We may like to feel that Christianity – essentially a religion of peace – is the exception. But only for a moment. The history of Europe has largely been a story of interdenominational Christian conflict. Vatican II had inspiring teachings about the rights of everyone to worship as they see fit, and clarified the value of denominations outside the Catholic Church. But this was in the 1960s – so about 1960 years too late. Indeed today’s orthodox views about human rights and ecumenism would have merited bell, book and candle – to say nothing of the stake – not so long ago. Historically, Christianity has not been an answer to the problem of conflict, it has been a major source.

We are aware that, in the lifetime of many of us, conflict has arisen from ideology rather than religion. Thus Nazism was emotionally inspired by the ideology of Aryan superiority, while Communism was bred out of Marxist materialism. And a study of both of these suggests a similarity to religion in that they required a strong enough emotional commitment to the sacredness of the central idea to ensure the initial consent of the population to a comprehensive authoritarian structure of state control.

From which I conclude that the contribution of Christianity to conflict has not been the doctrine it teaches, or the way of life it inspires – but its tendency to become an ideology. After all, it was well suited to this. A fundamental belief was that man could only be saved from eternal salvation by committing himself to the Church (extra ecclesiam nulla salus). It followed that any measure however extreme was justified in bringing souls to salvation. By the same token those who led souls away from the Church not only deserved the fiercest punishment but such punishment was actually an act of love in inducing the heretic to return, and warning others not to follow him. And invasion, subjugation and massacre took place under the holy banner of God’s love in the form of a cross.

We notice, too, that secular ideologies had a powerful command structure. They worked best with a dictator at the head, surrounded by a system of senior authorities who owed their present position and their likely futures to the dictator’s favours. And their junior authorities were found at local level. You do not need me to spell out parallels here. But remember that I am only writing about structure; it is indeed possible to have benign totalitarian systems – even if they are the exception rather than the rule.
So I would invite you to explore the difference, if there be any, between the marvellous idea of the Son of God offering himself to his Father so that we may all have eternal life, and the ideology which has led our religion in the past to be prominent in repression and cruelty. It is only when we have rooted out the latter that we can properly aspire to the former.

What turns an idea into an ideology? And how do we prevent it?

We may think of the brain as a complex of communicating parts, each part with its specialist function which may work on its own or in concert with other parts. And we may roughly separate it into the folded mantle of the cortex, which is the cognitive part. The limbic system, which majors on feelings, instincts and biological drives and the brainstem, providing basic life-support systems.

The whole will weigh about 1.4kg, and will contain around a hundred billion nerve cells. The more recently evolved cortex is very large in our species and, as the homo line developed, the brain increased in capacity from about 400cc to about 1350cc.

The neurons within the brain form and re-form connections at the rate of a million per second and typically each one has between 1,000 and 10,000 connections with other cells. They communicate using transmitting and modulating chemicals which pass through the synapses (connecting junctions between neurons). Others are more widely spread affecting whole brain regions. Deficiencies in these chemicals can have profound effects. For example, absence of dopamine can lead to Parkinson’s disease, just as lack of serotonin can lead to depression, or acetylcholine to Alzheimer’s.

Some neurons carry messages from the body’s sense receptors. Others carry signals from the central nervous system to the muscles and glands. Others, again, provide the neural wiring. Brain structure is directed by genes and by experience. We now know that new neurons are being formed throughout our lives, though this plasticity is marked by accelerated development in, say, the infant and at puberty. The other major inhabitants of the brain are glial cells, which provide support functions for the neurons.

The baby’s brain learns at a tremendous rate, forming and refining its brain connections in response to its environment. This process continues as everyday experience continues to generate connections. For example, the connection between a face and a name requires two areas of the brain to work in concert. We can even watch such connections being made in, for example, the brain of a mouse which is undergoing a new experience. Long term memory is formed by a continuing reinforcement of connections.

And everyone is familiar with the increased physical size of the memory of a London cab driver, as he learns “the knowledge”.

I cannot chart all the functions of the brain for you here, but a good example is provided by memory. Immediate memory is found in the temporal lobes. Basic stored memory is held in the hippocampus, and longer-term memories are posted in other parts of the brain. Near to the hippocampus is the amygdala, which handles emotions. It responds to our sense of fear or to our sense of delight.  (See link below)

When the brain of Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railway worker, was penetrated by an iron bar, he survived. This enabled scientists to locate the characteristics of his personality which were damaged by the wound. Incident by incident they were learning how to relate function to brain area. Nowadays they use brain scans.

