True, v. To make true, as a piece of mechanism or the like; to place, adjust, or shape accurately; to give the precise required form or position to; to make accurately or perfectly straight, level, round, smooth, sharp, etc. as required.
Oxford English Dictionary1
Truth is usually considered a topic in epistemology, in a philosophical theory of knowledge. The thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas recognizes this dimension of truth when he defines it primarily as “the conformity of intellect and thing” (conformitas intellectus et rei).2 Moreover, Aquinas held that the intellect is able not only to make true judgments about things, but also to know the conformity of its judgments with things, which is to know their truth. There is also another dimension of truth in Aquinas’s thought, which I will call ontological truth. He considers natural things to be true in relation to the divine intellect, which contains their immaterial likenesses and exists as their exemplar cause: “natural things are said to be true in so far as they express the likeness of the species that are in the divine mind. For a stone is called true, which possesses the nature proper to a stone, according to the preconception in the divine intellect.”3 A further aspect of this kind of truth is indicated in another work: something is true in an ontological sense to the extent that it “fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect.”4 Clearly, this idea has religious implications.
In this chapter, I will explore several intersections between the Thomistic understanding of ontological truth and a related body of ideas in contemporary anthropology. In a series of papers, Charles D. Laughlin and C. Jason Throop propose that religious cosmologies can bring about the trueing of the conscious life of religious practitioners to the hidden order and purpose of the universe.5 As with the ontological meaning of truth in Aquinas’s work, the essential idea here is not truth as an epistemic relationship between things and our ideas or statements about things, but truth as a process of our becoming “trued” to the ultimate meaning of human existence.
There has, of course, been extensive development in the physical and life sciences, as well as the social sciences, since the thirteenth century when Thomas lived and wrote. He relied extensively on Aristotle for his understanding of the natural world, and it is likely that he would be most interested in contemporary scientific research and its bearing on Christian theology. The work of Laughlin and his colleagues has the potential to make such an exploration especially fruitful. Over the past several decades, they have developed an interdisciplinary research program that incorporates anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, physics, and phenomenology. While evolutionary biology is prominent in the work of Laughlin and Throop, this idea is not present in Aquinas’s philosophical anthropology. A main purpose of this chapter will be to explore its potential application to Aquinas’s thought.
I will first introduce the general framework for my comparison between Thomas and Laughlin/Throop based on the idea of cosmology, and will then discuss certain philosophical aspects of Aquinas’s understanding of cosmology in greater detail. Next, I will discuss his thought on the divine ideas, exemplar causality, and ontological truth. In a further section, I will raise questions about Aquinas’s view that the human body impedes our knowledge of God. This will provide a point of entry for Laughlin and colleagues’ work and the context for a consideration of the application of evolutionary biology to Aquinas’s thought.
A fundamental concept, present both in Thomas’s theological system and Laughlin and his colleagues’ work, is the notion of cosmology. This is not a strictly physical concept in either case, but expresses the conception that human beings and the universe are interrelated, which has a religious dimension. In Laughlin’s earlier work, Brain, Symbol and Experience, he defines cosmology as:
A culturally conditioned, cognized view of reality as a systemic, multicameral, dynamic, and organic whole. A cosmology is an account of all the significant elements and relationships that go to make up the universe, as well as their cosmogonic origins, and occasionally their eschatological demise . . . The cosmos, as the term implies, is a great system, a totality . . . A cosmology will typically offer explanations for the origin of the universe . . . including its constituent elements and relationships . . . What we are defining here is a set of universal structures of the cognized environment commonly found among preindustrial, traditional peoples. Cosmologies do not exist “out there” somewhere but are cognized worlds, which inform and are informed by the world of experience as it unfolds in each individual’s sensorium. Cosmologies have their proper ontologies in the developing nervous systems of group members. They are points of view about experience. And they may be expressed in various symbolic ways, particularly through a culture’s mythopoea; that is, through the SYMBOLISM embodied in game, myth, ritual, drama, art, tale, and so on.6
An important aspect of Laughlin’s understanding of cosmology here is that it is subject-relative. Cosmology is a cognized view of the world or account of the way the world is. He provides several examples: the cosmology of the Tukano Indians of the Amazon rain forest, that of the Dogon of Berkina Faso, West Africa, the Beaver Indians in northwestern British Columbia, and the cosmos of some Buddhist traditions. While it may seem unusual to think of cosmology as present in “the developing nervous systems of group members,” this idea draws on evolutionary biology and is consistent with the reference to cognized views and cognized worlds – expressions that imply a concept of cosmology as an internal model of reality. I will return to this below.
