Death Symposium -The Revd Dr Jonathan Jong

Death, be not proud’: Dying, Death & Destiny

A record of the Symposium held in The Abbey Centre, 34 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BU on Saturday 18 November 2023, organised by The Society of the Faith.

The Revd Dr Jonathan Jong: On human being, death, and resurrection. 

The Revd Dr Jonathan Jong is Vicar of St Catherine of Siena, Cocking, in the diocese of Chichester. He was previously an Associate Priest of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford. He is also an experimental psychologist researching the psychology of religion and the philosophical issues related to theology and the scientific study of religion. He has appointments in both the universities of Oxford and Coventry.

I am going to pick up where Angela left off, I think. My brief for this talk was to make the case for maintaining what we might call a traditional ‑ and what I like to think is an orthodox Christian ‑ view of the afterlife, in our modern and ostensibly scientific age. The assumption behind that latter part of the brief is that there is something about modern science that makes it more difficult to maintain orthodox Christian belief. And I suppose my job is to argue that this assumption is faulty ‑ which ‑ fortunately ‑ it is. It is faulty in part because there are confusions about the science and its interpretation and reception. The science involved is mainly psychology and neuroscience, which is the only science I know anything about. There are also confusions on the part of theology, and its interpretation and reception.

Most of my talk will be, as it happens, on the soul. But to many contemporary theologians this is an awkward place to start. Awkward because, they say, the Christian view of the afterlife has to do, not so much with the immortality of the soul, as with the resurrection of the body. And they are not wrong. It is absolutely true that the Christian hope is for the resurrection of the body ‑ this is what we confess whenever we cite the Creed.

Christians are not to expect a disembodied existence beyond death, as a kind of ghost, but an embodied one, albeit one different from the one with which we are already familiar. The way St Paul expresses this is in the terms ‘soma psychikon’ and ‘soma pneumatikon’, in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15. The New revised Standard Version translates these as “physical body” and “spiritual body”; the Authorized version has “natural body” and “spirit body”. David Bentley Hart (already mentioned) has “psychical body” and “spiritual body”, which is delightfully literal but rather abstruse, as are some similar alternatives, like “ensouled body” and “spirited body”, which I rather like. Regardless of exactly how these terms are translated, the thing to notice is that they both share in common the term “soma” ‑ body; but these bodies clearly differ in ways that are difficult to express.

The Gospels also contain something of this tenson and ambivalence about resurrected bodies. Luke and John insist that Jesus can be touched, for example; and indeed, that he can even eat. But both ‑ John more clearly than Luke ‑ note that there was something different about him. His closest friends failed to recognise him, and he could appear in locked rooms. Whatever one makes of the historical veracity of these stories ‑ decidedly not the topic of this talk ‑ the metaphysical point being made here is that resurrected bodies are similar but different from natural bodies.

So, the Christian hope is for eternal embodied life. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the fashionable denial of the existence, let alone the immortality, of the soul among modern theologians is unnecessary. After all, the resurrection of the body is not mutually exclusive with the immortality of the soul. And indeed, on some accounts they are interdependent.

There is, for any account of resurrection, a question of personal identity and continuity, a question of how it is that your resurrected body is your body, and not somebody else’s. There are several possible metaphysical options on the table.

The most obvious in our day and age is that of material continuity: that is, a resurrection body belongs to a subject, if, and only if, it is in some sense sufficiently materially continuous with that subject’s natural body. It is easy to see how this works if we consider the relationship between our physical bodies as they are now, and the ostensibly same bodies as they were when we were babies. These two bodies share almost no physical matter in common, and so it is at least questionable whether they are the same bodies, except for the fact that we can tell a causal story in which bits of our bodies ‑ cells and molecules and atoms and so forth ‑ are sloughed off gradually, while the integrity of the whole is maintained over time. (This is like the Ship of Theseus debate*). In that sense, we might be able to say that my current body is the same object as my childhood body, even though its constituent parts have almost entirely been replaced.

*In Plutarch’s ‘Life of Theseus’ we learn that after his death Theseus’ ship was taken each year by the Athenians to Delos to honour Apollo. As time passed, parts of the ship decayed and were replaced until nothing of the original remained. This prompted a question in philosophical debate about growth, as to whether the identity of the ship remained the same when its constituent parts were no longer the same.

Not everybody thinks that this argument works even in the developmental case or indeed in the Ship of Theseus case: but it almost certainly will not work in the case of our resurrection bodies. In the developmental case, the material changes are gradual: not so in the case of death, in which there is a temporal gap between death and resurrection.

