Aneusomy Syndromes and Eschatological Retention: You can't Take it With You . . . Or Can you? . . .

Aneusomy Syndromes and Eschatological Retention

 You can't Take it With You . . . Or Can you? . . .

I. Introduction: The Metric of Eschatological Retention

II. “Perfection” Secular Strivings for Impassibility

III. A Christian Perspective on the Aneusomy Syndromes  

IV. Eschatological Retention and Aneusomy Syndromes

V. Conclusion                                 

Introduction: The Metric of Eschatological Retention

At a conference once, a bishop was giving the keynote address and he spoke quite eloquently on how all things will rest in God’s plan and workout too good in the end.  In his talk he gave an anecdote concerning a child with down syndrome who asked the bishop if he would have down syndrome in heaven.  The bishop assured him that he would not and reminded us that a merciful God will glorify us in heaven and rid us of all imperfection.  His talk was well received  by everyone in the audience, including myself.  But I would like to explore the culture that lead to his assertion that a person with down syndrome will not have their “syndrome”  in heaven.  The purpose of this paper is to speculatively explore eschatological retentions, that is, what you “keep” with a glorified or fully actualized body in traditional Christian thought.  To arrive at some sort of metric for generally calculating eschatological retention and then to apply that metric to some of our basic assumptions concerning personalities and bodies in the post-darwinian/post-enlightenment genetic based understanding of the body, especially as it relates to people with aneusomy syndromes, that is, syndromes defined by an abundance or lack of genes on a chromosome.

Our purpose in this first section is to try to determine a common metric from the most authoritative sources of Catholic Christianity concerning the continuity between our terrestrial self and our self as fully actualized and glorified in The Eschaton.  Unfortunately the Catechism has little to say on the topic other than to reiterate the mystery of bodily resurrection.  Thus we are left with three basic sources, the Bible and then, working off of that, St. Augustine’s City of God and, working off each of those, St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.

The metric for eschatological retention seems to be threefold.  First, A person retains what is essential to his or her humanity.  Second the glorified human achieves a balance between the excesses visited upon it by sin.  Lastly the glorified person will retain any aspects of their self that his or her terrestrial manifestation used to bring glory to God. 

Metric 1

With regards to the first metric, the fact that what makes us human is retained in The Eschaton would hopefully be obvious since we remain human there, however it may not be as obvious as one might think.  It is still rather common for people to believe that our eternal state is solely spiritual.  Some Christians even believe humans become angels in the after life, not realizing that angels are a different order of being than humans.  Most however believe that humans die and become spirits and stay that way for the duration of everlasting life.  This view forgets completely about resurrection of the body and is the effect of a renewed greek dualistic disdain for the body, snuck in under the enlightenment superstructure of cartesian dualism.  However, the standard Christian belief is that we die as humans, and we abide as humans, thus we are complete in our everlasting life when the dead rise for the final judgment and are reunited with their bodies, which are either glorified or damned.  Before that, the souls of the just dead rest in a state bliss, enjoying the beatific vision, but are not yet complete.  God made everything good, including human bodies and human bodies are essential to what it is to be a human, so they are necessary for abidance in The Eschaton, a state of completeness.

Belief in the resurrection of the body goes back to the beginnings of Christianity and even further in the Jewish faith.  There are quite a few passages in the New Testament that talk about the fact that we will rise again bodily in the end in a body continuous with the one we have now, but different.  The body of The Eschaton will be our body to its full potential, like a plant is the full potential of a seed (Jn 12:24, 1Cor 15:38).  This absolute potentiality is often couched in terms of “perfection”.  In fact the entire conversation of The Eschaton can, in some ways, be boiled down to a conversation about human perfection as it reaches the fullness of its development.  Anthropologically that perfection will break down along the lines of body and soul and how the glorification process affects them.  St. Paul sets the ground rules concerning this conversation and the first rule is that it should be brief, thus it is a dogma not often commented on, especially in modern times.  In couching the resurrected body in terms of a spiritual body, St. Paul introduced an air of mystery to what this body is.  Its true form in its entirety will not be known until The Eschaton.  However, Paul does set the matrix for the conversation in his assertion that at the resurrection the dead the body, “is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible. It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious. It is sown weak; it is raised powerful.” (1Cor 43)  This sets the conversation up in such a way that the discussion of the glorified body mostly revolves around what a perfected human is, both generally and particularly.  In fact St. Thomas Aquinas conceives perfection as the hinge of the conversation so absolutely, that he uses our current imperfection as a demonstration of the need for bodily resurrection,

The necessity of holding the resurrection arises from this---that man may obtain the last end for which he was made; for this cannot be accomplished in this life, nor in the life of the separated soul.  (Summa P3 Q79 A2)

The conversation on bodily resurrection in the modern time often revolves around what bodily attributes we gain at glorification.  There are differing list, but all boil down to a few abilities laid out in scripture; 1) impassibility, that is freedom from sickness and defect, 2) subtly, the quality that allows Jesus to move through locked doors in resurrection accounts, 3) agility, the ability to move without labor, and lastly 4) clarity, that is free from deformity and filled with “glory”.  Here we will take the same information and work at it from a different angle.  We will focus not on the changes, but the continuity of our terrestrial self (both body and soul) and our glorified self (body and soul).  
So whatever is essential for you to remain human, generally speaking, will certainly be retained.  Also whatever good is essential to you as an individual human would be retained.  Even though in the eschaton all are one with the Father through the Son in the Spirit, Christian ontology maintains that reality, as it is constructed by God, is simple and manifold at the same time, that it can be individuated and yet is a unit all at once.  Thus, we are one with God at the end, but we do also retain our individuality at the same time.  Once again, usually the focus of individual retention is centered on our spiritual, psychological, and cognitive individuality.  The standard assumptions consist of retention of our memories coupled with a continuity of perspective and point of view.  But as we have seen, we also retain our personal corporeal individuality.  That we retain our individuality concerning our bodies can be garnered in two interesting ways from ancient sources.  One is the debate about retention of biological sex in The Eschaton.  It appears that some were asserting that all humans become neuter, based off Matthew chapter 22 , and still others were arguing that all humans become men, base on the understanding of the glorified body being freed of imperfection coupled with the belief that the female body is itself an incompleteness that needs to reach the potentiality of masculinity.  This springs from the ancient popular understanding of the female being a defective male from the womb who, instead of inseminating, is now only good carrying seed to fruition.  However, this was not the view of the intelligentsia in the ancient world.  St. Augustine, a person often branded as the pinnacle of misogyny, very much believed that the female body was a good unto itself and not an under-formed male body.  Both he and St. Thomas after him in the Summa, assert that in The Eschaton human bodies retain their biological sexes.   