Laughlin’s identification of traditional – i.e., pre-industrial – societies as the locus for religious cosmology and the consequent emphasis on myth might seem to make a comparison with Thomas’s cosmology problematic. Although Aquinas lived in a pre-industrial period, Western philosophy extensively informs his thought, and his cosmology is arguably more logos than mythos. Nevertheless, the Christian narrative of the Incarnation and Redemption, as well as key events from the Hebrew scriptures such as the creation story, are deeply embedded in Aquinas’s philosophical theology. This is exemplified in his incorporating the Work of the Six Days from Genesis in his great systematic treatise, the Summa Theologiae (in I.65–74), and in his including the narrative of the Incarnation in the third part of that work. These religious elements are integral aspects of Aquinas’s cosmology as a system of comprehensive meaning. They provide a basis for comparison with the traditional cosmologies Laughlin references, which function as large-scale explanatory structures that articulate the origin, nature, and role of human beings in the cosmos.
In the following text from the Summa contra Gentiles, Thomas expresses his comprehensive understanding of the dynamic structure of the universe:
An effect is most perfect when it returns to its own principle: whence also the circle among all figures, and circular motion among all motions, is the most perfect, because there is in them a return to the beginning. It is therefore necessary for creatures to return to their principle in order for the universe of creatures to attain to its ultimate perfection. However, each and every creature returns to its principle in so far as it bears a likeness to its principle, according to its being and its nature, in which it realizes a certain perfection. In the same way, all effects are most perfect when they are most fully likened to their productive cause – a house when it most closely resembles the art [that produced it], and fire when it is most like the [fire] generating [it].7
An important idea here is that something’s perfection is realized through a process of assimilation or likening to its productive cause. This assimilation, however, occurs in and through the being and nature of the thing. The specific forms and functions of created things are thus integral to the realization of their end, which in Aquinas’s theistic cosmology is the participation in the divine goodness. Moreover, this reditus in deum (return to God) is clearly involved in ontological truth, considered as a process by which something “fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect.”8
In the theistic language of Thomas’s cosmology, God creates a world of existing things that they may participate the divine goodness. Individual things, whether purely immaterial (such as angels) or matter/form composites, exist in view of this ultimate end. Aquinas expresses this in the Summa contra Gentiles, again highlighting the role of likeness: “everything tends through its motion or action toward a good, as its end . . . Now, a thing participates in the good precisely to the same extent that it becomes like the first goodness, which is God. So, all things tend through their movements and actions toward the divine likeness, as toward their ultimate end.”9 It needs to be kept in mind, however, that the goodness in which a created thing is able to participate is closely tied to its natural form along with its complement of powers. Aquinas emphasizes that natural things are oriented to achieve participation in divine goodness in a manner commensurate with their proper natures and the operations integral to those natures. Since human beings are endowed with the capacity to know and will, the kind of fulfillment of which we are capable is proportionately higher than that of animals.
It is important to consider the eidetic basis of the created order in the divine mind before considering Thomas’s understanding of ontological truth. The foundation of the subsequent likeness of created things to God, in which they reach their perfection and realize their highest good, is their prior likeness to the divine essence, which occurs in the divine mind itself. A number of important metaphysical and theological themes converge in this doctrine of divine ideas, which is a form of exemplar causality. Given the plurality of species, there is here the problem of the one and the many in an especially pressing form. The doctrine of divine ideas is also an important locus for the theology of the generation of the Word. Most importantly, for present purposes, the doctrine of divine ideas is the basis for the idea of ontological truth in Aquinas, to which I will return below.
Thomas treats the divine ideas in several systematic works: his Sentences commentary, the Disputed Questions on Truth, Summa contra Gentiles, and the Summa Theologiae. In the context of examining knowledge in God, he asks how things exist in the divine mind. Exemplar causality, which involves the presence of things in God by way of a likeness, resolves the problem of material and metaphysical composition connected with the real existence of things, which otherwise would compromise the simplicity of the divine essence. Although a real cat, for example, cannot exist materially in the mind of God, which is purely spiritual, it can exist in the divine mind as an eidetic form or immaterial, intelligible species. These exemplary forms are integrally related to the divine essence as causative or productive. The necessity of likenesses, namely intellectual forms or exemplars of things in God, follows from the mode of action of an intellectual agent. Effects caused by such action do not merely emanate automatically as heat proceeds from fire or a falling stone leaves an impression in sand. Rather, an intelligent agent produces a determinate effect through a preconceived idea, concept, or intelligible form, and acts accordingly.