Furthermore, bodily integrity is always maintained in the developmental case, in a way that is not the case with death and resurrection. At best, some of our physical matter remains in close proximity, as in the case of bones buried in well-sealed coffins, which might take hundreds of years to decompose. But cremated remains may be entirely dispersed within a matter of weeks.

The other major contender in the debate around the persistence of personal identity is psychological continuity. Again, the developmental case is instructive. I am the same person as my childhood self to the extent, and insofar as, my present psychological state is in some relevant sense closely dependent on my former self’s psychological state at any given point in the past. If, say, four year‑old Jonathan is the same person as current(!) year‑old Jonathan, then we can see how his body and my body are the same body, not by virtue of any material continuity, but by virtue of belonging to one and the same psychological entity ‑ that is to say me.

This is not an unreasonable view, and is probably the dominant view among philosophers today, whether secular or religious, but it is not without problems. There are two main kinds of objections to this view. The first has to do with what kind of psychological continuity is relevant. Some prefer continuity of memory, others continuity of consciousness, but both memory and consciousness are patchy. Are we, for example, the same persons as those who experienced things we have now forgotten? Are amnesia and dementia tantamount to death? What do we make of bouts of unconsciousness: even if sleep does not count as death, what about prolonged comas? These debates over psychological continuity have gone on over centuries, and persist even now.

This is where the soul re‑enters the conversation. Among other things, the soul ‑ if it is immortal, that is, if it survives bodily death ‑ is an obvious candidate for the guarantor of personal identity between our natural bodies and our resurrection bodies. And, indeed, the traditional Christian view is exactly that human persons are made up of body and soul, and that the soul survives bodily death, and that it is united with a new body in the resurrection. So, it turns out that the modern assertion that the Christian doctrine of the afterlife is of the resurrection of the body is not inconsistent with a belief in the immortality of the soul. Modern theologians who try to oppose the two are simply posing a false dilemma.

On then, to science and the soul. I have already mentioned that the traditional Christian view is that human persons are comprised of body and soul. But this is, in some ways, a misleading description, using as it does two nouns: body and soul. This linguistic habit encourages the belief that there are two objects ‑ or substances, in the technical jargon ‑ in the way that, for example, salt shakers and pepper shakers are two objects, or indeed that the salt shaker and its contents are two kinds of objects. Philosophers and theologians sometimes call this view “substance dualism” because there are two substances involved: bodies and souls. And this is more or less the picture of the body and soul that most people have, whether or not they believe in the soul. Both believers and non‑believers assume that the soul (if it exists) – like the body ‑ is an object made up of stuff, spiritual stuff in this case, rather than physical or material stuff. Believers accept that such a soul exists and non‑believers deny this.

This common view of the soul as an object ‑ a thing made of stuff ‑ has had quite unfortunate repercussions in the history of ideas. The history of ideas ‑ and the history of science more specifically ‑ is littered with things-made-up-of-stuff now rejected, abandoned as imaginary for reasons of explanatory superfluity.

For example, once upon a time the ancient Greeks believed in aether, eventually Latinised as quintessence – that fifth element of which the celestial bodies were made. If the natural motion of earth was towards the centre of the universe and that of fire was towards the heavens, then aether/quintessence moved naturally in perfect circular motion, and this accounted for the revolutions of the star. Except, of course, that it didn’t, as Ptolemy’s Aristotelian astronomy gave way to the theories of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Descartes. And so, aether was left behind.

Or rather, its name was repurposed and, in the early modern period ‑ in the hands of Newton and other early scientists ‑ aether became the medium that filled up all apparently empty space through which light and other electromagnetic waves moved. All the way up to the early 20th century, physicists theorised and re‑theorised about the properties of this hypothesised, all pervading not‑quite fluid, which experiment after experiment cast doubt upon. It all came to an end when special relativity made the luminiferous aether redundant, though Einstein himself still used the term occasionally.

The point is that, one of the ways in which scientific theories change over time is in terms of the entities ‑ the things-made-of-stuff ‑ that scientists accept as real and then abandon as imaginary. And how an entity’s existence is discussed has everything to do with its explanatory power. Does the aether explain anything that would otherwise remain mysterious? If not, then off it goes from our catalogue of the furniture of the universe into the dumpster.

And so, it would be if the soul were an entity of this kind: it would be amenable to scientific analysis. Thus, it has been, and sometimes still is. And the most natural kind of functions to attribute to the soul are, of course, psychological functions. And this is where psychologists like myself and, in particular neuroscientists, begin to get antsy.

Pretty much all psychologists and neuroscientists agree that the mind is dependent on the brain. In other words, our mental activity, our thoughts and feelings, our memories, our experiencing of the world, our deciding to act in it, require brain activity. And we know this because we have a lot of evidence about what happens in the case of brain damage. Some of this evidence comes from clinical cases, and some comes from experimental work with animals. Let me give you an example that tries to covers both.

