Through the Body Comes Sin, Through the Body Salvation: Part 1

In the December, 2007 edition of Brain in the News published by the Dana Foundation, there is a reprint of an article from Salon.com: I Feel Your Pain. It seems that specific brain-cells have been found which respond to distress on the part of a nearby creature. True pain is felt.

What is empathy? It’s the response of certain brain-cells to certain sorts of stimuli. But…

Is that really empathy? Is that what ties us together during times of distress and trouble? Is that what motivates some to take in orphans and others to go off to serve in regions just hit by natural disasters? Is that what leads me to feel sorry for a man who just lost his beloved wife even when he’s the jerk who cheated me out of a promotion? We seem to have a need for some sort of higher explanation, something that would raise our emotions — loves and hates — into a realm more pure than our world of flesh and blood, dirt and rocks. We don’t really want to believe that empathy can be explained by the activity of brain-cells.

I had set out to write a nuanced and properly qualified discussion of this issue but changed my mind at Mass on Tuesday as I was bowing my head and praying while the priest consecrated the bread and wine that it might become the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. It came to me that any Christian believing that the Son of God is truly present in the earthly form of bread and wine should be able to believe that a human being is truly present in his own flesh and blood.

So, I return to the question: When those specific cells in the human brain respond to distress on the part of a nearby creature, is that empathy?

Yes.

And I’ll go beyond that to speculate that the basic brain activities that produce our sense of ‘self’ which can maybe develop into a true sense of ‘personhood’ are very much like those which underly empathy. We become self-aware as certain parts of ourselves (a complex system of various groups of specific brain-cells) establish some sort of empathy with our entire self, not just our flesh and our blood but also our relationships with others, our loves, and our relationships with other parts of God’s Creation.

I’ve argued for the view that our only stuff is flesh and blood, that flesh and blood is the basic substance of our full beings. I’ve also argued that stuff exists as an object of divine love. Beyond that, that stuff — our flesh and blood — exists to participate in relationships.

There are nuances as well as unexplored deep issues which are important. A full description of our relationships to the external world would be very complex. I’m not sure I’m qualified to produce any such full position but I do intend to continue speaking on the issue. And it is relationships which are the key issue, especially those relationships which God has with any created stuff or created entity, the relationships I call acts-of-being.

I’ll end by referring the interested reader to two earlier entries I’ve posted on related topics:

Staking Your Faith on Gaps in Empirical Knowledge; and

Abstract Mathematics and the Real Presence of Jesus Christ.