From those bodies, then, vice shall be withdrawn, while nature shall be preserved. And the sex of woman is not a vice, but nature . . . In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. (Matthew 22:30) They shall be equal to the angels in immortality and happiness, not in flesh, nor in resurrection, which the angels did not need, because they could not die. The Lord then denied that there would be in the resurrection, not women, but marriages; and He uttered this denial in circumstances in which the question mooted would have been more easily and speedily solved by denying that the female sex would exist, if this had in truth been foreknown by Him. (City of God XXII : 17)  

From this you see that something essential, not just to humanity, but to that individual’s participation in humanity is retained, for not all people are men, nor women.

Another more striking example of retention of corporeal individuality in The Eschaton revolves around the matter of height.  The question arises in City of God, what if an infant dies and is resurrected at the end, will they still be an infant? Or again, since we all conform to Christ, will everyone be the same height as Christ in the resurrection?  We don’t necessarily need to review all the scriptural and philosophical gyrations both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas went through in order to arrive at their answer.  The short end of the story is, “every man shall receive his own size which he had in youth, though he died an old man, or which he would have had, supposing he died before his prime,”  (CG XXII : 15) which, according to St. Augustine, is thirty years of age.  So it seems that a very individual trait that humans have, their height, is retained in heaven.  Later in the paper we will discuss some other very particular things, specifically hair and fingernails, that an individual keeps according to our sources, but for now, it suffices to say that any aspect of our personality and body that is good, even individually, is kept.

Metric 2

The retention of individual bodily characteristics is simply a reiteration of the belief in the continuity between the terrestrial body and the glorified one.  But the glorification obviously does entail a change of some sort concerning what is retained.  The second metric speaks of how, though continuous, there is a balancing of what is retained concerning the excesses visited upon the terrestrial individual due the the effects of original sin.   

So what is “lost” at the resurrection?  What attributes can we expect to jettison once our present bodies are fully actualized in glorification?  It is common knowledge that we will be perfect, but is there any way that this perfection can be explained?  For most of his observations on the resurrection, Aquinas sticks closely to what Augustine writes in City of God, however, concerning a methodology for calculating corporeal eschatological retention, we get an interesting embellishment in the Summa Theologica Part 3 Question 81 Article 2,

Man will rise again without any defect of human nature, because as God founded human nature without a defect, even so will He restore it without defect. Now human nature has a twofold defect. First, because it has not yet attained to its ultimate perfection. Secondly, because it has already gone back from its ultimate perfection. The first defect is found in children, the second in the aged: and consequently in each of these human nature will be brought by the resurrection to the state of its ultimate perfection which is in the youthful age, at which the movement of growth terminates, and from which the movement of decrease begins

    

This passage is truly a masterstroke of Christian natural theology.  Remember that the ancients were keenly aware that original sin had affected all of reality, including our physical state.  From this belief Aquinas makes calculations concerning the resurrection of the body.  His assertion is that since we haven’t yet reached perfection this is physically manifest, through the effect of original sin, in infancy, in that we must grow toward a perfection, once again, the age of thirty.  And since we have fallen from perfection, i.e. the fall of Genesis 3, at the age of thirty we begin to deteriorate much like humanity did after the sin of the first parents.  

  Aquinas’ view of how the effect of original sin plays out across the scope of human experience seems to call for a major “correction” of the defects.  Again the correction that takes place in the resurrection comes in the form of a balancing of some sort and achieves one of our sought after qualities, that of impassibility.  This balancing takes place upon the foundation of what is essential to human nature and what is essential to the individual person, but the effects of sin seem to play out in excesses and lackings that needs to be brought back into the middle.  

One get’s the same sense of a need for balance from St. Augustine’s musings on the wiping away of deformities at the resurrection.   

Once it is understood that no part of the body shall so perish as to produce deformity in the body, it is at the same time understood that such things as would have produced a deformity by their excessive proportions shall be added to the total bulk of the body, not to parts in which the beauty of the proportion would thus be marred. . . . whatever deformity was in it, and served to exhibit the penal condition in which we mortals are, should be restored in such a way that, while the substance is entirely preserved, the deformity shall perish.  (CG XXII : 19)

Once again, here, physical deformity is seen as either some sort of lack that the body requires, or some sort of excess that is beyond what is suited to a balanced body.  Both body and soul are glorified, this same balance is obviously also present in the wiping away of a chief spiritual effect of original sin, concupiscence.  Concupiscence is when one’s soul is off balance, when one’s appetites and/or passions rule over one’s reason.  When any one part of the soul is reaching beyond its purpose or is over emphasised in the personality the inclination to sin is far more manifest.  In the resurrection, such imbalance is cleared and concupiscence is no longer a human problem.  So the soul and all of its parts are essential to the human, but concupiscence is the imbalance that will be rectified after death.

Metric 3

The third metric, retaining any aspects that our terrestrial manifestation used to bring glory to God, embodies a particular focus of individual continuity as generally laid out in metric one.  Metric three can be deduced from the accounts we have from the gospels concerning the resurrected Jesus.  St. Augustine hints at this metric in City of God,

They also make eager use of all the deformities and blemishes which either accident or birth has produced, and accordingly, with horror and derision, cite monstrous births, and ask if every deformity will be preserved in the resurrection. For if we say that no such thing shall be reproduced in the body of a man, they suppose that they confute us by citing the marks of the wounds which we assert were found in the risen body of the Lord Christ. (City of God XXII : 12)

But what about those marks? Aren’t they a deformity?  There is a lot of conversation about the manner of death and bodily resurrection in our sources.  For example if one drowns or is devoured by lions does one come back bloated or mauled?  Augustine in this quote is hinting at an argument about the continuous nature of our terrestrial body with our glorified one.  The nail marks seem to indicate that painful and scarring things that happen to the body seem to carry through to the glorified body.  So it would seem that a just person randomly mauled by a bear on a hike through the Smoky Mountains would come back with the scars from the attack.  Augustine seems to write this line of argument off, he gives no indication as to why here, but he does elsewhere, as does Aquinas who quotes both him and Bede on the topic in the Summa

It was fitting for Christ's soul at His Resurrection to resume the body with its scars. In the first place, for Christ's own glory. For Bede says on Lk. 24:40 that He kept His scars not from inability to heal them, "but to wear them as an everlasting trophy of His victory." Hence Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xxii): "Perhaps in that kingdom we shall see on the bodies of the Martyrs the traces of the wounds which they bore for Christ's name: because it will not be a deformity, but a dignity in them; and a certain kind of beauty will shine in them, in the body, though not of the body." (P3  A54 Q4)

It seems that the reason he keeps his scars is because he turned that suffering to the glory of God.  Each of our bodies and the lives we live with them are unique.  God takes weakness and makes it strength and takes bad and brings good. Inasmuch as we do the same thing with our bodies, the marks such activity leaves on us remains on us there.  So what was the nature of Christ's wounds, they were painful things by which he demonstrated self emptying love.  To be randomly mauled by a bear is not a demonstration of self emptying love, thus those wounds would “correct” in the glorification process.  However, if one intentionally pushed a person out of the way of a bear saving that person’s life purposefully, with full knowledge of the high probability of a mauling, there may be some sort of eschatological retention.  The scars may not exactly correspond to the wounds received, they would be glorified wounds.  For example, was Jesus pierced in his wrists or hands?  His glorified wounds seem to be in his hands, keeping with scripture (psalm 22, “they have pierced my hands and feet), whereas the general Roman practice would be the wrists.  “Glorified bear maul woulds” would probably allow for the subtlety and agility ascribed to a glorified body.  