On 2 December every year I remember Henry Molaison on the anniversary of his death ‑ he is a sort of secular saint for me. Henry had incapacitating seizures as a child and in 1953, at the age of 27, underwent surgery to try to have the problem solved. The surgeon discovered that the epilepsy was localised to Henry’s left and right medial temporal lobes. So, he removed brain tissue from those regions. The surgery, I am happy to say, did help with the epilepsy to some extent, but Henry woke up with a serious and rather peculiar case of amnesia. He could mostly remember things that happened in the past, in particular the long past, but he could not form new memories. Or rather, he could not retain new information for very long. Except that he could still learn new motor skills. Most of the experiments run on him involved drawing tasks. He would improve on these drawing tasks even though he could not remember doing them before.

Henry’s case taught psychologists and neuroscientists rather a lot about the nature of memory. It taught us, for example, that short and long‑term memory rely on different processes, and that memories about facts and events are different from memories about skills; and that the medial temporal cortex is important for the formation of new memories.

So, this is both a clinical as well as an experimental example. In purely clinical examples, neuroscientists are testing people with different kinds of brain damage, to see what they can and cannot do. In purely experimental examples, they are genuinely disabling ‑ either temporarily or permanently ‑ brain function in animals, and then testing them to see what the effects are. And what all these studies clearly tell us is that, pretty much, human psychological phenomena require some corresponding brain activity.

We also know quite a lot about how psychological phenomena specifically correlate with brain activity. The example about the role of the medial temporal cortex in the formation of long‑term memory can be multiplied hundreds if not thousands of times over, with different brain areas and different psychological functions. Again, a lot of this knowledge comes from clinical and experimental cases, supplemented especially with neuro-imaging techniques.

But it is also the case that there is a lot we do not know. Let me give you just one example, again from clinical research. Among the most important lessons we have learned from patients with brain damage and abnormality is that we enjoy a lot of what we call neural plasticity, which means that the relationship between the brain and mental capacities is somewhat flexible and malleable. When one brain region is damaged, other parts of the brain can ‑ albeit not fully ‑ compensate for the damage. Some individuals even live remarkably functional, if not quite normal, lives with vanishingly little cortical brain matter at all. So having said that we know quite a lot about how brain activity maps on to psychological functioning, it turns out that this mapping is not fixed and exactly how this functional compensation happens remains a mystery.

More controversially, there are also a few case studies ‑ not very many admittedly ‑ of near‑death experiences that involve what are called “veridical perceptions”. These are generally cases of cardiac arrest, and the claim is that while the patient’s heart is stopped, she can nevertheless see or hear things, including things she should not be able to hear from where her body is. This might include visual details about the room she is in, or conversations carried on too far away from her to be able to hear physically. It is hard to know how seriously to take these reports, though they do sometimes find their way into quite respectable scientific journals. But some people ‑ some scientists ‑ do take them seriously so I thought I should mention that here.

In any case, the overwhelming neuroscientific evidence clearly tells us that mental activity always comes with some brain activity and that mental deficits arise when there is brain damage. In other words, the scientific evidence tells us that mental states and brain states are correlated and that brain activity is necessary for mental activity. In contrast, we have no direct evidence whatever ‑ whether clinical or experimental ‑ for something we might call a soul being involved in psychological functioning. And for this reason ‑ the overwhelming absence of evidence ‑ most neuroscientists disbelieve in the soul, and certainly in the soul as a thing‑made‑up‑of‑stuff.

Now, it is important to say that the mainstream scientific evidence does not logically entail the non‑existence of such a soul. The fact that brain activity is necessary for psychological functioning does not entail that it is also sufficient for psychological functioning. It remains logically possible that a soul is necessary, in conjunction with a body, for psychological functioning. Of course, just because this remains logically possibly does not mean that we should believe it: logical possibility is a rather low bar. But it is important to say that modern neuroscience does not, strictly speaking, rule out belief in the soul, even the soul as a thing‑made‑up‑of‑stuff.

But as it happens, this view of the soul as a thing-made‑up‑of stuff is not the dominant view of the soul among theologians, of the Christian west anyway. That view, the dominant view, inspired by Aristotle and expressed mostly clearly by Thomas Aquinas is called hylomorphism.

