The brain and the soul

At the First Things weblog, R. R. Reno has an interesting discussion of Brain Science and the Soul. I enjoyed reading his argument, because he talks about the soul in the Aristotelian sense, which is the classical Catholic sense, and not in the Cartesian sense. If any of my readers don't know what that means, Reno explains that

St. Thomas drew on Aristotle’s philosophy to define the soul as the form of the body. The soul is the pattern or highway system that organizes our bodies, including, of course, our brains.

By contrast, the Cartesian view of the soul has been called the ghost in the machine. An excellent example of cultural bias, and the power of definitions, is that the Cartesian notion of a "soul" is what comes to most Americans' minds when they hear the word. It was a complete (and pleasant) surprise to me to learn the Thomist view in seminary, which like many things Thomist derives from the Aristotelian point of view.

The most interesting and plausible part of Reno's article is the review of the science. I worry that his speculative aspects carry him to far, but it's a weblog, so that's fair. I'll try to summarize the science, with my own added interpretations, trying not to be speculative.

We all know that the brain has to be trained to develop skills and behaviors. You can have all the inborn mathematical talent in the world, but if no one teaches you anything or trains you in the discipline, you won't find the proof to Goldbach's conjecture.* Scientists have now found concrete evidence the brain needs training even in the moral realm.

Past research has suggested that other primates, like chimpanzees, have an innate moral sense: when they see that one "worker" is rewarded more than the others, they refuse to work, as if they see the treatment as "unfair". Whether the chimpanzees really have a moral sense or are merely engaging in collective bargaining, the human moral sense develops by cutting off connections to a "primitive" part of the brain.

Subjects with a high degree of neural activity linking the brain stem to the frontal lobe tend to allow emotional responses to override rational assessments of moral dilemmas. Subjects make more rational decisions, he reports, when the neurological activity from the primitive part of the brain is blocked from interfering with the frontal lobe.

This sounds a lot as if people think more clearly about moral issues when they engage in repression of certain instincts. Whodathunk it? Lots of people, actually, which is probably why they call us "repressed". (At least, I've been called that a lot. A couple of girlfriends said I was so repressed that I qualified as "mentally ill.")

It gets better! The brain can be trained for a certain morality, but eventually appears to fix on a certain point of view:

Cohen then concludes that these patterns of open and blocked communication are not fixed by nature. They solidify over time. Our brain patterns are vulcanized, as he puts it, and this occurs by the constant repetition of these patterns. The river cuts its channel.

Put differently, parents who indulge, or at least ignore, a boy's penchant for filching candy, allow these channels between desire and release to strengthen, helping the boy grow into a thief. Parents who encourage, or at least refrain from refraining, a boy's penchant for hitting other children, help the boy grow into a violent man. The tendency to a particular vice may be genetically determined, but not its actualization.

Sexual mores can be harder to modify:

It turns out that sexual desires are closely associated with the primitive, pre-cognitive part of the brain that Cohen has shown can build durable pathways to the frontal lobe. These durable pathways threaten to flood our capacity to reason with lots of seething, unsettling neural activity more suited to instinctive life than rational reflection. (emphasis mine)

Anyone with the slightest acquaintance with human sexuality will nod in agreement. I always found the following quote from Sophocles in Plato's Republic amusing:

[M]ost gladly have I escaped [love]; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.**

Reno isn't interested only in sex; he points out that vices are linked; that is,

neural patterns between the frontal lobe and the brain stem do not know nice distinctions between the private morality and public morality.

In other words, it is biologically difficult to maintain morals in one field while compromising them in another. People who indulge their financial appetites will likely indulge other appetites as well. Lorenzo Scupoli discusses this in The Spiritual Combat when he encourages the reader to focus on developing just one virtue; all the other virtues will follow.

The original article, which sadly lacks any images of the brain-scans to which the author refers, is available here. (Oddly, it's a paper on neuroscience, but published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Maybe if I read more of it, I'll understand why it's there.)

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*The fact that no one else has found the proof to Goldbach's conjecture is beside the point. For those not in the know, Goldbach's conjecture is the deceptively simple assertion that every even natural number larger than two is the sum of two primes: 4=2+2, 6=3+3, 8=3+5, 10=3+7, 12=5+7, 14=3+11, etc. Everyone believes it, and no one knows how to prove it. If you want instant fame and attention, prove this!

**Today's television advertisements illustrate that not everyone is so relieved by this escape. I recently had to explain to my son what is meant by Erectile Dysfunction. At least he was born after Bob Dole introduced the world to his "little blue friend."

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Honey from poison, and health from wounds

Ever since I decided to translate The Spiritual Combat, I have acquired a deep respect for translators. I've been working on the thing for years, and I've only just reached halfway, if one reckons by the number of chapters. If one reckons instead by the number of pages, I'm not so sure.

