-given soul which arrives on day one of pregnancy — are philosophically out of step with current medical science, which seems to affirm delayed hominization. To wit, we now know that it is only in the 24th through 32nd weeks of pregnancy that the central nervous system has developed to the point of being able to undergo any sort of experience. Being able to have conscious experience, including the ability to suffer, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of a rational soul, which is the fulfillment of human personhood.

So say Dombrowski and Deltete. I think they're right.


Unless, that is, there is reason to believe that a fully human "identity" simply exists at all points in the temporal career of the fetus, past, present, and future, being there from the instant of its conception through all of its embryonic and post-embryonic developmental stages; being present at its birth; then accompanying its life as an infant, as a child, and as an adult; and finally persisting to its death and beyond.

This view, which Dombrowski and Deltete explore, and the antithetical one which they prefer both bear upon the question of what time is. As Dombrowski and Deltete point out in their chapter on "The Importance of Temporal Asymmetry," there is and has long been a tendency among philosophers to believe that time is basically symmetrical.

If time is symmetrical, then it indeed makes sense to say that a newly fertilized egg cell already contains that immutable "substance" which gives it, now and forever, its unique "identity." Abortion is, on this view, wrong because it snuffs out that "substance," that "identity."

Philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz held in the 17th century, say Messrs. D. and D., that there is indeed an immutable "substance" in which inheres the constant "identity" of a person throughout life.

Time is therefore symmetrical, in Leibniz' view, because a person accumulates no added identity as time goes on. What is essential to a person's identity never changes.

The identity of any one person is, on this view, something like the subject of a sentence. It can accumulate more predicates over time, without itself being changed in any essential way.

Or, it is like a noun that can, over the course of time, have more and more adjectives attached to it, without having its core meaning altered in any fundamental way.


Dombrowski and Deltete disagree with Leibniz on this matter of time and identity. To them, we are what we have become. Our life is an ongoing process whose events, though they do not cancel the past, mean that a partially new and even unexpected identity emerges with each event that transpires in our lives. Each new identity is not strictly the same as any of our previous identities, though it subsumes all of them.

It is for this reason that Dombrowski and Deltete say that time is asymmetrical. The future for each of us is not set in stone, even as all of our past identities remain exactly what they always were.

As I said in this earlier series of posts, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine has written in The End of Certainty of scientific discoveries and insights that give him abundant reason to think science should abandon its longstanding conviction that time is symmetrical, and that our awareness of an "arrow of time" is but an illusion. If we think Prigogine is right, then I'd say it becomes easier to find Dombrowski and Deltete right as well.

But we are all somewhat heirs to the other type of thinking, the one which Leibniz upheld, which looks for an immutable, unchanging core of our (or anything's) existence. Such an immutable core of existence makes each of us in the present moment not different in any fundamental way than what we were in our (already determined) pasts and/or what we will be in our (equally predetermined) futures.

Einstein said, "God does not play dice." If indeed God were never a dice player, we could be assured that being, rather than becoming, is alone at the heart of who we are. If that is so, our future is somehow already written, and an omniscient God knows what it is.

But, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, this view of what divine omniscience supposedly is contradicts the traditional Catholic belief in free will, which denies that each of our fates, salvation-wise, is predestined.


It seems we have two dueling sets of ideas here, each set being a constellation of multiple notions that somehow "go together" and likewise somehow mutually contradict all the notions that make up the other constellation. One set of ideas elevates being over becoming, identity over process, constancy over change, omniscience over wait-and-see knowability, determinism over free will, destiny over potentiality. The other set of ideas flips the picture over and emphasizes the second of each of these matched pairs.

The first set of ideas seems to me (and I am not trained in philosophy) to be basically Platonic, while the other is basically Aristotelian. In the view of Dombrowski and Deltete, the Catholic Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were more Aristotelians than Platonists, while (I gather) people like Leibniz and René Descartes were more Platonists than Aristotelians.

Platonists believe that objects in the material world are fleeting, imperfect renditions of eternal ideas or forms. These forms are more real than anything tangible or physical. Christian Platonists think of the God-given soul as a real, eternal, indestructible thing; hence the soul is much like a Platonic form. At base, the soul's existence is independent of the physical body of the embryo or fetus that it is bestowed upon. Hence, God's act of bestowing the soul can be assumed to take place at the moment of conception.

Aristotelians (I gather) grant more reality to physical matter than do Platonists. There is no absolute divide between form and substance, mind and matter, etc., such that the one can exist without the other. Hence, it can make sense to believe that that which anything presently is can come about, at least in part, only through a process of becoming, and no part of that something's "identity" can be separated from the process by which that identity has been built up.


If I am right about this distinction — this Great Thought Divide — between Platonists and Aristotelians, then I imagine the late Ilya Prigogine was an Aristotelian (and Einstein was a Platonist).