Hylomorphism is not primarily a philosophical theory about the soul: it is a theory about objects in general. It is the theory that all objects ‑ cakes, tables, pepper shakers, people, societies ‑ are compounds of matter and form. This should not be understood as meaning that things are made up of two kinds of stuff; it is not a version of substance dualism as previously described – the form of an object is not a part of that object in the way that, for example, flour, eggs and butter are part of a cake. Objects are made of matter; the form is what makes a lump of matter the object that it happens to be, like a statue or a cake or a pepper shaker, or a Velociraptor: or you. In the case of animals like dinosaurs and human beings, the form is called the soul.

It might be helpful to think about this through another set of Aristotelian concepts, potentiality and actuality. Matter is potentially a particular object, and what makes it actually that particular object is its form. A lump of matter (think of a little pile of atoms, if you like, even though that does not really make much sense in the terms of modern physics) has the potential of being any number of objects, what makes it that cake or that Velociraptor or that particular human being is its form, its soul.

Exactly what a form is, is admittedly quite vague, as is how it is that it makes something what it actually is. But the idea might be more familiar than it first seems, when we consider the nature of information, which of course etymologically related to Aristotle and Plato’s form. We readily talk about the information contained in something, whether it is a page of a book or a computer hard drive or the cloud, and we accept that information is not identical or reducible to its physical substrate: a digital and a printed copy of a text can contain the same information, for example. But nor is information a thing made up of stuff. It might be helpful to think of an object’s form ‑ and a person’s soul ‑ as something like information.

On this view, there seems to be nothing stopping even the materialist from believing in the soul, even if no psychological functions are attributed to it. And I think that is right, until we get to talking about life after death, that is. Aristotle, for example, did not believe that the soul could survive death. More generally, he did not believe that forms co‑exist without the matter that they were informing. This is where Christian theologians, including Aquinas, disagree with Aristotle and with modern materialists.

There does not seem to me to be a knock‑down argument either way. After all, once we admit that the soul ‑ like information ‑ is conceptually distinct from the body, it is at least again logically possible for one to persist without the other, for example by being transferred ‑ like information ‑ from one substrate to another. The physicist‑priest John Polkinghorne proposed, for example, that my soul could be held in the mind of God until the resurrection, when it will inform some new lump of matter ‑ a soma pneumatikon ‑ to make it my body. This is a bit anthropomorphic for my liking, but it is not a crazy or unreasonable idea.

So far, I have tried to argue for a revival of the idea of a soul. I have tried to show that the quite right and proper theological emphasis on the resurrection of the body does not preclude belief in the soul, even the immortal soul. And I have tried to show that there is nothing in the natural sciences ‑ and especially psychology and neuroscience ‑ that refutes belief in the soul per se, even the version of it that supposes it to be a thing‑made‑up-of‑stuff. But then I also tried to say that this is not really the view of the soul that has been dominant in the western Christian theology anyway, which is a doctrine that is in some ways much more palatable even to scientific materialists, though this might not be that interesting a virtue, really.

Now, in this final ‑ and brief ‑ section, I want to do something altogether different, and say something about why we might want to hope for heaven.

These days, I spend most of my time not so much in a psychology lab, but in a parish as a parish priest, and in that role, I have lots and lots of conversations about death and sometimes these conversations turn to the afterlife. And one of the things people commonly say to me is that they do not see the point of it at all, of hoping for and believing in heaven. This life is enough, they say.

This always strikes me as a tremendously privileged thing to be able to say. It seems to me a luxury to have lived ‑ and enjoyed such a life that one could say there is no point to hoping for heaven. But not all lives are so fortunate. Maybe even most lives are not. Some are cut short, by the usual reckoning of things. Some are marked by such suffering, such horror they are barely worth living at all.

And if God is just, then I think there must be more for them than this vale of tears, even if our imaginations are so stunted that we cannot imagine a heaven worth hoping for relative to our comfortable middle‑class existences. It is not for nothing, I think, that, for example, African American spirituals, those hymns, rousing and rueful in equal measure, are so often and so unabashedly about heaven.

Sceptics will call what I have just said wishful thinking, or in more modern psychological terminology, motivated reasoning. And there is a sense in which they are right, more right perhaps than well-meaning liberal Christians who want to deny that heaven is worth wishing for. In this sense, I might have more in common with all these rich people obsessed with artificial and medical life extension or cryogenics, or something like this, because at least they want to live longer than they otherwise would, unlike some of the more liberal members of my congregation who seem perfectly satisfied with their three score years and ten, or whatever. I do not have an argument about this, unlike the first bit of my talk. I just want to encourage broader perspectives on the Christian hope than those our quite well-healed lives might afford us. Thank you. (Applause)

THE CHAIR: So, we now come to the panel comments section.

