A broader problem: union in love

In thinking about this question and its analogues, it is helpful to see that an answer to the question cannot be the sort of thing philosophers have in mind in discussing group epistemology, for example. In such discussions, a group is typically thought of as a collection of individuals who may cooperate in some more or less conglomerate way, but who do not have a deep metaphysical unity. The puzzle in the cases canvassed above, however, presupposes that human beings can be not just collected into one or another grouping, but that they can in fact be united into one. A solution to the puzzle requires finding a this something Footnote ¹⁴ – a subsisting concrete particular – which is nonetheless composed of more than one person.Footnote ¹⁵

Aquinas accepts what he takes to be a fundamental claim of Aristotelian hylomorphism, namely, that no substance is composed of substances;Footnote ¹⁶ and an analogue to this view seems to underlie at least some contemporary metaphysics too. For example, in his discussion of material beings, Peter van Inwagen examines certain methods of composition that might be thought capable of unifying two things into one material being. With regard to each of these possible methods of composition, Van Inwagen asks whether that method could unify two human beings into one material being; and in every case it is clear that the method of composition in question fails the test.Footnote ¹⁷ But on the Aristotelian metaphysics adopted by Aquinas and still discernible in some western philosophy, nothing could unify two human beings into one material being. There is no place in this metaphysics for entities that are one subsisting concrete particular and yet are composed of more than one person.Footnote ¹⁸

For that matter, there is no place in this metaphysics for entities that are one subsisting concrete particular such as a human being and yet are also composed of multiple other organisms including bacteria and viruses, a point some philosophers take to be evidence in support of process metaphysics. For example, John Dupre says,

Aquinas struggled with an analogous issue with regard to the incarnation of Christ.Footnote ²⁰ On the orthodox doctrine of the incarnation, there is just one person in Christ, namely, the second person of the Trinity; but included in the components of the incarnate Christ are both the second person of the Trinity and also a human soul and a human body which would compose a human person if they existed together outside of the incarnate Christ. Aristotelian metaphysics provides a limited number of ways in which components can come together to compose one material being. There is union in nature, in which differing components are united into the one nature conferred by a substantial form. There is the union of an accident with the supposit in which it inheres. And then there is the union by which a substantial form comes together with the matter it configures to form one material supposit.Footnote ²¹ But, clearly, none of these modes of union can be the mode which unites things into one material being when some of the things being united are persons or would be persons if they were taken apart from the whole. So, with regard to the incarnation, Aquinas thinks that we have to grant that the mode of union of the components of the incarnate Christ is in a certain respect incomprehensible.Footnote ²² He says, ‘to explain this union perfectly is not possible for human beings’.Footnote ²³

But what manner of composition could unify two or more persons into one entity? It is worth noticing that a version of the problem Aquinas flags with regard to the incarnation in fact arises also with regard to the ordinary mode of uniting that binds two human beings together in love. In his somewhat satirical poem on love, John Donne expresses the commonplace idea that romantic love can effect union between two human beings by means of the coupling of their minds. As Donne describes it, ‘Love these mix’d souls doth mix again and makes both one, each this and that.'Footnote ²⁴ On this description, the union of romantic love seems to depend on a kind of melding of minds reminiscent of the scientifically discredited notion of telepathy.

And something analogous can be said with regard to other kinds of human love too. Consider, for example, the relation between an infant and its primary caregiver. This is typically also a binding together in love; and when (for whatever reason) it is seriously impaired or absent, its absence can give rise to one or another degree of autism spectrum disorder.Footnote ²⁵ Trying to summarize his own research on one of these sources for the development of autism, Peter Hobson says that it is possible for autism to arise ‘because of a disruption in the system of child-in-relation-to-others’.Footnote ²⁶ By way of explanation, he says:

On Hobson’s views, the phenomenon of autism cannot be fully explained without the notion of a union of mind of some sort between an infant and its primary caregiver. This is a union which is some one thing that has within it, as components of some sort, two or more human beings. But what is this ‘infant-in-relation-to-caregiver’, and what enables its operation? Here too it can look as if we would have to resort to scientifically discredited notions such as the notion of telepathy to explain the nature of the one thing in question and its operation.

In his Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis gives an evocative characterization of the difficulty of explaining the metaphysics of union among persons. In Lewis’s book, a senior devil mentors a junior devil and tries to show him what the senior devil takes to be the complete lack of logic in God’s notion of love. Lewis has the senior devil say:

Here the point is not that postulating union among persons requires resort to scientifically discredited notions such as telepathy but that in fact it requires contraventions of basic laws of logic.

So the puzzle posed by the use of the first-person plural in Daniel’s prayer and in Moses’s speech to the Israelites entering the Holy Land highlights a problem arising from any attempt to find a this something – one something-or-other that is a subsisting concrete particular – and yet has more than one person constituent within it. What kind of thing could this be?