Nevertheless, when exemplar causality is considered in God, it is necessary to reduce any implication of multiplicity or diversity that would otherwise compromise the unity and simplicity of the divine essence. This reduction occurs through the principle of final causality, which implies an orientation in the divine intention to the divine being and goodness itself. Thus, the potential fragmentation that a diversity of creatures in the mind of God implies is overcome because they are ordered to the ultimate good of participation in the divine perfection and goodness. While Thomas argues that God creates through forms that are likenesses of the divine essence, further consideration of the ultimate end of creation suggests that precisely this likeness, as a likeness or imitation of God, is what God intends in the creation and ordering of all things. The governing idea in this consideration is that multiplicity and difference are reduced to singularity. As Aquinas puts it: “the one first form, to which all things are reduced, is the very divine essence considered in itself. Reflecting upon this essence, the divine intellect devises – if I may use such an expression – different ways of imitating it; in these the plurality of ideas consist.”10 The eidetic self-specification of the divine essence is thus the noetic foundation of the world.
This primordial likeness of creatures to God goes beyond merely external resemblance. The created forms and functions of natural things are rooted in the divine self-concept and are oriented to the participation in divine goodness in which they are destined to realize their perfection and fulfillment. Thomas proposes the idea of ontological truth in this context. Such truth fundamentally concerns the relationship of created things to their exemplar ideas in the divine mind:
Now a thing understood may be in relation to an intellect either essentially or accidentally. It is related essentially to an intellect on which it depends as regards its being, but accidentally to an intellect by which it is knowable; even as we may say that a house is related essentially to the intellect of the architect but accidentally to the intellect upon which it does not depend [for its existence] . . . Hence everything is said to be true absolutely, in so far as it is related to the intellect on which it depends . . . For a house is said to be true that fulfills (assequitur) the likeness of the form in the architect’s mind . . . In the same way, natural things are said to be true in so far as they express (assequuntur) the likeness of the species that are in the divine mind (similitudinem specierum quae sunt in mente divina). For a stone is called true, which possesses (assequitur) the nature proper to a stone, according to the preconception in the divine intellect (secundum praeconceptionem intellectus divini).11
This passage indicates that where there is a productive relationship between an intellect and something it has made, the existence of the thing made depends on the intellect. In the three instances above where Aquinas uses the Latin verb assequor to express this relationship, the translation uses a different English word in each case. Thus, something is said to fulfill the likeness of the form in a creative intellect, express that likeness, or possess that likeness. Nevertheless, considering the dictionary meaning of assequor may give further insight into Aquinas’s intention in using the same verb in each instance. Lewis and Short’s Latin dictionary offers the following range of English meanings: to follow, pursue, reach, attain, come up to, equal, match.12 These meanings imply a dynamic process – in the present context, a process of becoming true, together with an aspiration, effort, or impetus to truth, relative to the intellectual form. The English meanings above do not consistently capture this dynamic sense. It would be somewhat unusual, indeed, to apply this dynamic aspiration to inert things such as stones. Nevertheless, the active meaning is important in relation to living things, especially human beings, who may aspire to live according to external (or revealed) standards. Moreover, the implication of a process of “becoming true,” which attends the active meaning of assequor, would be consistent with evolutionary biology. In this case, the trueing of a species to its divine exemplar would extend over millennia.
How would Thomas deal with the concept of evolutionary biology given the immutability of the divine ideas? I believe he would approach the potential problem of temporal development in natural species in a manner analogous to the way he considers diversity and plurality in the divine ideas. Just as the divine essence is absolutely simple and singular, it is also immutable and unchanging. Nevertheless, incorporating the evolution of natural forms would not necessarily import change and temporal process into the divine knowledge of those forms. Consistent with his way of dealing with diversity, plurality, and composition, Aquinas could approach evolution by observing that divine ideas already imply a developmental aspect, given that natural things are oriented to achieving a participation in divine goodness through the perfection of their natural forms, a process that inevitably must occur over time in the material world. The evolution of created forms over longer periods of time would thus be consistent with other aspects of Aquinas’s philosophical theology.
