The Nature of the Soul: The Soul as Narrative (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) 9781409432968, 1409432963

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The Nature of the Soul This book offers a contemporary Christian explication of the word “soul” that uses Wittgenstein and his interpreters to suggest that human intelligence and desire cannot be “mapped into the world” that is described by science and metaphysics. It examines the Aristotelian notion of the soul as one who acts in the world, and suggests that we construct ourselves, our narratives, by our actions in history. Drawing upon the resurrection accounts of the gospels, where Jesus is presented as having been ‘translated into the liturgy’ it speculates that the core of the human person, his or her intelligence, can be translated into other material mediums, all the while maintaining personal identity. Reading Aquinas according to the insights of contemporary figures in Anglo-American philosophy of language, Klein argues that, ultimately, to be a soul is to be a narrative destined for Christic incorporation into the Book of Life spoken of in Revelation.

ASHGATE NEW CRITICAL THINKING IN RELIGION, THEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL STUDIES The Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. Headed by an international editorial advisory board of acclaimed scholars spanning the breadth of religious studies, theology and biblical studies, this openended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Other Recently Published Titles in the Series: Cassian’s Conferences Scriptural Interpretation and the Monastic Ideal Christopher J. Kelly Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality Testing Religious Truth-claims R. Scott Smith Thomas Torrance’s Mediations and Revelation Titus Chung Dalit Theology and Christian Anarchism Keith Hebden Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities Sustenance and Sustainability Pankaj Jain Piety and Responsibility Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika John N. Sheveland Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness Christopher B. Barnett The Trinity and Theodicy The Trinitarian Theology of von Balthasar and the Problem of Evil Jacob H. Friesenhahn

The Nature of the Soul The Soul as Narrative

Terrance W. Klein St. Bonaventure University, USA

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingd on, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Terrance W. Klein 2012 Terrance W. Klein has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Klein, Terrance W., 1958– The nature of the soul : the soul as narrative. – (Ashgate new critical thinking in religion, theology and biblical studies) 1. Soul—Christianity. 2. Soul. 3. Philosophy of mind. I. Title II. Series 233.5–dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klein, Terrance W., 1958– The nature of the soul : the soul as narrative / Terrance W. Klein. p. cm. – (New critical thinking in religion, theology, and biblical studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–4094–3296–8 1. Soul. 2. Philosophical anthropology. 3. Theological anthropology. 4. Storytelling. 5. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. BD421.K54 2012 233'.5–dc23 2012009191 ISBN 9781409432968 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgments  

vii

1

What a Piece of Work is Man  

2

Mapping the World  

19

3

Too Too Sullied Flesh  

37

4

A Narrative of Desire: Hebraic Usage  

45

5

Plato Summons the Soul  

59

6

Aristotle’s Actor  

73

7

Aquinas  

85

8

A New Name and a New Future  

107

9

Shuffled Off This Mortal Coil  

135

Bibliography   Index  

1

153 159

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Acknowledgments Excerpts used with permission: Braine, David. (1992). The Human Person: Animal and Spirit. Copyright © 2005 by University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556. All rights reserved. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1961). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London, Routledge. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.

For Douglas, noblest soul I know This page has been left blank intentionally

“You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God and they will reign on earth.” Revelation 5: 9–10

