Beaton, DRAFT 1
Language, Song, and the Senses: Liturgical Living in Light of Chauvet
Rhodora E. Beaton, Aquinas Institute of Theology
NAAL, Liturgical Language Seminar, 2018
“Where do you keep your soul?” This question, in one form or another hovered in the background of many versions of a classroom discussion of Christianity’s rejection of the Apollinarian heresy.[1] My undergraduate students wondered: if Jesus did have a fully human soul to go along with his fully human body, then where did he keep it? and where did he still find room to squeeze in the Logos? and where, for that matter, is my soul located, if indeed I have one, which I would like to think I do? Some might suggest that these very questions are the result of the rather haphazard and watered-down combination of metaphysics and the scientific method that percolates in the popular imagination. Only one thing can occupy a space at a time (think perhaps of the early medieval Eucharistic controversies) and human anatomy should be diagrammable (as my nursing students knew all too well). For the sake of proceeding with our discussion, we would usually agree that Jesus’ soul, and ours by extension, could be associated either with the brain or with the heart and I would then steer the conversation into the theological implications of anything other than the full humanity and full divinity of Christ. In general my students seemed mildly fascinated with the idea that anyone should care about this at all. But by and large, they did prefer to think that they were each in full possession of a soul. The lack of such was vaguely troubling to most, although not all.
A bedrock principle of Catholic sacramental theology is that the physical and the spiritual operate together in their sacramental effect on an individual. The physical symbolic elements, the sacramentum tantum, are set, and the sacramental outcome cannot be assumed if the “wrong” elements are used. Similarly, the verbal formula is also set, although the sounds may differ in different vernacular languages, and a sacramental outcome cannot be assumed if any other than the approved words are spoken.[2] That which is perceived by the senses should be directly related to the spiritual effect.[3] Relying on Augustine’s claim that one thing is seen and another is understood,[4] and Aquinas’s insight that God teaches the unknown by means of the known,[5] there is an intuitive understanding of a physical action (consumption of food for example) having a spiritual effect (spiritual nourishment). The task of suggesting how this might occur has changed over the years, in keeping with the philosophical and scientific trends of time periods and cultures. Augustine, for example drew on the Greek concept of the figura to suggest a way of thinking about sacramental efficacy.[6] Aquinas made analogical use of the philosophical ideas of substance and accident[7] to describe the way that a physical act could have a spiritual outcome. Aquinas’s description focuses on what God does to the physical elements themselves. Augustine’s approach focuses more on the human sensory experience and the rational process which is necessary to perceive the spiritual truth.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, neuro-scientific methods allow for the analysis of unconscious experience in the brain which, together with the heart, is one of the areas traditionally associated with the soul and with religious experience. In the pages that follow, I would like to suggest that this new evidence of unconscious experience could become a helpful conversation partner for sacramental analysis. In order to do so, I will first consider the context of embodiment from the post-modern (post-metaphysical) perspective of Louis-Marie Chauvet. I will then move to the insights of neuroscientist Michael Arbib concerning the unconscious effect of mirror neurons on human experience. Finally, I will address some areas of connection and potential difficulties which arise when these insights are applied to the contemporary worship experience.
Part I: Sacramentality and Embodiment
As his student Elbatrina Clauteaux puts it, “Chauvet doesn’t do theology arising from the social sciences and philosophy. He theologizes with them, without confusion, without separation, in fraternal company and fruitful conversation.”[8] His method thus offers a contemporary model for engagement with other disciplines that provides a fruitful starting point for theological anthropological reflection. Chauvet’s approach to embodiment is multifaceted. He considers not only the individual person, the “I-body” as he calls it, but also the “triple body of culture, tradition, and nature” which overlaps and includes all individuals although perhaps in different ways. The sacraments function theologically as corporeal focal points for transformation. Chauvet’s project is intended in part to overcome lingering gnostic preference for mind over body, voice over writing, word over matter. Such a framework can also be helpful in overcoming a theological perspective which regards humans as a.) over, and sometimes against, the rest of the world and b.) isolated individuals rather than members of a community.[9]We turn first to Chauvet’s understanding of embodiment and then to the sacraments as theological framework for considering individual experience in the communal context.
Chauvet’s project attends particularly to what he calls the “’corporality’ of the faith.”[10] As one entry point for his theological anthropology, Chauvet proposes the “I-body.” Distinct yet related to the ecclesial body of Christ, and the “triple body of culture, tradition, and nature,”[11] the “I-body” is the “human ‘way’ of inhabiting the otherness of the world as a home, a familiar dwelling.”[12] It is the place of encounter with everything that surrounds an individual and, as such, it is both a point of separation (or distinctiveness) and a point of encounter. Chauvet emphasizes this difference between bodies as both necessary for any form of communication and theologically as the place of the Holy Spirit.
