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The Human Soul and Evolution: A Mimetic Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
In much of the theological discourse concerning human evolution, the emergence of the human “soul” is commonly treated as off limits from any naturalistic analysis, lest one reduce human uniqueness or the immortality of the soul. This article offers a naturalistic approach to the “soul's” emergence in conversation with Catholic theological commitments, using René Girard's mimetic theory. I argue that locating “religion”—defined as the taboos, culture, and rituals that contained early human violence—as prior to cognition and language better orients our conceptions of what we mean by the human soul and how we evolved into our current form.
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- Copyright © 2019 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Pius XII, Humani Generis 36. “Animas enim a Deo immediate creari catholica fides nos retinere iubet.”
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15 E.g. “‘Man, placed in honor, fell, and is become like the beasts’ (Ps 49:12; 20), and now he breeds like the beasts. Yet there is still in him a certain spark of that reason in respect of which he was made in the image of God; and this has not been wholly quenched…It is God Who has given the human soul a mind” (Augustine, COG XXII. Chapter 24, 1160).
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21 As for “polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.” The text requires an “original sin” that was “actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.”
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27 He also excludes seeing “the great projects of the living creation” as “products of a selective process to which divine predicates can be attributed in illogical, unscientific, and even mythic fashion” (Ratzinger, In the Beginning 56). That is, “human beings are not a mistake but something willed.” He also objects to seeing “chance, necessity, errors and dissonances” in the emergence of humanity.
Ratzinger sets his footing partly on Einstein's idea of an Intelligence underlying all things: “there is revealed such a superior Reason that everything significant which has arisen out of human thought and arrangement is, in comparison with it the merest empty reflection” (Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, ed. C. Seelig (Vienna, 1953), 21; Ratzinger, In the Beginning 23).
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31 Citing Summa Theologica, Ia, qu.90.
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40 Assmann, Jan, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) 62Google Scholar. It is not entirely impossible, however, for other humans and animals besides the king to be regarded as “images of God” (29). e.g. The Instruction for King Merikare, wisdom literature in early second millennium BCE, writes of creatures, “His images are they, having come forth from his body.”
41 Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil, trans Buchanan, E. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969).Google Scholar Walsh, Brian, Subversive Christianity: Imaging God in a Dangerous Time, 2nd ed (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014Google Scholar). Ratzinger, In the Beginning 10, 12.
42 Such a blueprint approach is evident in Augustine: “Then there is the wonderful mobility with which his tongue and hands are equipped, so that he is able to speak and write and accomplish so many other arts and crafts. And does not all this show us clearly enough the kind of soul of which a body of this kind was intended to be an adjunct?...The beard exists as a manly adornment and not for purposes of protection is shown by the beardless faces of women, who are the weaker sex and for whom a beard would therefore be more suitable if it were a protective device…” (Augustine, City of God XX, chap 24, 1163-4).
43 Ratzinger, In the Beginning 14, 33.
44 E.g. Augustine, Confessions, books 10-13; Origen, De Principiis.
45 Or, von Balthasar deemed Girard's work as “surely the most dramatic project to be undertaken today in the field of soteriology and theology in general” (Balthasar, Hans urs von, Theo Drama 4: The Action [San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994] 299)Google Scholar.
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57 “Feedback loop” here refers to violent group events which are “catastrophic but also generative in that they would trigger the foundation mechanism and at each step provide for more rigorous prohibitions within the group, and for a more effective ritual canalization toward the outside” (Girard, René, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987] 96Google Scholar; 84, 88. The higher the level of crisis, the higher the intellectual level of human groups—and vice versa (Evolution and Conversion 111).
58 Girard, Things Hidden, 96; Evolution and Conversion 99.
59 Girard, René, The One By Whom Scandal Comes (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014) 86f, 90Google Scholar; Violence and the Sacred 221.
60 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 97, 105.
61 Girard, Things Hidden 84 88, 100; Evolution and Conversion 105.
62 Girard, I See Satan 94; Evolution and Conversion 65; Things Hidden 94.
63 Girard, Violence and the Sacred 13, 16, 19-21; Things Hidden 10, 13, 17.
64 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 169; Things Hidden 19f; Violence and the Sacred 92.