Although brain scan signals are, at this stage of knowledge, relatively crude, we are now able, for instance, to map the brains which correlate to different personality traits, such as neuroticism or conscientiousness.

In the past we used observational studies for this. For example, we know that people crossing a road, where jaywalking is forbidden, are over three times more likely to follow a man wearing a business suit than one who is informally dressed. (At least it was so in Texas in 1955, when this was studied.) Nowadays we might simply record the different brain activity triggered by an image of a business person.

There are different forms of brain scan. Some measure the electrical activity of neuron signals from outside the scalp. Others measure activity by inserting “tracer” elements which can then be identified, and others track the blood flow associated with activity in areas of the brain. While these methods have revealed much, it is generally agreed that they are still somewhat crude and generalised in their effects. Much research goes into the development of more refined detectors, and these will undoubtedly become more sophisticated. (see link below)

The wonders I describe are such that we should not be surprised at those scientists who believe that the whole story of our humanity can be deduced from a complete understanding of the brain. After all, if every aspect can be traced to cerebral or related activity, why do we need to look further?

To that, I think we must answer that every aspect of a violin concerto can be traced to the vibration of the strings and the sound-box of the instrument, but without the violinist there is no music. Yet the analogy is not exact. The integration of the human spirit and the human body is so much closer than the violin to the violinist that we are hard put to discern the boundaries.

In my next column we will review the commercial and psephological aspects of brain science. It is known as neuromarketing.

Meanwhile, the website Secondsightblog.net, which is available for comments and questions, carries links to brain functions and to brief descriptions of current scanning methods.

Brain functions – interactive chart at  http://www.newscientist.com/movie/brain-interactive

Summary of scanning methods at  http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/types-of-brain-imaging-techniques/

Of course divorce has been with us for many decades, but we may feel that what was once a rare tragedy, has now become common – almost routine. We wonder whether most of our fellow citizens make their marriage vows with a silent reservation: “as long as we continue to be happy together”. But then of course many of our fellow citizens don’t get to the altar because cohabitation has become so common, and is perhaps more honest if people are unwilling to make an unconditional commitment.

But I am kicking at an open goal: the morality of sexual activity provides the obvious examples. So let’s just touch on other possible areas.

Thou shalt not steal. No indeed, our society will not tolerate the housebreaker or the pickpocket. But how about the person who doesn’t declare casual income for tax? Or the supermarket which will reduce the contents of a familiar item — trying to fool customers into not noticing that the price has gone up? Has our society become slacker here?

Bearing false witness, envy and greed, care for the reputation of others – these all bear examination. And what interests me is not that we, and our society, are all – and have ever been – sinners. It is the way in which our moral values change. None of us is an island, and we know that we are all susceptible to being influenced by the morals of our society. We must be aware, not just of how the morals of society have changed, but the extent to which our moral assumptions have changed with them.

But changing moral values is not a one way street. Think of the way that we treated “fallen women”. Our society was prepared to immure many of them in homes for the mentally retarded. Political correctness covers a number of areas. How we laughed at its over-sensitivity! Do you recall the state official in Washington who had to resign because he had used the word “niggardly” in public? But a little self-examination may show that you, like I, are much more circumspect about causing offence than we were in our youth. And think it right to be so.

Now, I am hoping to write in due course about the way that moral values change in society, and the extent to which we find, perhaps in retrospect, that we have changed with them. I am afraid that I look back with shame at some of the views I held as a young adult, which I would now be the first to repudiate.

So I would be much helped if you would contribute  examples, from your own experience, of moral values which have changed for better or worse during your lifetime. And to what extent, if any, your own moral judgments have changed in concert.

I used that thought experiment some months ago to reflect on the “short-cut” brain. It will help us again here as we continue our exploration of neuroscience.

No doubt when your science teacher invited you to try that experiment you were intrigued. But did he tell you that you had experienced a fundamental truth of biological nature? And did he go on to tell you that this truth reverberates through our existence and is intimately concerned with Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven? Probably not. But I shall in time repair the omission.

