Let me state a certain political position as:
The United States of America are but Massachusetts is.
This is a grammatical statement of the classic States’ rights doctrine which was one of the matters so violently dealt with in the American war between the states. It was, in fact, a matter of contention from the beginning of the discussion of some sort of federation between the North American colonies — some of the Founding Fathers of the United States hoped that Canada and, a big maybe, the French and Spanish colonies above the Rio Grande would join in a general rebellion.
The deeper question was the one implied by the title of this essay: if several or many entities join together in some sense, can they become truly one in some sense and — if so — what is that sense?
This is the general form of the question I’m asking in various writings about the most important of all corporations, that of the brethren of Christ into the Body of Christ. This is a question of development and of evolution as I discussed in my previous entry, Human Moral Nature: An Overview. Jesus Christ is inherently and naturally the Head of His Body, but the rest of us can become members only by the completing and perfecting processes of grace acting upon us.
The Body of Christ is. And the Body of Christ are. For good reasons, we Christians always use the singular for God even when speaking of the Almighty in a sense where we are concentrating on the divine community of three Persons. God isn’t just the supreme Act-of-being, His own Act-of-being: He’s an act-of-being which brings into existence, from eternity to eternity, three Persons in one God.
Americans seem quite too well disposed to see unity in corporate collectives. We say, “General Motors is…,” while the British and most others say, “General Motors are…” Let’s call the whole thing a disagreement hovering in the wind high above solid ground.
If several or many entities join together in some sense, can they become truly one in some sense and — if so — what is that sense?
Let’s at least make it clear what’s involved rather than talking past each other.
Do positive laws, enacted legislation for the most part, bring a nominal entity into real existence? I think not.
Do we have any reason to believe that even the mortal corporate bodies we consider ‘individuals’ to truly be such? Maybe, but we haven’t explicitly dealt with the issues, except perhaps for some science fiction books and other related entertainment.
There are known evolutionary and developmental processes by which groups of individuals act together and, by those acts, form a corporate body with at least some of the traits of a true individual. Cells come together to form various sorts of organisms, ranging from jellyfish which are barely more than well-organized colonies to human beings made of so many cells subordinate to various organs themselves subordinate to the entire human organism. Yes, those cells retain some of the characteristics of individuals, but they are mostly servants of the organism. The situation becomes more complex when we realize that many of the bacteria in our body are part of a complex ecological system which can be perhaps regarded as our greater biological self. After all, recent research indicates the various little critters in our guts and other parts of our bodies are the ones expected in our family lines. I don’t know of any tight explanations of how this happens but those little critters not only exploit us but also serve us by helping us in digestion and other metabolic activities and also by occupying niches which might otherwise be occupied by bacteria decidedly less friendly to us.
- Sometimes, the several or the many can become one while retaining their own individuality.
- Sometimes, the many can become one and lose their own individuality.
- Sometimes, the many can become one and their individuality takes on an ambiguous status.
- Often, we speak of the many as one but they are one only in a nominalistic sense.
I’m not at all confident that I have firm criteria for slotting particular phenomena in any of the above categories.
I’m also not confident that I understand what happens when an individual, of perhaps defective unity, begins to fragment. That it breaks into free-standing entities and no longer exists as an corporate entity with its own individual self does not mean it was never such a unified corporate entity. I tentatively accept Ian Hacking’s explanation (see Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory) of the multiple personality phenomena as being learned behaviors in which the original individual learns to wall off unpleasant memories and that process takes on a life of its own and creates ‘persons’ living on those various ghettos in the memory. But I don’t know what that means because I’ve come to realize that I can’t define how an organism comes to a true unity when an organism seems to be a conglomerate of a sort which evolved in a largely ad-hoc way. I don’t doubt there is a true definition or a substantial understanding, but I don’t pretend to have such.
We should be careful to provide good definitions for those entities, objects, processes, and relationships which are important to our understanding of ourselves and our world. We often literally don’t know what we’re talking about. We Christians tend strongly to be willfully obscure, pushing off God’s self-revelations as mysteries of a magical sort when there seem to be always ways of speaking of God in terms of entities and objects and processes and relationships found in His Creation. After all, Creation is a manifestation of certain thoughts of God. Should we be surprised to see that there is a good set of examples and counter-examples for discussing God’s Triune nature: He who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit in one God? Augustine found one I don’t accept but it’s plausible and started us off on finding better ways of discussing the truths expressed at the Council of Nicaea, better than the Fathers of Nicaea themselves came up with:
Augustine gave classic expression to the psychological analogy of the Trinity in which the unity of essence is likened to the rational part of the human soul, composed as it is of “the mind, and the knowledge by which it knows itself, and the love by which it loves itself.” [The Trinity by St. Augustine of Hippo] to which he compares the persons of the Trinity.
- The image of God in us consists of that part of the soul which the beasts do not have in common with us, i.e., the ability to contemplate the eternal forms and to make judgments (know things) according to them.
- This ability requires memory – the metaphysical warehouse in which we not only store sense impressions, but in which we discover things we never knew we knew (present illumination vs. Plato’s reminiscence).
- It requires intellect (understanding) – the mind’s eye, as it were, which takes on the form of what it beholds in memory and conceives thought thereby. It requires will – that which directs the mind’s eye, as it does the bodily senses, to what it loves and attaches it thereto.
I think we can do better than Augustine was able to do in his time, though he should be honored for realizing it’s inappropriate to speak of God in terms of substance, though Augustine didn’t sharpen his ideas to nearly the point of Aquinas’ claim that God is an Act-of-being, His own Act-of-being, the supreme Act-of-being. I think we can discuss even the greatest and most transcendental truths in terms of God’s Creation, including even the most concrete and empirical aspects of this world of rocks and dirt, rattlesnakes and elephants, daffodils and redwood trees. We merely have to have the faith and courage and willingness to respond creatively to Creation. In current terms, this means we have to be willing to draw upon the those mountains of partially digested information about this world and the abstract realms upon which it draws. We need to realize that analogies to the greatest theological truths can be drawn even from evolutionary biology and even from that bloody record of villainy and deceit and treachery we know as human history. Even our currently unlovable governments might be failed forms of something which is an important part of the Body of Christ.
[See Creation and Freedom, a commentary upon one discussion in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which includes a short discussion of an experiment in which physicists created a new state of matter: “Cooling rubidium atoms to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero caused the individual atoms to condense into a ‘superatom’ behaving as a single entity…”
For another discussion of a relevant issue in the physical world, see A Universe is More than it Contains which presents a claim the universe is an entity of its own and not just a collection of stars and gas and strange forms of matter.]