Second Sight

Were I to show you the skeleton of an adult humanoid creature, standing about 40 inches in height, and with the brain capacity of a chimpanzee, you might immediately think of “Lucy”, a member of the hominid family, Australopithecus, which lived some three million years ago. Were I to tell you that these remains are in fact dated to about 18,000 years ago and were recovered from a small Indonesian island called Flores, you might perhaps want to revise your guess. You would probably settle for a surviving descendant of homo erectus, who first emerged from Africa about two million years ago, and may have been a direct forebear of homo sapiens. Restricted to their small environment, their brain capacity may well have shrunk to half its original size, a phenomenon not unknown in isolated non-human populations. Alternatively, the lack of challenge in a very restricted and safe environment may not have provided the evolutionary need for the brain, and skull, to enlarge.

This would have been mystery enough. The discovery of homo floresiensis (to be swiftly nicknamed the “Hobbit”) in 2004 presented us with a creature who should have been extinct millions of years ago, but was in fact our contemporary throughout most of human history. Indeed, if local legends are true, it might have survived as late as the 16th century. While you could be right about homo erectus, for the theory has respectable champions, the latest information suggests otherwise.

The bones of the legs and the pelvis show Hobbit to be bipedal, a characteristic of the homo line. But the feet are disproportionately long and lack proper arches. These primitive traits suggest an awkward, high-stepping, gait. But the big toe is aligned and not splayed out as it would be in an Australopithecine. The trapezoid bone in the wrist is ape-like in shape, and so less suited to tool making and similar operations than the normal homo version.

The skull is simply a mixture. The brain it encased was about the size of a grapefruit, similar to a chimpanzee, yet it has the narrow nose, brow arches and small teeth which suggest the homo line. Interestingly, the brain would have had an enlarged area which is believed to be associated with complex cognitive skills. This might explain the Hobbit’s ability to manufacture relatively sophisticated stone tools for hunting, and indeed may have influenced our homo sapiens ancestors in this regard. And they also used fire for cooking.

So a theory is gaining ground that the Hobbit is a newly discovered branch on the homo line which emerged before, and perhaps well before, homo erectus. Until this point the oldest hominid who moved out from Africa was thought to be homo erectus, and its remains, dating from about 1.8 million years ago, have been found in Georgia. But the Hobbit suggests the possibility that the first members of the human family spread out from Africa, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before that, and survived until relatively modern times.

Tracing the hominid tree from the last ancestor we shared with the apes has always been a complex task. The separation took place about six mya (million years ago). The evidence is restricted to chance finds which have survived because conditions happened to have been conducive. And all too often these finds are no more than clues from which inferences have to be made. Nevertheless, broad patterns appear.

Perhaps the most telling of these is the increase in brain size. We first find this at an average of 450cc about 3.5 mya. By 2.5 mya (homo habilis) it has grown to 750cc, and at 2.5 mya, with the arrival of homo erectus, it has become 1000cc. At around 195,000 years ago, homo sapiens appears, with a brain capacity of 1330 cc.

There is a parallel pattern of apparent brain functionality. The first, and crude, stone tools appear at 2.5 mya, and the skill gradually develops to sophisticated blades and grinding stones about 100,000 years before homo sapiens (who will graduate to bronze tools about 95,000 years later, shortly before the first evidence of writing).

The use of fire, shared childcare, purpose-built shelters and cooking all appear before homo sapiens. And a report in December 2009 described the relics of sophisticated settlements (near the Dead Sea) dated to 750,000 years ago - half a million years earlier than we previously thought.

If we throw into the mix painted Neanderthal jewellery, made some 10,000 years before homo sapiens entered Europe, and take into account somewhat less secure evidence of burial practices, it becomes increasingly difficult to square the scientific evidence with the concept of the first ensouled hominids being members of our own species. By “ensouled” I mean with intelligence, a sense of right and wrong and a recognition of the sacred.

