The human spirit
God is pure, uncreated spirit.
The angels are pure, created, spirits.
We are incarnate (enfleshed) spirits--"geist im welt" (Rahner).
We are like God in our spiritual powers (intellect and will), but God is not like us (matter in-formed by soul).
The human spirit is not a byproduct of material complexity but is a direct, personal gift from God at the moment of our conception.
Our spirit is our deepest, truest identity.
Our spirit empowers us to receive God Himself. No other living beings on earth have this power; whether there are other incarnate spirits (extraterrestrials) in the universe remains to be seen. God is, of course, present to all created things, but He cannot dwell within them as He can in us.
Hebrew
Hayah is the verb "to be."
- The Hebrew terms × ×¤×© nephesh, רוח ruach (literally "wind"), × ×©×ž×” neshama (literally "breath"), ×—×™×” chaya (literally "life") and יחידה yechidah (literally "singularity") are used to describe the soul or spirit. The soul is believed to be given by God to a person by his/her first breath, as mentioned in Genesis, "And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (Gen 2:7, NAB).
My spirit rejoices in God, my Savior
The Magnificat (Lk 1:46-47) uses both "psyche" and "pneuma" in the same sentence:
- ΜεγαλÏνει ἡ ψυχή μου τὸν κÏÏιον,
καὶ ἠγαλλίασεν τὸ πνεῦμα μου á¼Ï€á½¶ Ï„á¿· θεῷ Ï„á¿· σωτῆÏι μου
In this prayer of Mary, "my psyche" and "my spirit" are different aspects of the same human being who is thanking and praising God with her whole heart for His goodness to her. It is probably an example of poetic reduplication or elegant variation, where the use of two different words do not point to two different realities.
| Hebrew | Greek | Latin | English |
|---|---|---|---|
|
ψυχή |
anima, mens | psyche, soul, mind, heart | |
| ruah |
πνεῦμα πνεÏματος |
spiritus | breath, spirit |
| lev | cardia | cor | heart |
| μοÏφή | forma | form | |
| ὕλη | materia | matter | |
| nephesh | the whole human being: body and soul | ||
A body without breath is dead
- The body without pneumatos is dead.
- τὸ σῶμα χωÏὶς πνεÏματος νεκÏόν á¼ÏƒÏ„ιν
The spirit is willing ...
- "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."
- τὸ μὲν πνεῦμα Ï€Ïόθυμον ἡ δὲ σὰÏξ ἀσθενής.
This is from Jesus' Agony in the Garden; it is a word of compassion about the inability of His disciples to stay awake and pray with him.
The contrast between "spirit" and "flesh" appears in Paul as well.
- Galatians 5-6
- Romans 6-8
The Sacred Heart of Jesus
"Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light" (Mt 11:28).
The soul is the form of the body
The developed Catholic doctrine of "soul" depends on Aristotelian insights into form and matter (hylomorphism). Following Aristotle Aquinas, Catholics think of the soul as the form of the body.
The power of life comes from the organic form of matter, known as the "soul" (anima, psyche) in the Aristotelian tradition.
There are two kinds of living souls or organic forms of matter: plant and animal.
The human soul has God-given spiritual powers that distinguish us from all other animals: intelligence and free will.
From this perspective, plants and animals have souls, because they are an organic form of matter. The human soul is elevated above all other kinds of animal souls because it is given the power of intellect and free will at the moment of conception. Aristotle recognized that these spiritual powers make us immortal; they are simple and cannot decompose when we die, even though at death the soul ceases to form (in-form!) the body.
Metaphysically, the soul cannot be opposed to the body. There is only one principle of life--the soul. The soul causes the body. There is only one living being as a consequence.
- "Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity" (GS 14 § 1). The doctrine of the faith affirms that the spiritual and immortal soul is created immediately by God.
The soul is not part of the body nor is the body part of the soul. The soul is not located in any part of the body; the soul completely in-forms the body in all of its parts. In the sense, the soul can never be against the body, because the soul is the cause of bodily existence. The body can never stand against the soul, for without the soul, the body would not be alive.
The language of the Scriptures and of spirituality is non-technical. "Mind," "heart," "soul," and "spirit" are contrasted with "the flesh." It sounds as though the body is a principle of evil, but this is something that was vigorously denied by the Church in her struggle against gnosticism. The body is always innocent; it is the person who sins. When we decide to allow our bodily impulses to be our guide to live, we make a spiritual decision that has evil consequences. "But what comes out of a person, that is what defiles. From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile" (Mk 7:20-23).
The Gnostic heresy
Spirit good, matter bad.
Soul good, body (σῶμα) bad.
Plato taught "soma sema": "The body is a prison."
Gnosticism dates from the second century of the Christian era. Its view of the relation between spirit, soul, matter, and body is found in Hinduism, Buddhism, the Harry Potter novels, animism, and many forms of New-Age religion.
The thought that matter can contain and control a spirit or a soul is ludicrous. Spirits can act on matter, but matter cannot bind spirits. The idea of a spirit contained in a physical reality--a tree, the moon, the ocean, a totem, an idol, a horcrux, a river, an ocean, a cave, a magic wand, a ring, or the like--makes no sense metaphysically.
The soul is not "imprisoned" in the body. It is the formal cause of bodily existence. The soul forms or in-forms matter to produce the body. The soul is "in" the body in a metaphysical sense, but not in a physical sense. No part of the body is absent from the soul. The human soul is not truly itself without the body, although it has a God-given principle of immortality as a consequence of the spiritual powers of intellect and will given to the person by God at conception.
Hindus and New-Agers teach that our true self is a spirit that can act as the driver of any living vehicle whatsoever. The same principle of life ("jiva") can inhabit any form of animal or human life. Jiva has no intrinsic principle within itself that is related to the body it inhabits. It can be any kind of animal, male or female. When the body dies, jiva is released to inhabit some other body in its next incarnation.