Thank you very much for that fascinating talk, Father. What you made me think about in terms especially of the psychological continuity and memory and consciousness, was my relatively frequent link‑up with an 80-year‑old friend who has been getting aphasia and potential dementia. And how every time we speak, he always says, “I’ve lost so many of my friends in my life, they’re dead, and all I can think of is that my life is leading me to death.” That is what he says. He is the most entertaining and charming person I have ever known in my life and yet that is where he is with what is going on in his brain. He was a Christian. He was on General Synod for 25 years. He does not go to church anymore because he fell out with his vicar. What is going on in his brain, Father?

REVD DR JONG: This is what I am referring to when I talk about one of the challenges to the view in which personal identity is guaranteed by psychological continuity, and it is a question of whether or not this person is the same person who was younger and on General Synod and all the rest of it. There certainly is a temptation, I think, to say that that person has gone now and this person is a new entity, and perhaps a new entity not so much worth caring about, and that is part of the worry. I think it is not just a medical worry, it is also a moral worry. If patients with dementia or other neurological problems are not the same people that we married or with whom we were friends, or who were our parishioners, then perhaps they do not matter so much. That should give us pause and make us worry; if we are predicating who that person is on the basis of psychological continuity, then it raises these kinds of problematic moral views.

What is going on in his brain in medical terms is brain failure, brain dysfunction. I want to step aside from that a little bit because I think I detect, similar to what Angela was saying, a process of medicalisation. It is as if we are saying, ‘Let’s forget traditional doctrines like the doctrines of the body and soul and let’s make everything about the physical substrate: who you are in your brain and all the rest.’ It raises these kinds of difficulty. If your brain is no longer the same as it was before, then what is this new thing and should we care about it? And I say yes, we should.

REVD DR BELL: I have a question that is linked to that and it is particularly about continuity. I was really interested in what you were saying, particularly about dementia. Dementia for me is a really interesting question when we talk about continuity. I also want to say some of my work previously was with people very severe intellectual disability, to the extent they were non‑verbal and there was an inability to know what exactly people were expressing and so on. And so, there is a question to what degree the psychology of the individual is required in order for that to form an entity both within life and beyond life. I also wonder about that question, whether it is the same person. We also have to take into account that the person that we meet, whether that is the ensouled person or however we want to see it, when we first meet them does have particular psychological and physical characteristics, and that, in some way, is their personhood at that moment in time. And yet there is still, if we follow Fr Jonathan’s argument (if I am not misrepresenting you) the case that that personhood remains and yet is presenting in a fundamentally different way. Again, how do we manage the fact that the psychological and the physical may be so fundamentally different as to be unrecognisable across a life‑span, plus understanding how that is then taken into the future or into death in terms of personhood?

REVD DR JONG: I do not necessarily think that the psychological continuity view is correct. There is a version of this which says, for example, that in heaven one then recoups all one’s memories. Some modern Augustinians think this, for example. And that is not crazy. It is not crazy to think that in heaven you have full access – pure clear retrospective access – to all your memories, and it is an interesting job of trying to make sense of the different episodes in your life, which to other people are sometimes very disparate, and one hopes that when it comes to that you will be able to make some sense of the whole even though they seem contradictory in parts. So, there is a version of that that does not require any kind of “ism”, whether doctrines or otherwise. Similarly, there is a secular as well as a religious version of this where you can talk about personhood being invested not in the individual but socialised, where the person that you are is the person that you are interpreted to be by other people. That is the secular version. The religion version of this of course is a kind of idealised version where it is God who tells your story and holds all your pieces together, and it is God who makes sense of the Person (with a capital P) that you are, given the different and possibly contradictory episodes of your life.

There are various ways to hold the constituent bits of a person together, even without it being a brain damage case because obviously people do change, without necessarily any clinical problems arising. Sometimes you meet somebody who you grew up with and 30 years later nothing has happened to them neurologically, or clinically (their brains obviously have changed because that is what has happened to brains) and they seem very different people to you. You do not need the very dramatic brain damage case to think about whether people are the same people as they were when they were young.

REVD DR ANTHONY: Just on the broad contours of your argument, have I understood you correctly where you are essentially asserting there is remarkably little concrete scientific consensus or evidence that there definitely is not a soul? Is that basically what you are saying?

REVD DR JONG: Yes.

REVD DR ANTHONY: That is actually quite a strong argument. It appears a weak argument where all you are saying is that there is no evidence there is not such a thing as a soul, but it is actually quite a strong argument in other areas of human logic and argument. Take the idea produced in jurisprudence that you are allowed to do something unless it is specifically prohibited. This notion that everything has to be proved and one can only assert that something exists because we have evidence that it exists, is not a logic that anybody lives by.