I am aware of the difficulty this causes with the concept of sin coming into the world through one man - which led to Pius XII to say: “Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual…” I do not pretend to reconcile the scientific evidence with the theological. I rest in the confidence that, when both are properly understood, they will be reconcilable. But you may well have a solution to give us on www.secondsightblog.com. I may return to this question in a future column.

Postscript. My friend Edmund Adamus points out that the view of the Congregation for the Clergy, quoted in my last column, that the faithful had no business advising the hierarchy, was shortly to be reversed by the 1983 revision of Canon Law. So thank you to him for refining the point I was making.

Whether we agree or disagree with Advocatus Diaboli’s critique of the Church’s approach to sex, he has certainly given us something to think about. And I have been thinking. I do so speculatively – so I hope you will be ready to criticise or refine my tentative ideas. I want to make a start on this occasion by trying to clarify some aspects which I think often get entangled in our minds.

The sexual drive is more complex than the simple, though strong, sexual appetite. While few people nowadays would take Freud lock, stock and barrel I would certainly accept that sexual libido is a major trigger of the human psyche. Our sexual identities are fundamental and their expression is by no means limited to overt sexual activity or conscious thought. They are an inherent part of our self images, intrinsic to much of our motivation, and are expressed to a greater or lesser extent in our relationships and our interactions.

Thus I suspect that Catholics have no greater pre-occupation with sex than anyone else. It is only because we have, or attempt to have, common sexual values and prohibitions that we talk and argue about related matters so publicly and so frequently, and often so emotionally.

Perhaps we would all agree that the expression of sexuality, while potentially wonderful, is also potentially dangerous. In whole areas we really don’t need an ecclesiastical authority to tell us that the misuse of sex is a misuse of love. Starting a new life is just as momentous an action as bringing about the end of a life. The care and thought which needs to go into that conception so that this new life has the best chance of developing and growing into a mature and good human being is a responsibility which Catholics believe is only discharged by the presence of a loving and stable marriage. And, apart from any teaching, the sociological evidence is strongly in support.

By the same token we regard sex outside marriage as unloving in two ways. The first is that it creates an emotional bond (which may in fact be unequal between the two partners) without the corresponding permanent commitment. Or, in other words, someone is likely to get hurt – perhaps even badly damaged. The fact that we have potential control over conception through natural or artificial contraception does not alter the bonding reaction which has evolved in our brains. Secondly, to risk – as is often the case – an unwanted conception is to involve a third party. In addition of course, particularly where promiscuity is involved, there is the additional danger of disease.

Sex is frequently used as an exercise of power. I am not thinking just of the blatant examples but of any occasion when it is used to gain our selfish ends. This may range from the authority figure seducing the junior to the various ways in which men and women, within and outside marriage, can use or enforce their sexuality to gain their own psychological or concrete advantages.

I simply don’t need to attach the word “sin” to any of these misuses – which may vary from the great to the trivial – because they need no label. We can judge them for ourselves.

But there is a problem here. Because of the centrality of sexuality in all of us we are extraordinarily open to temptation. The passion generated by sex is altogether different from the passion generated by, say, hunger. We vary in the strength of our sex drive – from person to person and from circumstance to circumstance. But it is possible, and indeed common, for the drive to be so strong that under the influence of passion we can behave in ways which we should utterly repudiate in other circumstances. Indeed much of the thinking of theologians in the past has been based on the tendency of sexual passion to stifle our rational powers, and turn us into satyr or gorgon. Less than human, more like brute beast.

All of this reminds us that chastity is not a passive virtue – to be called into action when needed. It is a virtue which has to be continually cultivated: not in order to avoid sexuality but to use it – including its passion – at the service of love. I find this advice easier to take at 75 than I did at 25.

I have not on this occasion looked at aspects concerned with the Natural Law and sexuality. I will keep that for another time.

A decade ago John Paul II emphasised the error of treating the Church as though it were a multinational corporation and thus subject to a purely human form of authority. While the point is well taken, the human side of the Church remains vulnerable to our fallen human nature. We see a clear precedent in the strictures which Jesus reserved for the leaders of Judaism despite their guardianship of the divine covenant.