Indeed our systems are primarily tuned to measure and to react to change. In exploring this truth, I will follow up my promise, in my previous column, to explore why some 95 per cent of our day-to-day mental activity appears to be automatic – or subconscious.

Judging water temperature in a vacuum is hard, but judging it by comparing it with your previous experience is easy. Your left hand compared the lukewarm water with its previous state of hot water; and by comparison it felt cold. Over there my cat lurks lazily until something close within her vision suddenly moves – and she transforms into a primitive feline hunter. The detectors in her retinas light up with the sudden recognition of movement. And that car accident you just avoided today – did you notice that you reacted instantaneously and expertly but without thought, even before you felt that surge of adrenalin?

Nature is clever and efficient. Most of our life is spent in steady state and we scarcely notice the actions and decisions we make. Our physical and psychic reserves are saving themselves for the moment of change. And the major triggers are: danger to life, opportunity for food, and sex. Without instinctive response to these triggers our species would have become extinct millions of years ago – when we had only the primitive brain which still underlies our conscious thought today.

Rather than attempting an exhaustive list of the everyday states of our brains, it is easier to give some examples. If you walk into an unfamiliar room you will without thought survey its length and shape. You will note various objects and be able to assess their size and relative position. In other words you will read it subconsciously with a glance.  But a newborn baby cannot do that because it has no experience of such spaces and objects. Your analysis is only possible because of your stored experience.

We can take that further. Within a shared general assessment of that room we may not all see the same things. My friend, perhaps, will notice the chintzy curtains, while I notice the train set on the floor. There are studies which show that our brains may be responding to an object, or a happening, but we will not see it. Our efficient brain only attends to what it decides is relevant to us.

Consider a list of different kinds of people: university students, monks, teachers, mathematicians, poets, policemen. Each of those groupings throws up a stereotype with various characteristics which have been built up either through experience or imagination. Prejudice? Yes, certainly, but a necessary prejudice. It is the start point from which we can compare how the mathematician we meet differs from our expectation.

We store useful routines – which psychologists call schemas. For instance, the “restaurant” schema stores our expectations of being shown to a table, the waiter giving us a menu, and asking for orders etc. It is only variations from this schema which our brains need to notice. For instance we may develop a sub-schema for Japanese meals.

I make no apology for repeating the old story of the Jesuit and Dominican chain smokers. They agreed to ask their respective superiors for a solution to their problem of tobacco starvation while saying daily office. The Dominican failed and the Jesuit succeeded. Why? Because the Dominican asked if he could smoke while he prayed while the Jesuit asked if he could pray while he smoked. Two different comparisons, two different answers.

But this is only the beginning. We could look at habitual attitudes, the influence of early nurture or the effect of genes. Or experimental work that seems to show that our brain decides our actions a fractional second before we do. It will not be a surprise that some neuroscientists speak confidently of free will as an illusion. Since everything can be accounted for through the brain, what need is there for a conscious mind?

So my claim that these issues are intimately concerned with Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven is not exaggerated. What has eschatology to offer us if we are no more than the expression of material evolution, if the moral life has no meaning, and only death has dominion?

We will explore this further in due course. Meanwhile we will have many things to examine. Among them is the famous Phineas Gage, whose meeting with an iron bar gave a kick start to neuroscience.

Meanwhile, let’s discuss this. Your challenging questions or objections will be invaluable.

In Multimind, as I recall, he describes how we understand the world and our experience by choosing from one of the patterns which exist in our minds. The one which most immediately struck me was his remark that we use one pattern to judge other’s behaviour and another to judge our own.

Let me give you a small but true example. One hot summer my wife was complaining about a neighbour noisily playing pop music. I agreed with her. But a few days later I noticed (well, I couldn’t avoid noticing) that she had our hi fi playing at full volume. I asked her how she could do that in the light of her neighbour’s annoying habits. She said: “I’m playing Mozart. No one could possibly complain about that.”

(I would like to have given you an example of my inconsistency. But, you see, I am never inconsistent, though I am sure that you often are.)

What is the cause of this inconsistency? I note that it starts off when we are infants. You have all seen 5 year olds squabbling. Both are furious with what the other has done, and they escalate in a crescendo of accusations of “he did it first”, “she did it first”. The experienced grown up knows that nothing is going to be gained by an attempted judgment of Solomon. The only answer is to bring the escalation to an end by distraction, or to use force majeure.

