I saw a Jesuit priest I once knew recently. He was a good man who taught me much about Catholicism and I’ll always be grateful to him.
Before him, my Catholicism was one of vague notions. He helped me to ground it.
I do remember one conversation I had with him that always made me sad. He once said that while he was vehemently pro-life he was actually pro-choice the first few weeks of pregnancy.
Stunned, I asked him why.
He told me about theories about ensoulment and about when that occurs. And he talked about the fact that ensoulment couldn’t possibly happen before the splitting of twins can occur in the first two weeks of pregnancy.
I asked him if that was a rather limited understanding of the soul? And besides I said it was far from conclusive. Unless one is absolutely sure that ensoulment occurs at or after a certain time (which one cannot be) it seemed to me to be unconscionable to affirm the killing of the baby.
But he insisted his view was based on science. A fetus in the womb cannot have one soul if it about to split into two separate entities, he said. Ergo ensoulment occurs after twinning can occur.
He saw that I was stunned and he added that studies have revealed that anywhere from 10-25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. I guess that was supposed to shock me into believing that because God allowed…say…25% of babies to die in the womb then somehow I was supposed to believe they couldn’t possibly be ensouled humans and therefore could be killed?
I said are you saying that because God can do it so can we? But he simply returned back to the ensoulment issue.
I never understood that aspect of his argument. We are all going to die. 100 percent of us. The rate of miscarriages to me makes life even more fragile and worthy of our protection. But he didn’t see it as that. He saw the fragility of life as confirmation of his own thoughts demeaning the worth of early life.
Anyway, I saw that old priest a few days ago and I thought about going up and making small talk with him and maybe asking him if his thoughts had evolved on this in the past fifteen years. But I wimped out as he was speaking with a number of other people. And I had my children with me.
Now I’m regretting that decision.
October 5, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Would one way to argue yourself out of the "twinning" arguement be that God knows us before we're even knit in the womb (Isaiah??), therefore God would know when twinning would occur and would know that that fertilized egg belonged to two souls and therefore ensoul it with two souls?
This way of thinking restricts God's action and work to only occuring after a relatively arbitrary biological process, one which He created. It's, well, putting limits on the power of God!
Basically your priest friend is saying God doesn't know yet at this point in time whether a fertilized egg belongs to one baby or two and therefore can't have made up His mind yet about how many souls to give it. This is an error of people trying to humanize God to a point where His ETERNAL (ie: timeless, and therefore above and beyond the constraints of time) qualities and power are now subjected to the laws of time. For example: it's akin to saying, "Since we don't know yet how many souls that fertilized egg will become, God can't know it either." It's rather presumptive in my mind for a creature to tell his Creator how to make him.
Another arguement against the "twinning" line of thought is to question who causes the embryo to twin? If you say that twinning is just an arbitrary process, then you're claiming that God does not fashion us individually with equal care and love and instead has clean up duty after the biological processes He put in place. As though our Father in Heaven said, "Oops! That one twinned! Guess I'll have to make another soul!" This line of thinking would have the Creator be a slave to the mechanism of His creation. Hardly seems like God would be the Omnipotent One if that were the case. Rather, it makes more logical sense, to me, that the Lord gave the fertilized egg He intended to twin two souls and decided just which half of the egg got which soul. That fits better, in my mind with the whole "male and female He created them, in His image and likeness He created them" bit from Genesis.
Of course, what do I a lowly creature truly know about the Lord who formed me?
Someone, please let me know if anything about what I'm thinking here is a line of garbage.
October 5, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Thanks for this post.
I recently had an argument with a pro-choice supporter regarding this very thing. He alleged that we have no test to prove when a soul is created, or infused, into a growing cellular structure. He actually told me that if I could prove there was a soul in that "mass of tissue", he would convert and change his opinion.
I looked at him squarely and said, "Sir, I don't think I can even look at you and believe there is a soul in your "mass of tissue".
That was the end of the argument. My bad.
Anyway, thanks for the post. Being a grammarian of sorts, your first sentence, however, had me completely baffled. "I saw a Jesuit priest I once knew recently."
I think you meant to say "I recently saw a Jesuit priest I once knew."
October 5, 2009 at 7:57 pm
You know, you give the baby or babies the benefit of the doubt, don't you, in the time it takes to twin? That's the bizzare bias this priest shows – not a protective bias but an exploitive bias. That is what is so darn weird about people like this. They are subtle apologists for finding some pedantic way of doing whatever they are hell-bent on doing.
This priest revealed his bias, his love of argument of his love of life. Don't regret not speaking to him. People like that are nearly impossible to touch.
October 5, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Sarah,
I wish I had you around back then when I was arguing with him. Great points.
October 5, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Let me guess. He doesn't think lower animals and plants have souls either.
What organism are zygotes then?
Ridiculous.