Chapter 1

What a Piece of Work is Man Gently to Hear, Kindly to Judge, our Play We learn what it means to be human from the stories that we tell. We know what it means to suffer because of tales like those of Job, Jonah, Sisyphus, Socrates, and Charlie Brown. We fully expect to fall in love because of plays like Romeo and Juliet, countless romantic comedies, and torch songs. We picture ourselves as destined to challenge the skies because of Icarus, the Wright Brothers, and Star Trek. Stories narrate our humanity, and, in doing so, they reveal the deepest truths about ourselves. When I write that they narrate our humanity, I do not mean that they simply record our humanity, though they certainly do this. I mean that they wax and weave it. They make it—they make us—into something more than it was before the story was told. If one thinks of the life of a person as a story, one sees the same. With each life lived, with all its decisions, triumphs, and tragedies, a new story has been told. This is why one can say that the deepest truth of our humanity is its absolute boundlessness. We’re not running out of stories. If one were to try to picture that humanity, rather than tell stories, one would have to employ the most expansive images that we know: the magnitude of space, the eternity of God, the intricacies of the subatomic universe. Yet all of these would somehow be less suitable than stories. Why? Because stories grow along with our humanity. In narration they come to an end, but they need not be finished when the narrator falls silent. They continue on in the imagination of the hearer. In this sense, a story, as a bearer of meaning, is quite different than a conceptual model or an equation. The contrast is worth exploring, because it reveals a fundamental distinction between ourselves and the world from which we emerge. The expository value of a conceptual model lies in its stability. Relationships between the elements within the model are fixed and ready for calculation. Think of chemistry’s periodic table of elements, or of something as rudimentary as a number line. The relationships remain stable. And when a mathematical equation, based upon this stability, works, nothing can be added to the elegance of its staid symmetry. But when a story wows us, even though it is perfectly complete as it stands, an absolute jewel of insight and discovery that would defy any sequel, we know that the saga doesn’t end. We add to it in our imaginations. In fact, we’ve already done this in the very act of encountering the story. We can’t contain the fecund combustion between the story’s words and our own imaginations. This is why so

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many of us prefer written stories to their visual representation in film, because our imaginations are always richer than Hollywood’s. Shakespeare incorporates the imaginative faculty that humans bring to stories into the prologue of Henry the Fifth. He breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge that a stage is only a wooden platform without the imagination of the audience: “For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings.” O for a muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention: A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene. Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels, Leashed to the hounds, should famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! Since a crookèd figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to the great account, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high-uprearèd and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder. Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: Into a thousand parts divide one man And make imaginary puissance. Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times, Turning the accomplishments of many years Into a hourglass – for the which supply, Admit Chorus to this history, Who, Prologue-like, your humble patience pray, Gentle to hear, kindly to judge our play. Henry V, Prologue

Pictures and movies, at least the best of them, also expand in our imaginations, because they are also stories. Pictures could be called wordless stories, and movies

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are stories told in pictures, words, sounds, and music. In a painting or a photograph, we imagine what lies just out of the frame, just off camera. “Since a crooked figure may / Attest in little place a million.” Typically we do this without the realization that it’s happening, because pictures and films have become a way of life for us, what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called a “language game,” something we inherited when we first began learning to be a human in a given culture. So, watching a movie, we imagine all of Paris surrounding us, even though we only see a small street scene. We picture Gene Kelly, still singing and dancing in the rain, even though our own lives have moved on. Shakespeare knows the answer he puts to our imaginations. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?

Stories, whether told in words, on pallette, in photography, or on film, never stop living in their own realms but also never stop expanding when we return to them. This is why we instinctively weave them when we desire to know ourselves. Stories grow with us. The story teller is never subsumed by his tale, even in autobiography. As long as he exists, he can add to, and alter, the story. He’s not an inert element within it; he’s the source of the saga. Stories begin again, and with a greater depth and resonance, when we return to them. They both weather and wax, because our humanity, our interests and our desires, never stops growing. This is why the same person never listens to any story twice. An equation might as well be set in stone, but a story lives because we enter it, we animate it with our desires. And there’s the verb that deserves this book: to animate, to bring to life. This is a work about the soul; specifically, its meaning for Christian theology. I will be arguing that to have a soul is to have a story, to be that part of creation, or the world if you will, that certainly can be explained as part of nature, and yet can’t be explained away by nature. To have a soul is to be a creature of history, a self who simply is a story, a historically formed narrative, if you will. I fully realize that to call the soul a story doesn’t sound metaphysically apt, but of course the problem with Western metaphysics, as Heidegger showed, is that it is based upon things within the world. It is organized around our desire to make use of, even to exploit, those things. I will be arguing that metaphysics is something of a map that we wield to navigate the world around us, but that it doesn’t do much to explain the person holding the map. Another way of saying the same: the human person is the presupposition of any possible metaphysic, not a member of one. Of course one can, and should, speak philosophically of the soul as a nature, and I do just that when I argue that Aristotle’s understanding of the soul as a stable congruent of powers is still valid, and even helpful, today. The problem is that speaking of the soul as an Aristotelian “nature” doesn’t capture