65 Girard, Violence and the Sacred 32; Evolution and Conversion 247.
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67 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 125.
68 This is a position shared in Donald, Merlin, Origin of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. He treats the “mythic” and narrative layer of cognition as the first to emerge after “episodic” forms of thought. Only later does there emerge a theoretic layer in cognition.
69 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 146, 159, 196, 68, 85.
70 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 162; Things Hidden 142.
71 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 163.
72 Girard, Things Hidden 107.
73 Girard, Battling 23.
74 “Muo means to close one's eyes or mouth, to mute the voice, or to remain mute…The literal meaning of Greek word for truth, alethia, is ‘to stop forgetting” (Bailie, Gil, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads [New York: Crossroad, 1996] 33Google Scholar). “Myth is thus the lie that hides the founding lynching, which speaks to us about the gods, but never about the victims that the gods used to be” (Girard, Battling 22).
75 Alison, Joy 33.
76 Alison, Joy 32.
77 Girard, Things Hidden 81, 99; Evolution and Conversion 119; 66; The One By Whom 35.
78 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 119.
79 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 226.
80 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 66.
81 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 106.
82 Schwager, Raymund, Must There Be Scapegoats? (New York: Herder and Herder, 2000) 19.Google Scholar Or, the “sacred” is violence as an “independent being,” or “violence seen as something exterior to man and henceforth as a part of all the other outside forces that threaten mankind” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred 31).
83 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 37, 81, 105-106; Things Hidden 28. The participants in the killing experiencing restored peace: “This complex system of instinctual patterns and emotional effects produces a form of ‘short circuit’ in their perception, which has to be elaborated on a higher level.”
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86 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 119.
87 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 220, 211.
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91 Girard, Things Hidden 42.
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93 Or, as Alison writes, “desire is shown to be anterior to language (and thus reason), to will (and thus to freedom), and to memory (and thus history). In the first place, language is shown to be part of a distorted construction of a worldview. The key binary opposites (good/evil, life/death) are shown to flow from the lynchers’ perspective on the victim. Thus the whole human system of signification, rather than being in any sense independent of the sense world and not deceived by it, is already utterly shot through with a certain betrayal of truth” (Alison, Joy 40).
94 Alison, Joy 16.
95 Alison, Joy 29.
96 Gans, Eric, “René et moi” in For René Girard, eds Goodhart, Sandoor, Jørgensen, Jørgen, Ryba, Tom, and Williams, James (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2009) 24Google Scholar.
97 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 122f.
98 For a brief review of anthropological literature, including Iron, Sosis, Alcorta, et al, see: Haw, Chris, “Human Evolution and the Single Victim Mechanism: Locating Girard's Hypothesis Through Literature Survey,” Contagion 27 (2017) 191-216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
99 Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 117, 121, 124, 141. This branch of his theory enjoys considerable archaeological corroboration at Çatalhöyük: Hodder, Ian, ed, Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. See also Watts, Joseph, et al, “Ritual Human Sacrifice Promoted and Sustained the Evolution of Stratified Societies,” Nature 532, no. 228 (2016) 228-31CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
100 Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind 215, italics mine.
101 Girard, Battling 19.
102 For Girardian inspired anthropology and psychology, see resources in footnote 10 above.
103 Calcagno, James and Fuentes, Agustín, “What Makes Us Human? Answers from Evolutionary Anthropology,” Evolutionary Anthropology 21.5 (2012) 182-94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
104 E.g. Coppens, Yves, “The Bunch of Prehumans and the Emergence of the Genus Homo” in Scientific Insights into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life, eds Arbor and Sorondo 370.Google Scholar
105 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 97.
106 Girard, René, The Girard Reader, ed Williams, James G. (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1996) 20.Google Scholar
107 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 104; Alison, Joy 16.
