Silly Questions, Serious Answers

I don't know about other Orthodox Christians, but I suspect a number of them have some silly sounding, but to them serious questions they would like a well thought out answer on from someone like a priest or pious scholar of Orthodox theology who might know. They are the kind of questions that if brought up in almost any context from casual conversation to a catechism class could set crickets chirping faster than one could say horologion. But at their root....when one gets past the question itself...the things one has to think about and to weigh to give a meaningful answer...that is very serious.

The biggest problem with my questions is that even if given a serious answer they would pretty much remain in the realm of abstraction and conjecture, realms with which Orthodox theology is not terribly comfortable. To illustrate I was reading book length interview with Fr. Roman Braga on the course of his life. During it, speaking on the subject of the Jesus Prayer, he related the thoughts of some monks, deep practitioners of the prayer, commenting on another more urban monastery or seminary. They said that there, "they lecture about the Jesus Prayer." The implication is clear...lecture teaches one little or nothing worthwhile in regard to the Jesus Prayer. To learn about prayer or any sort one must simply pray and that without ceasing. Prayer teaches prayer. And the point is well taken. Theology properly needs to be incarnated not just batted about like balls at a tennis match. And yet my questions, my mental itches remain.

They remain because they are not an end in themselves; the answers matter to me at a creative level. As I've mentioned before, I like to write. I have big unfulfilled novel ideas, but going further with some of those ideas, developing the story I've been pondering for decades depends upon some useful answers from Orthodox anthropology. But informing fictional endeavors is probably not high up on the best use scale of theological discourse. It is, I admit dicey territory. There is a vast gulf between the use put to theology in the works of Dostevsky and that of Katzanakis. One writer is lauded as nearly a saint and the other was excommunicated for his gross impiety. And it seems to me, unless one is careful, even with an honest creative effort one can too easily find oneself more in the company of Katzanakis than Dostevsky.

But now there is this web log thing, this blog. Who knows, perhaps if I post my questions some kind passing priest or theologian in days to come will offer me something useful to consider. So here goes.

The Big Question: The larger question I want to deal with is the safest: What is man? It is to this overarching question that all the silly questions relate.

The Silly Questions: There are a couple of things I've run across in St. Gregory of Nyssa that intrigue me from a creative writerly standpoint. I recall reading somewhere he said that man was/may have been created en masse like all the other animals on the sixth day, but one became Adam when God breathed upon him. Other saints I've read on this point relate how man was not created a dead lump, but was created alive prior to God breathing on him making him what he was before the fall. Also, if I am not mistaken St. Gregory and others seem to hold a view that fallen man in many respects reverts in varying degrees to living in his "beastial" animal nature or something like that. St. Gregory and others also seem to be saying that man's rational character is part of the impress of the image of God in him.

In another place St. Gregory says that the Holy Eucharist is not for irrational animals. And this brings me to the threshold of my questions. Here it is:

Can there be another rational animal besides man? Could another creature like a capauchin monkey, chimpanzee, African gray parrot, or an octopus even be genetically "tinkered" with by man to have more complex brains and thus at least at the raw equipment level have the capacity for "rationality". Would having that capacity actually "produce: a rational creature? Could just having bigger more complex brains give something more than just very clever animal? This would seem to be the implication of a materialist perspective, that human sentience arises out of his particual biology with its highly developed central nervous system. If that development can be duplicated or parallelled in another species then that should produce other sentient beings who are not human.

But if like St. Gregory suggests mere materiality is not enough, that the distinguishing feature of the human persona as it were arises not first from his biology but from an earlier direct encounter between our earliest progenitor and God, where God impressed man with something of Himself so to speak, then what would such genetically enhanced creatures be? By "aping" aspects of his own physiology in that of another species could man for better or for worse succeed in sharing the gift of what he is to some degree with another species? And if he did as a fallen man then would this new species of sentient rational creature be likewise fallen as man is fallen?

Or if our efforts only yielded very clever beasts something like Adam before God breathed on Him, whatever that may have been, could God be prevailed upon to breathe also upon these creatures made more or less in the image of man? What would that mean regarding such creatures and their relationship with God and His Church?

Which brings us to the next round of silly questions? If by tinkering man can share his own "rational being" or if by Divine fiat God raises up other creatures man has tried to make like himself, then what does this mean for the Church. What would be the cosmological place for such creatures. Would they stand more or less with the angels? What could be permitted them within the Church? Could they attain to holy orders? Could they even be allowed to partake in the Holy Eucharist which would make them also members of the Body of Christ in the same way mankind can be? If that cannot be why not? What kind of sacramental life would be open to them?

If we cannot directly raise creatures to rational status by tinkering with what genetic capacities they alrealdy have...what if we in some small measure hybridize them...unite some key sections of our DNA with theirs. Does our leven leven them to rational status because they sare directly if minutely in humanity's biological nature?

The thing is this, if God made us capable of being like Him and participating in His Divine energies and be thereby transformed into His likeness why can we not do the same for other creature in the world to which we have an ontological connection? Cannot not enable them to become something like us, and becoming like us then able like us to bear the both the image and likeness of God?

Think of Chimpanzees...genetical they are less than two percentage points of difference away from us...how much of a DNA bump would it take to push them across the line in our direction. What would they be then?

Or what of Neanderthals..a seperate human species, stronger bodies, bigger brains, bigger noses. What if using Jurassic Park science one flesh specimin was found, its DNA extracted used to ferilze an embyro that was implanted and brought to term. What would that "human" be? True rational, potential Body of Christ, human, or very clever 'pre-Adamic" beast?

We are taught that at the end of the age everything will be transparent to the glory of God. What I wonder is would that include some opening of the communion now avaiable to man to other creatures as well...which would it seem have to include raising them to rational beings somehow.

Which raises another question. Let us say that this the plan and it will unfold in something of the same stream that brought forth man. God made man, man fell, God redeemed man and united Himself to our humanity, time goes by until the judgement, divinized man imparts something of his gift to one or more groups of animals so that they become rational beings and are in some capacity brought into the life of the Church where they may grow to experience divinization and well...and so on.

Let's just say that is the plan, or something like it. That would mean that it might be possible for man to jump the gun prior to the Judgement...making the creatures lifted into sentience be modeled on our fallen humanity, not our divinized humanity. They would begin existance as a kind of abomination...a frankensteinish race that still might be redeemable and ultimately brought back to the place they were meant to occupy if not a better place.

These are the kinds of things that bump around inside my skull, because, in addition to the story potential available in what ever answers may come, the core question may be more fully addressed...what is man, not just in the context of other men or God, but in relation to the rest of creation, and what are the implications of that?