THE GUARDIAN reported on the case of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, an American nun who was “likely the first Black person in the US to be found in an incorruptible state”. This sentence doesn’t mean that the paper does not believe in Original Sin, but that her body, when exhumed this month, was found largely unchanged from the time of its burial four years ago. The Sisters of the Order that she founded are now using this as evidence of her sanctity.
The whole story was lifted from Newsweek and the Catholic News Agency, with the exception of a call to the present Mother Superior, and another to a secular expert, who said that it was not at all uncommon for bodies buried, as Sister Wilhelmina had been, to resist decay for a number of years. The business of saints’ appearing completely unchanged after being buried for years seems unique to Roman Catholics. The Church of England does it only with arguments about sexuality.
THE other notable exhumations of the week were ones that I have conducted myself. I found a really good piece of Rowan Williams’s criticism in the January edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books, available outside the paywall on the web. This is his appreciation of Iain McGilchrist’s big book The Matter with Things (Comment, 14 April). I don’t know whether the American papers employ more ruthless subs, or whether he was simply stimulated by this in a way that he is not by most of the books that he is asked to review. In any case, the penetration and clarity of his critique and the sympathy with which he has read and digested the argument make one see again why so many people had such high hopes of him as an Archbishop of Canterbury.
“Ultimately, as he [McGilchrist] says in a forceful and eloquent epilogue, we either acknowledge God or we invent a God for ourselves,” Lord Williams writes. “If we invent a God for ourselves, we are bound to invent that God out of ourselves, out of our own psychic resources, and so sacralize our own ambitions and anxieties, projecting on to the universe our passion for analysis of and control over every aspect of what surrounds us. This is the idolatry that is literally killing us as a species. That is why it is so urgent to rethink how we understand thinking.
“The final sections of the book are impassioned and searching, but I found them in some ways the least satisfying. Is commitment to a specific concrete religious tradition somehow inappropriate in the context of the whole argument? Surely not, given the powerful emphasis on the role of time and community in our thinking. Without this, are we not back with the benign vagueness of spiritualities of self-cultivation?”
He continues: “Similarly, in the tradition that sees evil as privation, the point is not that evil is somehow less ‘real’ in its effect and cost than we might think. On the contrary, its force derives from the fact that it is desired with the same energy as the good is desired, because it is a misidentified good, not because it has some ‘evil’ essence. Genocide, torture, or child abuse happen because people who are lethally and hideously deceived think that they will attain some deeply desirable good (security, satisfaction, assurance, peace) through actions that are in fact destructive of themselves and others. If evil’s origins are in delusion, not in some evil power or element in things, this does not mean it is any less serious.”
If there is anyone out there who has not yet ascended the forbidding slopes of Mount McGilchrist, this review has fixed ropes up the steepest and most slippery sections of the climb.
AMONG the thinkers whom Dr McGilchrist swats aside like a contemptuous bear is the philosopher Daniel Dennett, of whom he writes: “To claim that consciousness is non-existent is self-exploding, since it requires consciousness both to make, and to make sense of, the claim: and to state that consciousness exists, but is an illusion, is no better, since an illusion requires a consciousness in which such an illusion might occur.”
Professor Dennett himself was confident that consciousness was an illusion when I profiled him for The Guardian nearly 20 years ago. “Eventually people will wonder what all the fuss is about,” he said. “They will say ‘Of course these computers are conscious. They’re good company’; and they will be good company and that will settle it. The philosophers will find they have to work mighty hard to maintain the difference.”
So, I much enjoyed his anguished essay in the latest edition of The Atlantic: “Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the ‘passing along’ of counterfeit people.”
Can this really be the same man? Enquiring memes want to know.