A reader writes:<\/p>\n
What if extra-terrestrials \u00a0are just highly complex critters, something like porpoises or thinking computers with opposable thumbs, but are not called additionally, gratuitously and\u00a0blessedly\u00a0to the beatific vision?\u00a0 In this case planet earth is not diluted within a universe of billions of possibly life-sustaining planets populated by rational thingamajigs, and the centrality of original sin in salvation history and the Incarnation is not undermined . . . and one need not rush off to baptize any martian (lower case) who might make a request (another\u00a0off the cuff\u00a0ambiguity voiced by Pope Francis).<\/p>\n
An\u00a0alternative view is that the gratuitous Incarnation would have happened even without the (added) dimension of undoing our original sin\u2013the view of Blessed Duns Scotus (whom Pope Benedict holds in high regard).\u00a0 Commentators point out that Christ is more than damage control.\u00a0 Then, I suppose, one\u00a0might baptize martians if they would ask, and the Church itself as the Body of Christ would be the instrument for opening the beatific vision to complex beings otherwise constrained this side of the veil by some sort of supercosmic glass ceiling impenetrable to rational complexity\u00a0alone, and who unlike us are rooted in\u00a0neither original sin nor\u00a0a more original innocence.<\/p>\n
(I have difficulty imagining that the Incarnation is multiple across the galaxies, although the Mass is something like this\u2013on each altar a day a singular re-presentation of Calvary, but also \u201cnumerically distinct\u201d each time the words are spoken.)<\/p>\n
But, then again, do\u00a0incomprehensibly and highly advanced clusters of rational complexity\u00a0and Warp-10 technological\u00a0skill actually\u00a0have souls capable of receiving baptism?\u00a0 Or would their request still be merely a complex kind of barking in the dark, not unlike Simon Magus?<\/p>\n
What\u00a0might the paradoxical Chesterton say of all this?\u00a0 Just wondering (wondering: a good word).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Mike Flynn, author of Eifelheim<\/em><\/a>, tussles with the \u201cBaptize aliens?\u201d question here<\/a>. Basically, for the medievals, as with \u00a0Augustine, rationality was the mark of the human, Whatever the physical form<\/a>. This, by the way, was what governed the Church approach to the mysterious beings called \u201cIndians\u201d whom Europeans began to encounter with the discovery of the New World. Recall that the Table of Nations in Genesis\u2013the authoritative text on the peoples of the world\u2013had no place for them. Had Catholics been fundamentalists, they might have simply taken the \u201cJust because they look human doesn\u2019t mean they *are* human\u201d approach. But Indians were admitted for baptism because Catholics took the medieval view that \u201crational=human\u201d. And this, by the way, was true even when European sensibilities were confronted by a culture which practice human sacrifice on a massive scale and whose dominant religious motif was the serpent. Couple this with the enormous pressure gold and gun crazy conquerors to simply enslave and slaughter Indians (as so many were) and what is remarkable is the resistance the Church put up against such pressure as, for instance, in the work of Dominican (yay!) Bartolme de las Casas<\/a>. So the approach (had it ever come up as in Flynn\u2019s Eifelheim <\/em>was \u201cbetter safe than sorry\u201d.\u00a0 By the way, you really should read Eifelheim <\/em>because this is one of the central questions of the book and Flynn\u2019s character approaches it in a thoroughly Thomistic way.<\/p>\n
Of course, as Lewis speculates, it may be possible that we will encounter rational races who have not fallen and are in not need of the redemption we desperately require. It may also be (as I think) that we will never encounter anybody at all, either because they are not there (which I think unlikely) or because God in his wisdom has made the distances between us so vast that we will never hear from them, much less cross the void to meet them. I think a meeting between us and an unfallen race can only end in tragedy, with either our extermination or theirs being the result. That too, is something to be learned from our experience in the New World.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A reader writes: What if extra-terrestrials \u00a0are just highly complex critters, something like porpoises or thinking computers with opposable thumbs, but are not called additionally, gratuitously and\u00a0blessedly\u00a0to the beatific vision?\u00a0 In this case planet earth is not diluted within a universe of billions of possibly life-sustaining planets populated by rational thingamajigs, and the centrality of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[290,650],"class_list":["post-91309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-i-am-a-cosmic-killjoy","tag-na"],"yoast_head":"\n
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