The Nature of the Soul

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the dynamism that a theologian needs. It doesn’t evoke the soul’s destiny. For a theologian, or a philosopher who seeks ultimacy down to the last bramble, you haven’t explained an entity without explaining its purpose, without giving some answer to the question of why it exists. When I speak of the soul, I am going to be arguing that to be human is to be a story. It is to be an actor full of desires, indeed, desire incarnate, weaving a tale in history, weaving her story, which is her self. As self and as story, she seeks completion, denouement, in what we have traditionally called God. Or as St Thomas Aquinas put it, “omnia naturaliter appetunt Deum implicitur” (De Veritate 21: 4).1 It’s fine to speak, as Aristotle and Thomas did, of the soul having a nature, essentially a set of acts that define what we can expect of a given entity. The issue is that for humans, who create history because of the transcendence that language gives us over the material world, the better question is to ask what cannot be expected of us, because we are, as Aquinas would say, quodammodo omnia, in some way all things. Aristotle thought of natures synchronically—this is what you can expect of any given nature, at any given time—but a synchronic approach will never capture the human, because we are diachronic. Because we are historical beings, anything might be expected of us, if not today, then tomorrow. Shakespeare’s Macbeth expresses my understanding of the soul—that a soul is being en-acted in our personal stories—when he reacts to the news that Lady Macbeth is dead: She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. Macbeth, V, v, 16–27

Of course, Macbeth is in the throes of despair. He thinks the tale, his tragedy, has come to signify nothing. His story is that of a humanity demeaned, lost and in need of redemption. But that doesn’t make the story senseless, without meaning. It still exists as a harbinger for others. To be human is to learn from others, to allow their humanity to extend the reach of our own. As long as we have a story, we have a self. We exist purposefully, even if tragically, in the world. 1

  All things naturally and implicitly desire God.

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And a believer might want to assert that Macbeth’s story isn’t yet complete, that no human tale can be said to have ended until it has been written into the Book of the Lamb. Only a tale found unworthy of that book could truly be called absurd. Indeed, if there could be “a tale signifying nothing,” that may be the best way to define a soul lost to hell, because such a tale would literally be senseless. Nothing can be gained through hearing it. It confounds understanding. Woven in and of history, it yet refuses to form. It has no meaning. That’s the fate Macbeth fears, as he muses, shortly after murdering King Duncan, “To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself” (II, ii, 71). The Book of Revelation envisions our stories as taken up, into the story of the Lamb. Either our sagas are destined to find their meaning, their denouement, in the divine, or they defy meaning itself: Then I saw a great white throne and the one who sat on it; the earth and the heaven fled from his presence, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, the book of life. And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books. And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire. Revelation 20: 11–15

Either way, whether destined for the Book of Life or the Lake of Fire, Shakespeare correctly identifies the human person as an actor, an agent at work in the world, fashioning his or her own story, creating something that is not reducible to nature, especially not nature when it is conceived as a vast, ineluctable and invariant, mechanism. In The Comedy of Errors, Adriana refers to her husband as A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, We bid be quiet when we hear it cry. But were we burdened with like weight of pain, As much or more we should ourselves complain. The Comedy of Errors, II, i, 34–7