108 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 107; Things Hidden 99. “Imitation has broken free from any instinctual constraint and become mediated by a dead co-member. The way ‘I’ am part of the sociality has to be defined as how ‘I’ am driven not by instinctive drives or purely cerebral imitational patterns, but by a group which has found a principle of order in the victim” (Alison, Joy 255).
109 Alison, Joy 16. “That which has functioned as transcendental signifier in the formation of the human race is the victim” (Joy 35). Or, “This is the origin and basis of the disjunction between actual events and their cognitive understanding and representation in collective memory—something that, eventually, helped in producing symbolicity, since the symbolic imagination works between terms that are incoercibly associated, but whose relation is logically obscure and of a metonymic or allusive order” (Antonello and Gifford, How We Became Human xxxiii).
110 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 123.
111 Girard, René, “The Evangelical Subversion of Myth,” in Politics and Apocalypse, ed. Hammerton-Kelly, Robert (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2007) 40Google Scholar, italics mine.
112 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 67.
113 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 199.
114 Girard, Violence and the Sacred 161.
115 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 178.
116 Alison, Joy 67.
117 Alison, Joy 35; 133, 224, 225.
118 Alison, Joy 35.
119 Girard, Things Hidden 153; Evolution and Conversion 141.
120 Girard, Battling 199.
121 Girard, Battling 122; Evolution and Conversion 198, 218.
122 Alison, James, “Worship in a Violent World,” accessed Jan 16, 2019, http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng13.html.Google Scholar
123 Colossians 1:16: ”In him all things were made.” John 1:3: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
124 E.g. from Origen, “Christ has flooded the universe with divine and sanctifying waves. For the thirsty he sends a spring of living water from the wound which the spear opened in His Side. From the wound in Christ's side has come forth the Church, and He has made her His Bride” (Commentary on Psalm 77:31; Commentary on Proverbs 31:16).
125 Girard, Evolution and Conversion 198.
126 Alison, Joy 171.
127 Alison, Joy 221.
128 Summa Theologica Ia-Iae, qu. 85, art 3.
129 Summa Theologica III. Q. 69, a.3 ad 6. St. Felix III at the Council of Orange II (Denzinger, Enchiridion 174-5) names such corruption as affecting both body and soul together.
130 O'Sullivan, “Catholics Re-Examining” 662.
131 Merton, Thomas, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, 1989) 85ff.Google Scholar
132 Alison, Joy 29. We need not make the false choice of O'Sullivan: “transmission [of original sin] can and should be explained not through problematic ideas of biological and physical inheritance, but precisely because humans are always situated in sin” (O'Sullivan, “Catholics Re-Examining” 660). Rather, that we are always-already shaped by the sins of others is biological and physical.
133 O'Sullivan, “Catholics Re-Examining” 665; Domning, Daryl and Hellwig, Monica, Original Selfishness: Original Sin and Evil.in the Light of Evolution (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006) ix.Google Scholar
134 O'Sullivan, “Catholics Re-Examining” 665; Haught, John, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000) 141.Google Scholar
135 This simplification is evident in Sarah Coakley's Gifford Lectures, in her antinomy between violence and “cooperation” (Sacrifice Regained [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012]Google Scholar. The error is paralleled in Grace Jantzen's misreading of Girard's theory as somehow prescriptively violent (Jantzen, Grace, “New Creations,” in Toward a Theology of Eros, eds Burrus, Virginia and Keller, Catherine (New York: Fordham, 2007Google Scholar).
136 I.e. Anselm and Aquinas held to the notion of an original justice and historic “paradise,” from which Adam and Eve “fell.” O'Sullivan, “Catholic Re-examining” 656.
137 Schoonenberg, Piet, “Original Sin and Man's Situation,” in The Mystery of Sin and Forgiveness, ed. Taylor, Michael J. (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1971) 251Google Scholar; O'Sullivan, “Catholics Re-examining” 662, 668. Fitzmeyer even writes that Genesis 3 does not contain “a hint of a ‘fall’ from grace or original justice, as patristic and later scholastics eventually formulated it.”
138 Alison, Joy 44, 61.
139 Alison, Joy 44, 61, 102, 174, 203, 300.
140 Alison, Joy 58.