But the keeping of scars does force one to rethink impassibility, the freedom from sickness and defect, and what that can mean for a body that began in a state affected by the corruption of original sin and then transitions through a glorification process.  If The Fall had not happened such scars that show the struggle of grappling with sin would not be possible and this kind of glory would not be accessible.  But because of the fall and the process of the human soteriological condition this new type of glory is available.  “Glorified scars” should not make one any more uncomfortable than Jesus’ lowly state in his earthly ministry.  In Paradise, being born in a stable and being a rejected homeless person would not have been necessary either, but the fall actually did change everything. The term “paradise” assumes a static state, but the “eschaton” is a fulfillment of a process of change.  It is perfection in a different way than the original garden.  We will be a different type of creature in The Eschaton than could have existed in the state of original justice found in paradise.  These varying acquisitions of perfection may be part of the “happy” mentioned in The Exsultet on the easter vigil, “O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!”   

In the Garden no corporeal “scar” could ever be conceived.  In the same way, like the wiping away of concupiscence in the balancing of metric 2, there are spiritual as well as physical components.   As noted earlier, we will retain memory and psycho-spiritual continuity with ourselves as we were on this earth.  The effect of living through a sinful life and a sinful world and how that existence changes a being, even as a post-eschatological perfect being, cannot be dismissed.  The type of “thinking, feeling and intuiting” of such a creature, would no doubt be a different type of goodness than a being who simply possessed original justice.  For example, a glorified human of The Eschaton will also possess compassion, a virtue impossible for the first humans in a state of original justice.  Compassion etymologically related to commiseration, and originally means something like fellow suffering.  Obviously those possessed simply with original justice could not have experience such a virtue.  The terrestrial psyche would retain the acquired virtues that are only perceptible in a fallen world.

The same would be true of a body that lived through such a tumultuous experience.  Continuity means that the experience is not undone, but developed.  The discomfort with scars on glorified bodies, or a variance between spiritual perfection in Eden and perfection in The Eschaton comes because we are assuming a static perfection uninformed by our present condition, but that does not seem to be God’s plan.  Perhaps more uncomfortable than any of this is that the wounds of Christ force us to reconsider our understandings of perfection.  After all, our present understanding is also tainted by the concupiscence of original sin.

“Perfection” Secular Strivings for Impassibility

A thumbnail sketch of humanity's quest for self perfection usually starts with the Greeks.  For our purposes we will zero in on Aristotle's definition of a human, “the rational animal”. This definition set the stage, or at least is a good angle, for how the western world struggles with defining human perfection.  Generally one considers perfection of mind and/or perfection of body, sets standards, then seeks methodologies for achieving those standards.  The reader will notice that even in the present work, this dynamic is in play.  Generally any given quest for human perfection will focus more on either the mind or the body.  Here even at the start it is hard not to succumb to the imbalance of concupiscence and diminish as well exaggerate what would appropriately be balanced.  Either an over focus of mind or body, and once that medium is chosen, over focus on particular parts of the form.  For example, our general tendency to value spiritual over bodily in religions is why many Christians operate with a model of the afterlife that completely lacks bodily resurrection.  Since “the rational animal” is Aristotle’s definition, those using it are often cognitively inclined and therefore the process of defining and seeking perfection itself is a thinking process.  Usually this cognitive process breaks down into two ways, 1) those who embrace the “Rational” probably to an exaggerated extreme and 2) those who reject the rational for a more intuitive or aesthetic model, once again usually to an exaggerated extreme.  The balancing that happens in the afterlife will include spiritual as well as physical aspects.

Our culture has certain assumptions and standard narratives about perfection.  These are usually not culturally systematic.  Most often there are not even different systematic camps.  Simply ways of assuming the perfect human should be or should act.  For example, after the enlightenment a deep rationalism, often expressed in a scientific and empirical worldview, became a paragon under one set of assumptions.  This view extols the ability to be objective and analyze sense experience using reason.  As a rejection of that Western civilization entered a Romantic era, where emotive and intuitive experiences were seen as all valuable.  The artistic mystic is the paragon in this era rather than the scientist.  The person who can draw others to a sense of beauty, relationship or awe is valued over the person who can deduce causality from physical objects.  These characters play out over and over again and often even interact in our cultural stories to draw value judgments on which is more appropriate to perfection.  

To balance the psyche, our culture also has bodily views of perfection.  Once again it is easiest to break this down into two categories, aesthetic and scientific.  An example of the aesthetic end in modern times is the massive propaganda push by the fashion and entertainment industry to sell us on what beauty is.  It is the ideal of art particularized into a specific cultural setting in an ever changing attempt to capture both a static sense of beauty, but in a cutting edge way.  Thus it would be pointless here to try to lay out the terms of what beauty is, like for example an ancient greek would using mathematics.  At the same time, popular atheistic culture is hyper focused in physical appearance, both corporeally and in terms of fashion.  

This conception of beauty is quite off balance under the influence of our postlapsarian state.  In The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis’ imagines that the entire fashion industry is under the influence of diabolical powers.  His demon character describes these ever changing ideas of beauty and how they are used to the detriment of mankind.

The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist (Screwtape letter 20)

Whether or not demon influenced, the fashion industry does put impossible pressure on both men and women concerning their physical bodies.  “Impossible” is not a hyperbole.  Lewis was quite prophetic when speaking of the nudes not being actual.  One need simply stand in line at a Wal-mart and look at the photoshopped cover of the standard fashion magazine and then look around for people that even slightly resemble those on the cover.  Once one prescinds the constant media barrage of unattainable bodily perfection and looks at actual people, it becomes clear that those bodies pushed upon us are quite alien to humanity.  Yet this sense pushes us to sculpt our bodies in very unnatural ways and leads to a good deal of misery.  All of these tendencies boil down to the concupiscent effect of original sin on our expectation of beauty working in tandem with the social sin aspect of original sin.  Together these give us an absolutely clouded sense of beauty.    