Thomas’s theological cosmology, based on revelation in scripture, contains an ordering of human beings to a cognitive participation in the divine mind in the beatific vision, which involves the elevation of human knowing to deiformity.13 Nevertheless, Aquinas emphasizes the impossibility of seeing God in the present life: “God cannot be seen per essentiam by one who is merely man, unless he be separated from this mortal life.”14 Moreover, this impossibility is not only a matter of sin, but arises from embodiment itself. We cannot see God because “the mode of knowledge follows the mode of the nature of the knower” and “our soul, as long as we live in this life, has its being in corporeal matter.”15
Thomas is systematically committed to the link between immateriality and cognitivity. This has the consequence that the embodied condition of the human soul is seen as impeding our higher cognitive functions, although indeed knowledge based on sense perception requires embodiment. The idea that cognitivity is a function of immateriality emerges when Aquinas considers the ascending degrees of knowledge from humans through angels to God. Angels, which are immaterial entities, have more powerful minds as a consequence of their disembodied state. Aquinas appears to have derived this principle from Aristotle as the reference in the following passage indicates: “the mode of cognition is according to the mode of immateriality. Thus it is stated in II De anima that plants do not know because of their materiality.”16 Aquinas extends this principle where he notes that the percipience of the senses is a consequence of the fact that they receive dematerialized forms: “Sense is cognitive because it is receptive of species without their matter and the intellect is still more cognitive because it is more ‘separated from matter and unmixed,’ as stated in III De anima.”17 Thus, when we see a stone, the eye is not “lapidified.” To extend this further, Aquinas argues that God is to the highest degree cognitive (in summo cognitionis) because God is to the greatest degree immaterial (in summo immaterialitatis).18
Within Thomas’s philosophical anthropology, human beings, as embodied creatures, are naturally disposed to know the world through sense perception and associated functions such as imagination and memory, which have a material basis. Problems arise, however, from the fact that the human being is ordered to an end, which can be realized not through sensory and imaginal forms, but only through a purely intellectual operation, which must function independently of the body. Aquinas reasons that such disembodied intellectual operation must be possible if the soul is to have any knowledge after its separation from the body at death. In fact, given that the sensory powers cannot then be exercised through material organs, he holds that the disembodied soul knows in a quasi-angelic manner, i.e., through infused intellectual forms.
The embodiment issue is foregrounded in Thomas’s consideration of rapture, which he holds is “the highest grade of contemplation in the present life.”19 In rapture, the human intellect is raised to a vision of the divine essence even before death, but only in a transient manner. This idea challenges Aquinas’s anthropology, which is committed to the view that the mode of knowing that is most natural to human existence involves understanding by way of sensible forms. At the same time, he also holds that human life is created with a natural desire to know the first cause of things, i.e., God. Moreover, this innate desire reflects the divine idea of the human species, as ordered to a participation in God’s goodness according to its highest operation, the intellect. The tension here is that we are ordered to an end that is inconsistent with the embodied state, while yet we are created, body and soul, for the realization of that end.
A major supporting text from scripture, which Thomas frequently cites for the impossibility of the beatific vision in the present life, is the declaration of God to Moses in Exodus 33:20: “no one shall see me and live.”20 In view of this, Aquinas has to interpret the apparent elevation to seeing God before death, which he admits occurred with Moses and Paul and also may occur in the contemplative life. He works around the Exodus stricture by interpreting human life as the condition where we are fully engaged in embodied existence and use senses and imagination, which depend on the material body for their functions. His interpretation suggests it may be possible to see God even before death, if there were to be a suspension of otherwise normal sensory and imaginal activity. Thus, Aquinas addresses the Exodus prohibition by proposing that the soul may be elevated to see God when it is withdrawn from all its normal embodied activities, apart from residual vegetative functions such as respiration.