From the Aristo-Thomist standpoint, this is nonsense. Each soul has the power only to form the kind of living being that it has the power to form: a plant, an animal, or a rational animal. Without that form, the being would not be alive. No other form can take the place of the organic form. One soul, one kind of living being.
The Harry Potter heresy
The soul cannot be broken into parts and stored in containers. The soul has no parts. It is a simple, immaterial, metaphysical reality.
The belief that one can capture spirits in physical objects and gain mastery of the spirit by possessing the object underlies the stories of about Aladdin's lamp, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Holy Grail.
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010)" employs the same primitive thinking about imprisoning and preserving souls in physical containers.
There is a mild form of this heresy in the "Rings of Power" in The Lord of the Rings.
Spirit in the World
One of Karl Rahner's early works was entitled Geist im Welt: "Spirit in the World." It is a beautiful expression, and the book is an excellent synthesis of the Aristo-Thomist vision of reality.
By nature, our minds are oriented toward knowledge of the material universe. "All knowledge begins in the senses" (Aristotle), and the senses operate through physical interaction with the material world. The physical sciences are ultimately based on sense knowledge--what we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. We easily understand matter acting on matter because that is what we see all the time: my fingers tap the keys, the keyboard sends signals to the computer, the computer produces characters on the screen, and so on.
Science traces cause-and-effect in physical relationships. For the most part, we can readily envision one material thing or force acting on another material thing or force. The thought that everything we see in the universe is nothing but particles and forces is a comprehensive and attractive cosmology. Where a primitive mythology saw the earth as a flat plate standing on the back of a turtle, which in turn stood on the back of an elephant, which stood on a turtle standing on the back of an elephant, ad infinitum, so that it was "turtles and elephants all the way down," modern science says that everything is particles and fields, all the way down.
With this intense training and conditioning in the scientific outlook, it is difficult for the modern mind to understand how pure spirits (God, angels, demons) can act on matter, especially if by "understanding" we mean "drawing a picture." There is neither need nor room to invoke metaphysical activity when the universe is understood as a set of particles and fields that follow the laws of physics. The materialist may take refuge in a stoic outlook on life: "It is what it is."
Christians necessarily must believe that matter is open to the action of pure spirits, i.e., personal beings that possess intellect, will, and existence, but that have no materiality at all. If God and the angels are locked out of the universe by the principles of physical cause-and-effect, then God cannot have created the universe, cannot govern the universe, cannot have entered the universe in the Incarnation, cannot work miracles of any kind, and cannot answer our prayers. We don't know how pure spirits can act on the material world; we do know that they can and do act on matter.
The reason why have no picture of how a pure spirit can act on particles and fields is that only material particles and fields can be represented in pictures. A being that, by nature, has no extension in time or space cannot be shown in drawings; picture-thinking must give way to metaphysical reasoning. This is a "dark night" for the mind. It goes against the grain to abandon visual representations, models, or analogies. Physicists who do Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED, Feynman) must make the same sacrifice. If we really want to know what ultimate reality is like in either the physical or metaphysical realm, we must give up imagery and be led by principles instead.
From the standpoint of natural theology, matter is disposed to the action of pure spirits because it is created by God. The five ways of Aristotle and Thomas show that there must be a single, infinite, existing, good, all-powerful, intelligent, spiritual being who is the cause of the material universe; if there were no First Cause, there would be no matter. But if there is a First Cause, it necessarily follows that spirit can act on matter. We have no picture of what the "interface" between spirit and matter looks like. All we can say is that spirit can produce and act on matter; we do not have, and cannot have, a scientific map of how this is so.
Besides this certitude that matter can be acted on by pure spirit because it is produced by pure spirit, we also have the evidence of embodied spirit acting in the world--all of our own consciousness of ourselves and our intelligent actions. Aristotle saw that the powers of intelligence and free will are spiritual in nature and, as a consequence, not subject to decay when we die. These spiritual powers act in and through our bodies, but do not come from the body. Our inner life is not a by-product of material complexity, as the materialists assert, but is the product of our spirit.
We cannot see that this is so, but we can know it by reasoning metaphysically. We cannot see our own spirit because it is the immaterial cause of our human nature. "The soul is the form of the body" means that our bodily life is caused by our soul, which has the distinctive spiritual powers of intellect and will that set us apart from all other animals. We reason to the existence of these spiritual powers by understanding the kind of cause that alone can account for the effects that we observe, just as we reason to the existence of force fields and quantum phenomena, which are, in themselves, invisible, by reasoning from the effects produced by these fields and phenomena.
There is a natural analogy that may, perhaps, help with the distress we are liable to feel about our inability to see our own spirit: we cannot see our eyes directly. The whole glory of the eye is that, even though it and the extraordinary neural processes that organize the eye's input are material in nature, and even though these physical things come between us and the visible world, the eye does not see itself but sees what is outside itself. We can only see our eyes in the reflection of a mirror; we can only trace the neural connections by believing that what is known about neural anatomy and neurology from the study of other people, living or dead, applies to what is happening in our minds. There is no way to cut into our own brains to see the neurons firing that carry the information from the eye to the brain or from the brain to the center of our self-consciousness.
The operation of our eyes is so natural and effortless that we never stop to express doubt about whether we have eyesight even though we cannot see ourselves seeing. In the same way, the fact that we cannot directly observe the spiritual powers that equip us to think, every thought we have is fresh evidence that we are, in fact, embodied spirits.
If God can act in the world, and if we can act in the world, so can angels, demons, the saints in Heaven, and, the souls of the damned in Hell.
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