The “I-body” does not exist in contrast to the mind or cognitive and social functions of the individual. Rather it is “the place of ‘living words’…of living significations, proper to each person, depending upon the history of his or her desire, each history unique and unrepeatable.”[13] Thus, the I-body is associated with the language in which humans communicate and signify, the particularity of each individual’s history and desires and also the physical body of the individual. The “I-body” exists in the context of language and culture which precede it and to which it, in turn, contributes.[14] Both corporeal and capable of symbolic interaction, Chauvet’s “I-body” provides an understanding of the human person in relationship with others and with the world; in the “I-body,” thought and language, word and symbol, relationship and the capacity for belonging are both manifest and inter-dependent.
The I-body is closely related to what Chauvet calls the “triple body” of culture, tradition, and nature. In the specifically Christian context, this triple body is manifested in a particular way---a way which is embedded in the sacramental life. Here the “cultural body” is the community of the church, the corporate “we” of liturgical responses in the present.[15] The body of tradition is “the words and actions repeated and passed down from generation to generation,”[16] from the past, and the cosmic body is “the body of the universe as creation” including the “bread and wine, water, oil, light, and so forth,”[17] pointing towards an eschatological future. As Timothy Brunk points out, the triple body acts as a reminder that “one’s being human is not a simple thing. It is never a finished product…Being human is always a becoming human and the human heart is marked by a restlessness that does not and cannot rest in what is ‘immediately’ available.”[18] To be a human, let alone a Christian human, means to exist in a relational ‘becoming’ in which persons collectively seek a balance between past, present, future, as well as between individual selves, the collective body of the Church, and what Chauvet calls “the body of the universe as creation.”[19] This becoming occurs in the negotiation of the relationships in which we find ourselves.
Chauvet argues that the sacraments help to reveal this three-fold body which is both part of the believing subject and is also the context for the believing subject. Sacraments both ground and make possible the “sacramentality of history and the world”[20] indicating “to us that it is in the most banal empirical details---of a history, an institution, a world, and finally, a body---that what is most ‘true’ in our faith thrives.”[21] An awareness of embodiment is central to the structures of Christian faith, as is clearly seen in the doctrines of the incarnation and resurrection.
The sacraments are also the transformative points of encounter in which humans become aware of God’s self-offer to them (represented by the ‘Scripture’ corner of the tripod) and become obligated, if they wish to maintain the relationship, through the process of symbolic exchange, to offer a symbolic return-gift of their own selves. This symbolic return gift requires the body, requires corporality. For Chauvet, as Judith Kubicki notes, “there is no meaning hidden in a symbol waiting to be discovered. Rather, it is by means of the exchange between persons that a symbol mediates meaning.”[22]It is in our bodies, engaged in these “ritual activities called ‘sacraments’ that God [enters] into corporality,” in the ongoing celebration of the paschal mystery. Where is it more suitable, Chauvet asks, that God “should ask to be inscribed somewhere in humanity, that God’s very glory should demand to be given flesh in the world?”[23]
This “inscription” however, comes with a kind of absence. While closely related to the humanity of God revealed in the incarnation, the sacraments are not prolongation of the physical presence of the historical Jesus. Rather, “Christ’s presence comes forward through the mode of being open.”[24] The sacraments are the realization of the presence of the absence of Christ. It is in the breaking open of the bread, in the spaces in between, which have no inherent value, but which are the spaces that allow for the possibility of encounter, that communion with God and one another is found. This cannot happen without the corporality of the human body, celebrated in the ritual sacraments, and distinct in its particularity. It cannot happen without the realization of the difference which is required for communication. God relates to human beings through our bodies, many elements of which we have in common with other animals.
Thus, for Chauvet, embodiment is about the individual, but is also about the culture, tradition, and natural world in which the individual finds him or herself, and to which she or he contributes in turn. The body is the place of encounter and distinctiveness. It is particular to each individual and in the points of difference or separation between bodies, Chauvet finds the Holy Spirit at work, creating points of encounter that affect the individual without threatening particularity. The sacraments are one such example of the Spirit’s work in the world; they function through the reception of God’s gift and the corresponding mode of openness in which the person in turn offers his or her body as a return-gift to God and to the world.
Given this, and as Chauvet himself models, it behooves theologians to try to understand the physical, social, and sacramental bodies that humans are in relationship to God, one another, and the created world. This includes the human capacity for operating in the context of language and symbol, as well as the ways that contemporary bodies are related to other bodies, past, present, and future, with which contemporary humans share the created world. To begin to do so, we turn briefly to the recent work of neurobiologist Michael Arbib.