Thomas mentions impedance by the soul’s lower cognitive functions in a pair of articles on rapture in the Disputed Questions on Truth. He argues that one of the main reasons the intellect needs to be withdrawn from its lower functions relates to the materiality involved in sense and imagination. The intellect needs to be as free as possible to operate in a purely immaterial way because the vision of God involves a participation of the intellect in the “most intensely intelligible object” (vehementissimum intelligibile).21 As noted above, Aquinas sees the degree of cognitive capacity being consequent upon, and therefore conditioned by, the degree of immateriality. Consistent with this way of thinking, he proposes in the present context, “the freer (purior) the intellect is from contact with material things, the more perfect it is” in its intellectual operation.22 At certain points, his language has an almost Manichaean tone, for example, where he writes, “the purity of the intellect, in a certain way, is contaminated (inquinatur) by sensible operations.”23 Aquinas has in mind the impedance that arises from the division between intellectual and sensory operations in the embodied state, where each function is hindered by the attention given to the other (impediunt se invicem intellectivae et sensitivae operationes).
The essential problem here relates to an apparent inconsistency: the divine idea of the human species, with its natural form and complement of powers, is ordered to an intellectual perfection realized in the vision of the divine essence while, at the same time, that vision is impeded by the human nature designed to achieve it. While grace is able to overcome these limitations in the elevation of the intellect in rapture, nevertheless, this elevation involves the withdrawal of the intellect from the operations of the lower powers, with the consequence that human beings may experience the vision only transiently before death. In another passage, Aquinas states the rationale for this withdrawal using terms that imply that the materiality of the body is itself an impediment (at least prior to the resurrection): “The perfect operation of the intellect requires indeed that the intellect be abstracted from this corruptible body which weighs upon the soul (quod aggravat animam).”24
It is difficult to separate a possibly dated human anthropology from the strands of theology in the above material. As mentioned initially, it is likely that Thomas, if he were alive today, would want to avail himself of findings in the social and life sciences. It is now known from the fossil record that the human brain has undergone a dramatic development since the genus Homo evolved from its ape-like australopithecine predecessors. As Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili point out, this evolution is not just a question of a larger brain in absolute terms, but a “change in the ratio of the brain to body weight” involved in encephalization:
Most of this dramatic increase is due to the process known as encephalization; that is, the tendency toward allometrically greater development of the cerebral cortex in relation to other parts of the nervous system. The cortex, a fairly new development in neural evolution, as evolutionary processes go, is the thin layer of tissue on top of the brain . . . the part of the brain that mediates the higher cognitive functions, as well as the highest and most complex level of control over lower-order neural networks . . . This development provides a rough indicator of the evolutionary enhancement of the higher cognitive functions of the brain, an emergence of cognitive operators that is the true hallmark of human evolution.25
The implication is that the evolution of enhanced neural structures has provided the material basis for the development of higher cognitive functions. As a consequence of this material change, there has been “a gradual increment in the abilities of the cognitive operators that organize the cognized environment, factors such as serial planning of action relative to goal, the formation of ever more complex concepts and images mapped onto sensorial events, the complexity and abstraction of operations performed upon concepts and images, and complexity of communication about the cognized environment between conspecifics.”26 The authors note that the frontal lobe in particular “has shown remarkable evolutionary advance in the hominid line” supporting the sequencing of events and ordering of conceptual material, which is “the foundation of the faculty of abstract causal thought.”27 In the context of Aquinas’s cosmology, such development is consistent with the concept of a progressive materialization in the created order of the divine idea of the human species, together with the trueing of the latter to its divine exemplar. The idea of the evolution of neurocognitive capacity might also help resolve the tension in Aquinas’s thought between the materiality of the body and the inception of higher cognitive states. If the human species is considered to be an evolving form, with cognitive capacities that develop over the course of millennia, the limitations attending embodiment, which restrict the inception of the beatific vision to the after-death state, might possibly be eventually overcome.