The grown up philosophically hopes that, with maturity, the children will realise that they are each as bad as the other – their comforting illusion which pictures themselves as innocent and the other as guilty is just that – an illusion. And irrelevant. One day perhaps the children will recognise this and become skilled themselves in reducing the escalation.

That is a triumph of optimism. We see adult irrational escalations every day in society: for example, trade unions and management. Or, even more dangerously, the escalation of nuclear armament in the Cold War.

At the individual adult level we can see the psychological factors at work. The behaviour tends to be characteristic of people who have a strong sense of ego. This of course is a weakness: such an individual becomes over anxious and defensive. He or she needs to protect their ego by placing the blame elsewhere or, on other occasions, attempting to deal the final, crushing blow. Only it has a tendency to be neither final nor crushing – and the escalation continues.

There is likely to be another reason too. It appears in a study from the University of Toronto published in Cerebral Cortex in January this year. This shows that, while we judge the external world through our (cognitive) neocortex, we judge ourselves through our (emotional) limbic system. This latter system mediates to us our emotions and our fears.

We had thought that we were weighing the faults of our opponent fairly against our own. We had forgotten, or did not know, that we were using two different weighing machines – and the one we used for our own behaviour was deeply biased in our favour.

This is why a spectator can watch an escalating spat – and wonder how two intelligent people can proceed to damage themselves by such irrationality. Meanwhile the participants are tricked by the primitive part of the brain into believing that winning, or having the last word, is an essential defence of their whole person. Everyone loses.

It’s in the news because the neuroscientists are examining how different parts of the brain, either alone or in conjunction with other parts, react to different stimuli. To take a simple example, our brains fire up when we hear the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, because music speaks directly to the amygdala – an almond-shaped part of the brain which responds to emotion.

These nuggets of human behaviour become available because methods of scanning the brain have become common. No need to ask your opinion, for we can talk directly to your brain. Although the answers may not be sophisticated they are at least direct. You cannot plausibly claim that Beethoven means nothing to you if your brain response gives you the lie.

But there are problems. Neuroscience is a subject of immense importance: full of promise and full of threat, and we are still only at the threshold. It would be a pity if our grasp were restricted to the party pieces which take up a couple of column inches in our newspaper.

And they are party pieces, because it is a strong temptation for neuroscientists, dependent on reputation for their funding, to get noticed for this often rather superficial work. In fact, at this early stage, relatively few new insights have emerged. Much of what is being confirmed about human nature now through neuroscience has been known for a long time through observation and studies. Try Plato’s dialogue Gorgias or Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

An important issue of concern relates to the opportunities which arise for manipulation. The simplest of examples will face you the next time you are confronted with a purchase priced at £5.99. Can’t fool you, of course: you know immediately that that is really £6. But that’s your rational brain. Your deeper brain evaluates prices from the left digit, and you buy.

Now, imagine that commercial offerings, from shops to advertisements, have all been designed, with the help of neuroscience, to sneak around our rational defences and trigger our subconscious responses. Imagine further that at election time our candidate has been briefed on what to wear and what to say by neuroscience rather than through his own judgment. Welcome to our world! It has been like that for years. It’s just that we are about to become much better at it.

In my example I used the term “manipulation”, but was I manipulating you? Is there a difference between manipulating people and handling people? After all, both words come from “hand” (Latin: manus), yet the emotional load is different. And I chose the one that I wanted so that I could trigger my intended emotional meaning in your mind.

I take you right back to the Canadian federal elections of 1974 for another example. In this study we may not be surprised that the candidates previously judged to be attractive gained two and half times as many votes as the unattractive. But we may wonder why 73 per cent were quite unaware that their votes had been influenced by appearance, and 14 per cent refused, when challenged, to entertain even the possibility of that influence.

Of at least equal importance to us are the issues which this knowledge raises about our free will. Were these Canadian voters free when they chose the attractive candidate without knowing why? Is a woman free when her sexual choices may be at the behest of her monthly cycle? Are your charitable gifts free when your emotions have been hooked by a subtle advertisement? If it is true that some 95 per cent of our choices are sourced through influences of which we are not aware, what price the virtuous life?

