Cloning inspires new talk about the soul

National Catholic Reporter, March 28, 1997 by Pamela Schaeffer

When talk in the news magazines turned earlier this month to the ethics of cloning -- not just sheep, but possibly human beings -- the compelling question for some journalists was the nature of "soul." The discussion found its way into millions of households through such unexpected vehicles as The New York Times and Time magazine.

Suddenly soul in the popular press was no longer an adjective modifying music or food. It was a noun again -- an ancient concept turning out in new dress. Perhaps soul -- the essence of the human person, that indefinable element that makes each of us unique and capable of transcendence -- is reducible to DNA. Maybe souls can be cloned.

Geneticists (the new experts on soul?) were quick to say no. Even identical twins, who share DNA, are clearly distinct persons with different personalities, different likes and dislikes, despite their common genes.

Here at NCR, we quoted Griffin Trotter, physician and professor of ethics at St. Louis University's Center for Health Care Ethics, who said, "Two people with the same genetic code would have a different soul -- or, if you don't like that word, whatever it is that makes them an individual." Jesuit Fr. Kevin Fitzgerald, a geneticist from Chicago, said, "The notion of a disembodied soul is outdated in most Christian theology."

Lurking around the edges of the national debate was an ancient religious mystery: What is the nature of the afterlife? We noted, "Many theologians today -- drawing on both modern biblical theology and scientific knowledge of the human brain -- understand soul as a dimension of human development, rejecting the ancient notion of soul as something `infused' from outside. For today's biblical scholar, salvation means resurrection of a body that incorporates a soul rather than immortality of a separated soul."

Spurred on by readers who wanted to know more, and in keeping with the Easter season, it seemed appropriate to delve a little deeper into the history and place of resurrection theology in Catholic thought.

It may seem elementary to say that Christians believe in resurrection of the body -- after all, don't we say something like that every Sunday in the Creed? But it isn't always so clear. Plato's notion of an immortal soul -- a soul that separates from the mortal body at death -- has long infected Christian thought.

Greek philosophers and Hebrew prophets were talking about an after-life several centuries before the birth of Jesus -- but from markedly different perspectives. The dualist Plato found it hard to comprehend that spirit could be bound to flesh, reasoning that such entrapment violated the very nature of spirit. He concluded that souls became imprisoned in bodies as a result of some sin committed in a previous life. Once the body died, the soul was set free to exist immortally. The matter-hating Gnostics of the second century of the Christian era took up this idea with a vengeance -- and were declared heretics by the church.

Aristotle got closer to what would become the Christian view in his insistence that there is a fundamental unity to body and soul in the human person. He wasn't a dualist, and he argued that the soul died with the body.

Bodily resurrection

Meanwhile, even before Plato, Hebrew prophets had alluded to a bodily resurrection. For example, both Ezekiel and Isaiah used resurrection imagery as metaphor for hope in the restoration of Israel. Ezekiel wrote in his vision of dry bones coming to life, "Then you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and have you rise from them" (37:12). In the fifth century B.C., Isaiah wrote, "Your dead shall live, their corpses arise" (26:19).

Such vague poetic imagery had evolved into a more specific belief in a personal resurrection by the time of Daniel. "Many of those who sleep in earth's dust shall awake, some to eternal life, some to shame and eternal confusion," he wrote in the second century BCE. Biblical scholars say that belief in resurrection was widespread in the apocalyptic atmosphere of the first century BCE.

Jesus was born into that era -- and the scriptures present him as a proponent of resurrection as well as the Resurrected One. When the Sadducees, disbelievers in resurrection, challenged Jesus, asking to whom the woman with seven husbands would be married in the afterlife, Jesus admonished them that it constitutes a new sort of existence. "When people rise from the dead [notice he didn't say souls] they neither marry nor are given in marriage but live like angels in heaven," he said.

When Paul began evangelizing among the Greeks, he had to contend with the body/soul dualism of Plato. As a Hebrew, Paul believed that body and soul, or spirit, were parts of an indivisible whole. He insisted that life beyond death -- though different from the life we know -- is still an integrated life, involving a resurrected body, a whole person.

"Tell me," he asked the Corinthians (15:12), "if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how is it that some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? .... If the dead are not raised, then Christ was not raised; and if Christ was not raised, your faith is worthless." Paul reminds the Corinthians of all the appearances Jesus had made since his death: to Cephas, to the Twelve, to 500 people "most of whom are still alive," and to James. Paul concludes, "Last of all, he was seen by me."