This is a straightforwardly metaphysical question; but the metaphysics to which we are accustomed seems to reject the very question as ill-formed, so that some philosophers suppose the question should be dealt with only phenomenologicallyFootnote ²⁹ or only by means of process philosophy.Footnote ³⁰ In these circumstances, because I am interested in the metaphysics, I propose to explore possible answers to the question with two different approaches.Footnote ³¹

The first makes use of some new developments within what is now being called ‘collective neuroscience’. The neuroscience is helpful because it suggests that there could be a naturalistic scientific explanation for the kind of connection that would enable union between human beings, so that neither telepathy nor any other as-it-were magic has to be postulated as the mechanism enabling it.

And the second approach looks to Christian theology for elucidation. The theology is helpful because it suggests that the potentiality for union among human beings is founded in human nature itself and represents at least in part the image of God in human beings.

But though taken together these approaches seem to me to indicate a direction that might be profitable for finding a satisfying answer to the question ‘What are we?’, neither of these approaches is anything more than suggestive. As I explained at the outset, in this article I have no solution to offer to the puzzle exemplified by Daniel’s prayer.

Collective neuroscience

We can begin with the neuroscience. In the past few decades, research in neuroscience has elucidated what is now called ‘the mirror neuron system’.Footnote ³² The mirror neuron system makes it possible for one person to have a kind of direct and immediate knowledge of some of the mental states of another person. This kind of knowledge shares something of the phenomenology of perception, and it has become common to refer to it as ‘mind-reading’. Like the perception of colour, for example, the knowledge of persons in mind-reading is intuitive and hard to translate without remainder into knowledge that (but very useful as a basis for knowledge that of one sort or another).Footnote ³³ Neurons in the mirror neuron system contribute to making the knowledge of mind-reading possible because they can fire both when one does some action oneself or has some emotion oneself and also when one sees that same action or emotion in someone else.

The point is easier to appreciate if we focus on empathy with another person’s pain,Footnote ³⁴ which is currently also thought to be a result of the mind-reading cognitive capacities subserved at least in part by the mirror neuron system.Footnote ³⁵ When Paula sees Jerome impale his bare foot on a nail in the garden, she knows he is in pain because (to one extent or another) she feels his pain; and she does so at least in part because her mirror neuron system produces in Paula an affective state that has at least some of the characteristics of the pain Jerome is experiencing.Footnote ³⁶ Paula does not actually suffer physical pain resulting from a laceration in her tissues; but, in her empathy with Jerome, she has some kind of feeling of pain. Only, in Paula, that feeling is taken off-line,Footnote ³⁷ as it were, because, as she is aware, in her it is not connected to tissue damage in the body, as it is in Jerome.

It may help here to notice that the neural mechanisms for empathy and for mind-reading more generally are in some respects like some of the neural mechanisms employed in dreaming. If Paula dreams that she is running, her brain will fire some of those motor programs it would fire if she were in fact running; but it will fire them off-line, so that there is no muscle movement in Paula’s legs even while her brain is firing the motor programs usually used to produce that muscle movement. In a similar way, through the mirror neuron system, in empathy with Jerome Paula can have a mental state that is the same as or similar to a mental state in Jerome when he impales his foot on a nail, but without Paula’s brain’s actually producing all the other brain states it would have produced in Paula if Paula had impaled her own foot on a nail.

In her empathy with Jerome, the mental state of Jerome’s that is shared by Paula really is Paula’s. But, unlike the mental state of Jerome’s that Paula is sharing, Paula’s mental state is not accompanied by the states of will and intellect this mental state has in Jerome. For example, in empathy with Jerome, Paula may mind-read Jerome’s feeling of pain, and then Paula will feel some pain too. That pain will really be Paula’s; but Paula will not believe that it is her foot that is hurt, she will not want medical attention for her foot, and so on. She will not have the states of intellect or will that Jerome has because of the pain in his foot. In the case of dreamed motion, when the brain’s motor programs for running are firing, they are disconnected from the muscles in the legs and so do not produce actual running. In the case of empathy, the brain’s mirror neuron system runs at least some of the programs it would run if Paula were feeling what Jerome is feeling; but it runs them disconnected from those states of will and intellect Paula would have if in fact she were in Jerome’s state.

In this way, Paula shares some of Jerome’s feelings but without having them as Jerome has them; instead, she has her own states of intellect and will, not Jerome’s, even while she feels at least some of what she would feel if she were suffering what Jerome is suffering. In addition, even though in empathy Paula feels pain that is her pain, in the sense that the pain is in her and she herself feels it, she nonetheless recognizes that this is primarily Jerome’s pain rather than hers. It is caused in Jerome (but not in her) by damage to bodily tissues; and without Jerome’s pain, she would not have had the pain she does. The final result of the neural interactions begun by the mirror neuron system is that Paula knows that Jerome is in pain; but she knows this because, in consequence of the mirror neuron system, she first knows Jerome’s pain.Footnote ³⁸

One researcher on mind-reading, Vittorio Gallese, tries to explain the relevant neural mechanisms involved in empathy this way:

Philosophers have sometimes referred to the correlative conjoined mental acts as intersubjective or social acts of mind. For example, trying to explain Reid’s account of social acts of mind, Richard Moran says:

In the mind-reading of empathy enabled by the mirror neuron system, one person has a kind of intuitive awareness, somewhat analogous to an act of perception, of the thought, affect, and intention in the mind of another person. And so the neural engineering that includes the mirror neuron system enables a certain kind of limited intermingling of minds.