In these contexts we must also consider a subject which I have mentioned from time to time. We have to take seriously the integration of body and soul. So there are questions here too. We want to know why God has intended us to evolve with our great intelligence, yet allows the larger span of our minds to be beyond our conscious control.

We also want to know why, if every aspect of our thought and response is traceable to brain functions, we have any need for a spiritual soul. It is true that the neuroscientists have not yet run to ground freedom of the will or moral obligation or consciousness. But they have solved so many earlier mysteries, that we might expect them to succeed with these as well.

In this column I have done no more than sketch in some introductory aspects of neuroscience, and I have raised more questions than answers. But I am planning in future columns to look further at some of these issues – because they take us deep into the heart of God’s gift of human nature.

My next column on neuroscience will examine just why it is that around 95 per cent of our responses have to be directed by our subconscious minds. There are very good reasons for this being so, and their discovery can give us a whole new view of human nature – and very useful one, too. You may never be the same again. I give away no secrets if I tell you that I will begin with considering a bowl of water.

Meanwhile,  come and contribute to Secondsightblog.net. Your searching questions or objections will be invaluable.

One such incident was when I learned to use empathy. That doesn’t sound very exciting, after all empathy is a common human reaction. So let me tell you how it same about.

Back in the ‘60s I was trained as a marriage counsellor. I had felt that I had a pretty broad knowledge of human nature and I had no difficulty in analysing situations so that I could distil and give some excellent advice. What a benefit I was to all my friends!

But I quickly discovered that it was very hard to help anyone before I had looked at his or her situation from his or her point of view. Empathy did not mean sympathy but it did mean understanding, and communicating my understanding, of where a person was coming from. I had to see the situation first through their eyes, and only then through mine.

We were put into little groups to practise this. Another trainee counsellor would imitate a client and, instead of interpreting or giving advice, I had to say “You feel X because Y.” So, for instance, “You feel angry with your husband because he won’t spend enough time with the children.” The client then will know that they have been understood or they will freely refine our understanding if need be.

That sounds too simple and formulaic, and one can argue that all I was doing was reflecting what the client had said but in my own words. But in fact it caused a revolution in my attitude. By really working at grasping my client’s feelings and the reasons for them, I was relating to them quite differently. And I was discovering that when they truly felt understood they were much readier to look at how they could change their behaviour. And much of that attitude spread into my personal life and relationships.

If you think that cannot be true, or think that, if it is true it is negligible. I offer you a challenge.

The next time someone (child, a spouse, a friend?) says something to you about themselves, don’t react as you might automatically but use “You feel…because…” And keep using it until you have the whole picture. Be prepared for a longer conversation – this may be the first time anyone has really listened to your friend and they won’t throw up the opportunity to be heard at last.

This is not a parlour trick. Getting into the habit of being more interested in what the other person has to say than in what we have to say, goes against our egoistic grain. That means that it is a habit which we have to work at every day.

But we haven’t yet grasped the true wonder. That may begin when we realise that eyes have evolved in the animal kingdom independently in more than 40 instances. Nature is profligate with eyes. God did not just fashion the eye, he gave us the system which would fashion the eye and a billion other outcomes. It is a progressive system, not in itself rational, but self-correcting through the filter of fitness to survive. Eventually, but seen and intended by him from the beginning, this resulted in an organism with such potential that it could only be complemented by an immortal soul made in God’s likeness.

That is the true wonder, and our imaginations cannot grasp it. Many people, among them readers of this newspaper, tell me that, while they can accept evolution in broad terms and recognise the mythic characteristics of the Creation story, there are certainly some phenomena so marvellous that we must assume God’s intelligent design.

I must distinguish such people from those who believe that everything is the outcome of God’s direct creation: that is, that Genesis is literal truth. Because this view is so unfashionable, some have adopted a modified form called “Intelligent Design” as a stalking horse for their larger idea. I do not have such people in mind here.

Over the decades many instances where it is proposed that only direct design could achieve the result have been cited. They have in common the claim that the steps required to develop the organism in question cannot be shown or even imagined. The argument started with the Rev William Paley who started his Natural Theology (1802) with the reflection that consideration of the pocket watch, which he found by chance, leads to the inevitable inference “that the watch must have had a maker.”