On the other side of the aesthetic sense of physical beauty is the rational / scientific sense of beauty.  What we are talking about here is a medical understanding of the human person.  Often this is extremely functional, but can also regard physical beauty, though that is culturally considered in poor taste.  According to this model the perfect body is a well functioning system and by well functioning our culture means a system absent of pain and running efficiently.  The “better” it functions as a mechanism the closer to perfect it is.  Once again the dual effect of original sin can be felt via concupiscence and social sin regarding the fixation on the medical model.  The hyper focus on the elimination of pain is not only futile, but also begs the question of the meaning of suffering, a meaning which according to scripture is essential to postlapsarian humanity whether we like it or not.  The social sin aspect comes in, much like the fashion industry for beauty, by means of the pharmaceutical industry as well as a host of sub industries that are good in many ways but sow discontentment and counter beatitude. 

The search for beauty and health are not bad things.  It is when they are taken to an extreme that problems arise.  The extreme can come in the form of methodologies or in standards that are sought.  The former is usually quickly recognized by culture as a fad and abandoned for new extremes.  The latter is much harder for our culture to reckon with.  We are a secular culture in the truest sense.  What that means is that we have put off waiting for glorified perfection in the afterlife and are seeking to shape the world for the better and toward perfection now.   Francis Bacon sets out the mission of science and by that the secular worldview in 1620 in the preface of his Novum Organum

  

in order to have a thorough knowledge of the subject, [man] will himself by degrees attempt the course which we describe and maintain; will be accustomed to the subtilty of things which is manifested by experience; and will correct the depraved and deeply rooted habits of his mind by a seasonable, and, as it were, just hesitation: and then, finally (if he will), use his judgment when he has begun to be master of himself. 

       

Bacon’s simple mission is to use science to better humanity's lot in life as we dwell on this earthly plane.   There is certainly nothing wrong with this, but the last two words of this quote also speak to something more than just “betterment”.  To be master of one’s self means that God is not the master, and that one is able to attain perfection in and of one’s self.  So in secularism what one has is a sense of progression toward a perfection by means of reason applied to experience.  The goal of perfection also implies some sort of stopping point, a rest and balance where there is no more need for progression.  The problem is that the standard of perfection is influenced by our postlapsarian state and therefore not clearly visible to us.  It is an ever moving goal post that shifts and changes in every way conceivable.  We are seeking impassibility, a stability and rest in perfection, but where that rest is truly warranted seems undefinable, so modern progression is progressing blindly toward an ever shifting destination.

Where the aesthetic model uses art and culture to strive for perfection our culture is also invested with a medical model on the rational side.  Thus with regards to bodily and cognitive, perfection of the person, modern society is turning more and more to the study and manipulation of genes.  This is not a new endeavor.  Genetic manipulation has been with humanity longer that recorded history.  For as long as humans have engaged in a breeding process for plants and/or animals, genetic manipulation has been occurring.  But the progress of modern science has allowed a level of knowledge and manipulation that is impressive indeed. Diseases can be cured, impairments can be erased and “imperfections” can be studied and eliminated.

But with the ever widening understanding of genetics comes an ever widening understanding of “disease”.  Disease is no longer simply germs that penetrate the body as an outside force.  Germs seemed to have taken the place of the old model of demon possession, but with a genetic model it is the human himself that is the  “problem”.  The defect comes with the structure of the being itself, and that structure must be altered.  Modern genetics more and more reduces both body and behavior (soul) down to the genetic structure.  Thus there is a push to manipulate genes with a wide variety of intended results.  But once again, to what end? And who gets to define “perfection”?  As noted, there seems to be ever shifting understandings of what makes a “good human”.  This brings us to a rather odd quote by Adolf Hitler, “the only disgrace is sickness.”  This quote hints at an interesting shift in modern times because for Hitler the sickness is not a germ, but a person.

The Nazis were the first to make scientific and systematic efforts at attaining perfection using the secular playbook of Bacon and the genetic narrative of survival of the fittest offered by Darwin.  They had not yet progressed beyond the simple breeding model of old, thus their practices are seen as abhorrent, but their goal is not that out of line with how most “reasonable”people think today.  The Nazis ascribed to a scientific model with a particular teleological narrative thrust.  There is a perfection to be attained here and now, and we can attain it by systematic observation and rational action, in this case breeding.  This is opposed to the Christian worldview, which has no problem with using science to alleviate suffering, but leaves perfection and it’s standards to God, seeking that perfection only in any way that is ascribable to God’s good revelation.  

The goals of the Nazis were physical and cultural perfection, as they perceived it under a program of empirical reason and applied eugenics.  Their methodology was to get rid of all ideas contrary to theirs on the cultural end and all physical imperfections as they perceived them.  The desire to spread your culture, even by warfare, is not unique, all cultures are invested with a sense of superiority.  To have a sense of physical beauty is not unique, all cultures have that.  That the Nazis were hyper specific in their metrics disturbs the modern sense of beauty being in the eye of the beholder, but then again, most people have an assumption of a commonly held understanding of beauty.  The rigid application of beauty metrics and the resulting  systematic destruction of perceived imperfect on such a large scale and with such rapidity, all made possible by technological advances, is what was shocking.  In previous cleansings, the purification was an idea or a religion.  If one changed the idea then there should be no need for slaughter (though there often was).  With the Nazis no amount of re-education would suffice.  One cannot unlearn genes, at that point in history one could only destroy less desirable genetic carrier. 

But when taken in a modern sense the program was not all that different than what is happening in America now.  It is just that our technology, methodology and propaganda is far superior.  The Nazis were in a great rush to implement what they saw as new and useful science and agenda.  The Chinese had the same rashness with the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.  American culture has many of the same types of goals as the Nazis, but America has taken its time and slowly acculturate humanity to the twisted ways of its eugenics agenda.  For example, anyone who has a child faces a host of motor and cognitive metrics that should be met by the child if the child is not to be labeled inferior.  If such labeling occurs there are aids to help the child, our culture does not murder them outright, but at a certain “deficiency” level marriage and breeding begin to be seen as impossible.  We don’t want these genes to spread.  

Apart from identification early in children, the preferred modus operandi in American culture is to nip the problem in the bud, to destroy the defective genetic carrier before he or she is born.  This way they will not be a drain on society or the family.  The pre-birth genocide of the genetically different is a simple fact.  There is always the specter of not wanting people to choose abortion because of hair and eye color (that would make us Nazis!) or biological sex.  But in the end, apart from these peripheral elements, one can choose to destroy a whole class of people for genetic reasons and a large majority of Americans see it not just as passively acceptable, but as a great benefit to society.  

