The Nature of Man: Body and Soul
Edward Holloway
Evolution and the creation of the soul
The soul is not part of the body, nor just the higher power of the brain. The soul is not material and it did not, and cannot, evolve as matter can. Yet, the soul, or spirit, crowns the process of the development of material life, and is the reason for, and the purpose of, the whole process of the material creation. This is not true only of our planet Earth: it will be true of anywhere else in the universe where there may be rational life. There may be countless worlds Re ours - yet not quite like ours! We just do not know. If there is life out in space which is like us, a synthesis of living matter and spiritual soul, then God will have provided for it even as he has provided for us.
The Church does not decide between evolutionary and direct creation theories of human origins. The Church teaches as of her basic Catholic doctrine that the soul of man is spiritual and not material, and that it is created immediately by God into each and every human individual. In these days it is very important, when children learn from their earliest schooldays that man is a product of evolution, that we show how if that is so then there is no contradiction here between true science and revealed religion. For, in any case the brain does not explain all that a human being is, nor could that 'soul' in a human being be material in its nature and origins.
The soul is infused into living matter, and if the creation of man was by a process of evolution as far as the body of man is concerned, then the soul was infused into living matter in exactly the same way as it is in the womb of a woman today. It would have been infused into the fertilised seed of life in the womb, when there was about to be developed, as a 'mutation' within nature, a brain so powerful that the interaction of control and direction, through the natural environment around, would no longer be able to provide a meaningful, controlled life cycle for the anthropoid animal about to be created. That is to say, when there is nothing more, in terms of eating, drinking, getting, defending territory or procreating, which can now be added to even the most versatile and sensitive of ape-like animals controlled by instinct and a fixed cycle and pattern of life. The animal brain, even in the highest ape, lacks the freedom to know and to judge which belongs to true man. This distinction is not one of degree, as most scientists mistakenly assume, it is one of quality and kind. The animal lacks free thinking (strangely, it is mostly 'freethinkers' who cannot see this) because in a mere animal the brain does explain all, but in true man it does not.
The brain of a mere animal is "tuned in" to the environment of nature all around it. It is programmed to that environment of nature amid which it first began, and with which it has "grown up" over long ages of development and evolution. From the environment of nature around, nature fixed and familiar, the animal brain has received its fixed law of life, its times and its seasons. If an animal evolved with a brain too powerful in energies and scope to be programmed by the environment around into a fixed way of life, then that animal and its brain would be a contradiction to the law of nature, and a diseased thing. For the brain of the merely animal life has a fixed, organic structure: it is made to be programmed and determined, and the more efficient it is in responding to definite determination by the environment the more surely it has been "selected" and "favoured" to survive by that environment.
The animal brain, since it began that way, and can only operate that way, is a sort of "super computer", and computers have to be programmed to a definite, determinate response. Indeed the human knowledge of computers has gained a great deal from the study of the animal brain and nervous system.
The Secret of True Man
Yet that moment of destiny did occur. We human beings, true men, are here. We are not controlled and directed by instinctual and fixed law, monitored by the environment of woodland, field, sea and air, all the fullness of the physical environment around us. We do not live a fixed cycle of life, responding to our 'proper' signals through the brain. Neither are we diseased animals, lacking a law of life and meaning, just a chaos of senses without a law. For the secret of man and his infinite superiority over the apes, does not lie in the brain alone. This is where the humanist goes wrong, and the neo-modernist or radical theologian goes wrong with him. Neither is Teilhard de Chardin, the great French Jesuit priest right, when he tries to get over the difficulty by making soul, or spirit, ones same order of being with matter-energy, so that even the basic elements of matter are said to have some form of latent consciousness. This latter way of looking at things is contradicted by the very exactitude of the sciences of mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
There is another way. At the moment when a brain evolves within nature in the womb of a living anthropoid, which overpasses the power of the material environment to control and direct according to the laws of organic determinism, then, from the nature of the brain itself, God must and he does infuse into the fertilised ovum of that form of life, pregnant with a brain beyond the power of nature to programme and control, the spiritual soul, truly such, made to the image of God. At this moment the Unity-Law, in which and through which all creation has grown and developed in harmonious balance, now passes on to a higher plane, and a higher order of being. For now we have man: and of man we must say that only God is the 'Environer', the controller and director of man. This God does, not by determining us in a fixed, instinctual way, but by teaching us, loving us, guiding us through the spiritual soul, intelligent and free, and leading us sweetly on. There is still a Law for mankind, and still a definite way to fulfilment, but now God is the principle of that Law of life, it derives from him. Please notice at this stage, how all of this, the lead forward from the creation of man to the beginning of God's revelation, and its culmination finally in Christ and the Church is one continuity of process from the poising of the explosive energies of the universe, to the making of man, and beyond to the Incarnation of the Word or Intelligence who is God. There is a climax of wisdom and good and love here- there is no "wand-waving" nothing arbitrary or unworthy of the mind of modern man, come of age in scientific knowledge. On the contrary, modern man must recognise in this majestic sweep of continuous and unified wisdom the most sure sign of a God infinitely higher than man in wisdom, truth, and unity: to such a God let every man bow his head in recognition, and lift up his heart in hope and in love.
Once the spiritual soul animates and infuses the truly new species of animal which is "man" that spiritual soul, the self-conscious and fully reflecting "me" of every human person, will enormously develop the very brain itself. For one thing, the spiritual soul which knows and judges in unity of understanding, will direct that brain, through eye, and speech and ear, and every sense, to knowledge without limit or frontier, even to penetrate the mysteries of outer space itself. But, far greater than this, is the rising of the whole man, body and soul, to know, penetrate, and compass to some degree, the vaster mystery which is God himself, and the master plan which is the consummation of the universe, and the meaning of men and of angels.
