Dear Theophilus, 

In the last letter, we had looked at some aspects of truth and how we come to accept as true, what we do. We saw that a popular definition of truth revolves around the correspondence between what we think and what physical reality or history tells us. This is a limited grasp of what we mean by truth and what I would like to do is to expand on this in this letter.

There is a popular misconception that all that religion is interested in is rigid acceptance of teachings without any questioning. Dogmas have gotten bad press but it should be pointed out that they arise only when heresies appear. They are a response to incorrect or slanted or partial teaching. Heresy is choosing part of the truth, to the exclusion of other parts, in preference to the whole truth. As we saw with salvation, that this is a communal affair, so it is with truth. Truth is not something held by one individual but something that is held by the community. Apophaticism is applied to teaching about truth to underline the fact that truth is not exhausted by its definition. This is one of the reasons for the importance of poetry and art and images. They complete and contribute to, our knowledge and interaction with truth. Remember, that anything won by the intellect has a limited shelf life and quickly passes into obscurity.

One of the commonest of idols is the golden calf of total certainty. In this life, as even science shows us in the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty, this is impossible to attain.

While we're talking about science, I want to draw your attention to an interesting point. We have been talking about the constituents of man. There is the essence, or ousia, and there is the hypostasis, or the personal uniqueness. But there is another aspect to man and that is sometimes referred to as energia or energies. The energy of a person is what makes the person known and this applies not only to people, but to God, as well as to all objects. If you look at an apple on the table you know that it is there because of energy. Light, which is a form of energy, bounces off the apple and the light enters your eye and is eventually registered in your brain. Energy is therefore something which tells us about the ousia or hypostasis of any being. This brings us to a consideration of something which creates a lot of confusion.

The meaning of body and soul is not very clear and the popular misconception is that there is a body that we have and this body dies and is buried while some 'spiritual' component, the soul leaves. You may be surprised to hear that according to Christian teaching, not only the body, but also the soul, dies. We will see this better if we were to understand what it is that the body and soul are. There is the you, which we can call the self, that defines you as a unique person and this self interacts and lets itself be known by others through its energies. And these energies are the body and the soul. It is through them that we allow others to know us or about us. But there is something else that is important. It is through these energies, the body and the soul, that the inner self can be affected and changed. This is therefore a two-way street - we affect and we are affected through our energies.

There are interesting illustrations which show that there is something deeper in us than our nature. One of these is the fact that people commit suicide, for no apparent gain in terms of the species. Thus, someone, may die because of anorexia where the person takes in less and less food. If what is fundamental to us is nature, and nature ensures that it continues to survive, then incidents of anorexia go contrary to what we would expect. This shows that there are factors which are more influential than our nature. In a sense, we are divided beings with a war going on in us. On the one hand we have the personal, where our will plays a dominant role. On the other hand, we have the impersonal where instincts and drives predominate.

The factor of energy has an important repercussion in some ethical questions. How are we to see the mentally ill? Are they fully human or are they not? Or how are we to see children in comparison to adults? What are we to make of cloning? What are we to make of the supposed ancestors of humanity such as neanderthal man?

These are all vexing questions which arise because we do not have a clear understanding of who we really are. Let us use the model that was described above. We consist of three components - our nature our hypostasis, and our energies. Our nature is not fundamental to us as we saw in the example of the anorexia. This points to the fact that what is most enduring and most important in us is the personal (as it is for God). When Adam falls, what happens is that the image of God in man becomes damaged. It does not disappear completely; it becomes distorted. Another way of putting this is that we become, through the fall, less personal and more subject to our nature which is ruled by instincts and drives. It is this personal aspect of us, sometimes referred to as the spirit, which defines us. Therefore, if anyone is mentally incapable, this does not make them less of a human being. The inner core is not touched; what we see is simply the energies being affected by circumstances that arise through genetics or through accident or through some other cause. Let's consider the case of cloning.

With cloning what happens is that genetic material is copied and a clone is made from an original animal, at least for the present. If this becomes possible, then we would be able to clone human beings. How are we to see these creatures in terms of their relationship to us and to God?

This is a particularly difficult possibility but one that is looming on the horizon. I don't think that we will be able to stop it from occurring so that we had better consider its implications for us. Fundamentally, what we are being asked is whether the clone would be human or would it be simply a biological machine in the physical form of a human being. If we go by the description that we saw above, the physical, biological body is an expression of the internal self. If this body gets damaged through disease or mishap, this does not affect the self. Similarly, if an experiment were to be carried out, and a body to be cloned, this would not mean that there is an internal self in that organism which would confer human qualities on the clone. This does not mean that uncontrolled experimentation should be permitted. There should still be respect for our biological vehicles.

Having said this, the question naturally arises: if this is the case, why do we show such respect to the physical body and what does it mean to be resurrected in the body? Respect for the body is just one aspect of a wider matter. The universe was created by God and as such, it is good and to be used for the glorification of God. When we start to do what we want with creation, no matter what, we are putting ourselves and our ego driven wishes at the center of everything. This kind of attitude leads to our destruction at the most fundamental level which we have called the self or spirit. This is a fundamental law of the universe and we cannot avoid it. We have been forewarned and our history testifies to the fact that we have chosen to ignore the warnings.

As to the matter of the body and the resurrection, the following points have to be made. Sometimes, the resurrection has been seen in a very materialistic fashion. We are to be resurrected with the very molecules that go to make up our present bodies. We now know that this is an impossibility. We share in the atoms and molecules of the world with those who have preceded us and with those who will come after us. A strictly materialistic view of the resurrection will not do.What is more important is to realize what the significance of body is and what its purpose is. It serves to give us our identification. It also enables us to enter into a communion with others that is, it supplies our energies for interacting with others. There is an interesting illustration given in the Gospel of John, an example that was overshadowed with the grossly materialistic interpretation of the resurrection in the Middle Ages. Christ says that our present bodies are like seeds that are planted in the ground to bear fruit of new, glorified bodies at the resurrection. It is obvious from the analogy that the molecules and atoms present in the seed are very different from those in the full grown plant. What this comparison seems to suggest is that there is a connection between our physical bodies and the 'spiritual' bodies after the resurrection but these bodies are not synonymous. We stand here before a mystery and maybe the best thing to do is to allow this mystery to work on us. For now, goodbye.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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