The genetic link to cognitive and motor abilities is more and more observable by modern science, but a more poignant question is, who gets to decide what the threshold is?  Does such a threshold even need to exist? And not just how, but more importantly why is that metric set?   Usually the concerns are schooling and then economic participation.  If a person cannot participate economic life, they are deemed useless, and a burden to secular society, which focuses only on betterment of this world.  If you can neutralize such genes before they are born into the world then society is better for it, if not, then certainly they are not to reproduce.  This is the unquestioned assumption concerning most sufferers of aneusomy syndromes in America.  In American hospitals doctors are required to inform you of the slew of prenatal genetic tests that are available “just in case”.  No one is forced to abort, but the pressure from doctors and society as a whole is almost overwhelming.  How is this set of assumptions different than the Nazi position?  It is simply perceived to be a little less brutal and a little more patient.  Also, there is the interesting urge to push the limits.  Since perfection is not clear, we as a society are constantly altering what it is we may want to destroy while at the same time looking with disdain on the past reckonings as if we have somehow made progress.  

There was a book published in 1969 called Helping the Retarded to Know God.  It was obviously not a bastion political correctness, neither are its theological ideas cutting edge.  But it seeks an end which most people abandon before even conceiving of it.  Those that our society would simply get rid of are valuable.  That is a core Christian belief.  The book itself may be atrocious, but the impetus behind it rings true to a Christian worldview of inclusion of all God’s creatures.  It assumes a place and purpose on this earth for people who are cognitively impaired or physically disabled.  It does not treat them as not worthy of life, but seeks for them exactly what it would seek for anyone else, a good relationship with God.  

What is more interesting is that such equalizing inclusivity is met with the vitriolic attack of this book in on-line reviews.  The attack are not generally about the lack of PC, nor the methodology offered in the book, two things worthy of attack.  Instead the attacks are on a religion that would see such people as worth the time, and then the people themselves.  To read the reviews on Amazon are embarrassing.  One gets a sense that people are angry that religion exists at all, and then that religion is somehow being predatory towards the cognitively impaired.  But at the same time, the amount of sport directed at those same cognitively impaired people is gut wrenching.  

Christianity and its relationship with the weak of society has not always been perfect.  But if my analysis of current attitudes regarding those who do not meet the proper metrics is correct, and I think the Amazon reviews of this book bolster my position, then the secular alternative is far worse.  It is interesting that such vitriol is waged for an ideological battle concerning those already deemed not worthy of life by much of society.  One is hard pressed to find healthy alternatives is most sources.  Absent preemptive abortion, “Job training” or mass institutionalization seem to be the only culturally acceptable options.  Michel Foucault does an interesting job in his book Madness and Civilization tracing the historical development of this attitude.  Starting in 1656 with the founding of the Hospital General in Paris there was what he calls a great confinement, a push to confine the poor, indigent, criminal and put them to tasks that were of use to society.  The rest of western society followed with similar institutions, “hospitals”, asylums, workhouses etc.  The aim of the Hospital General and other such institutions was not medical healing, but rather the marshaling of a bureaucratic arm of the state to deal with the problem of poverty, indigency and ultimately madness.  In fact it was through such institutions that the modern notion of madness arose, those deemed mad were those who after much “incentive” still seemed unable to work or follow disciplinary instruction according to the order of the institution. 

As can be seen in the second chapter of his book, the secular response to the modern understanding of these problems is confinement, re-education, work, and strict seclusion.  However at the same time you see the appropriation of these secular methods by the church but with a different goal.  St. Vincent De Paul founded such “Houses of Charity” and he defines the purpose himself, 

The principal end for which such persons have been removed here, out of the storm of the great world, and introduced in this solitude as pensioners, is entirely to keep them from the slavery of sin, from being eternally damned, and to give them means to rejoice in perfect commitment in this world and in the next (Sermon cited in Pierre Collect, Vie de saint Vincent de Paul (Paris 1818)

Anachronistically one can look back on any  institution of the 19th century and make broad judgments about the inadequacy of methodology.  But the difference in the purpose between the secular and the religious based institutions is of primary interest here.  The goals St. Vincent lays out here would actually be the goal of a Christian for any person under any circumstance, by means of whatever methodology.  Even the insane are targeted for the same end in the theological framework.  This carries through all the way till today in such orders as The Little Sisters Disciples of the Lamb, founded in 1985.  This order includes many sisters with Down Syndrome.  They are sisters as much as the others and all are included equally in the life of prayer and work common to the order.  The secular framework has a different end.  Given that the focus is on betterment of this world alone, the goal is to make them useful to society at large or lock them out of sight.  Locking them out of sight is tantamount to social death.  The Nazis simply decided to go all in and offered a “final solution” to the problem in one go, a massive genetic cleansing.     

A Christian Perspective on the Aneusomy Syndromes  

The reason the approach of the Christian “house of charity” can conceive of things differently is two fold.  First the belief in a divine rectification beyond our ability in The Eschaton which allows for patience concerning those perceived as impaired.  But perhaps more importantly, the Christian tradition is unique even in terms of world religions in that its hero is an absolute failure at life.  In other world religions the founder either starts off important in a worldly way and becomes important in a religious way, or is a rags to riches type person.  Jesus starts poor and ends poorer.  His death, true death as a human, ends his life with nothing to his name. He seems to be of no value to Rome, to Israel, to his followers, to anyone.  His only credit is his religious conviction, and that seems to have gotten him nowhere.  It is typical of Hebrew heroes to possess weaknesses, such that by their victory they demonstrate the power of God.  St. Paul says it most succinctly in 2 Corinthians (12:7-9), “Therefore, that I might not become too elated, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated.  Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me.”  Exactly what his problem was was never mentioned, and perhaps that is better, because the sentiment applies to any weakness, physical, mental, spiritual a person may have.  This Christian attitude is so upside down from the rest of human ideology that it takes constant meditation and awareness to practice it.  The purpose of this paper is to understand eschatological retention and therefore perfection in humanity as much as possible.  One thing we must understand is that this perfection will probably look nothing like we expect.

Some of the weakest and most vulnerable members of our modern society are those possessing “syndromes”.  We have already discussed how they are prey to a mass prenatal genocidal push based on fabricated eugenic calculations.  What we have not done is talk about what a syndrome even is.  A syndrome is a collection of “symptoms” or weaknesses. Now in a given syndrome all symptoms need not be present, just a threshold according to the defined metric. In the beginning of the modern development of the medical concept of a syndrome, the pattern of symptoms were deduced as more of an art than a science.  But, in more recent times a major definer has been some sort of “genetic deficiency” that by itself will indicate the syndrome.  A correlation is derived between a genetic presentation and a set of symptoms defined as a syndrome.  Hence you have aneusomy syndromes, for example, where there is an addition or deletion of genes on a chromosome.  By this point the genetic presentation has become definitive of the syndrome.  So much so that the simple genetic presentation is enough to destroy an in utero life with little guilt in the American type of eugenic program.