Most people will recall that Lord Acton’s claim that power tends to corrupt was written about the Renaissance popes. Fewer will know (if only because of its very recent publication) of a study which measures and confirms this tendency, under experimental conditions. In simple terms, the more powerful (and secure) you are, the higher the standards you are likely to enforce on the people you control, and the lower the standards you apply to yourself. In other words, power is a serious “occasion of sin”.

We learnt, at our mother’s knee, that if occasions of sin cannot be avoided, they must be minimised by prudent precautions. Thus all those who hold ecclesiastical authority, from pope to priest, must work actively against the corruption of power. We have seen in microcosm what happens in a national clergy whose power is so institutionalised that even independent civil authority defers. In macrocosm we must accept that the Church has been corrupted by power at least since it became the pet religion of the Roman Empire. We should not be surprised; it is only continual, active defence against the corruption of power which can mitigate even if it cannot entirely avoid.

While abuse of power is found in other religions, the Catholic Church’s case is particularly difficult because its unity depends on a firm basis of revealed doctrine and the lynchpin of the successor to St Peter. It cannot be otherwise, nor would we wish it, but the danger of this near-absolute power is exceedingly great. It may be useful to look at some examples at random.

Outstanding, of course, has been the refusal to allow freedom of conscience in choice of religion. Error was held to have no rights. The result was enforcement of Catholic teaching, including the extremes of torture and death. It led to the Catholic colonisation of territories, and so the use of civil force for preservation. There are few behaviours which we deplore in Islam which have not been enthusiastically pursued by the Church in its time. Even in later days when this was achieved through concordats, it continued. When Vatican II finally accepted the full rights of conscience, the tardiness in dismantling the shameful concordat with Franco’s Spain demonstrated the lingering desire to maintain power at the expense of the individual. When John Paul II announced in 2001 that the Holy See “has always been vigorous in defending freedom of conscience and religious liberty”, we are lost for comment.

Vatican II rightly emphasised that the bishops, although acting in communion with the Pope, hold their diocesan powers independently as successors to the Apostles. But it has become hard to distinguish in practice the difference between being in communion and simply being a delegate. And this is made all the more obscure by the relatively novel practice of the pope choosing the diocesan bishops. A new bishop should, of course, be chosen by the local Church, with full consultation at all levels, while the Pope retains a veto which would only be used with extreme rarity. This would be a charitable way of protecting a pope from the temptation to use placemen.

I have written before about the Church’s own principle of subsidiarity - that decisions should always be taken at the lowest practicable level. In general this is continually breached (perhaps the arrogation of the translation of the English translation of the liturgy by the Vatican is the outstanding current example).

And the attitude towards being a listening community is well summed up by the Congregation for the Clergy’s statement: “All believers have the right and duty to take an active part in the mission given to the Church… but they do not have either the right or duty to give advice to the hierarchy in their exercise of their pastoral task.” Can we imagine a modern business, hoping to be successful, informing its members that they have neither the right nor the duty to give advice to management?

We do in fact know a good deal about how secular cultures form, how they are preserved and how they change. This may give us some clues. Here, however, I will simply quote from two recent popes, both presumably guided by the same Spirit.

First: “The Church has always opposed errors. Frequently she has condemned them with the greatest severity. Nowadays, however, the spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. She considers that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations…”

Second: “To protect the Catholic faith against errors arising from the part of some of the Christian faithful it appeared highly necessary to us, whose principal task is to confirm his brethren in faith, to add (new) norms to the text of the presently valid Code of Canon Law, in order to impose expressly the duty to preserve the truths proposed definitively by the Magisterium of the Church, and, concerning the same matter, to institute canonical sanctions (against the violators).”

You may see, as one senior theologian did, a marked contrast between the two approaches to the use of authority. Which one relates, do you think, most closely to the Gospel? How can the Church at all levels maintain its God given authority while minimising the abuse of power? The answers to those questions may define the course of what the Church will give the world over the long distant future.

