Recently, on the Book of Face, this happened:
Orson Scott Card–a Mormon–remarks that sci fi and fantasy are the only places left in our culture where theological speculation is still permissible at a popular level. I think he’s right.
The question of baptizing creatures of dubious humanity was a subject of debate in the early Church, because there were all sorts of traveler’s tales concerning beings that were rational animals like ourselves, but whose bodies were radically different from ours. The human imagination did not have to wait for the exploration of outer space to populate remote places with extraordinary creatures. In antiquity, the nearest dark forest would do since most people never went further than a few miles from home. Or if you were slightly better traveled, there were always far-off lands, the horizon, or places you heard of by word of mouth. And the world was full of so very many strange things that making hard and fast distinctions between what we now know to be real and what we now know to be imaginary was not very easy. So quasi-human creatures were very much a live possibility. This included not only things like dog-headed men and monopods but, as Augustine reports seeing with his own eyes creatures with two heads but a shared body (or, as we would call them, conjoined twins). There were reports not only of pygmies, but of some sort of large man-like creature in African jungles. Did they count as human? What about creatures in the New World who looked and acted human, but who were impossible to connect with the family tree of the human race found in Genesis? These questions may seem silly to moderns, but when you are working from the data available at the time, they had to be solved.
The great Michael Flynn’s novel EIFELHEIM shows how the medieval mind would have tackled the problem. Essentially, what it came down to for most Christians was, “If it is made of corporeal stuff and is capable of reason, then it it is what we mean by ‘human’ and is eligible for baptism, even if it does not look like what we typically think of as human.” So Pastor Dietrich baptizes those Krenken (aliens resembling giant grasshoppers) who seek baptism in EIFELHEIM and Augustine has no trouble with the idea of baptizing conjoined twins whom he has seen, nor with baptizing dog-headed men whom he has never seen. Nor does the rest of Catholic Christendom. Indeed, at least one dog-headed Christian of legend–Christopher–is not only welcomed into the fold but even elevated to a saint in popular imagination.
Augustine, with typically circumspect common sense, suggests we hold off on the matter of baptizing dog-heads or centaurs or similar beings until we know whether they are real.
Bottom line: Grogu, Spock, Klingons, and similar rational animals would all be eligible for baptism if they sought it. The Church’s attitude is “Better safe than sorry.” Christ has redeemed not just us, but all of creation.
For more on this, here is a piece from the man himself, Michael Flynn, of blessed memory.
Advertisement
One Response
This brings up a serious question. If there is “intelligent life” out there, in perhaps another galaxy, what does the Church say about it? Are they too, children of God? The intersection of science and religion could be quite tricky.