The issue is that, like Adriana, we recognize ourselves, and our fellows, as actors, as those who share the world with us and want something of it. We recognize our own humanity in their stories, their words. As the French phenomenologist Georges Gusdorf wrote in Speaking (La Parole), “The affirmation of individuality begins when it has stepped back, when speech confers on it the double capacity of evocation of self and invocation of others” (93). There is no part of us that is not of the world, and yet we are not reducible to it. We act in the world as an

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actor upon a stage, and we recognize others as our fellow actors. Or as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “My attitude toward him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul” (1967: 178e). The soul may well be a topic of seemingly endless speculation, but that we are confronted by others as irreducible claimants to life, that we see ourselves in this way, is everything that philosophy means by the word “phenomenological,” as something immediately given, irreducible, an obvious starting point for any further deliberation. According to Wittgenstein, a philosopher might speculate—might be of the opinion—that the other is reducible to the mechanisms of nature, but one cannot treat the other in this way. As Emmanuel Levinas has shown in his phenomenological treatment of the human face, the visage of the other makes immediate demands upon us. It is irreducible both in its presentation of self and in its claim upon us. I Desire to Know God and the Soul It is currently fashionable to insist that Christian theology has no foundations, other than the revelation of God. That sentence can stand as written, but it immediately prompts questions. If by “foundations” one means clearly identified and readily affirmed truths about the nature of reality, self-evident starting points for philosophical discourse, those are indeed our times. But then one must admit that even divine revelation stands today on an unstable base, since our ability to identify that revelation rests upon our own convictions, our prejudices, and our own starting points. Of course, to a certain extent this has always been the case. If it weren’t, there would be no ability to resist the Word of God. It would be something so apparent as to be inescapable, but a deity made that manifest would obliterate the very freedom of the human person’s response. Whatever carping one may want to do on the subject of foundations, it matters a great deal whether or not we define ourselves as open to something essentially other than ourselves or as a closed, mechanized system of cause and effect. If the latter is true, the word “soul” can have no meaning, and “God” cannot be used to designate that which would complete the human person. Contemporary philosophy correctly insists that all knowledge is fiduciary, meaning that the human person can’t help but bestow trust upon some tradition, some experience of life, some communal insight. Ironically, some form of faith then becomes a necessary converse of anti-foundationalism. We may not be able to verify our confidence in a manner that is self-evident to all, but we can’t forgo the act of placing our confidence in something. We can’t stop acting, can’t call a halt to living. Even if we insisted that nothing gives confidence to the correctness of our insights, that nothing guarantees the morality of our actions, even then, not to act—the failure to act—would still be an action, simply because it would still be a stance taken. What should be self-evident is that to be a human being is to act. We can’t resist writing books, asking questions, and developing theories. We can’t forego falling in love, can’t fail to be moved by the beautiful and appalled by the

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heinous, whether they be aesthetic or ethical. Charles Taylor puts it so well: “We are not selves in the same way that we are organisms, or we don’t have selves in the way we have hearts and livers. We are living beings with these organs quite independently of our self-understandings or - interpretations, or the meanings things have for us. But we are only our selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good” (1989: 34). And that is why the very meaning of the word “soul” stands at the core of what is called fundamental theology, foundational reflections on the meaning of human experience, of humanity itself as a reality open to communion with God. If by the word “soul” we mean, at the very least, that the human person is one who must act, who must go out of the self in order to become the self, then the word “soul” is essential to theological discourse. One cannot speak of God without first showing that the human person is a reality open to something other than itself, open to what has traditionally been called “transcendence”. St Augustine couldn’t have put it more than succinctly than he did: “I desire to know God and the soul” (Soliloquies, ii, 7). Language and Transcendence What is transcendence? It need not be pictured as something “supernatural,” a share that we possess in another world not our own. Here it simply means the boundlessness of our world, an inexhaustible human fecundity due to our ability to wield language. The Anglo-American tradition has been focused on language for well over a century, but it has been so centered upon what language does, its relationship to the world—again the desire for exploitation is never far—that it rarely stops to wonder at the sheer existence of language and its relationship to our own humanity. A continental phenomenologist is therefore a helpful interlocutor. Georges Gusdorf reminds us that “[s]peech, in its full reality, manifests the transcendent power of man who, by inserting himself in the world, gives meaning to himself and to the world” (1965: 45). In other words, the more we talk and write, the more we create, the more human we become. And “the purest expression, the affirmation of spirit in art, founds a new communion, and perfect communication liberates in us possibilities of expression that until then lay dormant” (1965: 57). In the end, either the sheer fecundity of our linguistic ability to create worlds means something, or “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” When forced into imprisonment, Shakespeare’s King Richard II responds: I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.

