PhDr. Mgr. Jeroným Klimeš, Ph.D. 2009
(translated with kind help of DeepL)
Czech version
Catholic theology is in a serious crisis, for two reasons. The less serious reason is that modern biology raises questions that traditional theologians never even dreamed of - for example, chimerism, that is, the fact that a single person can have DNA from one biological mothers and two biological fathers. A person can have two, three, four or more biological parents. The second reason for the profound crisis in Catholic theology is the fact that theologians make no significant effort to reconcile theology with modern natural sciences.
But let's get back to the topic of chimerism (a lecture in Czech) and repeat the traditional Catholic view: For every fertilized egg capable of life and development into an adult human, God creates an immortal, immaterial soul at the very moment of its conception. All right, so take a look at the following image:
This person has what are known as Blaschko's lines - alternating black and white stripes. How do such stripes form? It is a manifestation of chimerism. His mother was white, and let's say she had sexual intercourse with a white man on Monday. During this encounter, one released egg was fertilized, and according to Catholic teaching, God created an immortal soul for it. On Wednesday, she had sexual intercourse with a black man; a second egg was fertilized, and God created an immortal, immaterial soul for that one as well. However, the woman did not give birth to twins; instead, a few days later, without any action on her part, these two eggs fused into a single embryo. Their cells mixed chaotically, resulting in a man who is a composite of two brothers or siblings - one black and one white. Each color stripe on his body has DNA of a different biological father, but the same biological mother (three parents). This occurs in approximately 1 out of every 10,000 cases.
Geep
This poor animal actually has four biological parents. One father was a goat, the other a ram; one mother was a sheep, and the other a goat. That's why it's called a "geep" - g(oat)-(sh)eep.
So what does this mean for theology?
First and foremost, the question: Whose soul does he ultimately have? The white brother's or the black one's? What happened to the other's soul? Did God kill both of the previous souls and create a third soul for this person? Etc. Let's realize that, according to traditional beliefs, it's impossible for a simple, uncompounded, immortal, and immaterial soul to just merge with something else... Simply put, this gives rise to aporias that are unsolvable for Catholic theology.
Organ Transplants
A similar problem. The soul is the principle of life—that is, what enables a person to live and their heart to beat. If we assert that the human soul is whole and indivisible in every part of the body, then it also gives life to the human heart — the immortal, simple soul is the principle behind its beating. So how do we explain that the donor’s indivisible human soul continues to make the recipient’s heart beat for a few more years? Because the form of the heart is the donor’s form, and that does not change with transplantation. By the way, whose heart will it be after the resurrection?
A traditionally tolerated aporia was the so-called forma cadaverica, that is, a kind of vegetative soul that causes a corpse’s nails and hair to grow.
Based on these and similar considerations, I have come to believe that the traditional notion of the soul as an immaterial "backpack" carried by a material vessel is off the mark. That is why I included a chapter on immortality in my book A Psychologist's Testimony on Christ - https://christ.klimes.us(*), in which I explore an alternative theory to this concept, which now seems to be obsolete. I acknowledge that you may not like it. However, I don't know of a better one. If you know of a better theory that would reconcile the chimerism described here with the doctrine of immortality, bring it on!
(*) Unfortunately this chapter is not translated yet, only the first one on Jesus' childhood as an adopted child.
At our house, I’m the only one who’s interested in how a microwave works
But I’m also the only one who gets called upon to fix the toaster. Yes, today I enlisted one of my daughters to help so she could learn how to solder and understand how a toaster works. She fixed it with a transformer-powered soldering iron. Electronics have one big “advantage”: if we come up with a bad theory, it will kill us. The question of right or wrong is a matter of life and death. In theology, unfortunately, we don’t pay with our lives for mistakes, which is why we aren’t so troubled by erroneous thinking and nonsense. And I fear that the number of us who are troubled by the fact that the Catholic Church’s Thomistic teaching fails to explain chimerism is therefore several orders of magnitude smaller than the number of churchgoers who know how a microwave works. If you don’t die for mistakes in theology, why bother addressing them?
My patron saint, St. Jerome, said: “Whoever does not know Scripture does not know Christ.” A statement that is entirely true, but incomplete. In addition to the Bible, God wrote another book—the book of the world. We must add this to the Bible in order to understand Jesus more deeply. I am referring to his sayings:
Luke 16:9 I tell you this: You can use even unrighteous wealth to make friends for yourselves; when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.
