Multiple factors shape thought, but communication is especially heavy-handed. Communication not only restructures the contents of the mind,; it re-configures the brain’s very neurological patterns (Rotman 2008: 51-52). Brian Rotman explains four ways people communicate selfhood: self-pointing, a spoken “I,” an alphabetically written “I,” and “self-enunciation within contemporary media” (Rotman 2008: xxxiii). The written “I” is the only disembodied method, but this separation subliminally trickles beneath conscious awareness. Writing has been a major component of communicating theological concepts because writing has been the easiest form of mass communication for centuries. Theologians 1,000 years ago probably did not ponder the disembodiment of writing any more than landing spaceships on the moon. Television – which mediates communication through bodies – was not on their radar. But contemporary theologians have options. Gunther Kress is clear that, “The former constellation of medium of book and mode of writing is giving way… to the new constellation of medium of screen and mode of image” (Kress 2003: 9). These moving constellations have forced a fundamental shift in the way social brains engage thought. Theology that fails to take this into account will find itself hopelessly outmoded and no longer equipped to engage the study of God in fresh situations.

This article addresses the cognitive and neurological effects stemming from shifts in “culturally mediated systems of external memory” (Rotman 52) – such as writing and images – and how theological communication could expand in response. Writing reinforces left-brain, systematic, and linear thought (Armstrong 1995: 115). Images, on the other hand, encourage more right-brain, intuitive, and spatial reasoning. It would be simplistic to hold that writing is only mediated through the right hemisphere and images only through the left, but communicative modes create lateral biases. Theological minds emerge, – not only from the “linear, logical, detail-oriented left hemisphere”, – but from embodied, whole brains. The first section of this paper shows writing’s left-brain bias. The second section turns a corner by examining emotion as altered body states and how this leads to a right-brain bias. Visual mediums are the most direct way to communicate right-brain thoughts, so the last step is to show how visual mediums could add a holistic, embodied element to theology.

WRITING AND A DISEMBODIED, LEFT-BRAIN BIAS

Writing forces neurons to march in line with time (Kress 2003: 2). The left hemisphere attributes meaning to words and strings those words together to form sentences, paragraphs, and full discourses (Hogue 2003: 87). In a sentence, one… word… follows… another, so the brain follows a preset “reading path” (Kress 2003: 3). A dog bit Karen means something entirely different than Karen bit a dog. Reading paths necessitate choices about which words make the most sense in which temporal order (Kress 2003: 3), so writing creates “the subliminal appeal of reducing wholes to constituent parts” (Jahandarie 1999: 57-58). It entrenches linear (temporal) neurological patterns through the repetitive, reductive decision-making (Jahandarie 1999: 54).

This leads to what could be called: alphabetic reasoning. Daniel Siegel explains that the left hemisphere is responsible for “more slowly acting, linear, sequentially active, temporal (time-dependent) processes. Verbal meanings of words… are a primary mode of processing for the left side” (Siegel 2001: 179). The left-brain deals in “monosemantic ‘packets’… which are then processed in a slower, linear mode” (Siegel 179). Writing strengthens linear thought patterns in the left hemisphere. Siegel holds that, “Repeated activation of specific neuronal pathways reinforces the strength of connections between groups of neurons” (p. 194), so neurons fire in similar patterns in the future (p. 24). The brain functions like a malleable muscle, but writing only exercises the left-brain. The brain is sculpted like a bodybuilder who only lifts with one arm. That arm ripples, but the other atrophies. Plastic makes perfect.

The “linear, logical,” and “linguistically-based” left-hemisphere (p. 161) evaluates the contents of written words through syllogistic reasoning (p. 197), prejudicing the brain to evaluate their contents through the brain’s semantic operator. The semantic operator deals with “propositional representations – symbols of external or internal facts that can be… assessed as ‘true’ or ‘false’” (p. 35 [emphasis mine]). In alphabetic reasoning, ideas are filtered into categories of: right or wrong, – fact or fiction. Then, alphabetic reasoning reinforces the brain’s quest for causation through sequencing. Reading paths communicate meaning through cause-effect relationships, so the ensuing left-brain thought patterns in the semantic operator create a syllogistic lens. Wholes are eliminated in the effort to snap details into linear, cause-effect relationships. Meaning is confined to these necessary but limited ways of processing information.