8

The Nature of the Soul My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father; and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts; And these same thoughts people this little world, In humors like the peoples of this world, For no thought is contented. The better sort, As thoughts of things divine, are intermixed With scruples, and do set the faith itself against the faith… Richard II, V, v, 1–14

It’s all there: the sheer fecundity of the human imagination, its ability to “people the world” with “a generation of still-breeding thoughts.” Even if the possibility of every other action were denied, the human person would continue to act in the imagination and to find, even there, a vitality that breeds discord—the faith itself against the faith—because it is born of illimitable desires. When it comes to our humanity, equations, theorems, hypotheses, models, and paradigms, all have their place, but their role is to describe something inert about the human being, something less than our humanity as we actually live it. A human being can be explained as part of the natural world, that is, as an entity explicable in terms of empirically observed regularities. But when this is done, you have explained a part of nature that we call the human person, but what you have not yet done is to encounter a human person. To jump ahead to Aristotle and Aquinas, you haven’t discovered an actor in a story, you haven’t recognized one who acts, whose deeds are not subsumed by natural explanation, not because they defy such explanation, but because natural explanation can’t evoke the actor, the one whose own intelligence is offering the very description of the self. There is as much difference between a psychological explanation of human action and the actual human actor as there is between a trail and the one who walked upon it. You can draw a picture of movement, but pictures themselves don’t move. You can describe human actions, but descriptions aren’t the actions of a human being. Or, to put it more precisely, even a description of a human being is a human act, which is to say that it requires a human being to act, to pursue some value latent in the world as part of his or her completion of self. Human beings tell their stories, even their scientific stories, in pursuit of values. One could say that human beings perceive what lies in nature and then write history. Hence “man calls the world into being. One might add, as well, that the world calls man, that it waits for the revelation of man in order to be fully expressed” (Gusdorf 1965: 47). To think that a human being is subsumed by nature would be to assert that history itself doesn’t exist, that its triumphs and tragedies are simply the unfolding of natural forces. A very insightful interpreter of Aquinas, the Dominican friar Herbert McCabe, suggested something very similar to what I present here. He argued “that we should think of the self in the narrative mode and recognize that narrative history of a

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certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human action.” He went on to suggest that “living a human life, having a human soul, is being a character in a story, or rather in many stories, and that this belongs to being in a history or rather in many histories” (2008: 51). As we write our stories, we compose ourselves. What’s in a Name? The great contribution of Wittgenstein’s second published work, the Philosophical Investigations, was the realization that the meaning of a word is not necessarily some object being referenced within the world. Early in the Investigations he acknowledges that “[f]or a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (1967: 20e; §43). Or, as Juliet says of Romeo’s appellation, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (II, i, 85–6). Nowhere is the difference in the approach to language more pronounced between the work of the early and later Wittgenstein than on the question of a word’s meaning. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein insisted that words, at least when properly employed, needed to stand for elements or features of the world.2 Otherwise, our assertions would literally be meaningless. In the Investigations, however, philosophers are told to “look and see” how a word is used. “One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that” (1967: 109e; §340). This is done by observing language games, a metaphor that Wittgenstein coined to express the logical character and coherence that exist in the skeins of words that we employ. A word’s meaning is a function of its usage in a given pattern of words, a “language game.” For example, being on the same “spot” on a dance floor is different than being in the same “spot,” namely unemployed, as I was a year ago. One is a spatial locator; the other, a social description. Human beings learn language games as they learn language. Language games are so inherent to life that we normally don’t recognize our employment of them, unless we’re writing comedy skits, say, about the attempts of aliens from outer space to understand us. Shakespeare’s clowns are forerunners in this genre. Language games thus surreptitiously reflect and express cultural interests and desires. One culture may have only a few words to describe something that is green; another might have many more. Of course, any given culture takes its language games for granted. Their logic and usage seem self-evident until juxtaposed with those of another culture.