The first example I encountered was the bombardier beetle. This contains chambers of two different chemicals whose mixture was fearsomely and explosively ejected by the beetle in defence. It was claimed that the mixing of these chemicals would cause an explosion – thus prematurely destroying the beetle. This attractive theory came a cropper when the two chemicals were in fact mixed and no explosion occurred. In fact, catalysts are required to enable this to happen.

A more sophisticated example is provided by the rotational (wheel-like) motion of the flagellum in certain bacteria. It was argued that the intermediate steps required to build such a complex and rare mechanism could not be accounted for within evolution.

It is true that rotation does not occur at a larger scale. There are difficulties such as the provision of blood flow. But there is no such difficulty at bacterial level, and indeed rotation does occur in many other bacteria – but using substantially fewer genes. While, as far as I know, scientists have not been able to demonstrate all the intermediate steps, there is no reason to suppose that they did not occur. Proteins in different species can vary by 80 to 90 per cent, yet perform the same function. In fact, only two genes are unique to flagella.

Perhaps a less familiar example concerns the blood-clotting cascade. The process which leads to the clotting of blood, potentially bringing about healing, is very sophisticated. So many different processes are involved that “cascade” is an appropriate word. It has been argued that this complexity defies the power of evolution. It must have been directly designed. But it is possible to show how all the steps could have developed through evolutionary principles, enabling more sophisticated and efficient mechanism to develop, simply because the chance effects of each stage benefitted the owners, who survived to breed. We are living in a universe where a creature the size of a mouse can evolve to the size of an elephant in a mere 24 million generations, but retaining similar constituents and body parts, taking no more than a speck of evolutionary time.

It is important to note that such explanations do not claim that all these intermediate stages did occur in the fashion and the order which is suggested. Think of that old stone archway. We do not need to suppose that the scaffolding needed for its construction did not exist because it has been removed. What such explanations do show is that the end result could have been achieved through evolution, and Occam’s razor indicates that this is the preferable explanation.

And this, of course, is the problem. It will never be possible to disprove every claim that a biological phenomenon could only have been produced through Intelligent Design. In many ways our understanding of biology is still in its infancy. If one proposition is shown not to prove Intelligent Design, another can be put forward. There will always be cases where the intermediate stages cannot be identified.

But those who, perhaps through piety, argue for Intelligent Design do disservice. Each time one of their candidates is felled, a little damage is done to true religion. The god-of-the-gaps shrinks a little, and disbelievers mock.

Meanwhile, you can see God’s work here. This brief YouTube video was recommended by our contributor Nektarios – and is most impressive.

Tell us if you agree with my thoughts.

Apologies for the past are somewhat unusual in official Catholic circles, and this was undoubtedly an apology. In referring to those Catholics in Germany and the occupied territories who failed to protest and protect, it said: “We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church.” The message is that we must remember, then we must repent. And we must ask ourselves whether, and to what extent, anti-Jewish prejudice has contributed to this calamity. Pope John Paul, in his introduction, says “May it enable memory to play its necessary part in the process of shaping a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible.”

So, in the spirit of Pope John Paul, I want to dig a little deeper into memory, and reflect on the Reflection. But I have an initial difficulty to unravel: it is not always clear in the document what meaning is given to the entity of the Church. There is an unspoken distinction between the Church as a formal institution of teaching and authority – in effect what nowadays we call the magisterium – and the unfaithfulness of many members of the body of the Church. But history suggests that the Church, taken as a total community, has been riddled with anti-Judaism from the beginning. If blame is to be apportioned, it lies most heavily with its leadership – which by no means excuses those of the rank and file who followed that lead. And, although there is more than a technical difference between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, all too often the two streams flow in the same channel. You will have to test the soundness of my judgment from the sad summary which follows.

We may not easily blame St Paul for referring to the Jews as the killers of Christ who will reap their reward, nor his epithet of “dogs”. He was writing in the middle of the first century when the incidents were almost contemporary, and he had been much troubled by their opposition to his apostolate. He could scarcely have guessed that accusations of deicide would quote his authority throughout two millennia.

The Early Church Fathers, who are frequently quoted as high authorities in Vatican teaching, had no such excuse 400 years later. Tertullian, Origen, and Ambrose make a representative list. But they all fall way behind John Chrysostom (“golden-mouth”) whose public abuse of the Jews was used by the Nazis in defence of their activities.