REVD DR JONG: The answer is yes. The more interesting question is whether we think this is interesting. So, is it interesting that you can believe all the things that you read in the scientific journals and still believe in the soul? Not just in the soul which I described as the hylomorphic soul, but also if you believe the soul is like an object, a thing-made-up-of-stuff. As I keep saying, I think it is true you can believe all the neuroscience and still hold on to that view of the soul. So, the question is: is that interesting?

On the one hand it is not interesting in that just because some proposition is logically possibly to hold, it does not mean that you should hold it, or just because it is possible to believe, you do not have to believe. On the other hand, I do not know if it is that low a bar really. One can easily imagine a science that does show that the material explanation is sufficient for cognition and perception and all the rest of it. That is one in which you create, with our purely physical matter, an entity that cognizes in the way that humans cognize. Maybe AI people are looking in this direction. Last year a bunch of scientists managed to construct a neuron, so that is very exciting.

You can certainly imagine a mature neuroscience which can build out of constituent physical parts a thinking entity or a human entity or a relational entity, or something like this, or even a kind of religious entity, if you like, or at least an entity that behaves like it is a religious entity. Because you can imagine that scenario, it is not so low a bar, because it is not as though it is impossible to show that physical matter is sufficient for explaining all the things that one wants to explain. Maybe that gives some comfort to people who are substance dualists of that kind. Not being a substance dualist, I do not care, I guess. But if you are a substance dualist maybe you can take some comfort from the fact that certainly modern neuroscience is not anywhere near showing that physical matter is sufficient for explaining all the things that psychologists want to explain.

REVD CANON TILBY: Thank you very much, Jonathan. That was really fascinating. It reminded me of two things, or one thing, and maybe you want to comment on another. I was quite taken with, and I am not sure I go all the way with it, but I am taken with the idea of the soul being something like information in the AI sense. Whether that is in a more literal or more analogical way I am not sure, but it reminds me of something Lady Helen Oppenheimer, (that brilliant Anglican philosopher, a disregarded but very formidable woman of letters and philosophy), suggested in an article a long, long time ago now, when she was trying to tease out some of these issues, and she had a rather interesting comparison. She said that what we are hoping for in the resurrection would be that there is a body appointed and that, in a way, the soul informs the body, the soul is the substance of that appointed body. And the body appointed – the resurrection body – must be fitting. It must be recognisable in that sense but also able to somehow take on and express that information in a fuller way than we ever could on earth. Interestingly, she compared it to the Eucharist, a body appointed: that the Eucharistic host is in some way appointed to be the body of Christ. Consecrated we would say. And then, in a way, it both feeds us and we are incorporated into it. So, we both receive it and become part of it.

I think there is a real comparison there. Surely, if we are looking for a life which is fuller and more complete than our life here, ideas like the mystical body of Christ in which we are participating more in one another and recognising others’ participation in us, without going along the full social model and resurrecting my people, is actually quite promising really. There is something there I want to meditate on and think about, an enrichment of personal being, which has analogies both physical and spiritual, as it were. I do not want to say it is a complete continuity or complete discontinuity but there is something of a participation going on.

The second small thing was your point about people not needing any life after death. Fascinating! I have come across that. It is extraordinary really, but it says to me something about the awful poverty of middle‑class imagination and middle‑class longing and desire. I am thinking in the sense of desire, the longing for what is not given here. Here again I come back to the same point. The fullness of being in the body, in the richer body; in the body which includes the bodies of other persons who have made us and who we are making; the mystical body which is the blessed company of all faithful people. All of that surely is implied here, so, in a sense, the resurrection life or the life after death is also a waiting. You can call it Purgatory, if you like, or the place of the Saints in waiting, those who are on the other side encouraging us to cross over the river. Whatever it is. The fullness is both individual and corporate and much more than anything we could know here, where individuality and corporateness are sundered by sin and selfishness. That is taken away. That is helpful.

REVD DR JONG: I think that is absolutely right. I want to pick up on the first point you made which reminds me of something that followers of modern philosophy do not like so much about Aquinas. Often, like other theologians, he will say that something does not seem seemly or apt in the way that you talk about a body being appointed is apt, that is fitting for your soul. But there is something vague about the notion. What does it mean for a body to be fitting or apt? I think in a quest for a particular kind of rigour, modern philosophers are a bit uncomfortable with the vagueness that they find in particular in this direction. I think, in a way, it is the notion that there is something mysterious about it, something not normal. The best way in which we can express the thing that we yearn for is an aptness, a fittingness, which is our only guide without giving us something much more firm or much more completely indelible.