But this relatively recent work on mirror neurons is only the beginning of what is now a growing branch of neuroscience called ‘collective neuroscience’, and it includes research showing that the brain has systems for connecting human beings in even more complicated social patterns than the mirror neuron system alone enables.Footnote ⁴¹

Consider, for example, this experiment. A person Jerome was put in an fMRI scanner in one city, and another person Paula who was a stranger to Jerome was put in another fMRI scanner in a different city. Jerome and Paula were then connected only by sound. Jerome was given 30 seconds in which to begin telling a story, which Paula could hear.Footnote ⁴² The story then went to Paula, who had another 30 seconds to continue the story, which Jerome heard. Then Jerome had a further 30 seconds to continue the story, and so on. The scientists doing the experiment found that although at the beginning of the experiment the brain waves of Jerome and Paula were very different, their brain waves quickly synchronized and converged as the two of them made up their joint story.

In a recent article presenting this new research, Lydia Denworth says:

This phenomenon is being called ‘interbrain synchrony’, and scientists are now discovering that it can be found also among other species of animals that live socially, including, for example, bats.

As Denworth explains interbrain synchrony among humans:

Interbrain synchrony is of course a sub-personal process, but it seems to be involved in generating a kind of cognition that underlies certain social activities. One group of researchers sum up their findings on interbrain synchrony this way:

The new work in collective neuroscience on interbrain synchrony shows that what we learned from the earlier work on mirror neurons is only the beginning of our understanding of the brain’s mechanisms for social cognition and social agency. Like the mirror neuron system, the neurological mechanisms involved in interbrain synchrony play a part in enabling a kind of direct and immediate cognitive contact with the feelings and intentions of other human beings, and they do so in a way that generates ‘synchronized goal-directed actions’ among individuals. Interbrain synchrony seems to provide a kind of cognition that can coordinate sports players and dancers and musicians in their respective activities. If mind-reading is a reasonable way to refer to the cognition enabled by the mirror neuron system, then maybe mind-melding is a reasonable way to refer to at least some of the cognitive states produced through interbrain synchrony.

We can distinguish mind-melding in this naturalistic sense from its fictional near neighbor which is a kind of bringing two minds into one without enabling them simultaneously to remain two.Footnote ⁴⁶ As depicted in the popular Star Trek series, the Borg results from a uniting of persons that produces a hive mind, called ‘the Collective’. In the fictional story, that uniting produces one mind in which there is only one consciousness that all the minds assimilated into the Collective share. This is a kind of uniting analogous to the uniting in Van Inwagen’s thought experiments about uniting two human beings into one material being. In both the case of the Borg and the cases rejected in Van Inwagen’s thought experiments, the uniting is meant to take two (or more) things and through some method of composition turn them into just one thing.Footnote ⁴⁷ But the kind of uniting of minds now being researched in the new branch of collective neuroscience is a mind-melding that somehow unites minds to one extent or another in one or another activity while leaving each mind in the union intact in its individual consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁸

Furthermore, it is worth noticing that the unity at issue apparently meets one of the criteria for an Aristotelian substance. On Aristotelian metaphysics, function follows form; that is, the form configuring components into one composite substance gives the whole substance a power which is not had by the components of the whole when they are taken singulatim, in isolation from the whole. The water molecule has the power to form hydrogen bonds, for example; but this is a power that its components, hydrogen and oxygen, do not have when they are taken as individual atoms apart from the whole molecule. Analogously, the mind-melding enabled by the relevant neural systems grants the people connected together a power for simultaneous mutual awareness of the sort exemplified by jazz improvisation, for example; and this is a power that they would not have or would not have as fully otherwise, if (for example) they were simply located together playing instruments in the same place but without being in the mind-melding condition. Furthermore, when the relevant neural systems fail to function in their typical way, the diminished power for awareness of another can impair some kinds of typical human functioning, as is evident, for example, from the current research on one source for the development of autism spectrum disorder.

So the burgeoning new neuroscience sketches a kind of neural engineering that, without resort to magic or telepathy, could help to explain how two human beings could be mind-melded together into a this something without ceasing to be two. And it suggests that there could be a naturalistic explanation for what the senior devil in Lewis’s Screwtape Letters takes to violate the laws of logic: it enables there to be two human beings that are somehow truly one this something while remaining two substances.

Synchronization in succession

But, of course, the current neuroscientific work on interbrain synchrony is just suggestive even with regard to the relatively simple case of an occurrent condition of union between two people. For the kind of case exemplified by Daniel’s prayer, clearly something more complicated is needed. That is because an occurrent union is what some medieval logicians called ‘a permanent state’; that is, a state that can exist entirely at one particular point in time. But the kind of union indicated by Daniel’s use of the first-person plural pronoun is what medieval logicians called ‘a successive state’, a state that requires a period of time for its existence. This medieval distinction is helpful for thinking about what else is needed as the referent of the ‘we’ in Daniel’s prayer.