But the Christian view asks us to take note of weaknesses, in this case “symptoms”, and intuit from them something about how God works in the world.  Syndromes themselves are not “real”, they are simply a categorized collection of perceived weaknesses, or in our more recent understanding, some genetic situation that leads to these weaknesses.  What has happened in recent times is loss of self to a syndrome.  Instead of a person having symptoms, the syndrome is the person, and the person is a weakness to be dealt with.  Hence we can return to Hitler's quote, “the only disgrace is sickness”, and begin to see how weakness is used to devalue the person to a state of an object defined as a disease, all the way to a point of mass destruction.  But it is a reasonable question to ask why the metric is set.

What does a person need to do in life to be a successful human?  Economic participation is obviously a major American answer.  But this has never been the Christian answer in any way.  To come into relationship with God and your neighbor would be Christian answers.  God is seeking to relate to every one of his creatures and ensures the grace for them to relate back.  Thus it is impossible for the Christian to judge and life not worthy of living.  On the contrary a relationship being one of dependence is absolutely acceptable, in fact preferable when speaking of God and possibly preferable even towards your fellow humans.  In this case the “weakness” of the person with a syndrome of any kind is actually a strength.  It is a constant reminder of the weakness and dependency that Paul speaks of checking his pride.  If you previce yourself as stronger, you must remember, inasmuch as we take care of each other in this life those we take care of are doing us a favor in the Christian world view.   

At the same time a deeper reality must be ever present in your mind as a Christian.  The Christian already understands that we are all dependent on God for our very being. Also we are all dependent on each other on this ever shrinking planet.  Couple with that the natural progression of dependence we experience as humans and one will begin to see that “syndromes” as a weakness or sickness set apart from others is a warped view of reality.  Aquinas already laid out our experience of dependence in the above quote  in the Summa P3 Q81 A2 concerning the perfect age.  We are born and develop, we move from a state of dependence in utero to a state of physical dependence, breastfeeding, from which we wean to the simple dependence of childhood.  Slowly we gain a sense of independence as we strike out on our own as adults, but ignored world interdependence that absolutely mitigates this.  Then we move to a geriatric state and return to obvious dependence.  All of our life is dependent on others.  The part where we feel we are most independent is probably the shortest span of our natural life, and even that independence is an illusion.  So if a syndrome is a collection of weaknesses and dependencies, then the human condition itself is a syndrome.  A Christian should be able to deduce from the book of genesis that this particular syndrome, the human condition, is here to afford us the ability to come into proper relationship with God.  And from that the Christian should feel unable to cast dispersion on any medically defined syndrome simply because it demonstrates some sort of weakness. In fact they are regarded as more valuable because those with medically defined syndromes know the all important lesson of dependence on God, a beatitude absolutely necessary for a state of grace and abidance in The Eschaton.  So retention of a syndromatic features in The Eschaton is not unlikely.

Eschatological Retention and Aneusomy Syndromes

For our purposes we wanted to look at aneusomy syndromes and eschatological retention. Our metric was not cognitive, motor, or social, nor even offered for the present age, but teleological and eschatological.  We have seen that society places no value on what it perceives as genetic deficiencies, but at the same time we have called into question the “defective” nature of these genetic variances.  We have called into question a society that sees people as an illness in and of themselves.  It seems that our striving for perfection in a secular sense has been clouded by the fog of original sin to such a great extent that the ever shifting nature of the static perfection we seek is seen as a token of good progress and not evidence of a misguided quest.  

For Christians, a secular worldview should entail the betterment of our lot in life by all the best advances of science, but the quest for perfection is beyond science and beyond human reach in isolation.  The Christian vision of human perfection is the eschaton and it has always been a vague vision.  Given that, I would like now to revisit the Bishop’s assertion that the person with down syndrome will not have the syndrome in heaven.  

What one will notice from the first part of this paper is that no specific cognitive ability is noted among our three metrics for glorification.  If there is a balancing, according to metric two, of psychological traits, it may be between the rational/analytic and the emotive/intuitive as laid out earlier.   But both of these would be subservient to the beatific vision, which is invested with a sense of acceptance, trust and dependency on regarding God.  Thus there may be a rebalancing also of self reliance that needs to take place.  Regarding this, those in our culture who posses the structures of aneusomy syndromes will be more suited to The Kingdom than the those not. They are used to having to depend on others and see it as a natural state unlike the rest of us.  It may turn out that the person with an aneusomy syndrome is more of a “normative” person in The Kingdom with regards to what is most important.  The continuity of the psycho-spiritual aspects of their being may be greater, given their disposition.  Given that, what about the cognitive “problems”?  

There seems to be a persistent belief, or once again assumption, that we “will know everything” in heaven, that with salvation comes omniscients.  It is the post enlightenment mentality that knowledge is a  summative good in and of itself, thus we can’t fathom a perfection where we are in the dark about anything.  But of the lists of virtues and gifts of the spirit, knowledge usually gets a low billing.  It is not a summative good but an instrumental one, Christianity is not a gnostic religion.  With beatitude in The Kingdom of God one could easily conceive of having sufficient knowledge without having anything near absolute knowledge.  In fact, the only reference I can find concerning any advancement of knowledge in The Kingdom is Jesus saying, “For there is nothing hidden that will not become visible, and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light.” (Lk 8:17).  But Jesus is speaking here of the moral character and abilities of people, not all encompassing knowledge of facts and circumstances.  What may be reveal in the glorification process is that those possessed of syndromes were closer to perfection all along given their beatitude and it was us and our hyper fixation on knowledge and reason that needed the massive correction. 

Perhaps the dependence experienced by a person with a syndrome being retained in The Eschaton could be accepted as a specific effect postlapsarian acquired virtue.  Perhaps even a lack of omniscience for all people in The Eschaton can be accepted once one related it to the virtue of dependence on God.  But certainly someone possessing a syndrome would not retain the physical characteristics of the syndrome in the bodily resurrection.  Here once again we fall into our genetic metrics and warped sense of beauty.  None of our ancient sources described the beauty of the glorified body in any physical terms.  The obsession on height was brought about regarding fetal mortality, but few other physical characteristics were mentioned.  This lack of definition is a wise policy.  The ancients believed that beauty resided in the thing itself.  It was not their understanding that humans defined beauty, only God.  In fact the ancients were like the Nazis in that they believed in an objective physical beauty but, unlike the Nazis, the sources on resurrection did not presume to think they knew how to describe perfect human beauty.  Only a secular minded person who seeks to attain perfection in this world would presume such and then seek to implement it by the most violent and unbeautiful means available. 