I think the other thing about this is that the importance of thinking about aptness, fittingness and newness is that it acts as a push back against a very much secular yearning, in some people who think of themselves as humanists, where what they want is for the soul to be uploaded to something else and then the possibilities of physical ascension are literally meaningless, where you can be whoever you want be to. I think certainly Christians have to resist that, because that does away with the notion of aptness altogether, where there is not this participation between the soul and the body, where the body is not important at all, because it could be anything. And in a funny kind of way that kind of continuism is even more dualistic, even more spiritualised than a somewhat more Christian view of the body and soul.

THE CHAIR: So, we now come to questions.

JENNY BREEWOOD: You gave me a lot to think about regarding who a person is when they are ill with dementia, who they are when they do not recognise you and so on, and also your comment a moment ago about we could be anything we want to be. It is almost as if in this life just now, there is so much confusion, unknowns and mystery. It brought to my mind the Scriptures where it says “We are made in God’s image”, so I feel that in all of this life and the questions and the comments and everything that we are talking about, I feel like everything is pointing towards God with us, His creation: we are His creation and that He is everything above us and has made us; and He has written his name within us because he is the Creator. There are some Hebrew letters that would correspond numerically within our DNA. That is a messianic teaching and understanding, scientifically. I cannot explain that very well because I am not so literate in medicine and these types of things, but maybe you know something about that.

Also, being anything we want to be is very heretical in God’s eyes. He made us specifically, with exact DNA, an exact soul and an exact body, and everything He has placed within us. I feel that we as persons are not just a created being, soul and body, which is wonderful that God made us fearfully and wonderfully, but also I feel there has to be some kind of a seal of approval upon His creation, he made everything so perfectly and beautifully. Therefore, I would suggest that God’s spirit is within us as a living human being and the light that comes out of us. Are there things you can relate to or expand on here?

REVD DR JONG: I think I want to say two things about that. One is the question of being made in the image of God which has perplexed biblical theologians for centuries and centuries. There is a quite an old-fashioned view, which I do not dislike, which says that that God is a spiritual being and that we must therefore take seriously the idea that we are spiritual beings too. Part of the point of my talk is to say that although the emphasis on the embodiment of human beings is a good corrective against a particular kind of spirit focussed emphasis in the past (which neglects or even repudiates the body), we do not have to deny there is something spiritual about human beings as well. I think that is one way to think about what it means that we are made in the image of God.

One of the difficulties about thinking about aptness between body and soul in this life is that I think is it raises all sorts of difficult moral questions about what to do about people, for example, who are born with various disabilities. And I think there has to be some room in our talking about the aptness between body and soul for acknowledging that the world is imperfect, broken, fallen, in such a way that we can say that there are things people are legitimately dissatisfied about in the correspondence between their souls and their bodies. I do not think that in any way detracts from idea that God creates good things. Christians have held two ideas for ever: God makes good things, on the one hand, and the world is imperfect on the other. We have different theories to explain this gap. The traditional Catholic interpretation of this has to do with the privation of the good – and then you have heretics who think differently (for example, that there is positive evil, and even that God creates it) But I think that there is space, regardless of how you fill it out, to be able to say that there is in inaptness as well as aptness in our lives – we have to be able to hold that in some way.

REVD DR BELL: Could I ask you to develop this a little bit? I think one of the questions which any discussion on the soul brings is this: what is it to be a human and what is it that you need, what is the jump which you have to make, in order to be a human being and be ensouled. There are questions there, for example, about someone being born without a brain, and there are so many other examples we could go into, some of which are very distasteful. But what can we do with that kind of question, or is that the kind of question we simply cannot be doing anything with so that in the majority of cases one talks about how one’s identity is formed and what embodiment means, and then in these difficult circumstances, we revert to the response: well, that’s God’s problem and not ours?

REVD DR JONG: I do not want to say it is God’s problem and not ours, but my answer is going to sound like that. In a way, there is a trend among psychologists who think a lot about evolution and who happen to be Christian – let’s just call them evolutionary psychologists in religion. In this group there is a desire to say because of evolution there are no categorical distinctions between species. That is the prevailing assumption among my colleagues and any talk of discontinuity between species is anathema. And I totally understand where they are coming from. From a purely biological perspective that is true. The distinctions between species are arbitrary, continuous and natural. But my worry is that that leads to people being attracted to what is traditionally called the capacities view of what it means to be human, which is to say in terms of abilities ‑ cognitive and personal, relational, emotional, et cetera.