Dan Zahavi puts the point this way:

In this connection, the new research on interbrain-synchrony may help. Consider an oral tradition, for example. It is now thought that the Homeric epics were not originally the product of a literate culture but were instead composed and transmitted orally. Someone who composed a part of a Homeric epic (or all of it) recited the poetry orally to some listeners; and one or more of those listeners memorized the recited poetry and (with or without adding new material) recited it to others, some of whom remembered it and recited it to still others, and so on. The oral tradition of the Homeric epics results from a process of composing, remembering, and transmitting the poetry from one person or community to another over a period of time.

But now we can ask about oral tradition itself. It does not fit into any of the Aristotelian categories, for example. So what is it? Given the experiment in which the process of two people jointly crafting a story was characterized by interbrain synchrony, we might say that the oral tradition of Homeric poetry is a this something that arises from the successive interbrain synchrony of multiple generations around Homeric poetry. That is, it seems that there is one something – an intergenerational community of those constructing and/or reciting and passing on Homeric poetry – which is constituted as one thing by the people reciting, remembering, and passing on Homeric poetry through a successive series of mind-meldings around the poetry.Footnote ⁵⁰

By extension, something analogous might help to explain the use of the first-person plural in Moses’s claim that we have heard the voice of God. In the story, Moses himself has heard the voice of God. It is reasonable to suppose that the group of those who were listening to God with Moses on the mountain and the group of those who are listening to Moses later, on the banks of the Jordan River, are each mind-melded with Moses as they listen. So perhaps we could understand the we who have heard the voice of God as a something-or-other constituted first by Moses and those people who were originally with him at the time God was speaking and then in succession the subsequent generation of people who were not present when God spoke but are listening to Moses by the river right before entering the Holy Land. Like the oral tradition of Homeric poetry, the something-or-other that is the referent of Moses’s plural first-person pronoun when he says that we have heard the voice of God could be constituted by means of the oral transmission of stories, through successive mind-melding from the original people who did hear God’s voice to a subsequent generation which did not hear it through their ears.

Of course, even if this supposition were suitably clarified, we could still wonder whether such mind-melding would be sufficient to support Moses’s claim that we have heard the voice of God. But here we might get some help from the neuroscience of mind-melding around the performance of music.

Recent research has shown that there is interbrain synchrony not only among musicians engaged together in a musical performance but even between musicians engaged in the performance of music and the audience who are simply listening to it. One set of researchers says,

It seems then that the successive brain synchronization between at least some musicians in a musical performance and some of the members of the audience listening to them is included in the means by which those members of the audience hear the music. But, as these researchers are at pains to make clear, that brain synchronization continues even during pauses in the music, when the audience is not hearing the music by means of sounds conveyed to their ears. They say,

As this research reports, the mind-melding which was established between the musicians and those members of the audience synchronized with them while they were performing can remain even when the members of the audience have no occurrent auditory input from the music made by the performers. In that case, those members of the audience are not hearing through their ears the music which the performers had made and which the members of the audience had heard. But some of those members of the audience can nonetheless remain in the synchronized condition they were in when the music being performed reached their ears; and to that extent they remain mind-melded with the performers.

If interbrain synchrony can support a claim of this sort about mind-melding with regard to music, is there some extension of such interbrain synchrony that might support the claim Moses makes about hearing the voice of God? Could the audience for Moses’s claim be mind-melded with Moses through their experiences together, and could they by this means somehow count as hearing what Moses himself had heard, without having heard it through their own auditory channels?

In this connection consider what seems to be a fairly radical extension of the same idea. Gregory the Great says,

Gregory is here evidently imagining an entity that is an evil imitation of the church, which is the body of Christ. On the Pauline description of the body of Christ,Footnote ⁵⁵ all Christians comprise one entity, the body of Christ; and they comprise this entity in virtue of the fact that each person within it is individually united to Christ, who is the head of the body. If we focus on Gregory’s allusion to the Pauline notion of the body of Christ, then we could think of the entity Gregory is describing as the body of Antichrist. On this interpretation of his lines, Gregory the Great is supposing there is a successive chain of people connected to one leader whose evil attributes somehow bind all the individuals into one entity through their union to him.

Gregory’s notion of an entity into which the wicked are conjoined through their evil acts that unwittingly unite them to Antichrist significantly stretches the notion of successive mind-melding. Nonetheless, given the importance of the Pauline notion of the body of Christ to Christian theology, it might be tempting at this point to try to produce a more carefully formulated metaphysical account of Gregory’s notion, so that it could serve as an exemplar of a this something comprised of more than one human being. But even if such an account could be constructed, it would not be sufficient to explain and support the use of the first-person plural pronoun in Daniel’s prayer.

That is because Daniel’s prayer ascribes both communal guilt and communal shame to all those persons in the something-or-other referred to by his use of ‘we’. The synchronization of minds yielded by a chain of successive remembering or successive shared musical experience or even successive unwittingly imitative evil acts is manifestly insufficient to warrant Daniel’s use of ‘we’. It might be that Gregory’s notion of a union through successive mind-melded sinful actions can constitute a community that has sinned, but even so it would not explain how any kind of sinfulness could be attributed truly to Daniel, who risked death rather than disobey God’s commands.