Part II: Embodiment, Social Context, and Language
Michael Arbib’s recent work on the function of mirror neurons in the brains of humans and other primates demonstrates the close relationship between action, thought, and communication. It attends in particular to the theory of the “language-ready brain” which allowed our evolutionary ancestors to make the jump from a pre-linguistic body to the ability as a group to use fully developed language as a form of communication. Arbib’s work is important because it is beginning to fill in some of the evolutionary gaps behind terms such as language and symbol, and because it offers some interesting points of intersection, in terms of embodiment, with Chauvet’s work.
Like Chauvet, Arbib argues that in the evolutionary process which resulted in modern humans, “brain, body, and social structure co-evolved. New social practices endowed certain changes in brain and body with a selective advantage that was not there before; but then certain social practices became newly adaptive (and this may include development and use of new tools).”[25] Arbib describes a complex system in which a new social challenge emerged (for example, the group increased in size and the possibility of greater numbers of relationships resulted), the brain adapted to cope with it, and, in the process, the brain developed new abilities, such as the capacity for imitation, which allowed it to develop an advantage in stone tool construction. Arbib suggests that the ability to watch and learn might have emerged indirectly as a result of the increasing complexity of evolving communities. While Chauvet indicates that individual human beings emerge into subjectivity in the context of culture and encounter with others, Arbib suggests that humans as a speciesbecame human in the intermingled development of the brain, the body, and the community. Each element subtly influenced the others, allowing for the evolution of modern human beings who interacted in increasingly complex social situations to try to flourish in the world. There is thus a shifting context, which involves the brain, visible physical practices/action of other parts of the body (perhaps related to tool making), and an increasingly complex social structure.
This shifting context became the context for the emergence of human language;[26] it is directly related, at least according to Arbib, to the social and physical needs of the developing society. Arbib argues, although not everyone agrees, that since “humans have equal facility for language in the manual and vocal domains—signed and spoken languages, respectively” and “speakers gesture with their hands and faces as they talk,”[27] the shift from nonlinguistic communication, to protolanguage, to fully developed human language likely built on capacities for vocal and gestural signaling. To apply Chauvet’s term, the “I-body” speaks, in its embodiment, because it has already been spoken, both vocally and physically.[28] The brain is central to this and has not developed in isolation.
One example of the way that this applies today is in the study of mirror neurons. Recent studies of the modern human brain indicate that the same neurological responses occur not only when a person acts (points, for example) but also when she sees someone else act (is a witness to pointing).[29] This neurological response illustrates the complex physical and social elements of the actions and thought processes of any particular “I-body.” An individual’s physical neural pathways can be developed not only by acting individually, but also by watching someone else act. This physical change is entirely involuntary and is embedded in the social context into which each person is born and emerges as a subject.
Arbib’s work has demonstrated that there are evolutionary connections between the way that human brains function in this capacity and the way that the brains of other animals function. For example, Arbib discusses the presence of “ mirror neurons in [macques]; each such neuron is active both when the monkey executes a specific set of manual actions…and when the monkey observes manual actions more or less similar to the actions in that set.”[30] For macques however, the mirror neurons fire only when the monkey observes an action that “is carried out on an object.”[31] Apes, on the other hand, including humans, have neurological responses not only to gestures carried out on an object, but also to “intransitive gestures,”[32] which could be intended to further social goals---like a gesture that means “come over here.” These more abstract gestures may have contributed to the “language-ready” brain in human ancestors, but not, again for example, in macque ancestors. To develop the connection to Chauvet’s work, the intransitive, or symbolic, gesture becomes meaningful in the unconscious interaction between two individuals who have evolved in a community. The gesture has no value as an action that produces something; it does not function as a tool. Yet it has significant value in developing the social connections which allow an increasingly complex community to develop.
Several avenues for exploration emerge. First, as Chauvet’s structure suggests, and modern science supports, it is necessary to think of the person as an “I-body” encompassing mind, body, and social context, who necessarily encounters the world and God from this perspective. This circumstance is not so different from the realities of other creatures who also have bodies including brains which may react involuntarily to better adapt the organism to a social context which is facilitated by means of communication, although not perhaps language. Embodiment is, as Chauvet puts it, simply “the way that we are in the world.” Humans have adapted to the world in particular ways, macaques and other creatures have adapted in other particular ways. Second, the mirror neuron example demonstrates not only the complex interaction of brain, body and society, but it also points to the type of difference that is necessary for communication. When someone else speaks or acts, my “I-body” is involuntarily affected. Neurons fire whether I want them to or not. My brain reacts to the actions of another and I am physically changed by this. Here, there is an absence of movement on the part of the witness, but the absence is a form of openness, even attentiveness to the presence of the other. This seems to be the kind of openness that Chauvet associates with the human posture in the sacraments.