Once again, I’ll state a standard Jewish and Christian view of man: man can be usefully and truthfully seen as a creature made of mind and heart and hands. This points to state of unity which is not achieved by men in this mortal realm but might be achieved by the resurrected who share the life of God; after all, God, acting in His transcendence, is not separate in this way—His thinking and feeling and doing are as one and all that God does can be described, at least roughly—and in Thomistic terms—as acts-of-being. This theological claim of Christians (and perhaps Jews) is in agreement with the ways in which some neuroscientists speak of our bodies thinking, of our emotions and thinking and memory-formation being intertwined, and so forth. It is almost a cliche in popular or philosophical works by neuroscientists and others who study the human brain and mind that our thinking is distributed throughout our bodies—as certainly seems true of some athletes as well as dancers. Leave this enriched and complex way of viewing human being aside in the interests of making some valid points by thinking as if mind and heart and hands were well-defined and mutually exclusive `parts’ of a human being.
Those who have read any of my writings on human being will probably realize that I consider human beings, individual and communal, to be creatures of action at the point of the now—that is, creatures of acting hands. Heart, emotions and feelings to speak roughly, motivate us towards a state of moral order. Mind can be seen as living in anticipation of the future, guiding the development and shaping of mind and heart and hands. On a minute to minute basis, we rely on thoughts already formed and encapsulated in habits of various sorts though those who do individual thinking as opposed to those who are smart by proper participation in communal thinking have to always be re-evaluating those habits or preparing to think new thoughts. In any case, a well-formed human being participates in the now by way of what I call, following St Thomas Aquinas by way of Etienne Gilson, acts-of-being which are complex acts partaking of mind and heart and hands.
Many Christians of the modern era, including Pope Francis, distort Christian beliefs, as well as empirical knowledge of individual and communal human being, by claiming we should always act to immediately relieve suffering—even when that suffering is self-inflicted and will continue for centuries if we act to relieve it, even when our acts of relieving the suffering of those far away will do further damage to a badly injured pilgrim Body of Christ. They rely on “God is love.” Yes, God is all-loving but He is also all-knowing (mind) and all-powerful (hands). To take part of our belief out of context and push it as if it were the fullness of revelation is to fall into an old trap: any truth taken out of context and stated too strongly or too consistently becomes a heresy.
Let me move to a practical discussion and use as an example the part of Europe’s immigration crisis caused by Africans from the Sahel, the belt just south of the Sahara. The Sahel is fertile most years but suffers through famines which kill humans and cattle when the monsoon rains fail on a partially predictable basis—predictions can be off by a year or two. Yet, the residents of the Sahel take advantage of the good years by reproducing and allowing their cattle to reproduce without constraint. In recent decades, they have learned that they can head to Europe to take advantage of the more rational individual and communal human beings of that region—when the bad years come. Pope Francis and likeminded folk think it wise and good to extend the welfare systems intended to cover disabled and unlucky human beings of established nations to the unwise or unlucky of all the world.
Unbalanced human being is dangerous—glorifying the absolute or even large-scale dominance of mind or heart or hands create different problems but all such distortions of human being lead to serious problems. The point I made in my title and which I wish to emphasize is:
A distortion of human being so that it doesn’t accord with any of the major traditions of understanding the Bible and natural revelation is a heresy in the sense of being a rebellion against the Creator, a refusal to accept some aspects of what He created and of what He is teaching us about what He created. It’s an act of rebellion.
In ending, I’d also like to point explicitly to something I’ve always implied and sometimes stated in one way or another: to a Christian or anyone else who believes in an all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving God, there can be no real separation between what is real and what should be. At most, human being as it is in this mortal world of evolution and development and decay and death can be demoted to an imperfect manifestation of the human being which is truly an image of God, but it is a manifestation. There is no real separation between is and ought. God created a world in which innocent human beings suffer, often because of their own unwise acts or those of others, often because of evil acts by others. In Jeremiah and Lamentations, we read of God inflicting punishment (directly or by way of the `rules’ of His Creation) so that the most tender of mothers is driven to eat her own children. We can do much to improve this world—when we act in unison with the Creator and His Creation. We can do much to damage an evolving and developing world when we act against either mind or heart or hands, often that damage inflicting suffering, famine and disease and poverty, upon our own children.