THEOLOGY AND LEFT-BRAIN BIAS

As writing has become increasingly more accessible in punctuated bursts over the past few millennia, theologians have become more and more linear and syllogistic in thought. But neurons fire in strikingly complex and highly plastic patterns (Bennett and Hacker 2008: 137). Linear rules for systematic theology are only engrained through repetition. The dark side of alphabetic reasoning is that it can produce theologians who tend to exercise linearity while alternative methods atrophy. Recall that the semantic operator can only qualify concepts as right or wrong. Linear patterns do not leave cognitive space for multiple details to be processed simultaneously. In the study of God, this cognitive capacity is absolutely necessary.

So far, I have examined several important consequences of alphabetic writing: it is inherently linear; in committing to using particular words in particular sequences it automatically eliminates other options; it coerces thought into cause-effect analysis, and it externalizes, or disembodies, thought. Of these consequences, the disembodied nature of theological writing is the most problematic.

EMOTION AS ALTERED BODY STATES

Emotions are physiological changes in a person’s body. These are mediated through combinations of gestures, postures, and behaviors (Damasio 2003: 63). External images – or stimuli – are mediated to the brain through the senses, and internal body and brain states refract the external world (Damasio 195). Marshall McLuhan writes, “The use of any medium or extension of hu/man/ity alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses” (Jahandarie 51). The higher cognitive processes involved in developing theological concepts are pushed and pulled by the body’s constant emoting (Siegel 143).

The signals passing in and out of bodies generate emotion, so change signals can make emotions contagious (Siegel 143, 50). Siegel explains that, “Complex neural/bodily aspects of emotional processes are not easily translated into words. Nonverbal expressions, including those of the face, tone of voice and gestures, can transfer information about internal states more fully to the outside world than words can do” (Siegel 150). When it comes to altering the emotions correlated with belief – belief that can override higher cognitive functions – bodily gesture trumps writing.

Because this emotional processing is primarily non-conscious, people do not qualify intuition as true or false by sequencing details into rational arguments. For example, anger is typified by “dilated pupils, widened orbital area, raised eyebrows, furrowed brow, and pursed lips” (Siegel 128). The brain absorbs all of these signals at once when someone unexpectedly sees this:

Through non-conscious processing, faces can change emotions and minds in a flash.

Intuition of other people’s emotions occurs within the Mirror Neuron System (MNS). This system draws most heavily from facial expressions (Siegel 290), and it tells the viewer’s brain to respond to the viewed face in kind (Siegel 129). The MNS non-consciously indicates: whatever is happening in that person is also happening in me. This is why people constantly imitate the “motor acts, postures, and gaze of their co-citizens” (Kanwisher and Duncan 2004: 463-64). When people talk, their body language loops without their awareness as emotions harmonize. Yawning becomes contagious. When the MNS causes altered body states and facial expressions, people influence each other’s emotional-cognitive looping, and thought itself is steered.

There is scientific evidence that the entire body is engaged in understanding and remembering. James McGaugh demonstrated that the Vagus nerve – which connects the brain stem to the stomach – directly unites visceral and emotional experience with mental processing. McGaugh presented subjects with two stories containing similar amounts of data. One story had high emotional content and the other had low emotional content. People with functioning Vagus nerves recalled more data from the stories with high emotional content than from the stories with low emotional content. People with damaged Vagus nerves had identical recall from both stories. This suggests that certain types of thought are crippled by the absence of full-bodied emotion. Siegel explains that, “conceptual representations are nonverbal. They form the fundamental building blocks of our thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and aspects of our explicit memories” (Damasio 167). Written theological method is often left wanting embodied communication to close the cognitive loop.