And I, too, am an Aristotelian at heart, even if I sometimes catch myself thinking like a Platonist.

For too many years to count, I have been assiduously working out a worldview in which my belief as a Christian need not contradict my views as an (amateur) philosopher or (equally amateur) scientist. In my capacity as amateur philosopher-scientist, I have yearned to see how the Darwinian theory of evolution can be brought into accord with Christian belief, or vice versa. To make a long story short, I've come to embrace the extensions of Darwinism that the sciences of "complexity" have recently offered (see my Beyond Darwin blog).

According to the sciences of complexity, even chaos (defined mathematically and scientifically, of course) is of creative value in an unfolding cosmos. The "edge of chaos," where genesis is ongoing, is where evolution takes place.

Complex systems that evolve at the edge of chaos, and even chaotic systems per se, pass through "bifurcation points" where they opt for one possible future trajectory and bypass at least one other. In this earlier series of posts about Prigogine's book — a book which upholds the notion that all "dissipative systems" are intrinsically "complex systems" in the above sense — I suggested that God works minor miracles at the bifurcation points of such systems' developmental processes. With the "assent" (in some sense of the word) of the system itself, an evolutionary branch is taken which pleases God.

Yet God does not coerce assent at the time of what I am calling the mini-annunciation that he makes to the system, seeking its cooperation, nor does he know what the system will choose to do in advance.

Such an idea about mini-annunciations and mini-miracles, it seems to me, tips the philosophical scales toward the Aristotelian constellation of notions, and away from the Platonic. Time is asymmetrical, and the future is not somehow already latent in the past. The human person, likewise, is not somehow already "there" in the fertilized egg cell. The genesis of worldly being is not somehow "above" the process of evolutionary becoming. And God in his omniscience does not know everything that will someday happen.

Such an idea about mini-annunciations and mini-miracles as part of the ongoing process of creation, while it flies in the face of Platonic notions of genesis and ensoulment, does not make me un-Christian. It just puts me on the other side of the Great Thought Divide from a great many other Christians.

Flip-Flops on Abortion

If you go back and read my entire series of Abortion Rights posts to date — and please don't waste your time delving into them at any length — you can see that I've been flip-flopping on my support as a Christian for a woman's right to choose. At this point in my evolving attempt to confront the issue, I am pro-choice, but as recently as a year ago, I was anti-. Prior to that, I had once thought I'd found good reason to support women's abortion rights, while earlier still, I was against them. And so on and so on, as far back as I can remember.

Recent readings have, for now, changed my attitude yet again from pro-life to pro-choice. Among them:

• Garry Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities (see this, this, and this post)
  
• Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor (see In Defense of Abortion)
  
• A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete (see, again, In Defense of Abortion)

One of the main things that I have learned from Wills and also from Dombrowski and Deltete concerns embryology. The fact that medical science now knows more about how the fetus develops than ever before gives me good reason to believe that "ensoulment" — the conferring by God of an "intelligent" human soul of the type identified by Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas — happens only after the cells in the developing brain start to communicate with one another. That happens between the 24th and 32nd week of fetal development, meaning that a fetus in its first two trimesters of existence need not be considered a human person.

Sentiency — higher mental function of a human-specific sort — coincides with fetal viability, the infant-to-be's ability to survive outside the womb, which arrives during that same span of weeks. That fact is another clue that pre-viable fetuses don't have the moral status we accord to newborn infants.


In so saying, I repudiate ideas I expressed in, among other posts, The Future of Abortion. In that post I said a five-week-old embryo, but 10 millimeters in size, already has recognizable eyes, ears, organs, and appendages. It therefore presumably has the moral status of a human person.

That assumption, however, misses the fact that the cerebral cortex, though it exists early on in the budding embryo, has yet to be "wired up."

According to Dombrowski and Deltete, it is only during the third trimester that "neural pathways are connected through the thalamus to the neocortex (p. 45). The neocortex — the most recently evolved part of the cerebral cortex of the brain — is the part of the higher mammalian brain concerned with sight and hearing. Before it is "wired in," the fetus cannot form sensory knowledge about the stimuli it receives.

Prior to the 24th through 32nd week of gestation, according to Wills, the cerebral cortex's neurons are functionally isolated from one another, pending the development of tiny synaptic gaps between neurons for electrochemical signals to bridge and thereby propagate thoughts, feelings, cognitions, and perceptions within the higher brain.

From these reasons which flow from modern embryology, the authors conclude that fetuses do not yet have the moral status of a sentient human person.

Augustine and Aquinas lacked such sophisticated knowledge of embryonic development, but both of them likewise argued against the view that "hominization" — the conferring by God of an immortal human soul — coincides with fertilization of the woman's egg cell by the male's semen or sperm.