October 5, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Sarah, is it a fertilized egg or a child? Even Bill Clinton had trouble figuring this out.At what point does it become something other than a fertilized egg? I always heard that it was either an ovum or a sperm, or when these two met, it was a person.
October 5, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Wasn't there a paradigm shift that focused on the singularity of person as opposed to the dichotomy of body and soul? That would may any ensoulment theory irrelevant and will not make the earlier stages of fetal developement contradict the truth that the human person is created at conception.
October 5, 2009 at 9:31 pm
"Would one way to argue yourself out of the 'twinning' arguement be that God knows us before we're even knit in the womb (Isaiah??), therefore God would know when twinning would occur and would know that that fertilized egg belonged to two souls and therefore ensoul it with two souls?"
"At what point does it become something other than a fertilized egg?"
What's a "fertilized egg"? Is there such a thing? After sperm fuses with the egg, it becomes a zygote: the egg actually disappears since the new cell is a totally new cell type. An egg and zygote are totally different things. An egg has no gender, a zygote is either male or female. An egg can't eventually grow an arm, a zygote can if s/he is in the right environment.
A male and female (non-frat) twin can't come from the same zygote. The genetic makeup of one person or two twins is set at fertilization; it can't change.
What happens with conjoined twins? Are they one or two people? One emerges from the other.
The point: The direct killing of one person or two people is still killing and should be made illegal.
The way I read the Catechism (para 362-368) is that if there is a body (from zygote on), there is a soul. I.e., body X if and only if soul X, assuming the body is alive.
–gbm3
October 5, 2009 at 10:02 pm
I hope I can pull this off while sounding angry at the ERROR, rather than at the poor, confused priest (and may God bless him for how he helped you, Matthew)…
he talked about the fact that ensoulment couldn't possibly happen before the splitting of twins can occur in the first two weeks of pregnancy.
In addition to dabbling in his own (forgive me) private heresy, the good Father seems rather confused about what a soul *is*. A soul is the life-principle of a living thing; it's the difference between a living thing and a corpse. We have souls, living dogs and cats have souls (though not immortal ones); heck, even living *carrots* have souls! This has been common Catholic knowledge at least since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas (if not since Aristotle–but that'd be a bit less than "Catholic", I guess). If any discrete being is alive, it's ensouled; case closed; the only way not to have a soul is to be dead (or inanimate from the start).
Re: "splitting of twins"… he said ensoulment "couldn't possibly happen" in such a case? Just off the top of my semi-incoherent and end-of-workday-fogged head: how about the first baby having a soul, and–at twinning–another soul is immediately created for the second baby? (Which one gets the "original soul", and which one gets the new soul? I don't know… nor do I really care, nor does it affect the matter in the least.)
But he insisted his view was based on science.
Indeed? What a standard by which to calibrate one's moral compass; it may be morally evil, but at least it's "scientific" (whatever that may mean to any armchair scientist who might opine)! Good grief…
He saw that I was stunned and he added that studies have revealed that anywhere from 10-25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage.
Right… which means that the souls of those dying children return to God. I'm not sure what's so hard for him to understand, about that.
Anyway, I saw that old priest a few days ago and I thought about going up and making small talk with him and maybe asking him if his thoughts had evolved on this in the past fifteen years. But I wimped out as he was speaking with a number of other people. And I had my children with me. Now I'm regretting that decision.
You know your situation best; but my gut feeling is that the good Father would be reluctant to abandon his (apparently well-worn) position, especially in public. I.e. I think you'd have had something of a mess on your hands, if you'd talked with him about it… and likely with no good results. Anything's possible, though…
October 5, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Sad. Hopefully, the Jesuit has matured in his thinking on the matter. However, given the circumstances, it was probably the prudent choice not to confront him in the presence of others.
His argument about twinning is a common "pro-choice" argument. This fails to understand the nature of individuality, since most people who argue from this perceived "moderate" view will still insist that every individual human being has a soul and is a person. They think that because twinning can occur in the early days of gestation, then the entity before this point is not an individual human being.
Yet, the fact that being A gives way to being A and B, does not mean that being A was not an individual.
Do you know that a flatworm, if cut properly, will grow into two (or more, depending on the number and manner of cuts) flatworms? Surely, Fr. Jesuit would not argue that the initial flatworm was not an individual before the incisions.
Or, to use an absurd and disturbing thought experiment we might look to the possibility of human cloning. A human clone would, in essence, be a form of twinning. Although, this twinning would be much later in the zygote's life (i.e., after birth) and man made, the principles are generally the same. Would Fr. Jesuit conclude, then, that the human being was not an individual person before his clone arrived?