EMBODIED COMMUNICATION AND RIGHT-BRAIN BIAS

The body’s indicators of emotion – somatic markers¬ – interface with the right hemisphere more than the left (Damasio 144, 82). The right-brain simultaneously correlates multiple details rather than sequencing them in cause-effect relationships. Siegel describes how the right-brain deals with nonverbal communications through “fast-acting, parallel (simultaneously active), holistic processes” (Damasio 179). This means that the right-brain is the default processor of metaphor and paradox. Imagistic representations in the mind do not force choice, categorization, or analysis. They exist simultaneously without being truncated by “top-down” processing as emotions ebb and flow (Siegel 165).

Kress calls this type of right-brain embodied thought “spatial reasoning,” and he places it in opposition to the “temporal reasoning” sublimated by alphabetic thought (Kress 45). Spatial reasoning portrays multiple details simultaneously, so spatial reasoning is correlational rather than sequential. This opens up possibilities for theologians by beginning with building blocks of thought before they are sequenced into categories of justified and true, fact or fiction.

The right-brain is functionally nonverbal, so its contents have to be externalized in “non-word-based ways, such as drawing a picture or pointing to a pictorial set of options” (Siegel 327). Alternative mediums, such as video and visual art, could generate entirely new forms of theological thought.

MEDIA’S ROLE IN SPATIAL REASONING

Video and visual art are viable possibilities for developing a right-brain, spatial reasoning into theological method. Jahandarie poetically explains, “Electric media are extensions of our central nervous systems and thus put us in touch with the totality of experience” (Jahandarie 99). Jahandarie overstates his case; – for example, video does not communicate through odors, for example, – but his intended meaning is helpful. New technologies make it possible to create right-brain mass communication. The MNS is 80-85% as effective at influencing emotion through video as it is in person (Kanwisher and Duncan 469), so gestures captured on video have a startlingly high ability to steer the emotional side of the cognitive loop. Emotions can be altered and details can be expressed simultaneously if theologians were to use a wider set of cognitive and communicative tools.

Rotman explains that people listen, “not to speech sounds as such… but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their preparatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away, and completions” (Rotman 23). Through the MNS, we get hunches, – not only about what another person is thinking, – but how the person is thinking and feeling. The dynamics of gesture in film add an intuitive, interpretive element to its communicative ability. In split-brain studies, the left-brain cannot even register facial expressions or emotional states (Rotman 151). While the left-brain might be incredible at reading and writing books, it is inept at spatial reasoning. Siegel writes that the left-brain’s “monosemantic ‘packets’” operate through neurological patterns and processes “quite distinct from the analogic representations seen, for example, in an artist’s painting or in a photograph,” so “the right hemisphere more fully ‘sees the world for what it is,’ whereas the left hemisphere must reduce the world much more into mentally defined, often socially constructed chunks of information” (Rotman 179). The right-brain’s holism and simultaneity could be invaluable to theologians, but it is too often dampened by the limitations of past technologies.

WHEN THEOLOGY IS EMBODIED

Siegel mentions the “theory of nonlinear dynamics of complex systems” in regard to personhood (Siegel 7). The firing of every synapse in every thought exponentially complexifies what it means to be human. Perhaps God is not only linear, either. Images are not filtered through the linear critiques applied to writing because they function differently in the brain. This does not make imagistic, spatial reasoning irrational. It makes spatial reasoning non-rational, and theologians desperately need non-rational ways to discuss a nonlinear God. Spatial mediums are not able to comprehensively encapsulate God’s personhood any more than writing, but they could generate new perspectives to better triangulate theological depth in conjunction with it.

In the syllogistic line that runs from rational to irrational, the concept of a trinity is inherently problematic. The semantic operator only deals with logical, sequential coherence, so the multiple, simultaneously existing details involved in conceptualizing the trinity do not get cognitive space. In this case, it might be advantageous to take a right-brain, imagistic approach to theology.