Hence, said Augustine, if an abortion is sinful, it is not because the soul "arrives" then and there, at the time of conception. It is sinful, rather, because it is one of several sorts of behavior that thwart or pervert what he believed to be the essential function of coitus: to procreate. Augustine went so far as to declare that any sort of pleasure derived from the marital act, even when procreation is also intended, is "lustful cruelty." Augustine was anti-sex, as we understand and experience sex today.

Aquinas, centuries later, was pretty much silent on Augustine's "perversity" argument against "lustful" sex and (consequently) against contraception and abortion. But Aquinas elaborated Augustine's notion of late fetal hominization into a scheme by which there was a "succession of souls" during the development of a fetus, only the last of which comes from God.


This "succession of souls" schema has never been formally repudiated by the Catholic Church, but since the 17th century a great many Catholic (and other) thinkers have informally set it aside in favor of a growing belief that an embryo at very early stages of development is well enough formed to receive a God-given soul. Early scientific investigations of embryonic development, using powerful magnifying glasses and the first microscopes, convinced scientists (wrongly) that the embryo (or the seed it comes from) is a "homunculus." That is, it is already a fully formed human being, albeit exceedingly tiny. All that happens during the nine months of gestation is that it gets bigger.

Accordingly, the soul began to be envisioned as a separate, fully formed entity that God attaches to the physical homunculus, perhaps as early as the moment of fertilization. Before the 17th century, though, Aquinas' view held sway. According to the Thomistic (after Thomas Aquinas) theory of "hylomorphism," the soul and body develop step by step, in tandem, during a woman's pregnancy. It is only at the last step of this developmental trajectory that the "intelligent" soul can pair with a sufficiently developed brain to yield a being whose life is thenceforth sacrosanct.

In my earlier Abortion Rights posts, I spent a lot of time trying to decide when sentience and self-awareness arrive in an embryo/fetus/newborn child. One reason I wavered so much on the subject was that I had never been made aware of of the Augustinian and Thomistic viewpoints, derived from Aristotle.

As Dombrowski and Deltete show, the "early hominization" position that fully emerged in the 19th century had its roots in the 17th century, when the homunculus notion became, briefly, gospel. This position, which informed the attitudes of the Catholic Church toward abortion in the centuries following the 17th, came to overshadow the Church's original Augustinian-Thomistic-Aristotelian view ... although, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, the Church never formally repudiated the Thomistic doctrine of the succession of souls.

It was then, in the 17th century when scientists temporarily believed in the homunculus theory, when Rene Descartes said "I think, therefore I am." That is, Descartes championed a Platonic notion of the soul as an entity basically higher than and separate from the body. The Greek philosopher Plato had held that "ideas" or "forms" exist on a higher plane than physical beings, which were imperfect representations of the forms. Descartes' notion of the thinking mind as the true locus of our existence, rather than the physical brain or body, was fundamentally Platonic.

We are all, myself included, prone to the Platonic-Cartesian view today. Yet up-to-date science leads us back toward the Aristotelian-Augustinian-Thomistic view, in which the fully formed physical body is a precondition of the existence of the rational soul. Today's embryology seems to show that a human fetus is not wholly formed, not capable of higher mental function, and not viable outside the womb until the third trimester of pregnancy.

In Defense of Abortion

Right now I am reading two excellent books on the subject of abortion. The first is Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor, the memoir of a doctor who has provided women with first-trimester abortions and other reproductive health services for over twenty years.

Wicklund came from a traditional, upper-Midwestern, rural background and was, judging by her family's history, unlikely to do anything so bold as go to medical school, much less, as a professional doctor, provide women with abortions. But when as a young woman she became pregnant, under circumstances that made it impossible to try to have and bring up a child, the abortion she had instead was an experience made needlessly traumatic by medical professionals who hadn't the vaguest idea of how to treat their patient as a worried, fearful fellow human being. Wicklund decided she needed to do something to keep that sort of thing from happening to other women in the future. She became an abortion doctor.

This was in the 1970s, in the wake of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that made state laws banning abortions unconstitutional. When Wicklund found her medical school loath to train her in abortion procedures, it was but a foretaste of how hostile the communities in which she would eventually practice, medium-sized cities scattered across the North Central United States, would be to women's newfound reproductive rights. Her story is as much about how much danger she was perennially placed in from menacing, if supposedly well-meaning, "pro-life" protesters — and occasionally from angry perpetrators of paternal incest — as it is about how she allayed the fears and anxieties of her patients, none of whose fetuses she would abort unless patient and doctor were both clear that it was what the patient really, truly wanted.

As I read through the episodes of Wicklund's professional and personal life — the latter being circumscribed by the need to cope with the ceaseless perils of the former — I am frankly ashamed of myself for having failed to recognize for so long just how evil are the intentions and actions of those who would kill abortion doctors (!) in order to prevent the supposed "murders" of "unborn children."