To consider what else might be needed to explain Daniel’s prayer, it is helpful to consider Aquinas’s notion of a stain on the soul.

The stain on the soul, and a simulacrum of the stain

On Aquinas’s view, serious moral wrongdoing leaves the wrongdoer with impairments in his intellect and will, but these impairments do not exhaust the defects caused by such wrongdoing. Aquinas calls the additional defects ‘a stain on the soul’; and, for the sake of convenience, I will simply adopt his phrase. To understand what he has in mind with this phrase, it is helpful to recognize that there are cognitive and conative faculties besides intellect and will, and wrongdoing can leave them in a morally worse condition, too.

For example, there is memory. The very memory of having engaged in serious moral wrongdoing that caused suffering to others diminishes something that might have been lovely in the wrongdoer’s psyche; and, by staying in memory, the past evil a person has done remains part of the wrongdoer’s present.Footnote ⁵⁶

Then there are the empathic capacities. Most people cannot simulate the mind of a person who commits seriously evil acts, and we give expression to that incapacity by saying ‘I can’t imagine how a person could do something like that!’ But the perpetrator himself does understand what it feels like to do such things and, what is worse, what it feels like to want to do them. There is consequently a kind of moral elasticity in the evildoer’s psyche. The hard barrier against the doing of evil acts – the ‘I can’t!’ – that ordinarily decent people have in their psyches is missing in the person who engages in such evil, and the consequent moral flabbiness in the wrongdoer’s psyche has something repellent about it.Footnote ⁵⁷

In addition, on Aquinas’s view, there is a relational component to the stain on the soul. Included in the stain is an absence of some good relational characteristic which a person would have had if he had not done a serious morally wrong act and which would have contributed to his inner loveliness.Footnote ⁵⁸ An ongoing relationship is affected by the past states of the persons in it, not least because the past can live on through memory; it is not only their present condition that is relevant to the relationship among persons.

For these reasons, on Aquinas’s view, in addition to its effects on a person’s intellect and will, serious moral wrongdoing can diminish a person; or, as Aquinas says, it can leave a stain on the soul through its effects on the wrongdoer’s psyche, including through the disruptions it makes in the wrongdoer’s relationships with those affected directly or indirectly by his wrongdoing. These effects of serious moral wrongdoing lessen the inner comeliness that the wrongdoer might otherwise have had. Because they are not moral defects in the will, such psychological leftovers of moral wrongdoing are not by themselves worthy of blame or punishment; but there is something morally lamentable about them all the same.Footnote ⁵⁹ Consequently, the stain on the soul itself may leave the wrongdoer in a morally worse condition than he was before he did the evil in question, not because he merits punishment or even blame for these psychic leftovers of evil, but because he is somehow more morally shabby than people who have not committed serious moral wrongdoing.Footnote ⁶⁰

Clearly, there are many questions that could be raised about Aquinas’s notion of the stain on the soul, but I am leaving them to one side here because it is actually an extension of his idea that I want to focus on. For my purposes, it is helpful to see that there can be something like a simulacrum of the stain on the soul.

We can sketch this notion by noticing that mind-reading and empathy between two people can occur when one of them is engaged in doing an action that is evil or morally repulsive. That this is so helps explain why watching graphic videos of horrific violence or abuse is so distressing to most people. The dreadful scenes in those videos can prompt mind-reading and empathic sensations in the viewer too.Footnote ⁶¹ The neural systems engaged by mind-reading and empathy give the viewer some no doubt limited sense of what it feels like to do such things and to want to do them, even though they give this sense in a way which is disconnected from the viewer’s own intellect and will. Sensing what it feels like to do and to want to do such things can be greatly troubling if the things in question are deeply revulsive to one’s own moral sensibilities, to one’s own beliefs and desires. What mind-reading and empathy give in such a case is not an actual stain on the soul but something like a simulacrum of the stain on the soul. The neural engineering underlying the social nature of human beings can connect human beings in a way that transfers something not identical to a stain on the soul but something somewhat analogous to it.

The empathic pain Paula has when she sees Jerome impale his bare foot on a nail is in some sense a pain of Jerome’s that she is sharing; but that feeling of pain is not connected to the beliefs and desires Paula would have had if it had been her own foot that was hurt. Analogously, when (in person or through some medium such as narrative or film) a morally decent person Paula sees Jerome doing something seriously morally wrong and mind-reads him as he is doing it, then the resulting empathic state in Paula is not connected to the rest of her psyche in the way Jerome’s intellect and will are connected to the rest of Jerome’s psyche. Paula’s will rejects doing the kind of acts Jerome is engaged in, for example, while Jerome actually wills to do them; and she is distressed by the feeling she gets from Jerome empathically, instead of accepting or welcoming it as Jerome does.

