HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021280.jpg

did Nygren oppose the caritas view of Christian love? The answer is that the meaning of love as caritas did exactly what Nygren thought Paul and Luther, his theological heroes, did not do. In the classic Roman Catholic view, love as caritas builds on eros. Caritas was seen to include natural desires for health and affiliation. But the caritas view of love also held that religious education and God’s grace built on and expanded these natural inclinations to entail a self-giving benevolence to others, even strangers and enemies — an idea so central to the concept of Christian love. All of this seemed too naturalistic for Nygren. It seemed to play down the importance of God’s transforming grace. He joined other European neo-orthodox theologians of his day such as Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann in cutting off Christian love from eros,'' which in effect was to cut Christian love from nature and desire — the very things scientists tend to study. Beginning with Nygren’s strong view of agape and the strong supernaturalism of both Nygren and Barth, there was little room in these mid-twentieth century Protestant trends for a productive dialogue between Christian ethics and the new scientific advances in moral psychology, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. At the same time, however, breakthroughs in these very disciplines have led to a new reassessment of the Catholic caritas model of Christian love. But before I review in more detail how this model worked, especially in the thought of the great medieval Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, let me turn to review some of the moral implications of insights into kin altruism and inclusive fitness emerging today Page |34 from evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience. Moral Implications of Kin Altruism and Inclusive Fitness As is well known, the idea of inclusive fitness was first put forth in 1964 by William Hamilton. '” Hamilton’s view of inclusive fitness holds that living beings not only struggle for their individual survival but for the survival of offspring and kin who also carry their genes. Their altruism is likely to be proportional to the percentage of their genes that others carry. This insight was further developed by the concept of parental investment. Ronald Fisher and Robert Trivers (1972) defined it as “any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring’s chance of surviving...at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring.” '’ These insights were at the core of the emerging field of sociobiology and were first brought to the wider public attention by E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). "* But the moral implications of the concept of inclusive fitness, parental investment, and kin altruism have received competing interpretations. Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene (1976) turned these ideas into a defense of philosophical ethical egoism and argued that all altruistic acts are disguised maneuvers to perpetuate our own genes. '° But there are other interpretations. Social neuroscientist John Cacioppo interprets our motives toward inclusive fitness and kin altruism as the core of human intergenerational care and the vital link between sociality and spirituality. In cooperation with his colleagues, his research on loneliness HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021280