Dorothy’s Test Puzzle
1. Introduction and Hypothesis
On February 28th 2020, The Washington Post published a story about how a Roman Catholic church in New Jersey denied, Anthony LaCugna, an 8-year-old boy with severe autism, his First Communion because he is not up to the “benchmark required to make communion” (Farzan 2020). This was seemingly contrary to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who have stated that people with disabilities “have a right to participate in the sacraments as fully as other members of the local ecclesial community” (USCCB 2017). The spokesperson for the parish where the LaCugna family worship stated that contemporary guidance from Pope Francis and canon lawyers is that “the child should be presumed to have an inner spiritual relationship with God, and this would be sufficient in these particular cases” (Farzan 2020).
The practical issue to be resolved in the real-life case outlined above is not specific to autism but is a matter of settling on the criteria for participation in First Communion. However, beneath the practical question of criteria lies a theological puzzle on how neurology, capacities and certain behaviours affect or provide evidence of a believer’s relationship with God. Being a Christian, we are frequently reminded by theologians and pastors alike, is not primarily about affirming certain propositional beliefs or following some moral code but is about a distinct and ongoing personal relationship with God.
In Christian theology this relationship is said to be realized by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who works to illuminate the believer’s mind and sanctify their life. The theological puzzle to be addressed then revolves around how far the indwelling of the Holy Spirit can be said to parallel or depend upon the same forms of social cognition that are employed in human-human relationships, which operate differently in persons with autism leading to social impairment in various neurotypical environments. Put more simply, does the indwelling of the Holy Spirit require a neurotypical brain? If we answer yes, then it seems that we cannot presume that Anthony LaCugna and other autistic people have an “inner spiritual relationship with God,” and perhaps should be denied access to the eucharist. If we answer no, as I argue we should, then we need to think afresh through the question of how human neurology undergirds one’s relationship with God.
In this puzzle, I start by outlining how analytic theologians have recently conceptualized the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, focusing on how Eleonore Stump’s work on second-personal knowledge and presence employs autism research to develop her account of indwelling. I then turn to the psychological literature on autism to further examine the Theory of Mind and mirror neuron hypotheses that Stump relies upon. In the discussion, I explore four different ways of matching up the theology of indwelling to autism research: (1) the exclusionary model (which I take to be Stump’s), (2) the either/or model, (3) the mystery model, and (4) the asymmetrical model. The first two models grant that the Theory of Mind mechanism and mirror-neuron network are directly necessary for indwelling but differ in how they interpret the empirical findings in autism research. The third model denies that neurology is in any way relevant for this area of theology. The fourth model, which I suggest is the most promising, suggests that neurology is descriptively relevant, but neither necessary nor inhibiting to a believer’s relationship with God. This, I suggest, has some theological implications for how we relate the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to the incarnation of the Son and to the broader doctrine of divine accommodation.
2. Fields of Study
2.1 The Indwelling of the Holy Spirit
One of the central claims of the New Testament is that believers receive the Holy Spirit who lives within them, or ‘indwells’ them (Rom 8: 9-11; 1 Cor 3:16, 6:18). The indwelling of the Holy Spirit does a lot of work in Christian theology: It is by the indwelling Spirit that we can receive the gift of faith and come to know Jesus as Lord and Saviour, for the Spirit is the Spirit of truth (John 14:17; 15:26; 16:13). It is through the indwelling Spirit that believers can hope to grow in holiness and virtue, because the Spirit’s indwelling bears fruit in the life of the believer (Gal. 5:22-23); It is with the power of the indwelling Spirit that believers can heal the sick, raise the dead, and proclaim the Gospel, for the Spirit gives the many gifts to the church (Rom 12:3-8; 1 Cor 12: 4-11). The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the mark of a Christian, which sets them apart and assures their membership within the people of God, and undergirds many (if not all) of the ordo salutis.[1]
Although the idea of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is both clearly Scriptural and foundational for many aspects of the Christian life the concept of “indwelling” itself has received very little scholarly attention. What exactly is “indwelling”? How does the indwelling denote a sanctifying or transformative divine-human relationship, which is different from incarnation or possession? In recent decades, the new field of analytic theology has started to ask just these kinds of questions (Alston 1989; McCord Adams 2005; Yeo 2014; Porter and Rickabaugh 2018; Kroll 2019).
In 1989 William Alston proposed three models of indwelling: the fiat model, the interpersonal model, and the sharing model. Alston favoured the later where, “there is a literal merging or mutual interpenetration of the life of the individual and the divine life, a breaking down of barriers that normally separate one life from another” (Alston 1989, 246). More recently, Eleonore Stump has developed an influential model for the indwelling of the Spirit which combines Alston’s “interpersonal model” and the “sharing model”. Stump argues that the influence between human persons is a useful metaphor for the indwelling of the Spirit, because human interactions are not as insulated through “physical and psychological barriers” as Alston supposed (Alston 1989, 246). Stump draws upon recent studies in developmental psychology and autism research to argue that neurotypical human interaction provides a useful analogue to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Stump argues that we might distinguish various types of presence, both for God and for humanity. On the one hand there is being presence in a certain place and at a certain time, or in God’s case present in all space (omnipresence) and at all times (eternality). Presence can refer to a spatiotemporal location. However, a person can also be present with and to another person, and this can be distinguished from spatiotemporal location. For example, imagine you are in a conversation with a friend, standing a few metres from them, but you notice a glazed look in their eyes and so you ask, “Where did you go? I don’t feel like you’re really present with me right now.” Stump calls with latter type of presence with and to, “personal presence” and argues that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the personal presence of God to the believer.