Consequently, Paula does not get a real stain on the soul from her empathic connection to Jerome in his wrongdoing. In having some of Jerome’s mental states in herself through mindreading and empathy, she has some degree of mind-melding with Jerome. But she does not in consequence become morally shabby; her psyche does not become morally worse than it might have been, any more than a person who dreams she is running is actually running. But her mind-reading of Jerome and empathic connection to him will be disturbing to Paula because she experiences at the same time both some of Jerome’s evil mental states and her own distress at those mental states. This is one way in which someone who mind-reads another person as he is engaged in serious moral evil gains something like a simulacrum of the stain on the soul of the wrong-doer.Footnote ⁶²

To get some intuitive feeling both for the notion of the stain on the soul and the analogous notion of a simulacrum of the stain, it may help to have an example drawn from history. So consider in this connection Amon Göth.

Göth was the commandant of a concentration camp in Poland during the Nazi occupation, and by all accounts he was one of the most sadistic of the Nazi camp commanders. In his film Schindler’s List, Spielberg depicted him as a moral monster. At the end of the war, at the age of 37, Göth was convicted of torturing and killing an unidentifiably large number of people; and he was hanged for his crimes in September 1946.

Now suppose that Göth had not been executed but that, like Albert Speer, he had simply been sentenced to a lengthy period of imprisonment; suppose also that, like Speer, Göth had presented himself convincingly as totally repentant. Then when Göth was released from prison, it seems that his intellect and will would have been those of a morally decent person; and (in my thought experiment) he would not then merit any further punishment or blame either since he had finished his justly imposed prison sentence. But, even so, many ordinary people would have been unwilling to invite him to dinner. Even with the completion of his punishment and with thorough repentance, there does seem to remain something about Göth that alienates others.

Something in some parts of Göth’s psyche other than his will and intellect have to be the source of this alienating since Göth’s total repentance (in this thought experiment) puts his intellect and will into the same condition as that of ordinary, morally decent people. And so the problem has to lie in the conditions still obtaining in other parts of Göth’s psyche. The deficiencies or impairments in those parts of his psyche will not themselves be worthy of blame or punishment; but it seems clear that they nonetheless leave Göth morally worse than he was before his wrongdoing. The alienation of others from him, manifested in the unwillingness to invite him to dinner even if he were in a repentant state at the end of a completed lengthy prison term, is a kind of moral judgement on Göth. In my view, this hypothesized fictional case of Göth illustrates Aquinas’s notion of a stain on the soul.

We can understand the notion of a simulacrum of a stain on the soul by analogy. The connection Paula has to Jerome that she gains through mind-reading him in his evildoing can be distressing to Paula, and so it can diminish some things in Paula’s psyche that would otherwise have been healthier or more functional. Unlike an actual stain on the soul, the diminishments in Paula’s psyche will not be morally lamentable. But they will nonetheless have a negative impact on her flourishing, not because the stain alienates her from the human community, as in Göth’s case, but because the simulacrum leaves her somehow alienated from herself.

As it happens, Göth’s story also provides examples of a simulacrum of a stain. While he was camp commander, Göth had a relationship with a woman Ruth Irene Kalder, who seems to have been in love with him and who apparently tried to blind herself to his evil. In the course of that relationship, Ruth Irene had a daughter Monika Hertwig. Monika never knew her father – she was less than a year old when he was executed – and she grew up knowing next to nothing about him either. By the time she was an adult, Monika was still largely ignorant of the truth about Göth.

In connection with the making of Schindler’s List, Ruth Irene was interviewed by the filmmakers about Göth; and in the course of that interview they brought home to her the truth about the horrors Göth had perpetrated. The film makers also allowed Monika to listen in secretly to that interview.

The interview forced Ruth Irene finally to confront the true nature of the man she had loved and been intimate with, and that truth was apparently unbearable for her. The day after the interview, she committed suicide. But what Monika learned through the interview was also devastating for her. As she makes clear in her memoir, I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I?, Footnote ⁶³ she spent years of her life afterwards struggling to come to terms with the evil her father had done.Footnote ⁶⁴

Then there is Göth’s granddaughter. In consequence of a brief relationship with a Nigerian man, Monika had a daughter Jennifer Teege. Monika felt unable to care for the baby; shortly after the baby’s birth, Monika gave her into the foster care of a family that eventually adopted her. In that family, Jennifer grew up unaware of her grandfather and his crimes. She discovered the truth through an incredible coincidence. Wandering through a city library, she picked a book off the library shelves at random and glanced through it. It turned out to be her mother’s memoir. The book sent her into a serious life crisis from which she recovered only slowly. In her own book My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me,Footnote ⁶⁵ she details the ruinous impact that the knowledge of her grandfather had on her and the long struggle she had to come to terms with her family history.Footnote ⁶⁶

As this severely abbreviated summary shows, the evil Göth did, which left a real stain on the soul in him, also left its mark on his lover Ruth Irene, and then on his daughter Monika, who never knew her father, and subsequently also on his granddaughter Jennifer, who was an adult before she realized who her grandfather was. Ruth Irene, Monika, and Jennifer are of course bound together by their family connection to Göth: Ruth Irene as the mother of his child, and Monika and Jennifer as his biological descendants. But clearly more than the family relation is needed to explain the effects of his evil on these women; they had the family connection for years before they felt its ill effects.