In Laughlin’s view, the evolutionary development of higher cognitive operations has a religious end beyond mere adaptation for the purposes of survival. In a series of papers co-authored with C. Jason Throop, he proposes that the religious narratives and rituals of traditional societies are able to function as a “mind-brain-trueing, mythopoetic system” capable of aligning the conscious life of participants with the transcendental order and purpose of the cosmos.28 They are here using the word “true” in a verbal sense, which is similar to the dynamic meaning of ontological truth in Thomas’s work. They go beyond the more usual epistemic meaning of truth, which implies agreement between statements and the way things are, and describe what they have in mind by the verbal sense of true: “Used as a verb, instead of as a noun or an adjective, the word true . . . suggests the domain of physical and mechanical activity. In this case, the term implies architectural activity. To ‘true a wall’ means to make the wall accurate in measurement relative to a plan, a plumb line, or a level – the sense of an activity that makes something precise. One may ‘true’ something by adjusting or shaping it into accurate conformation with a pattern or plan.”29 In view of this, Laughlin and Throop propose that in a religious context, “myth operates as a truer of cognitive operations.”30 It operates on “the inherent, epistemic faculty of the brain to produce a cognized world in a dynamic and veridical way in conformation to reality.”31
This “inherent epistemic faculty of the brain” – referred to earlier as the “cognitive operators that organize the cognized environment” – has evolved over time. This evolution implies that the human mind/brain does not presently begin life as a tabula rasa or blank slate in which our experience and ideas about the world are engendered solely (or largely) from external input. The authors hold that human experience, even in the womb, is already highly organized as a consequence of inherited neurocognitive structures, in other words, “genetically programmed organizations of neurons and support cells.”32 These evolved (and evolving) neurocognitive formations mediate and spontaneously structure the processing of sensory input so that the world of the prenatal and perinatal child is already patterned or modelled in a species-typical manner that the authors call neurognosis.
Laughlin and Throop use the metaphor of trueing in this context to refer to our constant cognitive modelling of the world. All human experience of the cognized environment has evolved through natural selection as a consequence of the need to constantly adapt to the external world: “The role of trueing in adaptation is obvious. During the many generations that our brain has been evolving, failure to model the world accurately resulted in a quick death and a continuous selection against nonveridical distortions of cognized reality.”33 Thus, the neurognostic models that (together with external input) produce our organized experience of our environment exist in the body as inherited structures that have allowed human beings to survive, adapt, and develop over the past two million years.
The authors elaborate on their concept of religious myth and its trueing function within this larger evolutionary context. Myth, in their view, is not just an externally acquired cultural deposit, but is already present, at least formally, in the inherited neural structures by which we are disposed to experience the world in a distinctively human way: “Although myth frequently takes the form of a narrative, we hold that the essential structure of myth is nonlinguistic – it is neurocognitive, a structure of consciousness.”34 These neural models or patterns do not simply facilitate human survival, they also function as schemata, which pattern human experience within the larger social and cultural environment:
Mythical stories can be understood as the expression of both the fundamental neurognostic structure of the human mind-brain and the content appropriate to the varying environmental and cultural exigencies characteristic of a particular society. The neurognostic structure of myth comprises what we might call the eidetic cosmology upon which virtually all traditional cosmologies are grounded and of which all are transformations. We argue that it is the neurognostic grounding of this eidetic cosmology that assures the trueing of knowledge. In common parlance, we are “wired” to know reality from a very human, species-typical point of view.35
The authors hold that recurring similarities between elements in the myths of different cultures – as explored, for example, by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Carl Jung – reflect their common, underlying neurognostic origin: “The world views of many of the world’s cultures are informed to some extent by transcultural attributes of an eidetic cosmology – which is to say the inherited, species typical, archetypal knowledge about extramental reality, knowledge that is (so to speak) ‘wired into’ the infant mindbrain.”36 These inherited neurophysical structures, which human beings universally share, are variously operationalized in different social environments, giving rise to the culturally specific contents of different myths and worldviews. The implication, then, is that religion does not merely adventitiously supplement human nature, coming to us from an external source, but also reflects a deeply rooted, innate propensity, which in some sense awaits activation or potentiation by the sacred stories, sacraments, and rituals passed on by a society’s religious tradition.
From Thomas’s perspective, created things are embedded in the dynamic procession and return of all things to God. Moreover, this cosmos is not just natural but sacred: it is ordered to an end beyond itself. From our present perspective, Aquinas’s cosmology indicates the possibility of two modes of assimilation to God. The first would have been familiar to him: the assimilation of the human person to God through the vehicle of the belief structures, religious narratives, liturgy, sacraments, pilgrimages, art, architecture, and drama (e.g., the Passion Play) that make up Christian culture. The other assimilation, involving a process of evolutionary development as a long-term, species-level event, could not have been considered during his lifetime.