So will a person with down syndrome still look like a person with down syndrome after glorification?  As noted earlier, the first metric for eschatological retention is that we retain what is essential to our humanity.  I asserted two types of essential retention, general and individual.  With regards to what is essential to the individual, as I said, we tend to make the syndrome over take the person.  It is a presence that is more powerful than the person himself.  Because of this we hold the assumption that in the resurrection, the balancing would glorify them to what they would look like if they had not had an aneusomy syndrome, just like it would glorify a person who died as a baby to the stature they would have had at thirty.  However, the physical age of thirty is the potential of a biological baby, but our perception of “normalcy” is not necessarily the potential of a person with an aneusomy syndrome according to God’s plan, only according to modern eugenics programs.  

I would argue that the syndrome is not a “reality”, and instead what you are seeing is a person for which modern science has constructed a categorization, first by symptoms, then by genetic identification.  Or to rephrase, first by perceived weakness, then by eugenic agenda.  But if you are regarding a true and whole unique person and not an example of a syndrome, then their individual beauty may entail physical features of that syndrome.  The ancients saw hair and fingernails as a sign of the passage of time and some believed these were not suited to a glorified body.  Augustine and Aquinas begged to differ.  Aquinas stated, 

although they do not belong to the primary perfection of the human body, they belong to the secondary perfection: and since man will rise again with all the perfections of his nature, it follows that hair and nails will rise again in him. (Summa P3 Q80 A2)                

The “secondary perfection” is personal individual beauty. Similarly if one begins to see the physical features of a person with a syndrome, not by the passing fancies of pop culture, but as a creature made in the image and likeness of God, it stands to reason that they may retain it.  

Aquinas claims above in Summa Part 3 Question 81 Article 2 that our defects will be wiped away, but notice the categories for his defined defects are lack of development and degeneration.  An aneusomy syndrome is woven into the fabric of the person if one understands genetics to be fundamental to the individual.  When Augustine is quoted above talking about deformity in CG XXII: 19 he talks of gaps in the body that are filled and deformities that are excessive, tumors so to speak, that diffuse into the bulk of the body. But the physical characteristics of a syndrome such as down syndrome doesn’t seem to suit this description.  Our culture may not find it beautiful, but the facial features cause no suffering other than social and that is not the fault of the person with downs.  Their physical characteristics are as part and parcel to the beauty of the individual as a person with red hair and blue eyes.  If we defined those characteristics culturally as undesirable or medically as the weakness of a syndrome it certainly would not stand to reason that there would be no red haired, blue eyed resurrected bodies in heaven.   
In the same passage Augustine says that deformities will perish, but he speaks mostly in terms of proportion and deformities that exhibit a “penal condition”, meaning deformities that result from our infection with original sin.  I would couple this assertion with John 9 where the disciples equate a blind man with a penal condition only to find out that they are wrong, his blindness is present only to demonstrate the glory of God.  It is true that penal conditions will be wiped away, but we cannot assume we have perfect knowledge of what those conditions are, once again due to the cloud of original sin.  In that story the man is healed of his “deformity”, but it is clear that he would be better blind and faithful than seeing and self righteous like the pharisees.  In fact it is also clear from Genesis 3 that the penal situation regarding original sin is pain and suffering more than anything else.   So in as much as deformity causes pain or suffering in a syndrome or otherwise, it will be rectified.  But our perception of a feature as a deformity does not call for immediate “correction” in The Eschaton.  In fact Jesus talks of how a “perfect” body may lead to sin and corporeal reception into The Kingdom that is partial rather than whole is preferable to sin and castigation into hell in full form. 

If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna,* into the unquenchable fire.  And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life crippled than with two feet to be thrown into Gehenna.  And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. Better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna,  where ‘their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.’  (Mark 9:43-48)      

If our perfect bodies today lead us to eugenic arrogance, can a body defined as a syndrome actually be more helpful, more perfect, teach a better beatitude?  Concerning the man born blind, most of the “pain and suffering” of being blind is the result of social sin not the actual blindness.  It could be that a fully actualized human in The Eschaton may well retain blindness under metric three.  This could be true if any suffering caused by the physical features is due, not to the biology, but the social sin of ostracization.  In this case it is not the “sufferer” who is at fault and in need of correction but the tormentor.  If the sufferer bears all well and demonstrates compassion and forgiveness despite needless prejudice out of love for Christ his “deformity” is his glory.   

This leads us back to our troublesome glorified nail marks.  Remember that the point of the nail marks being retained was that they were the method by which Christ glorified the Father.  The same was true of the martyrs.  The ancient sources seem to speak of this eschatological retention of deformity mainly in terms of a suffering that leads to sacrificial death, but when the metric is coupled with the call to be a living sacrifice than any suffering that one bears out in life and somehow turns to the glory of God may well retain in a glorified way.  

As an example, I am bald.  It is a serious lack in form of what seems natural to the human condition.  It stands to reason that I would regain my hair in my glorified body, and the sources even remind us specifically that hair and nails are part and parcel of the beauty of the resurrection.  As a young man I had long straight delicate hair and I may take comfort in the belief that I will retain my beautiful flowing locks in the afterlife.  My only downfall would seem to be that in class I often recount to students how losing my hair at a young age, I was bald as a melon long before thirty, taught me great humility and served me well.  I use my baldness to talk about proper self love and other such Christian virtues.  If one applies the living sacrifice to the third metric, and I perceive things correctly, then I will most certainly be bald in The Kingdom.  

The third metric of eschatological retention reminds us of how out being in this world is continuous in every way with what we are in the next.  Any suffering a pearson bears for the love of God through Christ may leave spiritual or physical marks on a person.  If the marks are spiritual, they shape their personality, and if they are bearing these things out of love shaping would be toward beatitude.  Once again an example of this would be the virtue of compassion.  The suffering wayfare of this terrestrial plane would obviously retain compassion in the eschaton, but perfected.  If the suffering left physical mark, remember their body is also who they are.  The physical sign wrought upon the person’s physical being in glorified form and would be their glory in the kingdom.

To conclude I would like to return to Helping the Retarded to Know God.  I must admit that I never really read the book.  I glanced at the table of contents and knew it was nothing I really wanted to get involved in.  However, as I said before, it is the type of book that only a Christian could write.  I will now give my own assessment of how to help “the retarded” or anyone really to know God.   I would say that the cornerstone of this is to help them know themselves and find the image and likeness of God within them.   

On a listserv concerning a certain syndrome once I remember reading a desperate parent of a cognitively impaired child ask, what basics should she bother to teach her child.  The child could only retain so much.  “5 thing, let’s say 5 skills”, that was her goal.  Such a calculation really makes one reflect on what is important in life.  All of the sudden that dolphins are really mammals, that the sun is larger than the earth, whether or not Pluto is a planet or any of the other foolish post enlightenment/scientific revolution factoids that we seem to need to drill into our children become so pointless.  What do we need to know basically as an individual?