For each woman, the traumatic effects began with her hearing true stories about Göth’s actions. It is as if the combination of the family connection and the stories produced a mind-melding of some sort, psychological if not neurological, with Göth; but it was a highly distressing mind-melding for all three women.Footnote ⁶⁷ The result was not a stain on the soul, but something like a simulacrum of the stain on the soul, successively passed on from one generation to the next through connection to Göth and true stories about his evil acts. That simulacrum does not make any of the women morally lamentable, as an actual stain on the soul would do; but it does leave each of them considerably disturbed and somehow divided within herself. It is as if the evil Göth did, which appalls each of the women, is nonetheless somehow also inside each of them, with the result that each of them is alienated from herself. Each of them felt her connection to Göth as both a trauma and a kind of defilement. Ruth Irene dealt with it by being the agent of her own destruction; the autobiographies of Monika and Jennifer chronical their more complicated struggle with it.Footnote ⁶⁸

The simulacrum of a stain, communal guilt and shame, and suffering

Recent research in epigenetics has shown that it is possible for the biological correlates of psychological trauma to be passed on through generations in a successive genetic chain from the person who originally suffered the trauma to others who did not.Footnote ⁶⁹ Analogously, it seems possible that a simulacrum of a stain can be passed successively from one person to another in a connected series of minds synchronized around a wrongdoer’s evil actions or even around true stories about those actions. The three women connected to Göth are bound together not only because they share a family relation but also because they share Göth’s stories and the simulacrum of a stain that the stories and their family relation to Göth give them. If we can make sense of this idea, then it seems that the unity enabled by mind-melding and a shared simulacrum of a stain on the soul could give some help in understanding the communal guilt and shame expressed in Daniel’s prayer.

Think of the matter this way. When Americans who are living now suppose that we owe reparations for the long-past evil of the enslavement of kidnapped Africans, who or what is it that has the obligation to make these reparations?Footnote ⁷⁰ And what sense is there in our thinking that the community of the currently living innocent have an obligation to do what is in effect penance for the morally wrong acts of the long-dead guilty?Footnote ⁷¹ Additionally, what sense is there in our feeling shame over the actions of the past slaveholders, as many Americans now do (and in my view ought to do)? How is that sense of shame to be explained?

Here the example given by the story of Amon Göth is suggestive. It might be possible to explain both the obligation of reparations for past slavery and the sense of shame over it if there were a something-or-other which by means of shared true stories about the past practice of slavery in America binds those who are part of the current American community together into a this something with the past slaveholders. Could there be a shared simulacrum of a stain on the soul that weaves the guilty dead and the living innocent into a kind of metaphysical unity so that those now living can truthfully say that we owe reparations for past enslavement of Africans, that we are ashamed of our past practice of slavery?Footnote ⁷²

Unfortunately, whether or not these sketchy suggestions could be turned into a satisfactory metaphysical account explaining communal guilt and shame, it would still not be enough to deal with the puzzle of Daniel’s prayer. That is because the people who are part of the something-or-other which Daniel is referring to with his first-person plural expressions of guilt and shame are people who are suffering; and it is part of the point of Daniel’s confession to accept their suffering as coming from a just and merciful God. Whatever help the notion of a simulacrum of a stain can give to explain communal guilt or communal shame, communal punishment seems to pose a more challenging problem.Footnote ⁷³

But here too the notion of a simulacrum of a stain on the soul may help. The women bound together by their connection to Göth and stories about him certainly suffered because of their connection to him. But it would be an unreflective mistake to take their suffering as a punishment.

On the contrary, their suffering seems to have been purgative, at least for Monika and Jennifer. Jennifer’s memoir made a powerful impact on many people, as witness the fact that it became a New York Times bestseller and was translated into Danish, English, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. And in her recorded videos after the success of her memoir, she is evidently flourishing, as she was not when she first came to know the stories of her grandfather. Monika’s suffering and her struggle to do something to make amends for her father’s evil were chronicled in the prize-winning film Inheritance, produced by James Moll, the Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. It is clear in the video that her attempts to come to terms with the harm her father did were transformative for her. She is no longer the pathetic woman she seems to be in her earlier adult years; rather, there is something admirable and appealing about her in her attempts to do something as amends. And maybe some analogue of this point can apply even to Ruth Irene. She could not bear living with the truth about the man she had loved; the knowledge of his evil was intolerable to her. Certainly her suicide is sorrowful. But while she still found Göth and her relationship with him somehow acceptable to her, she was not sorrowful; she was horrible.

If we think about the suffering occasioned by the simulacrum of a stain on the soul not as punishment for individual personal guilt – of which there is none – but as healing for what the simulacrum has left greatly disturbed in the psyche of the person who has it, then perhaps the suffering of the innocent members of Daniel’s community, including Daniel himself, can be understood in some similar ways.

Theological reflections

Whether these considerations, prompted in part by the new neurobiological research, could be developed enough to explain Daniel’s prayer or Moses’s speech is not clear. But it is clear that the very attempt to find a metaphysical something-or-other which is the referent of Daniel’s first-person plural pronoun will strike many people as counter-intuitive – perhaps because they have an unnoticed acceptance of a sort of Aristotelian metaphysics, or perhaps because they share an unexamined commitment to reductionism that makes the metaphysics of human union alien. Whatever the reason, it seems that, in effect, many people share the attitude of Lewis’s senior Tempter, who thinks that even the idea of union in love between two human persons is logically incoherent if taken in any literal sense.