But could "pro-life" forces be somehow correct when they say embryos and fetuses are human persons whose lives are, inexplicably, more sacrosanct than that of an abortion doctor like Wicklund? Wicklund's book is not the place to explore such issues coolly and philosophically. For that, one needs to turn to ...



The second book I am presently reading, which is as detached and intellectual as Wicklund's book is personal and emotional. It is A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by two (Catholic, male) professors of philosophy at Seattle University, Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete.

This book examines the history of Catholic thought about abortion ... which in many ways is the history of Western thought on the subject, since two of the Christian West's philosophical pioneers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, wrote before the Reformation.

Prior to the 17th century and the rise of enlightened science, Western Christians looked to their forebears — Augustine, Aquinas, the other Church Fathers — for guidance on thorny issues such as when and whether abortions are anything but sinful, and when the new life in a woman's womb acquires the status of a human person.

As Dombrowski and Deltete set forth, neither Augustine nor Aquinas based their rejection of abortion on the notion that a just-begun embryo, or even an early-stage fetus, has yet been infused with a God-given soul. Ensoulment, they reasoned, happens later, in the final stages of pregnancy, when the fetus becomes what we would today call sentient. Before that, Aquinas said, the fetus has but a vegetative, nutrition-seeking soul, and later a sensing, questing, animal soul ... but not yet an "intellectual soul" of the sort conferred and cherished by God.

Aquinas' view echoed that of the much earlier St. Augustine. Augustine's notions on the "succession of souls" were not as elaborate or consistent as those of Aquinas, yet they nonetheless led to the same conclusion: that the soul whose extinguishing constitutes murder does not arrive until the later stages of pregnancy.


But, never mind. Augustine found another way to show that abortion was sin. Though he sidestepped the "ontological" argument, that the God-conferred soul exists from the time of conception on, he pretty much originated the "perversity" argument: that abortion blocks procreation and thus perverts the true purpose of sex and marriage.

In fact, it was St. Augustine's belief — one that hounds many of us to this day — that anything that admits the slightest glimmer of pleasure into the marital dealings of wives and husbands was an occasion for "lustful cruelty":

Married persons who have intercourse only (sola) for the wish to beget children do not sin, whereas those who mix pleasure with sex, even if sex with one's spouse, commit sin. A remarkable view! It must be granted that this sin is venial (i.e., venia or pardonable), but the mere fact that it is a sin at all should alert us to how negative Augustine's view of sex is. Even worse than intending pleasure in sex is to try to prevent pregnancy, say through an evil appliance (opere malo), or, we might add, through the "rhythm method." For Augustine those who use such contraceptive devices retain no vestige of true matrimony, which is synonymous with, not accidentally connected to, propagation. These people sometimes (aliquando) go so far as to have abortions in their lustful cruelty (libidinosa crudelitas). Since Augustine also accuses those who have merely used contraceptive devices of being cruel, we can be sure that it is not cruelty to a human person inside the womb that he is worried about. It is Augustine's own clever pen that makes this clear when he rephrases his accusation as cruel lust (libido crudelis). Lust itself (or even the desire for sexual pleasure) is cruel, whether or not a fetus is aborted. (p. 21)

Sexual mores have changed radically since Augustine's time, yet the Catholic Church still condemns using contraceptive devices. (The "rhythm method" is somehow excluded from latter-day condemnation, though by Augustine's own logic it, too, ought not to be permitted.) And the Church continues to call abortion sin.


However, since the 17th century the Church's continuing condemnation of abortion has moved prudently away from emphasizing the perversity argument, Dombrowski and Deltete show. Nowadays, the argument most heard as to why abortion is bad is an ontological one — the sort of argument Augustine and Aquinas expressly shunned.

When scientists first got hold of optical devices in the 1600s — the microscope, etc. — which let them peer at aborted embryos and fetuses with a high degree of magnification, they found human contours and organs begin to develop very early on. They quite naturally jumped to the conclusion that perhaps Augustine and Aquinas had been wrong: perhaps "hominization," the juncture at which a fetus becomes a human being, occurs at or precious near the very moment when sperm meets egg.

Hence, maybe all abortions kill a human person.

But wait. Today, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, our much more advanced science of embryology gives us reason to believe that Augustine and Aquinas were correct after all. Though tiny embryos quickly develop recognizable organs, including brains, the cells in the forming brain don't actually start to communicate with one another until the 25th through 32nd weeks of pregnancy.

Accordingly, what Messrs. D and D refer to as "sentiency" — sentience, self-awareness, higher cognitive function — are entirely missing in younger fetuses. And it is to the onset of sentiency that the authors say we may ascribe the advent of the "intelligent," or truly human, soul. That this is the time at which the fetus can first hope to survive outside the womb is further indication that abortions in the first or even the second trimester of pregnancy are not murder.