Depictions allow for multiple details to coexist without sequence. Images can be worth far more than 1,000 words. Imagistic reasoning allows space for entire persons to subject themselves to concepts. The “events and actions” lost in writing’s “principles and concepts” could be filled out through images (Jahandarie 17). Instead of only understanding theology in terms of right and wrong, the theologian could also trust a Vagus nerve when it communicates that an image or gesture is good or bad. The details could remain simultaneous in the right-brain without being sorted, and persons could experience theologies to a fuller degree in addition to critically evaluating them.

CONCLUSION

As neurological patterns become more spatial and less linear, theologians have the opportunity to construct new theological paradigms by diversifying their communicative tools. Creating theology through imagistic mediums would be bounded by its own “epistemological commitments,” (Kress 57) though. Critical thought is a crucial element in theological conversations, for example. This suggests that – when used in isolation – either alphabetic or imagistic methods are reductionistic. Theology has to be alphabetic, linear, and critical to be constructive, but it also needs to be imagistic, embodied, and holistic to avoid reductionistic sequencing of nonlinear concepts. The multiple natures of cognition cannot be mixed or separated. Language and experience, left-brain and right-brain thinking, knowledge and belief, are locked into cognitive loops (Eichenbaum and Bodkin 179), and it is impossible to have a one-sided loop.

The advent of new mediums makes the creation of an embodied theological method – complete with shifting neurological patterns – a mandatory opportunity. The next step is to synthesize multimodal theologies with alphabetic reasoning. A critically holistic methodology would emerge as gestalt. Full-blown theological paradigms could materialize if both hemispheres were used in conjunction. However progressive, however gestalt, and however critically holistic theological method becomes, it can never be comprehensive or complete. Theologians must do theology at all times. When necessary, they should use words.

Jonathan Camery-Hoggatt is a freelance writer in Seattle. He has MA in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.

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To begin with, we can agree, as pointed out by Mason and McCall Smith (1984, p.107), that what constitutes the state of being a person, or personhood, is a matter of moral decisions, not of scientific facts. The relevant arguments are therefore primarily based on some moral, philosophical and theological hypotheses. However, even these arguments are informed by the scientific knowledge we have recently obtained about the condition and development of the human embryo. Insofar as the question is a moral one, arguments fall broadly into two groups, those that follow a secular approach, and those that follow a theological approach.

According to the secular approach, the basic condition for being a person is being capable of valuing one’s own existence. And the moral difference between a person and non-person lies in the value that persons can give to their own lives. Through language a person can comment on and declare awareness of awareness or fully developed self-consciousness (ibid. pp.l9, 21). Command of human language is thus offered as the decisive criterion. On this argument, pre-embryos, embryos, fetuses and very young infants are living beings, even living human beings, but they are not human persons. So, morally, we owe them nothing.

In his widely read article ‘A defence for abortion and infanticide’, Tooley (1973) observed that it is important to be very clear about what makes an entity a person, what gives that entity a right to life. He went on to define five necessary properties: 1) the capacity to envisage a future state for oneself, and to have desires about it; 2) the capacity to have a concept of a self; 3) being a self; 4); the capacity for self-consciousness; and 5) self-consciousness. As unborn babies, very young infants and PVS patients do not fulfil these requirements; they would not qualify as human persons. Singer (1993, p.87), in a forceful line on personhood, made a point of comparing human ‘animals’ with non-human animals, arguing that there could be a person who is not a member of our species and, conversely, there could also be members of our species who are not persons.

Those writers who, by contrast, accept the spiritual side of being a human person, have used different arguments to define personhood but, generally, link it with the human embryological state. Keith L. Moore, one of the foremost embryologists of our time, answered the question ‘When does the embryo become human?’ as follows: ‘The scientific answer is that the embryo always had human potential, and no other, from the time of fertilization, because of its human chromosome constitution. Two things are definite: (1) human development begins at fertilization, and (2) the zygote and early embryo are living organisms. My personal view is that the embryo becomes human being during the eighth week when it acquires distinctive human characteristics’ (Moore, 1989, p.72). 