But Laughlin and his associates do not simply add the evolutionary perspective. What is of value in their work is the way they unite these two dimensions of assimilation. They propose that the body of sacred symbols in a religious cosmology may itself potentiate or empower neural structures, which have evolved in the course of millennia. These symbol systems may function as “innate releasing mechanisms for structures in the depths of the human psyche . . . The imagery penetrates to the depth of the psyche and activates and potentiates development of those constellations of faculties valued by the society.”37 A religious cosmology thus has a cognitive function based on “correspondences between structures of experience, the structures of consciousness, and the structures of reality.”38 In the context of these correspondences, such a cosmology trues human participants to the ultimate meaning and purpose of the cosmos.39
The authors hold that the myth-ritual complex is “bound to reality” in several respects including an experiential dimension, which facilitates “the direct intuitive grasp of the order of reality.”40 This suggests a kind of knowing similar to connatural knowledge in Thomas’s work – an experiential knowledge of something through innate familiarity, for example, knowing a particular virtue by possessing it as an acquired habit. Laughlin indicates a similar kind of knowing in his understanding of myth. He sees myth not only as a body of religious meaning received from one’s culture, but also as an inherited “neurognostic structure of the human mind-brain.”41 As a consequence, when these innate structures are potentiated by a religious cosmology, participants may experience an intimate familiarity with religious meanings, which may seem to express a reality that is at once both “out there” and “in here”: “One of the most common reactions people have to the intuition of truth about reality is to feel as if they knew it already. In a very real sense they do know the truth before they hear it. When the embedded universal structures of myth penetrate to neurognostic networks that are ready for potentiating, the experience may be one of recognition – literally of ‘re-cognizing’ or ‘re-calling’ what the species has known throughout the ages within its collective unconscious.”42 If the divine idea of the human species is not static but includes a temporal dimension, then our bodies may be evolving neurocognitive structures that allow for an embodied intuition of the transcendent, which then could become a living reality. Within a theistic cosmology, the dynamism behind the direction of such evolution can be understood as a kind of grace in which the human brain is being “neurognostically prepared to apprehend the mysteries.”43
There is the potential for a fruitful exchange of ideas between Thomas Aquinas’s philosophically informed thought and Charles Laughlin and his colleagues’ social scientific views. The lack of an evolutionary perspective in Aquinas’s work is a main point of entry where Laughlin’s ideas may provide an interdisciplinary updating to Aquinas’s understanding of the natural order. I have indicated a particular application of evolutionary theory, which has implications for Aquinas’s assumption that the relatively fixed material structures of the human body constrain our knowledge of God. The incorporation of evolutionary biology could help to address the tension in Aquinas’s thought that human beings are created to participate intellectually in God’s goodness while yet the realization of the beatific vision is frustrated by our embodied condition.
I have argued that the idea of the evolution of species does not inevitably compromise the unity and immutability of God, just as the simplicity of divine essence is not compromised by the diversity and multiplicity of the divine ideas. If the material structures of the body are malleable over millennia, then it seems human evolution in the direction of the beatific vision as a living reality may be intelligible.44 This is not only consistent with Thomas’s understanding of ontological truth, but is perhaps more consistent than a non-evolutionary perspective, which maintains the idea of fixed species.
I will conclude with some reflections on the application of these ideas to our present culture. A further question Laughlin and Throop consider concerns the consequences for a society when it loses touch with its religious tradition and shifts to localized, empirical modes of knowing aimed primarily at adapting to the external world. Drawing on the work of sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, the authors propose that Euro-American society has devolved into a monophasic “sensate” culture. This contrasts with the idealistic orientation of polyphasic societies, which are open to modes of consciousness other than the waking state. In their view, materialistic cultures tend to ignore the mystical ways of knowing that are encoded in religious traditions open to the transcendent. Sensate, materialistic cultures lack a living mythology able to give individuals “a field of interconnected meaning in which each of life’s significant experiences has a location, much as a patch has its appropriate place in a quilt.”45 As a consequence, individuals who live in a materialistic society may experience disorientation and insecurity, arising from the sense of not knowing their place in the world: “A society characterized by a sensate culture that has lost touch with its mythological tradition is awkwardly positioned to guide its people to a way of life in keeping with the more unitary aspects of reality.”46 The issues discussed here thus have relevance beyond the academy and touch on the need for comprehensive frameworks of meaning that will be able to address the profound crises that currently afflict humanity on a global scale.
1 Oxford English Dictionary OED 2 Online, s.v. “True v.,” accessed 27 October 2010.
2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House), I.16.2. This work is referred to as Summa Theologiae in the text.