I translated three more chapters of The Spiritual Combat today, and a quote from the first of the three struck me:

Esteeming such resolutions as though they were already fact, we grow prideful in a different way. Unwilling to endure a trifle or a tiny word to the contrary, we meditate a long time on our resolutions of suffering great punishments for the love of God, even the punishments of purgatory. Since our lower nature does not feel repugnance to this, as if it were a distant thing, as sorrowful creatures we convince ourselves that we have attained the level of those who patiently suffer great things.
(from Ch. 30)

This text could serve as a word of warning to many, many of us.

Take me, for example. I noticed in myself a long time ago that I have a tendency to imagine myself persecuted by others because of my Christianity. One day I realized how absurd it was to think that I am persecuted in this country; I have since endeavored to avoid this sentiment. (I would like to think that this weblog has never once indulged in such pretensions to persecution.)

Such an attitude distracts us from the real challenges facing the individual Christian. If you imagine yourself a martyr, go look at a recent entry on Elliot's site, or this earlier entry on my site, or even this one. Whatever reservations I may have about such people's politics, they put their faith on the line in a way that I have not. Would I, were I in their circumstances? I don't know. I did quit seminary, under circumstances that suggest to me that I have not yet met those standards.

Of course, Catholics acknowledge something called White Martyrdom, where no blood is spilled. Even by that measure, we Americans are a marvelously un-martyred bunch. The surest sign that Christians are not persecuted in this country may be the fact that so many of them seem to be afraid it will happen at any moment. From what I've read, the early Christians who did face persecution did not fear it, but embraced it as a gift; it allowed them to imitate Christ more closely.

Man, does that send shivers down one's spine.

In any case. Scupoli's remedy for such flights of fancy is one that won't sit well with our culture: self-esteem. This assertion may shock the reader; isn't self-esteem the order of the day in our culture? Well, yes, but not in the way that Scupoli means it! Scupoli's notion of esteem is a radical one: esteem yourself for what you really are:

You are nothing,
you know nothing,
you can do nothing,
and you have nothing
aside from sorrows and defects,
nor do you deserve anything apart from eternal damnation.
(from ch. 32)

Scupoli is not a model for contemporary notions of self-esteem; we have here no medieval monk who thinks he has found the way to avoid troubles, and enjoy peace in this life. Scupoli spent most of his clerical career (1585—1610) unable to celebrate the sacraments, because his order had suspended him for some now-unknown crime. He remained as a lay brother in the priestly order of which he was a member, and the suspension was lifted near the end of his life. While translating the Italian today, I wondered if Scupoli were recalling personal experiences as he wrote these words:

If you desire that this awareness of your malice and vileness keep your [spiritual] enemies far from you and render you dear to God, act so that you not only disdain yourself as unworthy of every good and meriting every evil, but so that you prefer to be disdained even by others, abhorring honors, enjoying their vituperations and making yourself avilable to perform all those tasks that others disdain. To avoid abandoning this holy practice, you must not value the opinions of others. I assume of course that you do this for the sole aim of lowering yourself for this exercise, rather than through a certain presumption of spirit and an unknown pride, for which you may beneath a good pretext hold little or no regard for the opinions of others.

These are the words not of a man who has figured out how to avoid disquiet and obtain enlightenment, but has struggled with them over a long period.

It is also fashionable today to imagine oneself a nonconformist. Many people make a show of disdaining others' opinions, looking down on others and considering their opinions worthy only of sneers and condemnation. I have met such people; they would not hesitate to deny this statement about themselves. They abound in academia, and I worry that I myself share this trait.

Scupoli's idea is the complete opposite: one should disdain others' opinions precisely because the only opinion worth worrying about is God's. Scupoli reminds us again and again that our opinions of ourselves are usually wrong, and contribute to self-delusion. For this reason, one should consider one's own opinion least valuable of all. I was reminded today of the words of so many saints as I read these chapters.

I will never tire of speaking to you of this. If you desire to praise God, accuse yourself and desire that others accuse you. Humble yourself with all and beneath all, if you wish to exalt him in you and yourself in him. Lower yourself again and again whenever you can; he will come find you and embrace you. The more that you make yourself vile in your own sight, and the more you take pleasure in being humiliated by all and rejected as an abominable thing, the more will he gather you up and and draw you more tenderly to himself with love.
...In this way can we extract honey from poison, and health from wounds.

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The Spiritual Combat: restraining speech

Lately I've been translating more of The Spiritual Combat, and today I translated the chapter regarding restraint of the tongue. (An entry on a previous chapter is here.) This was a particularly difficult chapter to translate; most chapters seem easy, but for this chapter, my initial wording usually sounded awkward, and my second attempts were not much better, occasionally even worse.