Most of the writers who think that human personhood begins at some stage of embryological development base their view on various theological arguments. Before explaining these arguments it will be useful to give some historical background.

Aristotle (d. 322 BC), considered the first thinker to speak explicitly of human life as beginning in the womb, wrote: ‘the soul is the cause and the first principle of the living body’ (1957 edn. p.4l5b). He suggested that, when first formed, the embryo would have a nutritive or vegetative soul, replaced in due time, as a result of the causal influence of the particular semen’s pneuma, by the sensitive soul. Finally, in the case of a human, the rational soul would emerge to complete the generation of a human offspring. Aristotle associated quickening and differentiation into distinct stages of 40 days for the male and 90 days for the female, and so has been traditionally interpreted as placing the beginning of the individual boy and girl at those times respectively.

Aristotle’s ideas on this subject influenced many philosophers and scientists from prior to Christian times right through to the Middle Ages, notably Thomas Aquinas (d.1274), and for several centuries afterwards. His ideas also shaped the views of philosophers and scientists from the Islamic world and the East. For example, according to Musallam (1990), the method of lbn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) consisted of bringing Aristotle’s facts up to date, then re-stating the original Aristotelian arguments on the basis of the new facts.

Aristotle’s concept of the soul as the cause and first principle of the living body is confirmed by all monotheistic religions with little divergence. Despite significant differences on other points, these religions share the concept of life as sacred because given by God, and therefore forbid the termination of an innocent human life after it has been given its soul. However, they differ in their understanding of when this happens and what it means. Christian theology is definite that ‘immediate animation’ or ‘ensoulment’ is the instant at which our humanity is determined, but is uncertain when that instant occurs. Mahoney sums up the Christian theological position on the beginning of a human life as follows: In point of fact, current Roman Catholic teaching on the time of human ensoulment is one of uncertainty. Official Roman Catholic teaching is that we cannot be absolutely certain when animation takes place, or when the conceptus or the fetus is a human person; but it may well be precisely at the moment of conception’ (Mahoney 1984, pp. 6 7-9).

Evidently, in the monotheistic religions, certain topics can only he discussed knowledgeably after clear Divine guidance or Revelation. Without such guidance, human beings simply cannot know when ensoulment takes place. Because this information is not disclosed in the Christian scriptures, there is uncertainty on the subject among Christian authorities.

In the case of Islam, the situation is quite different. The creation of the human individual, fetal development and ensoulment are referred to in several dozen verses of the Qur’an in various contexts (32:8-9, 23:13-14, 71:14, 16:4, 75:37-9, 86:6, 77:20-1, 76:2, 22:5, 96:1-2, 40:67, 39:6, 53:45-6, 35 11, 3:6). Also, in the second source of knowledge after the Qur’an, namely the Hadith, there are a number of sayings of the Prophet, upon him be peace, which specifically address the subject of the embryological stages of a human being and the time of ensoulment.

From these texts, the great majority of Muslim scholars have understood that ensoulment takes place 120 days after conception (al-Nawawi, 1965 edn, p.189). However, when the relevant verses and ahadith are considered more carefully, the time for ensoulment should be put at between 40 and 45 days after implantation (the detailed textual discussion to support this view cannot be given here; see Aksoy, 199-) This means that. 49 or 55 days after conception, a human individual, with all the attendant rights, can be considered to exist, due to ensoulment having taken place.