Edward Holloway
Evolution and the creation of the soul
The soul is not part of the body, nor just the higher power of the brain. The soul is not material and it did not, and cannot, evolve as matter can. Yet, the soul, or spirit, crowns the process of the development of material life, and is the reason for, and the purpose of, the whole process of the material creation. This is not true only of our planet Earth: it will be true of anywhere else in the universe where there may be rational life. There may be countless worlds Re ours - yet not quite like ours! We just do not know. If there is life out in space which is like us, a synthesis of living matter and spiritual soul, then God will have provided for it even as he has provided for us.
The Church does not decide between evolutionary and direct creation theories of human origins. The Church teaches as of her basic Catholic doctrine that the soul of man is spiritual and not material, and that it is created immediately by God into each and every human individual. In these days it is very important, when children learn from their earliest schooldays that man is a product of evolution, that we show how if that is so then there is no contradiction here between true science and revealed religion. For, in any case the brain does not explain all that a human being is, nor could that 'soul' in a human being be material in its nature and origins.
The soul is infused into living matter, and if the creation of man was by a process of evolution as far as the body of man is concerned, then the soul was infused into living matter in exactly the same way as it is in the womb of a woman today. It would have been infused into the fertilised seed of life in the womb, when there was about to be developed, as a 'mutation' within nature, a brain so powerful that the interaction of control and direction, through the natural environment around, would no longer be able to provide a meaningful, controlled life cycle for the anthropoid animal about to be created. That is to say, when there is nothing more, in terms of eating, drinking, getting, defending territory or procreating, which can now be added to even the most versatile and sensitive of ape-like animals controlled by instinct and a fixed cycle and pattern of life. The animal brain, even in the highest ape, lacks the freedom to know and to judge which belongs to true man. This distinction is not one of degree, as most scientists mistakenly assume, it is one of quality and kind. The animal lacks free thinking (strangely, it is mostly 'freethinkers' who cannot see this) because in a mere animal the brain does explain all, but in true man it does not.
The brain of a mere animal is "tuned in" to the environment of nature all around it. It is programmed to that environment of nature amid which it first began, and with which it has "grown up" over long ages of development and evolution. From the environment of nature around, nature fixed and familiar, the animal brain has received its fixed law of life, its times and its seasons. If an animal evolved with a brain too powerful in energies and scope to be programmed by the environment around into a fixed way of life, then that animal and its brain would be a contradiction to the law of nature, and a diseased thing. For the brain of the merely animal life has a fixed, organic structure: it is made to be programmed and determined, and the more efficient it is in responding to definite determination by the environment the more surely it has been "selected" and "favoured" to survive by that environment.
The animal brain, since it began that way, and can only operate that way, is a sort of "super computer", and computers have to be programmed to a definite, determinate response. Indeed the human knowledge of computers has gained a great deal from the study of the animal brain and nervous system.
The Secret of True Man
Yet that moment of destiny did occur. We human beings, true men, are here. We are not controlled and directed by instinctual and fixed law, monitored by the environment of woodland, field, sea and air, all the fullness of the physical environment around us. We do not live a fixed cycle of life, responding to our 'proper' signals through the brain. Neither are we diseased animals, lacking a law of life and meaning, just a chaos of senses without a law. For the secret of man and his infinite superiority over the apes, does not lie in the brain alone. This is where the humanist goes wrong, and the neo-modernist or radical theologian goes wrong with him. Neither is Teilhard de Chardin, the great French Jesuit priest right, when he tries to get over the difficulty by making soul, or spirit, ones same order of being with matter-energy, so that even the basic elements of matter are said to have some form of latent consciousness. This latter way of looking at things is contradicted by the very exactitude of the sciences of mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
There is another way. At the moment when a brain evolves within nature in the womb of a living anthropoid, which overpasses the power of the material environment to control and direct according to the laws of organic determinism, then, from the nature of the brain itself, God must and he does infuse into the fertilised ovum of that form of life, pregnant with a brain beyond the power of nature to programme and control, the spiritual soul, truly such, made to the image of God. At this moment the Unity-Law, in which and through which all creation has grown and developed in harmonious balance, now passes on to a higher plane, and a higher order of being. For now we have man: and of man we must say that only God is the 'Environer', the controller and director of man. This God does, not by determining us in a fixed, instinctual way, but by teaching us, loving us, guiding us through the spiritual soul, intelligent and free, and leading us sweetly on. There is still a Law for mankind, and still a definite way to fulfilment, but now God is the principle of that Law of life, it derives from him. Please notice at this stage, how all of this, the lead forward from the creation of man to the beginning of God's revelation, and its culmination finally in Christ and the Church is one continuity of process from the poising of the explosive energies of the universe, to the making of man, and beyond to the Incarnation of the Word or Intelligence who is God. There is a climax of wisdom and good and love here- there is no "wand-waving" nothing arbitrary or unworthy of the mind of modern man, come of age in scientific knowledge. On the contrary, modern man must recognise in this majestic sweep of continuous and unified wisdom the most sure sign of a God infinitely higher than man in wisdom, truth, and unity: to such a God let every man bow his head in recognition, and lift up his heart in hope and in love.
Once the spiritual soul animates and infuses the truly new species of animal which is "man" that spiritual soul, the self-conscious and fully reflecting "me" of every human person, will enormously develop the very brain itself. For one thing, the spiritual soul which knows and judges in unity of understanding, will direct that brain, through eye, and speech and ear, and every sense, to knowledge without limit or frontier, even to penetrate the mysteries of outer space itself. But, far greater than this, is the rising of the whole man, body and soul, to know, penetrate, and compass to some degree, the vaster mystery which is God himself, and the master plan which is the consummation of the universe, and the meaning of men and of angels.