soul

soul In the Hebrew scriptures, the human being is a single and undivided entity: the soul and body are not clearly distinguished from one another. Thus any discussion of life after death points to the resurrection of the body rather than the immortality of the soul (Isaiah 26: 19 and Daniel 12: 2). Jewish and Old Testament scholars have debated whether the authors of the Hebrew scriptures ever thought of the body and soul as distinct entities; certainly, later Jewish writers have interpreted passages such as Ecclesiastes 12: 7 — ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it’ — to mean that at the death of the body the soul returns to reside with God forever.

The Greek, especially the Platonic, tradition saw the soul and body as utterly distinct and separate entities. For the Platonists, the soul is the human being; the intellect is eternal, and pre-exists and survives the body. In this earthly life, the soul makes use of the body and its instincts which, while not seen as evil, must be kept under control. While Aristotle modified this Platonic teaching, the Neoplatonist, Plotinus, developed it such that his biographer, Porphyry, recorded that Plotinus would tell no one his birth date, as the day of his soul's entry into his body was cause for mourning, not celebration.

This Greek tradition affected Judaism. The Greek-speaking community in Alexandria, of whom the foremost member was the philosopher Philo, began to understand the body and soul as completely distinct from one another, and Philo taught the immortality of the soul. The distinction between body and soul exists everywhere in the Rabbinical/Talmudic literature, and medieval Jewish thinkers understood the body and soul as being in struggle, and therefore promoted a denial of bodily pleasures; Maimonides saw the building up of the body as occurring at the expense of the destruction of the soul. The Kabbalists believed that the soul was a divine entity which had to descend into the body.

The Christian tradition took on both the Hebrew and Greek traditions in its thinking about the soul. The Incarnation — the Word made flesh — emphasized the Hebrew notion of the unity of body and soul: Jesus was born of a woman, and thus God took human form, with a body and soul. However, in the Hellenistic world in which much of Christianity spread, Platonic notions of the soul as temporarily imprisoned in the body took hold, so that Origen, for example, believed that humans were originally created as intellects without a body, and taught that the pre-existing soul entered the body after it had fallen into sin, and was bound to the body as a punishment. However, he also taught that the soul uses the body for healing and restoration: the body itself is not evil, but rather our misuse of free will is the root of our evil (Origen's teaching on the soul was condemned, after his death, at the fifth ecumenical council in Constantinople, in 553). By contrast, Clement, another Platonist, did not understand the soul as pre-existing and saw the body in a more positive way, as the ‘soul's consort and ally’.

Ideas about the soul were linked to notions of resurrection of the body, and from the third century to the late Middle Ages many theologians emphasized the full and literal resurrection of the body after death. Tertullian, for example, following a stoic metaphysics, not only believed that resurrection meant the full reassemblage of the body but also that all reality is corporeal, and therefore even the soul is composed of fine material particles. Irenaeus held a similar view. However, such ideas gradually declined, and by the later Middle Ages Aquinas' view that the soul is an individual spiritual substance was becoming predominant (though it did not go unchallenged) and eventually received wide acceptance amongst many branches of Christianity. For Aquinas, influenced by Aristotle, body and soul together form the human unity, though the soul can be separated from the fleshly body, as happens at death, and continue to exist. It is believed, in this scholastic tradition, that each soul is made by God individually for each human body (Creationism, as opposed to Traducianism, a belief in which the soul is the product of the generative, material power of human beings, a view that was to be held by many Lutherans and Calvinists).

In some other religious systems and philosophies, body and soul are not as sharply opposed as they often have been in Christianity. In Taoism, the religious philosophy developed in China, the soul is essential to the body's wholeness and healing. Central to Taoism is a system of meditation and prayer in which the soul relates to the inner body and the external world. The ‘shen’, meaning soul or spirit, resides in the heart. When ch'i (mind energy), shen (soul), and ching (intuition and physical powers) are in harmony, the body is healthy, works in concert with nature and the person lives a long time. However, a person dies when the ch'i and ching are exhausted and at that point the soul leaves the body. In Zoroastrianism, the world's oldest prophetic religion, which originated in Iran, body and soul are seen as distinct from each other, but not necessarily opposed in a dualistic manner; indeed, bodily sickness is said to indicate the soul's sickness, while bodily health, fertility, and maturity indicate spiritual health. The body is to be treated with respect and is seen as a part of the human being's ultimate nature, not a means to an incorporeal nature.

Jane Shaw

See also mind–body problem; religion and the body.