John 14:2-3 “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also.”
John 14:23 Jesus answered him, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him; we will come to him and make our home with him.”
These mysterious statements about a dwelling place are connected to Jesus’ life after the Ascension, the afterlife, and the end of the world. The Bible does not shed much light on these statements, but they are clearly not just metaphors, since Jesus continually elaborated on them. This also applies to the Eucharist. Even the statement “I am the living bread” is not meant as a metaphor. Indeed, Jesus departed with the understanding that He must create a dwelling place for each of us so that we may be like angels (Matt. 22:30), or like Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor (Mark 9:1).
We can only deepen our understanding of these sayings and terms of Jesus with the help of the natural sciences, specifically quantum theory. If we have a correct theory of immortality, then we can surmise what Jesus is probably doing now as he creates these dwelling places. We will also be able to surmise what the end of the world is supposed to be, since it is not supposed to be a war or a common natural disaster. Otherwise, these statements will remain closed off and incomprehensible to us, just like a microwave oven.
I’ve heard countless lectures arguing that there are no contradictions between faith and science, but I don’t recall anyone ever saying that this isn’t a state of being but a goal. In fact, there are dozens of contradictions between our faith today and modern science, such as the chimera described above versus the doctrine of the immortal soul. To eliminate them—well, we’d have to try a a much harder.
I’m simply trying to inspire you, the readers, to love knowledge and the natural sciences, and to convince you that if we want to advance our understanding of Jesus and His Father, then we must gain a better understanding of the natural sciences and adjust our outdated theological notions in light of what the natural sciences have revealed to us about God’s creation—including, in this case, chimerism. For chimerism is not only the key to understanding the immortality of the soul, but quite possibly also conception by the Holy Spirit.
I hope we believe that Mary, as Jesus’ biological mother, passed on half of his DNA to him. I also hope that Christians believe that Jesus was diploid. So where did the second, male set of his chromosomes come from—the one we receive from our father’s sperm? If the Virgin Mary were a chimera, she might have had within her the testes of her never-born brother, which could have been the source of the Y chromosome and other male chromosomes that Jesus needed to be diploid.
Just as we understand evolution today as a tool God used to fashion humanity, so too can we understand chimerism as another of His tools, through which God provided the male chromosomes for Jesus, who, as a true human being, had to be diploid.
A Word in the Debate
In other words, those of you who try to claim that there are no contradictions between faith and science, try starting by coming up with a coherent theory of the immortal soul and chimerism. And those of you who don’t care—at least buy a UV lamp for 150 Kč so you know who you’re sleeping next to.
We have other “minor articles of faith.”
There are “major articles of faith”: the Trinity, the Resurrection, etc. Then there are “minor articles of faith.” Aquinas discussed one of them as the question:
Whether it could be that the past did not exist. (I, q. 25, a. 4)
I understood this to mean that God could have created the world ex nihilo a second ago, with the world fictitiously appearing to be several billion years old. Yes, God can do that. We believe this with “major faith.” A lesser faith is the belief that He did not do so — that the world has simply existed for 14 billion years. But both are matters of faith. There is no scientific proof for either. We simply believe.
Likewise, I believe that God could perform a miracle and my daughter would suddenly become pregnant. Yes, He can, but with the same lesser faith, I think He doesn’t do it that way — that He has enough of His own laws at His disposal to accomplish it without a miracle. Therefore, if I am to believe that the Virgin Mary was impregnated by a “poof!” miracle or whether it was chimerism, I lean toward the idea that it was chimerism. Because, as I know the Lord, He isn’t very fond of miracles, and if He does perform them, He uses them sparingly as much as possible. He likes natural laws — bacteria, evolution, clouds — gradual development.
And anyway, only believers like miracles. Jesus mostly had bad experiences with them, and I think even now he’s trying to avoid them as much as possible—see:
If a miracle does happen to us, it’s usually done in such a way that we don’t recognize it—and, most importantly, so that we can’t use it as an argument against non-believers. So that’s one of my lesser beliefs.
On another note, regarding chimerism.
Yes, we can entertain the theory that the Lord creates two souls, and then one, like a cuckoo, displaces the other soul from the body. So, in a sense, the fusion of two embryos is fratricide. Yes, I’ve rejected that—again, as a minor act of faith. I simply find it repulsive.
But stating one’s faith brings the debate to a close, because there’s no proof for faith. It’s simply something one feels.