St Augustine is, by comparison, almost liberal – teaching that since their offence brought about salvation, they were not to be destroyed but only to be dispersed so that their fate would be obvious to everyone. But this was a two-edged sword stretching into the future: one edge forbade violent persecution, the other promoted marginalisation. The two edges were eventually to come to a point.

In 306, the Council of Elvira was to rule “If any cleric or layperson eats with Jews, he or she shall be kept from communion as a way of correction.” Over the next three centuries at least eight synods restricting Jews in various ways took place. The Third Lateran Council (1179) ruled that no Christian ought to be servant to a Jew, and that Christian evidence should always overrule Jewish evidence. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) ruled that Jews should be distinguished by their clothing, forbade them from appearing in public at Eastertide and – confirming the Synod of Toledo (589) refused them preference in public office. It would never be proper for a Christian to be ruled by a Jew.

Over the following 500 years there were more than 20 Papal Bulls unfavourable to Jews. They cover such matters as the obligation to live in ghettoes, restriction of the trades they could adopt, including the practice of medicine, and refining the regulations on dress. Jews were at one time required to wear distinctive yellow items – which should cause a shiver of memory. The Talmud was to be destroyed. Pontifical documents often described the Jews as impious and perfidious; and it was not until the insistence of Pope John XXIII that such epithets were removed from the official liturgy. The severity of these rulings applied variously in times and places, but they were not abrogated before the mid 19th century, although semi-official anti-Semitic propaganda was to continue.

Forced conversions were forbidden, although they took place. This was flagrant under the Spanish Inquisition, which was then to put major focus on such converted Jews, and their descendants, to root out and punish any continuation of Jewish practice.

Of course the general Catholic population followed the official line with all the enthusiasm of a mob given licence to behave cruelly while feeling virtuous about it. There were outbreaks of violence, pogroms, expulsions and general abhorrence of anything Jewish. And these continued throughout history. The grotesque Dreyfus affair (1894 to 1906), in which a Jewish officer was unjustly imprisoned, was sustained by widespread anti-Semitism in France. Civiltá  Cattolica, a Jesuit journal, which worked in close collaboration with the Vatican, was publishing anti-Semitic articles right up to 1938.

A recurrent theme has been the allegation of deicide. I am glad to see that it is now accepted that St Matthew may have exaggerated, for polemical purposes, the part which the Jewish mob played in the crucifixion but, even without this, it is obvious that a local crowd of Jews without the slightest belief that Christ was God, whipped into frenzy some 2000 years ago, could not damn their entire race into the future. Or if it could, what burden do we bear for our prolonged and much more recent sins against the Jews? One bright star shines from the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which declared that the guilt for the crucifixion lies more heavily on us since, when we are unfaithful to Christ we know, unlike the Jews, what we are doing. I am not going to give the “blood libel” (the sacrifice of Christian children for Jewish ritual) even the credence of refutation.

I do not consider here questions such as the behaviour of the German bishops over the period of Nazism, nor the steps taken, or not taken, by Pius XII, for my purpose has been to review in what ways we (and here I speak of the whole body of the Church) may, historically, have prepared the ground for the Shoah. Should we have been surprised that the German people, and those in several occupied countries, took so meekly, and sometimes so readily, to the persecution of the Jews? The soil of Europe had been composted with anti-Judaism for hundreds of years, when it received the Nazi’s poisoned seed.

It is clear of course that the Shoah was the direct responsibility of the Nazis and their wicked collaborators. But is also true that it occurred against a background of Christian European culture, of which we are so proud. The Reflection ends with the words “To remember this terrible experience is to become fully conscious of the salutary warning it entails: the spoiled seeds of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism must never again be allowed to take root in any human heart.”

The Council document, Nostra Aetate, firmly proclaimed our debt to Judaism and repudiated any form of anti-Semitism. But the human heart is another matter. Anti-Semitism can take many forms from the simple stereotyping of Jews to confusing it with legitimate criticism of the State of Israel as a political entity. It can even take the form of envy, for Jews have been remarkably successful, for instance in financial and artistic fields. Was the shock of the Shoah sufficient to eradicate it, or will it like bindweed only have been cut back to reappear in another year? Pope John Paul called for metanoia – a deep change of direction through repentance. Has the Church, at all levels made that deep change? If you have found this article as uncomfortable to read as I have found it to write, it may help us to remember his words: “Guilt must always be the point of departure for conversion.”