Stump links presence with and to person to, what she calls, second-personal or Franciscan knowledge; that is, knowledge of a person as a person. Second-personal knowledge is not irreducible to propositional (or Dominican) knowledge for Stump, as it captures the difference that spending time with a person, as opposed to reading a list of facts about them, makes to relationship. To have second-personal knowledge of another person, then, requires that one be in inter-personal relationship with that person, has spent time in personal presence with them, and knows them as a person (Stump 2009, 553-565; 2010, chapters 3, 4, and 6). Second-personal knowledge of God, Stump suggests, is core to the Christian faith.
Personal presence and second-personal knowledge, according to Stump, is facilitated by particular cognitive capacities, namely mind-reading and empathy (Stump 2013, 37). Stump writes that,
In human mind-reading, there is a sense in which something of the thought, affect, or intention in the mind of one person is in the mind of another. In the intermingling to minds made possible by the mirror neuron system, one person is present to another in virtue of being in that other, in a way that the neurobiology of the brain makes possible. This is intersubjectivity, or presence with. In mind-reading, one human person can be present with another in a way more powerful than mere presence at a place or in a time (Stump 2013, 41).
Does this presence with-another between human beings account for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit? At first, Stump seems hesitant as she writes: “The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is meant to be something ontologically more powerful than mutual closeness accompanied by shared attention” (Stump 2013, 46). However, it seems that mirror-neurons are sufficient in giving Stump the “ontologically more” that she is looking for: “the intersubjectivity of mental states enabled by the mirror neuron system and evident in mind-reading transforms from a mere psychological sharing to something that is ontology… ‘Indwelling’ is not a bad word for this kind of relationship between minds” (Stump 2013, 49).
The difference between the human-human case of indwelling and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (a divine-human case) seems to be a matter of degree. Stump refers to the divine-human case as being a “maximal second-personal presence” (Stump 2013, 51). This appears to be a bottom-up account where the more minimal cases of mind-reading via the mirror-neuron system have to be in place in the human-human case, in order to then achieve the divine-human maximal case. It follows that if there is a disruption to the human-human cases of mind-reading, as Stump cites occurs in cases of children with autism, then a proponent of Stump’s account would have serious reason to doubt whether a child with autism can be indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
2.2 Theory of Mind Hypothesis in Autism
Autism is a difference in neurobiology that arises from a genetic foundation and manifests in distinct behavioural traits. Depending upon both the individual and the environment in which they find themselves these behavioural traits can be advantageous, lead to marginal difficulties, or constitute significant impairments for a person’s quality of life. The goal of much psychological research into autism is to find a cognitive or psychological theory that explains the link between neurobiological and genetic differences to the manifest behavioural traits, which dictate diagnoses. One psychological hypothesis that has been a popular theory for explaining autism is the so-called Theory of Mind hypothesis.
There are three main categories of cognitive theories of autism that have been developed over the last thirty years: primary difference models, developmental models, and information processing models. All have some empirical success and continue to be explored today, but equally all have significant limitations which continue to confound researchers pursuing each of these avenues.
Primary deficit models, or the more recently preferred term primary difference models, seek to identify a single, underlying difference that explains all the diverse features used to diagnose autism. This was the first approach that modern psychologists of the 1980’s utilized in order to explain autism. At this time, the prevailing view of the brain was modular – meaning that researchers were looking for a particular module or area of the brain that was “switched off” in autism but switched on in everyone else.
One of the most prominent and earliest versions of a primary difference model is the so-called Theory of Mind hypothesis. Theory of Mind is a concept developed in the context of exploring chimpanzee social cognition to refer to the ability to attribute independent mental states to oneself and to another agent in order to explain behaviour (Premack and Woodruff 1978). The gold standard for Theory of Mind is a false-belief test, where a person S understands and predicts person A’s behaviour by attributing an incorrect belief to person A. The most famous experimental false-belief test in autism studies is the Sally-Ann test, developed by Uta Frith, Alan Leslie, and Simon Baron-Cohen in the mid-1980’s (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985).