Aristotle’s argument that ‘the soul is the cause and the first principle of the living body’ should not be dismissed as a religious myth. Something important is lacking in all our reflections on the subject if we take into account only the material existence of living beings. Although life is a continuous process, the physical existence of living beings is finite. If a human is taken as an example, every single cell in a human body has a limited (and programmed) lifespan. Some cells live a couple of hours, others a couple of days, weeks or months. After that they die and are shed. It is now known as incontrovertible fact that, with the exception of certain brain cells, all the cells in a human body are replaced with new cells every two years. Thus, in two years time, as regards my physical and material existence, I will be a completely different being from the one I am today. So, if I murder someone today and am caught after two years, I might say: ‘It was not me who did the crime. It was not exactly ‘this brain’ that planned it, not ‘these feet’ that walked to the scene, not ‘this finger’ which pulled the trigger’. This defence is logical and must be acceptable if I am only a material being. Of course, our current legal systems are not based upon the (false) assumption that a person is a merely physical being and therefore I would be unable deny responsibility on these grounds.

There should be something beyond merely physical existence that makes me me. Parfit (1984, Part 3) has discussed the nature of a person and sought answers to such questions as: What makes a person at two different times one and the same’? and What is necessarily involved in the continued existence of a person over time? He defines two kinds of sameness or identity: qualitative identicalness (or exact alikeness), and numerical identicalness (or one-and-the-sameness). He writes: ‘Two white billiard balls are not numerically but may be qualitatively identical. If I paint one of these balls red, it will cease to be qualitatively identical with itself as it was. But the red ball that I later see and the white ball that I painted red are numerically identical. They are one and the same ball’ (ibid., p.20l). According to Parfit, a person is a separately existing entity, distinct from his brain and body, and his experiences. What makes an individual at two different times one and the same person is psychological connectedness and/or continuity, with the right kind of cause. The psychological connectedness is the holding of particular direct psychological connections. And the psychological continuity is the holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness. Parfit addresses these and similar matters extensively and intelligently in his Reasons and Persons (ibid.).

All the Divine religions and some philosophers name that which provides the necessary continuity to make a person as soul. According to the authority of religion, a living human being consists of body and soul. Soul cannot manifest its existence without a body, and a body cannot be animate and survive without a soul. They are like glove and hand: just as the glove is an inanimate piece of cloth until the hand enters it, so the body becomes a human person only when the soul enters it. Likewise, just as when the hand is removed, the glove reverts to a piece of cloth, so too the human body ceases to be identifiable as a human person when the soul departs. Aristotle expresses the soul in this famous, graphic image: ‘For if the eye was an animal, then sight would be its soul…. so that when sight leaves it is no longer an eye except homonymously, much as we might say of a dead body that it is our friend; in one sense it is but in a very different sense it is not’ (Aristotle, 1957 edn, p.412b).

In sum: when the body meets with the soul it comes to be a human person, with all the attendant rights, especially the right to life.

References

• AKSOY, S. (199-) ‘When does a human individual begin to be?: A philosophical, embryological and theological perspective’. (Unpublished paper)
• AL -NAWAWI. (1965 edn) Sahih-i Muslim Bi-Sharh-i Nawawi, Kitab al Qadar, vol.16, Matbaa-i Misri. Egypt.
• ARISTOTLE (1957 edn), On the Soul (De Anima), trans. W.S. Hett. W. Heinemann, London and Cambridge, Mass.
• MAHONEY, J. (1984) Bio-ethics and Belief Sheed & Ward, London.
• MASON, J.K.& McCAll. Smith, R.A. (1984) Law and Medical Ethics, Butterworths, London.
• MOORE, K,L..(1989)Before We Are Born, W. B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia.
• MUSALLAM, B. (1990) ‘The human embryo in Arabic scientific and religious thought’ in G.R. Dunstan, (ed.) 7 ‘The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions, University of Exeter Press, Exeter. pp.32-46.
• PARFIT. D. (1984) Reasons and Persons, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• RISPLER-CHAIM, V. (1993) Islamic Medical Ethics in the Twentieth Century, E.J. Brill, Leiden.
• SINGER, P. (1993) Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• TOOLEY, M. (1973) ‘A defence of abortion and infanticide’ in J. Feinberg (ed.) The Problem of Abortion’, Wadsworth Publication Company, California, pp. 51-91.