I would say there are three areas and any person must garner as much skill in each as possible according to his or her ability.  First bio basics, the skill to feed, maintain hygiene, and physically care for ourselves.  Second social basics, how to interact with our fellow humans as well as possible.  This concerns both moral and cultural.  To learn a basic morality even if it is rewards and punishment based and to learn the basic social/cultural ways humans interact is a skill that should be sought.  

Lastly I would say there are certain pneumo-basics that need to be appropriated.  These are a bit higher level and may appear impossible for some severely impaired, but as a goal they should be sought, I would say even before mathematics (though that is a noble goal too).  These would entail certain awarenesses.  For example everyone should have some sort of awareness of God.  To instill an awareness of all an powerful caring transcendence that the individual can come into relationship with is of paramount importance.  If abstract or transcendent thought is impossible, then in some way, even narratively, this is worth having.  It may be protested that certain cognitively impaired will never understand the concept, but my point, as a Christian, is that we are not talking about a concept, we are talking about a reality that is desirous to come into relationship with them and willing to mead out the graces appropriate to the person.  We don’t need to worry about anyone’s inability to understand God.  If that were a true barrier, then any quest for God should be abandoned, God is beyond any human’s understanding.  We don’t even need to worry about our perception as to whether our efforts are “working” because in reality we are coworkers with God, who is doing most of the work.  God seeks all of us, and our religion, communally based as it is, reminds us to help each other seek him, thus how we go about helping the cognitively impaired seek, rather than know, God should be culturally appropriate, and appropriate to the individual.  There is no need to be discouraged even if that individual is deemed cognitively impaired, they are no more unsuited to the task than any other human.  After all, because of original sin we are all cognitively impaired when seeking God.

The second type of pneumo-basic is the awareness of relation to others.  This is close to Basic two, social basics, but with the added goal of empathy as opposed to simply responds stimulus.  If in any way a person can learn some sort of regard for the other, this should be fostered.  This will allow them to participate on some level in the second greatest commandment, which is a noble goal.  Similarly to the quest for God this goal can become abstract, and as a goal may seem impossible, but remember, all of us are limited.  None of us come into perfect communion with our fellow humans, none of us practice perfect empathy.

The last pneumo-basic I would urge is to help a person understand that they are possessed of dignity and purpose.  This goal was the assumption of the book Helping the Retarded to Know God.  This goal is the aim of St. Vincent’s Houses of Charity, and is also the aim of the the Little Sisters Disciples of the Lamb.  The cognitively impaired or someone invested with an aneusomy syndrome, or anyone really, does have a purpose and does possess dignity.  The task is to bring them to some awareness, regard for or sense of this.  

Once when discussing Islam with an Imam, he told me that children and the cognitively impaired go straight to heaven.  This is because one must follow law intentionally in Islam in order to go to heaven.  I was struck by the compassion of the religion, but also the religiously pointless place it put children and the cognitively impaired.  Our religion places a special emphasis on the weak and their true and full relationship with God.  These weak very obviously include children.  Jesus invites the children to a blessing and early Christian leaders in the New Testament called the followers of Jesus children in order to orient them to a more eschatologically appropriate way of thinking.  In the end a childlike approach to life is a key requisite for The Eschaton, “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 18:3).  I think to have a sense of dignity and worth in creation and in the eyes of God is a skill worth fostering for a Christian.  To be able to do it with a child like sense of dependency and acceptance seems to be a goal according to Christ.  In this those with aneusomy syndromes may be ahead of the curb.      

Once again, this is hard for all of us. None of us know our true worth as beings sculpted in the image and likeness of God.  We are all constantly told we are not good enough.  This is especially true when someone is defined by society as an outcaste by their very being, such as someone with an aneusomy syndrome.  Such people are deemed worthless by their very existence.  But the cross teaches us that our religion is the religion where the weak and defeated conquer, and where the failed at life are the glory of God.  The lesson of the cross itself is a lesson most suited to any hard life, far more suited than scientific facts, mathematics, or clever wit.

If these three pneumo-basics can be achieved even at trace levels, then it is possible that one could live their live with an aneusomy syndrome, with severe impairment, and still achieve some sort of use for that syndrome in achieving glory for God.  Living for God and being an example of God’s glory is possible for anyone with intention, and judgment of another person’s ability regarding this intention is possible only for God.  If the intention is there, then retention seems to be the glorious result The Eschaton.  If a person bears society’s scorn for the glory of God, if a person who is perceived as impaired seeks to teach the simple ways of God, then in the afterlife God would certainly not rob them of their glory, they would retain a glorified form of the “syndrome”.  Once again, if a syndrome is a collection of weaknesses then human existence is a syndrome and abidance of the effect of struggles in The Eschaton is simply evidence of continuity between our postlapsarian existence and The Kingdom.

Conclusion                                 

To conclude, the opening question was, “will I have down syndrome in heaven?”  The first answer given was a resounding no, the assumption being that down syndrome is some sort of deficiency that will be wiped away.  But upon review it is harder to tell.  Through exploration we came to three metrics for eschatological retention, keeping what is essential, a balancing of the excesses of sin and a retention of all marks of the glory of God.  None of these three eliminates the possibility of retention of the syndrome off hand.  The syndrome may not be a lack of potentiality or the result of sin, but could very well be part and parcel to who the person is as created by God, and our judgment of a syndrome as a deficiency could be the result of a lack of clarity due to original sin.  

Christianity sees value in knowledge, but more so in proper relationships and anyone who values God as their creator and sustainer is well on their way to the fundamental relationship.  So certain dispositions of some syndromes may very well suite one to The Kingdom.  Also, perception of physical beauty is perceived as culturally bound.  The ancients saw it as an objective fact, but when concerning perfect beauty in the resurrection, they were curiously silent, only hinting at some sort of proportionality.  Thus it may very well be that a person’s physical characteristics of a syndrome is objectively beautiful once glorified and the receiver are washed of the cloud of original sin.  

It is very likely some of those with what we perceive as impairments will turn out to be the great heroes of Christianity, not in spite of, but because of those impairments. When picturing someone with down syndrome in heaven now it may strike one as odd or out of place.  But that is only because we see them as a syndrome and not a person.  When one is in a state of grace, I believe that picture would appear as natural as picturing haloes, robes and clouds in heaven.  Defining syndromes is useful in so far as it is a means of mitigating suffering.  But when these definitions are used to castigate and hural judgment this is a sinful situation.  In the eschaton, true perfection will come to humanity, and in that what any given syndrome is will be born out to perfection, and all of us in a state of original sin may well find that the “normative” state of affairs was in for the majority of correction during the glorification after all.