3 Ibid., I.16.1.
4 Thomas Aquinas, The Disputed Questions on Truth, vol. 1, trans. Robert W. Mulligan, S.J. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), 1.2. A natural thing (res naturalis) is said to be true “with respect to its conformity to the divine intellect in so far as it fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect.”
5 Charles D. Laughlin is an emeritus professor of anthropology and religion at Carleton University in Ottawa. During the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded a school of neuroanthropology known as biogenetic structuralism with John McManus and Eugene G. d’Aquili. They present their work in the coauthored volume Brain, Symbol, and Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Laughlin subsequently worked on a special application of biogenetic structural theory called cultural neurophenomenology with C. Jason Throop. Information about biogenetic structuralism is available at www.biogeneticstructuralism.com.
6 Charles D. Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene G. d’Aquili, Brain, Symbol, and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 214–16.
7 Thomas Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa contra Gentiles, book 2, trans. James F. Anderson (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 46.2 (translation modified).
8 See note 4.
9 Thomas Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa contra Gentiles, book 3, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 19.5.
10 Thomas Aquinas, The Disputed Questions on Truth, vol. 1, 3.2 ad 6 (trans. modified).
11 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.16.1. The English translation is from the Basic Writings; see note 2.
12 Charlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary, rev. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1879), s.v. “assequor.”
13 The Latin word “deiformitas” is used, for one, in Summa Theologiae, I.12.6.
14 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.12.11.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., Summa Theologiae, I.14.1.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), II–II.180.5.
20 For example, in Summa Theologiae, I.12.8. Aquinas achieved the academic degree of “master of biblical sciences” (magister in sacra pagina) at the University of Paris in 1256. As a theologian, his work is fundamentally oriented to the exposition of sacred doctrine, based on revealed truth. In this context, he draws from the theological tradition and Church Fathers, especially Augustine. Nevertheless, Aquinas recognizes that sacred scripture does not present a systematic understanding of the natural world and human nature. Appreciating the need for such an understanding, he draws extensively from the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic works that were available to him.
21 Thomas Aquinas, The Disputed Questions on Truth, vol. 2, trans. James V. McGlynn, SJ (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953), 13.3–4.
22 Ibid., 13.3 (trans. modified).
23 Ibid., 13.4 (trans. modified).
24 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II.4.6 ad 3.
25 Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili, Brain, Symbol, and Experience, 125.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 127–8.
28 Charles D. Laughlin and C. Jason Throop, “Imagination and Reality: On the Relations between Myth, Consciousness, and the Quantum Sea,” Zygon 36/4 (2001): 709–36. The idea of the transcendent is prominent in Laughlin’s work and is sometimes used in a religious sense. Nevertheless, rather than referring to God, he tends to speak of “God Consciousness,” “Void Consciousness,” etc. (see especially chapter 11 on “Mature Contemplation” in Brain, Symbol, and Experience). Regarding the phrase “mind-brain,” which the authors sometimes render “mind/brain” or even “mindbrain,” Laughlin explains in Brain, Symbol, and Experience that his biogenetic structuralist approach mandates a view of the mind and brain as two perspectives on the same reality: “mind is how brain experiences its own functioning, and brain provides the structure of mind,” with each perspective on its own being incomplete (13).
29 Laughlin and Throop, “Imagination and Reality,” 719.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., emphasis in original.
32 Ibid., 720.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 721.
36 Charles D. Laughlin and C. Jason Throop, “Experience, Culture and Reality: The Significance of Fisher Information for Understanding the Relationship between Alternative States of Consciousness and the Structures of Reality,” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 22 (2003): 19.
37 Laughlin and Throop, “Imagination and Reality,” 717.
38 Laughlin and Throop, “Experience, Culture and Reality,” 9.
39 Ibid.
40 Laughlin and Throop, “Imagination and Reality,” 718.
41 Ibid., 721.
42 Ibid., 723.
43 Ibid., 725.
44 This chapter is a further development of ideas initially presented in Pamela J. Reeve, “Evolution, Neuroplasticity, and the Beatific Vision” (Toward a Science of Consciousness, University of Tucson, Arizona, 8–12 April 2008).
45 Laughlin and Throop, “Imagination and Reality,” 715.
46 Ibid., 726.