Our old, if critical, friend, Advocatus Diaboli, has had some spare time between Christmas and the New Year. And if the Devil makes work for idle hands, we can expect his advocate take advantage of the opportunity. I have now received a further contribution from him – and I look forward to you putting him firmly, though I am sure courteously, in his place. Quentin.

O     O     O

Thank you once again for the hospitality of Secondsightblog. I am not going to comment on the discussion which followed my last contribution, you must decide for yourselves. Instead I turn to a different subject.

An outsider, like me, might well get the impression that the Catholic Church is primarily a movement designed to control, and preclude as far as possible, anything to do with sexual activity. That impression might be formed from the fact that it is the one subject which, in different manifestations, gets the greatest column inches. And, even on a blog to which mature people like yourselves contribute, anything related to sexuality seems to get the most comments. If I may take a single example, your Bishop O’Donoghue (whose work on Catholic doctrine has recently been commended by the Vatican) was able to claim that obedience to the Church’s condemnation of all contraception was the “litmus test” of Catholicism.

This remark may seem idiotic, but – taken against history – it is typical of how Christianity can be perverted with the best of intentions. I can see very little in the Gospels about sexual sin (and what is there is compassionate), and in St Paul what is condemned is not sexuality but sexual excess. Even his cautions on marriage can be explained by his belief (based foolishly on taking Jesus’ words literally) that the end of the world was about to come. If that is what a bishop in good standing thinks being a Catholic is primarily about, he is either a fool or my case is already proved.

Where did it all start? The major authority was Augustine who was a reformed Manichean. Like many converts his reaction was extreme, and the result was his doctrine that the only justification for sexual intercourse was procreation (Manicheans believed that procreation was sinful, and advocated alternative sexual practices). Augustine believed that sexual pleasure as such was sinful, even in marital intercourse; that the terrible inheritance of original sin was transmitted through this lust. Not a very good start for an attitude which was to last about 1500 years.

About 200 years later we find Pope St Gregory the Great making it clear that the libido  necessary for sexual intercourse was in itself sinful, and should preclude a man from entering a church for a time. Aquinas takes the same general view. And so on – until the great alarm caused by Pius X1th in 1930 suggesting that, under certain conditions, intercourse without intention to procreate could be lawful and good.

Being as generous as possible I calculate that for 77% of the history of Christianity it has been generally and explicitly taught that every form of genital expression, even in the most loving expression of the holiest of marriages, is inevitably sinful. Not bad for an infallible Church, is it?

And what about those who are picked as leaders of the Church? We might think of the bright-eyed seminarians, fully infused with call of the Spirit. The only figures I have are from the 1950s but a study at that time showed that their rate of self abuse was 99%. Interestingly it was somewhat higher than most other groups. Coming to much more modern history (2002) I find that less than half the priests under age 45 believe that to be a practising homosexual is inconsistent with being a priest. How many would you guess accept self abuse? And you do not need me to turn the knife in the wound of international paedophilia.

I am not commenting on the rights and wrong of any of these practices. I am merely saying that they are grossly at variance with what your Church teaches. Fundamentally I am accusing you of deep laid hypocrisy. The only indulgence I can offer is that long, indurated culture (and 1500 years is long) has put you into denial. You may be forgiven because you do not know what you do.

Do you believe that the celibacy of the clergy is a great and sacred thing – allowing a priest to devote himself to his mission? Nonsense and double nonsense. There are plenty of monastic orders for those who choose celibacy as a free act. The secular clergy (and take that right up to the bishops and cardinals, and all the other steps on the ladder of priestly ambition) rejoice in a celibacy which allows them to conceal their lack of experience and their fear of an intimate committed relationship with the opposite sex. Don’t bother to tell me that there are exceptions, I am concerned with the many who sustain a regime of sexual orthodoxy not through a mature understanding but through warped and wounded personalities. These are the people who have the sheer impertinence to pontificate on how you should lead your sexual lives.

When your Church has rid itself of such attitudes I will listen to what she has to say about sexuality. She may or may not have a good deal to contribute. In the meanwhile I’d as soon walk down Soho and buy a dirty film. At least no one there is pretending.

Your friend, Advocatus Diaboli