October 6, 2009 at 1:24 am
I think most of what I have to say about the matter has been said very well by paladin and others. I will say though that, in the abortion debate at least, talking about souls or persons is problematic, because most discussions begin with a Cartesian theory of soul. See though, David Braine's The Human Person: Animal and Spirit for the best work on personhood. I prefer to speak of human beings, or as human members of our community. Now, from the moment their conception is known, babies have a real human relationship with at least one other human being – their mother – and make a huge difference to that particular human being. Whether or not twinning occurs is neither here nor there. Their essences in a sense beyond this does not matter except in exceptional circumstances.
I'd want to argue further, that it is problematic to speak of someone or something as "potentially human." It sounds a bit like describing a puddle as potentially a sea. One runs into Wang's paradox.
What might be better is to abandon science altogether as a promising line of enquiry about persons, and abandon talk of persons altogether (Cf. Gilbert Ryle: "A physicist does not have anything interesting to tell us about the world, in any awe-inspiring sense of the word") and argue, from a perfectly valid "ordinary language" perspective, that embryos are precisely the sorts of things we call human beings, and (if one is talking to a Christian), these sorts of activities (abortion and Contraception, and trying to eliminate the possibility of pregnancy after sexual intercourse) are precisely those things to which all of Christian tradition has reacted with horror. Further one might point out that, to abort, leaving God out of the picture for the moment, is to eliminate at least one human being in a relationship with another, and damage both.
October 6, 2009 at 2:47 am
I believe that the classical argument is regardless of when ensoulment occurs, it is a human life that God wills to live and therefore it is unlawful to end it.
October 6, 2009 at 3:04 am
It is as ridiculous as the old questions on how many angels can stand at the top of a needle. When we deal with philosophical and theological matters, we transcend science or physics, that is why the philosophical discipline for beings, natures, essences, existence is called meta-physics or ontology.
October 6, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Good point Fr. Thomas.
My apologies for the "fertilized egg" misnomer. Once fertilized, the egg is a tiny little person (or two as may be the case).
October 6, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Sarah,
Thanks for looking again at the term "fertilized egg".
"Once fertilized, the egg is a tiny little person (or two as may be the case)."
– October 6, 2009 8:38 AM
Please note that the egg is not a person: once fertilized the egg no longer is present, but, instead, a tiny little person (people) exist(s).
I know it's subtle, but any misnomer that a person it just an egg is very very very dangerous to the personhood debate.
gbm3
October 6, 2009 at 6:24 pm
I'll be more careful of my terminology in the future!
Chalk the earlier lack of clarity to mental fog brought on by too much report writing…
October 7, 2009 at 7:10 am
When did the "ensoulment" of Jesus happen?
When did the "ensoulment" of Mary the Immaculate happen?
Aside from their lack of sin (and Jesus' divinity), are they any different from any other human being, such that they would have a different time of "ensoulment" as anyone else?
October 7, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Ergo ensoulment occurs after twinning can occur
Depends on what you mean by soul – the Latin word is very instructive – anime – which means life force, that which gives life to and animates a creature. If the zygote did not have a soul, it would be dead, and therefore incapable of continuing to grow, much less twinning.
A fetus in the womb cannot have one soul if it about to split into two separate entities, he said.
Why? He gives no basis for this. Far from an impediment or argument against personhood, twinning requires the presence of a soul. As the flatworm and cloning examples above demonstrate, that is very much possible.
But he insisted his view was based on science.
It sounds more like his argument is based upon a misunderstanding of the terms being used, not on science.
October 7, 2009 at 6:38 pm
From CCC:
""CONCEIVED BY THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT AND BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY"
486 The Father's only Son, conceived as man in the womb of the Virgin Mary, is "Christ", that is to say, anointed by the Holy Spirit, from the beginning of his human existence, though the manifestation of this fact takes place only progressively: to the shepherds, to the magi, to John the Baptist, to the disciples. Thus the whole life of Jesus Christ will make manifest "how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power."" (emphasis added)
When did the personhood of Jesus begin? From the "beginning of his human existence" ("ab initio Suae exsistentiae humanae")? Isn't that at fertilization? Another showing of person if and only if human (assuming they're alive)?
gbm3
October 7, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Just FYI, The Church has indeed explictly stated that the flaps over ensoulment have no bearing on the immorality of abortion in the Declaration on Procured Abortion. Use it when you get those ludicrous Pope Gregory vs. Sixtus arguments:
19. This declaration expressly leaves aside the question of the moment when the spiritual soul is infused. There is not a unanimous tradition on this point and authors are as yet in disagreement. For some it dates from the first instant; for others it could not at least precede nidation. It is not within the competence of science to decide between these views, because the existence of an immortal soul is not a question in its field. It is a philosophical problem from which our moral affirmation remains independent for two reasons: (1) supposing a belated animation, there is still nothing less than a human life, preparing for and calling for a soul in which the nature received from parents is completed, (2) on the other hand, it suffices that this presence of the soul be probable (and one can never prove the contrary) in order that the taking of life involve accepting the risk of killing a man, not only waiting for, but already in possession of his soul.