Fr. Spitzer’s Universe: Exploring Life’s Big Questions
By Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D.
EWTN Publishing Inc., 2024.
Paperback, 160 pages, $17.95.
Reviewed by David Weinberger.
Ever wonder what Original Sin is? Or whether there is evidence for the human soul? Or why Catholics believe Jesus is really “present” in the Eucharist (i.e. the “bread” dispensed at Communion)? Or whether “Purgatory” is real? Or why we suffer and whether it is compatible with love?
If so, grab a copy of Fr. Spitzer’s Universe: Exploring Life’s Big Questions. Formatted in a question-and-answer style and packed with his trademarked wit, priest and philosopher Robert Spitzer tackles real questions from ordinary people about life and faith.
Take, for example, Original Sin. What exactly is it, one questioner asks, and why should we be punished for something Adam and Eve did long before we were born? To answer that, Father Spitzer first clarifies that “it is not that we’re being punished for what they did; we are suffering a consequence for what they did.” As he notes, human beings were originally gifted with a specially close relationship with God. “Before the Fall,” he says, “God’s presence to Adam and Eve was intimate and powerful; they knew His goodness; they knew His presence in a way that we do not.” Because this was a gift, however, it could be squandered. And that, regrettably, is exactly what happened. Whether there was a literal Garden as described in Genesis, or whether—more likely—such imagery is meant to convey something true about human existence, the point is this: There really was a first pair of human beings (evidence suggests that although our anatomy may have evolved before then, the emergence of rational animals, or human beings, occurred approximately 70,000 years ago—more on this below) who did something that caused us to lose our close connection with God. Because of that, we lost the internal integration of our desires, intellects and wills, meaning that we do not grasp truth as easily, we do not choose the good as firmly, and our appetites and passions resist reason rather than acquiesce to it as they once did. Prior to the Fall, in other words, we were in harmony, whereas now we are in disharmony—or as the apostle Paul put it, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” All this sounds pretty bad, so what is the “something” that Adam and Eve did? In a word, they tried to become God. By substituting themselves for the divine, they inverted the order of things and disfigured their relationship with Him. This fractured connection to God, as Father Spitzer explains, is what we have inherited:
Because we have been impacted by Adam, we suffer a significant, but not total, inability to be aware of the profundity of God’s presence. It is as if Adam introduced into our souls that darkened glass. This is transmitted from generation to generation, but not as something punitive. Rather, it is something that is a natural consequence of the misuse of freedom.
Of course, much more is said about this in the book. Another topic raised, however, concerns the nature of the soul. Is there evidence for its existence, one questioner asks, or is it simply an article of faith cooked up by religious believers? In fact, Spitzer points out, the evidence for the soul is robust. First, though, it ought to be noted that the idea that the soul is simply the invention of religion is false. Philosophers for thousands of years—including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who predated Christianity by centuries—have recognized the reality of the soul, and for a simple reason: There is a difference between things that are alive and things that are not alive, and the soul is what accounts for that difference. It is also worth emphasizing that the soul is not a “thing.” It cannot be measured or weighed. Nor is it some sort of “ghost” that occupies a body, for a ghost, although invisible, is still a “thing,” and the soul is not a thing. Rather, the soul is what makes something alive. In traditional philosophical jargon, the soul is the “form” of the body—the principle which organizes and animates physical matter into a living organism of a certain kind. In this sense, then, all living things have souls—plants, animals and human beings alike. What is unique about the human soul, however, is that it is rational. Unlike plants and animals, human beings grasp concepts, which enables us to investigate reality through disciplines like math, science, and philosophy, as well as to communicate meaning, to love and create things, and to make choices.
Building on these considerations and drawing on the research of distinguished scholars Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick, Father Spitzer examines the anthropological evidence for the human soul in the historical record. Roughly 70,000 years ago, he observes, there was an abrupt “syntactical linguistic revolution that led to the multiplicity of languages and to universal grammar and syntax,” including the emergence of practices like “burial of the dead, artistic and symbolic representations on the walls of caves, mathematical proclivity, and social norms.” In short, rational behavior appears to have rather suddenly exploded onto the scene, which fits with the idea that when our biological ancestors were sufficiently anatomically evolved, God infused them with rational souls, making them the first official human beings.
Additional evidence for the soul is considered in the book, and plenty of other topics are covered as well, including suffering, evil, and many of the central tenets of Christianity, especially of Catholicism. Concerning the latter, for example, one questioner wonders why Catholics believe that Christ is really present in the Eucharist. Isn’t it, he asks, just a symbol? This is no doubt a thorny issue, but Father Spitzer addresses it with depth and precision. Combining New Testament data—including the words and deeds of Jesus himself—with Old Testament data—including the Jewish context in which both the New and Old testaments were written and in which Jesus himself conducted his ministry, as well as assessing what the earliest Christians themselves believed—and up through the time of the Martin Luther, Christians virtually unanimously believed that the Eucharist is not merely symbolic but is in fact the body of Christ. While we cannot survey this issue in depth here, a couple points are worth highlighting. First, it is critical to have the proper metaphysical framework, that is, the correct conceptual categories for grasping reality, for understanding this issue. For, when a priest says the words of consecration during Mass, it is not he but God who converts the bread into the body of Christ, and vital to seeing how this is possible is recognizing first and foremost that God exists outside of time. This means that the past, present, and future exist simultaneously to Him—like one big eternal “now.” Here is how Father Spitzer explains it:
Since, for Jesus, all time exists in God, God can transcend the structure of time. Thus, when Jesus did the rite of the bread [at the Last Supper], He was speaking in a prophetic way, specifically the prophetic future. …This means that He can take the time between the present moment (at the Last Supper) and a future event (His Crucifixion) and collapse it so that the substance of the event in the future (Jesus’ Body hanging from the Cross) can become present in the bread He is handing to His disciples at the Supper. He does this by His prophetic pronouncement as the Messiah and the Son of God. Note that this was not just His prophetic pronouncement, but also His divine pronouncement: “This is my Body given for you.” The very second that He expressed that in the present tense, He literally collapsed the future moment, namely His Crucifixion, into the species of the bread that He was handing to His disciples, transforming that species into His crucified Body.
A second key to making sense of the Eucharist is understanding its Jewish context. For example, when Jesus issued the words, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he was not asking his followers to simply reflect on this experience in the future. Rather, as Spitzer once again explains, the Semitic milieu in which he issued that statement casts it in a deeper light:
Jesus understood time to also be collapsible between the present and the past because it, too, is governed by divine power. Thus, Jesus (following the ancient Semitic understanding of time and His awareness of His Father’s power over time) did not view “remembrance” as a merely intellectual “calling to mind.” Rather, He viewed “remembrance” as a reliving of a past sacred event so that the past event could be made real in the present moment. Thus, when a priest relives a sacred event, his words collapse the time between his present movement and the past sacred event, making the past sacred event real in the present moment. This is what Jesus meant by “Do this in memory of me.”
Of course, this barely scratches the surface of this issue. For a deeper understanding of both this topic and others, pick up a copy of Fr. Spitzer’s Universe. It is chock-full of evidence-based answers for life’s great mysteries.
David Weinberger formerly worked at a public policy institution. He can be found on X @DWeinberger03.
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