There are two ways to respond to that view. One is that the ‘capacities’ view leads to difficult questions about what you do when confronted with something which looks a lot like a human person but lacks capacities. Can you say they are not human or not a person? That seems morally dubious. Or do you take a more categorical route, in which case you are seen to be anti-Darwinian, which obviously would be terrible among my social circles! I do not know if it has to be anti-Darwinian. Donald MacKay talks about theology sometimes and there is this great analogy which I have always loved about the relationship between continuous and categorical. If you turn on the gas, the gas flows into a particular area and the volume of the gas in the particular area increases gradually over time, but at some point, it is enough for a spark to cause a fire. So, there is discontinuity as well. You can have discontinuity within a culture of continuous movement. I think that is right. You can think about ways to draw lines along species boundaries if you want to. This is where it becomes God’s problem. You also do not need that. There is nothing stopping God from arbitrarily deciding at this point in evolutionary history, that some specific organism is a human being with a human soul, prior to which its ancestors are not human beings and do not have human souls—they have Australopithecine souls, or whatever. In that sense, my answer is that is God’s problem, but we can run these thought experiments to work out how it is logically possible to make categorical distinctions even given human evolution.

PENNY: I am going to take things back to basics here, and forgive me if I have missed something. We have established, if I understand correctly, that we cannot necessarily deny that there is the existence of the soul. What do we actually believe that a soul is? It is a very open question. Also, what is the relation of the soul to the spirit?

REVD DR JONG: So, on what the soul is, the traditional Aristotelian and Thomist answer to that question is that the soul is whatever it is that makes your body your body. So, that leaves lots of questions unanswered about what the mechanics are, and to that I think there is no answer. If you want to be Kantian you could say that the soul is the transcendental condition for human personality and persistence over time and persistence between life and afterlife, for example. It is whatever makes that possible. But then it is a lot like Thomas Aquinas’ answer to the question: what is God? Right. God is whatever it is that makes it something rather than nothing. Basically, that is the answer to the question.

Aquinas famously argues five ways for God’s existence. He goes on to say, now that we have established that God exists, what we should usually do is to say lots of things about God, to tell you what God is like. Aquinas says obviously we cannot do that. We cannot say what God is like. At best, we can say what God is not like, and then he writes 6,000 pages of the Summa on God, which seems contradictory if you cannot say anything about what God is like, but never mind.

He makes the link with the soul. Once you establish that you need something like the soul to establish a personal identity which pre-exists and extends after death, et cetera, you might be tempted to then say let’s have the signs of a soul. Incidentally the word psychology in some ways means this idea of a soul, but no self‑respecting psychologist would use that word – ever! They use the word “mind” instead but it is much the same thing, really. I think there is an aversion to whether we can say ultimately there is a soul. I think we should resist that interpretation. There are just some things we cannot say very much about.

On the question of the spirit, it is true that the early Christians had a much more robust tripartite distinction, between body, soul, and spirit; and over time we have lost that. These days the theological issue concerns the body and soul/mind/spirit, all treated more or less as the same kind of thing. Whether or not this is desirable, I do not necessarily know, but that is the state of the conversation. Given that alternative between any kind of dualism and our bland monism, that is a battle I am going to fight, rather than worrying about what other entities there might be besides bodies and souls/minds/spirits

REV CANON TILBY: May I make one suggestion in reply to Penny. One phrase I find helpful is this idea that this world is a vale of soul‑making, that souls, in a way, are themselves progressive. A soul is not just some information written in your genes; it is also the outworking of your life choices. The soul develops through time and this is what survives and goes on and is reappointed to a resurrection life. It is those memories and those realities as opened by God, so there is that sort of sense that the soul develops and can change and repent and grow. I think that is really important because otherwise we get stuck in something that is a static little shadow of myself which I have always had and has no sort of connection with my life story. I think if soul means anything, it means something that has itself evolved through circumstances.

PENNY: A refinement of essence?

REVD CANON TILBY: I do not like that kind of language. I like to think that when I die all my memories and things that have gone on inside and through my body become available to God ‑ to God’s judgment, to God’s mercy and to God’s ongoing grace and fulfilment, so that the will of God continues to be fulfilled through me, even though the bodily part of that, as far as I can understand it, is no longer needed, no longer available, it is worn out. The person that I am, the character I have received through my genetics, upbringing, the grace of God, belonging in the church, the mystical body of which I am a part and a member, that carries me, as it were, through into the next life and into the fullness of where God is leading all of us. That is how I would see it really.

REVD DR JONG: I think that is really important. I think that is why the tenses used are very important. The soul is what makes your body, as opposed to the soul is what once upon a time made your body your body. In the same way we talk about creation, that creation happened once upon a time and then does not happen anymore, whereas we should think of creation as ongoing. Similarly, the way some Catholics think about soul is that it happens at conception, but that the soul is then static for ever after that. But the present tense is important, because the aptness between your body and soul is continuous: as your body changes, as your life changes, there must be some sense in which your soul develops.