As to the content, Don Scupoli's point strikes me square:

When your heart swells with words, examine them before they pass to your tongue. You will realize how much better it would be not to send many of them outside. But I also warn you: of those things that you then think it good to say, not a few would be better off buried in silence. You will understand this if you think about it, after the opportunity to speak them has passed.

In a culture obsessed with self-expression, the vast majority of words that swell our hearts would be better off buried in silence. God knows that I'm no better than anyone else; I tend towards a multitude of words, and I keep a weblog after all. Often enough, later consideration of my words leads to a shaking of the head with pursed lips.

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A moving Gospel, a blinder blindness, an aroma pleasing to God's divine nostrils

For some reason, I decided today to translate two more chapters of The Spiritual Combat. This may be getting out of hand.

Part of it was prompted by this morning's Gospel reading. I have heard St. John's telling of the blind man and the pool of Siloam many times before. Today, however, I found the story moving in the same way that I found Shatov's kindness to Marie moving in Demons, or the death of Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, or the death of Stefano in The Red Horse. These episodes are the only ones in literature that have reduced me to blubbering idiocy. What's worse is that I realize I'm emotional, so I start laughing at myself at the same time that I'm crying. It's very embarassing, yet I consider it proof that these are three of the world's best novels.

Maybe I'm just too emotional lately. Maybe it's the stress of the thesis. Or maybe it's John's Gospel becoming more and more effective on me; in the past I have also found several other stories in that Gospel profoundly disconcerting: the woman caught in adultery, or Mary Magdalene's meeting the resurrected Jesus, or the whole crucifixion bit in any Gospel.

Whatever the cause, I find that I don't retain much manliness in the presence of St. John's Gospel. I hope he's happy.

And then, the Eucharistic prayer the priest used today!

When we were lost and could not find the way to you, you loved us more than ever; Jesus, your Son, innocent and without sin, gave himself into our hands and was nailed to a cross.

Oof. Yessir, ladies and gentlemen, this is what sin does to us: God gives himself to us, and we nail him to a cross. It was almost enough to make me forget how the organist's experimentation with dissonance ruined the last verse of Amazing Grace. ("...was blind, but now I see!")

Anyway, the point of mentioning John's Gospel reading is that it's about a blind man. Today's chapters from The Spiritual Combat are also about blindness, one of them explicitly so.

Enjoy, if it interests you; otherwise, go find some quality literature that will reduce you to a blubbering idiot; curl up with it and read it. I've already mentioned three; the floor is open to nominations for others.

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No better than what I am

Someone alert Steven Riddle (whose weblog you really should be reading if you're at all serious about Catholic spirituality): I have added two new chapters to my translation of The Spiritual Combat.

It's been months since I updated my translation — perhaps even years. I remember that one of my possible resolutions for Lent last year (or maybe it was two years ago) was to translate one chapter a day. That didn't work out. Neither did translating one chapter a week.

It was easy to motivate myself to today's translation. I gave up on going in sequence because I really wanted to translate chapter 26. That's one of my favorite chapters in the text, due to the suggested prayer on occasions of sin: Lord, I have acted no better than what I am, nor could anyone have expected more from me. ...Now act according to who you are: forgive me, never allow me to remain far from you, nor to offend you again. Ladies and gentleman, this is a spiritual classic from the days of the Counter-Reformation, although you'd never guess based on what some people say about us (including some Catholics who should know better).

I didn't translate those sentences that way. That's what they feel like to me, but it's not exactly what they say. I agonized over the translation, and in the end I stuck with a more literal translation than what I feel. This rather contradicts my stated goal in the preface to translate it into the English that I might use to convey the ideas. The trouble is that at times I fear the English that I might use conflicts with the other goal: to ensure that the ideas [remain] entirely Scupoli's.

Sissignore, il traduttore è traditore. (Yessir, the translator is a traitor.)

Anyway, I read those two sentences early on in my Catholicism, at a time when I was beset by the very disquiet Lorenzo Scupoli described. Translating chapter 26 has therefore been a long-term goal of mine; the fact that I hadn't done it yet is one reason it took me so long to update the translation.

Chapter 27 was so short that it seemed a crime not to translate it tonight.

There you have it. Now that I've translated chapter 26, however, I may never translate another word of it again :-) Just kidding.

As for my thesis: I finished the first revision last night. It's a 213-page monstrosity, and it's only going to get longer, I fear — although I hope that subsequent revisions make parts of it feel less haphazard. I also hope those subsequent revisions won't require too much work, but that may be asking too much! :-)

PS: Please don't alert Steven; I can email him myself :-) If not for an encouraging email of his during an earlier pause in the translation, I may never have gotten past the first few chapters.

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