From The Catholic Herald, 25 Jan 2008

What do we find acceptable within the Church today, of which we shall be ashamed tomorrow?

Do you ever think seriously about the soul? Consider the holy souls who have worked their time through purgation and are now waiting, very happily, for the Day of Judgment. In fact, from their point of view, not waiting at all. They are outside the realm of time. They experience no time between death and resurrection, just as there was no time for those who lived before Christ but benefitted, as the Creed assures us, from his redemption. While we have to use “time” words in order to express these mysteries in human language, that is no reason for interpreting them literally.

Ensoulment is an interesting concept. We encounter it at two major points: one is the ensoulment of the first human being and the other is the ensoulment of every human being at, or after, conception. How do we think this works? Perhaps God identified a member of the species homo erectus who, as the result of a mutation, was brighter than usual, and decided that this was worth a soul – and injected it. Similarly, he recognises the zygote (the first cell after conception) and does the same. I am not trivialising: this is how I know many Catholics think and, when I am not wary, I think myself.

The old (and splendidly scholarly) Catholic Encyclopaedia gives us: “The soul may be defined as the ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies are animated.” And it goes on to speak of the faculties and the powers of the soul. Written 100 years ago, the Encyclopaedia was clear that these powers worked in some sense through and with the biological processes.

And nothing has changed, although our knowledge of the brain and, through types of scan, its functions has grown mightily. So much so that many neuroscientists, of a secular turn of mind, mistakenly believe that all of what we call the powers of the soul are determined psychologically.

We do not have to cross this Rubicon to grasp something of the integration between body and soul. Take, as an obvious example, our use of free will. We know that our decisions are so strongly influenced by our genetic inheritance, by our nurturing experiences and by the nature of our subjective perception, that it is hard to determine, in any particular instance, that our decision is free. Aquinas taught that virtue is a habit which makes us good and our work likewise. And we recognise habit as an outcome of strengthened neural connections; just try to imagine exercising any of the soul’s functions without the help of both instinctive and conscious memory.

Since the human soul works through biology, but in some mysterious way transcends it, it can make no sense to us to think of a human soul without its body. But of course we don’t have to, if we go from our mortal body immediately to our resurrected body. The alternative idea of souls, minus time and space, blipping immaterially around eternity seems odd to me. (Please don’t ask me about angels; they can furnish their own explanation if they wish.) I have parents, a brother and a sister, and a miscarried child in heaven. I can pray to or for all of them – confident that they know I am praying and that not a word is wasted. Exactly how is not yet my business to know.

One Catholic asked me why it is that God cooperates with immorality by giving a soul to a foetus conceived in a petri dish. This is a reasonable question if one accepts the injection theory of ensoulment. But if the soul, both naturally and supernaturally, is bound in with the body, then the creation of the body with its human faculties (through evolution, as I think, or otherwise) is the occasion of the soul. God cannot make a fully human body without a soul, for without a soul it would not be a fully human body.

Are new issues raised by the fact that the foetus is initially not capable of exercising the powers of the soul, other than the power of animation? I think not, because the human foetus is by intrinsic nature ordered to developing the required biological form for their exercise. Even the axis of the nervous system is affected by the entry point of the sperm at conception. I am not speaking of a soul that develops, but I am speaking of a developing body and brain, and that means that the ability of the soul to exercise its powers must similarly develop. For example, it will be a matter of years, not months, before a human being can exercise reason, notwithstanding our recognition that rationality is a cardinal characteristic of human beings.

In this matter I go back to Heraclitus, who famously said: “You cannot step in the same stream twice.” His doctrine of continuous change applies a fortiori to the human organism.  We change and develop throughout our lives, stopping only when the bell tolls. A human life is a continuously changing identity. Even reading this column you have been subject to thousands of mutations: my hair has grown a little thinner, and all of us are nearer to our graves.

But feel free. I speak with no authority beyond the force of argument – although I do not think that my speculations on the soul take me outside the perimeter of orthodoxy. But if you disagree, or wish to take my speculations further,  and tell us about it.