In addition to the gold-standard of false-belief attribute, Theory of Mind was also seen to affect more basic cognitive tasks such as deception (Chandler, et al., 1989), humour (Reddy 1991), imaginative free play, and empathetic responses, all of which require some form of “mentalizing” – attributing mental states to other agents (Leslie 1987). In the 1990’s, the Theory of Mind and mentalizing hypotheses were joined with the apparent discovery of “mirror neurons” in macaque monkeys; that is, the observations that the same motor neurons fire when performing an action as when observing someone else performing the same action (Rizzolatti, et al. 1996). For two decades, psychologists were hopeful that this discovery would illuminate “the driving force” behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution by accounting for learning through imitation, metaphorical language, and empathy (Heyes 2010). This led to the so-called “broken mirror” theory of autism, which Stump draws upon, arguing that autism results from damage or impairment to the mirror neuron system (Oberman and Ramachandran 2007). However, after twenty-five years of the mirror neuron hypothesis, only one single study on humans has claimed to be able to locate a mirror neuron in human beings giving rise to significant doubt to this whole line of enquiry into human behaviour (Kilner and Lemon 2013; Hickok 2014). Moreover, the “broken mirror” theory of autism has been refuted by further empirical testing of this hypothesis (Hamilton et al., 2007; Hamilton et al., 2013; Dinstein et al., 2010).
With or without the backing of a mirror neuron system, what are we to make of the Theory of Mind hypothesis? To be clear, Theory of Mind is a hypothesis or theoretical construct, which enabled psychologists to predict and explain why some behaviours are reduced or impaired in autism children and others, seemingly similar behaviours, are not. Moreover, the idea of Theory of Mind has helped distinguishing between behaviours that are reduced for children with autism, but not for children with other learning disabilities. For example, the reduction of gestures in autism only applies to gestures connected to mental states (Attwood et al., 1988); there is a lack of protodeclarative pointing, which is for the sake of shared attention, but not protoimperative pointing, which is for the purpose of attaining some object (Baron-Cohen 1989). The precision and success for this theory in the 1980’s and early 1990’s was such that it really seemed that psychologists were “cutting nature at the joints” and were on the cusp of a single unified theory of autism.
Autism is now believed to be a neuro-developmental condition, rather than a straightforward deficit and this has led to more developmental models of the Theory of Mind hypothesis. Developmental models posit a subtle innate difference in how an individual relates to their environment, which leads to a non-typical development of sharing attention and Theory of Mind abilities, resulting in the pattern of behaviours used to diagnose autism (Happé 2015). One attempt to pinpoint these differences focuses on the orientation of preferential attention, arguing that in autism this attention is orientated away from social content in the world (Dawson et al., 1998; Klin et al., 2002). However, the empirical sources behind this theory have been contested by later studies (Guillon et al., 2014, Elsabbagh et al., 2013, and Jones and Klin 2013). Another developmental account has suggested that it is not social orientation, but social motivation, that is the underlying difference. That is, an innate difference in how much social interaction is valued by the individual, which may lead to a non-typical cognitive and neurological development. However, this theory is mostly based on adult studies or regional brain responses to different stimuli and is challenged by the report from autistic people themselves who report high motivation for greater social interaction, leading to costly “camouflaging” behaviours (Hirschfield et al., 2007; Lai et al., 2017).
The third version of the developmental model of Theory of Mind comes from intersubjectivity accounts, primarily put forward by Peter Hobson. It is Hobson’s account that Stump’s theology also draws from. Hobson argued that autism is rooted in differences in the ability to perceive and respond to the affective expressions of others in infancy, which went onto affect the developmental of social understanding. However, as with the other developmental models, this account has not been corroborated by further empirical studies. Indeed, recent studies suggest that neurotypical individuals have as much difficulty identifying the emotions or “reading” the facial expressions of autistic people and vice versa, and that this deficit disappears for interpersonal communication between two autistic people, just as they do between two neurotypical people (Sheppard et al., 2016; Brewer et al., 2017; Komeda et al., 2015). This points to the possibility that “in-group” / “out-group” status played a major role in generating the results of these studies, and that autistic social cognition and interaction is different, rather than impaired. (Fletcher-Watson and Happé 2019, 97, 111).
Challenges
Despite the popularity and predictive success of the Theory of Mind hypothesis, it continues to face some significant challenges in meeting the criteria for any successful theory of autism: universality, specificity, and primacy. First, the criteria of universality states that a successful theory of autism must be universally true of all people with autism. In every study using ToM, without exception, some autistic participants pass the tests and perform as well as neurotypical participants. That is, the idea that autism is caused by a Theory of Mind deficit or difference does not seem to apply universally for all people with autism. In particular, there is almost no difference in the performance of autistic and neurotypical individuals in Theory of Mind tests past childhood. There are two possible reasons for this lack of universality; either, some autistic participants in studies have found other ways to solve the tests or complete the tasks; or, there is a developmental delay, but not a permanent impairment, in the development of mentalising capacities which leads to the idiosyncrasies of autistic behaviour but does not prevent people with autism from mind-reading or mentalising entirely. This led to developmental models, rather than primary difference models, of the Theory of Mind hypothesis.
Another challenge to the Theory of Mind hypothesis is specificity. In order to securely claim that autistic behaviour (since autism is diagnosed at the behavioural level) results from a deficit or developmental delay in Theory of Mind, then the Theory of Mind deficit/delay must characterise autism specifically and not other psychological diagnoses which do not manifest the same set of distinctive behaviours. Three other groups fail to pass false-belief tests developmentally are neurotypical children under three years old, non-autistic children with other learning disabilities, and deaf children in non-signing homes. Although, when the demands on executive control are lessened then typically developing children show more basic signs of mentalising at 15 months, (see
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Contact the author
Joanna Leidenhag
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