But it is worth noticing what difference Christian theology makes to these metaphysical issues. Here I want to gesture to just two Christian doctrines: the doctrine of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the doctrine of the Trinity; and I will take Aquinas’s interpretations of these doctrines as representative, both because his views are the ones I know best and also because they are philosophically and theologically sophisticated.

We can begin with Aquinas’s explanation of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

Aquinas supposes that in the first instant in which a person comes to faith, the Holy Spirit begins to indwell in that person, and it remains in him for as long as he does not return to rejecting faith. So, for example, Aquinas says,

On this view, in faith, through the indwelling Holy Spirit, a human person has a second-personal connection with God. In describing the love that is necessary for a person to have the Holy Spirit, Aquinas says,

In fact, as Aquinas interprets the relevant theological claims, the indwelling Holy Spirit unites a human being with God in a relationship personal enough to count as friendship with God. Aquinas says,

Aquinas assumes that a second-personal connection of love between two human persons enables them to grow in connaturality with each other. That is, on his view, if Paula and Jerome love each other and are united to each other, then Paula and Jerome will tend to become more like each other in certain psychological and moral respects.Footnote ⁷⁷ Among other things, their judgements and intuitions about things will grow increasingly similar. For Aquinas, a second-personal connection between Paula and God will have the same sort of effect. When Paula has a second-personal connection with God through the indwelling Holy Spirit, then Paula will grow in connaturality with God. Connected to God in this way, Paula’s intuitions and judgements will grow to be more like those of God.

Because of this connection, it will be possible for Paula to have as-it-were mind-reading with God, in a direct and intuitive way that is in some respects like the mind-reading between human persons.Footnote ⁷⁸ On Aquinas’s view, when she is in this condition, Paula will not need to try to reason things out as regards ethics, for example. She will be disposed to think and act in morally appropriate ways because of her connection to God, and not because of her reliance on reason.

So, for example, in explaining wisdom as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit (rather than as an infused or an acquired virtue),Footnote ⁷⁹ Aquinas says:

In fact, on Aquinas’s view, all the gifts of the Holy Spirit are a manifestation of a second-personal connection of love with God; and they have their source in God’s indwelling in a human person. That indwelling and the union it establishes result in a person’s being attentive to God and apt to follow the voice of God heard inwardly. So, for example, speaking of the gifts, Aquinas says:

And Aquinas generalizes this account of human perfection by maintaining that the perfection of every creature is a matter of a relationship to the Creator; in human beings, the bond of the relationship is love.Footnote ⁸² Aquinas says:

Clearly, it makes a difference here that on Christian doctrine God is triune: one God in three persons.Footnote ⁸⁴ On that doctrine, there is only one God, who is being or esse; but it is also true that there are three divine persons. The three divine persons are not reducible to the one Deity, as if the esse that God is were more foundational than the three persons; and, similarly, the esse of the deity is not reducible to the divine persons, as if they were more fundamental than the esse that God is.Footnote ⁸⁵ Consequently, on the doctrine of the Trinity, it is right and appropriate for the one God to use the first-person plural pronoun to self-refer.Footnote ⁸⁶

An example of such self-referral can be found in the Gospel of John. In that text, Christ uses the first-person plural to refer to the unity that God is; and he connects the unity of all the faithful to that unity of divine persons in the deity. Speaking in his divine rather than his human nature, Christ the Son prays to God the Father for all those people who are or who will be connected to Christ through faith. He prays that

Aquinas comments on this passage:

And Aquinas cites approvingly Chrysostom’s interpretation of this passage, which takes Christ to be praying for God’s gifts to his faithful.

In this connection, both Chrysostom and Aquinas are echoing the Pauline line about the body of Christ. In 1 Cor.12, Paul says:

In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Aquinas maintains that the purpose of the divine gifts is in fact participation in union with God. He cites the phrase in Christ’s prayer for his disciples, ‘that they may be one, as we also are one’; and he says about that phrase:

Aquinas understands the nature of the unity in question this way. He says:

On Aquinas’s view, then, a human person most fulfils his human nature when he is integrated into a unity whose components are not only other human persons but even the persons of the Trinity. But what kind of unity is this? When someone in this unity uses the first-person plural, what is he referring to? Whatever it is, it is a this something that has persons as its constituents.

Maybe the Pauline notion of the church as the body of Christ captures this idea. Maybe this is what Dante had in mind with his idea of the mystic Rose of heaven. But whatever the right philosophical and theological characterization of the something-or-other enfolding the persons of the Trinity and human persons into a unity of love may be, it seems that there is nothing in Aristotelian metaphysics that can capture or explain it. And yet, as these brief remarks show, the Christian tradition depends on it and incorporates it. And maybe we can say the same thing about the Jewish tradition if it turns out that some such unity could explain the prayer of Daniel and the speech of Moses to the Israelites who are about to cross the Jordan River.