2

  Logic was considered a “feature” of the world. Thus, for example, one didn’t have to assert that the word “not” represented a thing. It was a “logical operative,” arising from the fact that we can make true or false assertions about the world.

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It’s difficult to imagine a word whose meaning is more defined by usage than the word “soul.” Both those who insist upon the reality of a soul and those who would deny it need to follow Wittgenstein’s advice and “look and see” how the word is used. What they will discover, when they do, is a myriad of meanings, and yet the many usages of the word “soul” all depict the human person as distinct from, yet active within, the world. In contemporary life the word “soul” functions quite successfully in various language games. Christians speak of an immortal soul, one that survives the destruction of the body and is destined for judgment by God, but, even for those who reject this belief, it makes complete sense to talk of “losing one’s soul.” We call each other soulmates. We speak of soulful music. A park bench in Central Park bears the inscription, “Central Park, the soul of New York City.” “Conceptualists,” philosophers who think that every word we use represents an essence in reality, with an essence being a class of objects standing within the world, might be inclined to say that the first usage reflects the proper essence of a soul, while the others are merely metaphorical employments of the word, the detritus in popular parlance of the properly Christian usage of the term. One of my purposes in what follows is to show how wrong such a presumption is. The word “soul” doesn’t denote an object, not even an occult one invisible to empirical science, but that does not mean that such diverse talk of souls is meaningless. In saying that the word “soul” doesn’t denote an object, I am far from denying its reality, which I very much seek to affirm. It would simply be clearer to say that the soul denotes an identity, which in this case is a destiny born of desire. An “identity” immediately raises the question of relationship, and that’s the proper place to seek the meaning of the word “soul” because the word is used to relate us to the world around us, to each other, and to God as our destiny. One could say that a soul isn’t something one possesses, that it makes no more sense to talk of possessing a soul than it does to speak of possessing our humanity. “Soul” is the word we use to designate ourselves and our destiny in the world. So here, “I am” seems less misleading than “I have.” Again, as an instrument, metaphysics doesn’t seem particularly well suited to the human; it tends to catalogue things to be possessed, while the human is essentially that which desires, desires even beyond possession. And, of course, the various employments of the word “soul” aren’t simply a synchronic or contemporary tangle. The word’s meaning has constantly shifted in time. Here is how Paul MacDonald introduces the complexity of a diachronic treatment of the topic in his superb work, History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations about Soul, Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume: The history of the concepts of mind and soul is a complex and twisted network of many paths, each path strewn with obstacles, dead ends, false or hidden beginnings, relapses into old ways of thinking and forward leaps of imaginative projection. One of the principal problems is to sort out exactly which issue is being addressed when one holds up for scrutiny any one of the numerous terms involved in the ancestry

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of the modern concept of mind or soul. The obverse side of this same problem is to think that, in starting one’s inquiry with the concept of mind, for example, instead of soul or spirit, and then making an effort to discern its earliest lineament, one has a sure grasp of a clearly defined, well-marked out concept. In other words, if there is no consensus on what the concept of mind picks out or what it makes reference to, if the historian cannot appeal to a readily identifiable conceptual item, then how can any effort to trace its ancestry ever be confident that discussions of an earlier version are indeed a version of the same thing? (2003: 1)

And he quickly adds, “[a]nd it does not serve to clarify the issue by peremptorily claiming that ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ and ‘psyche’ have all been subsumed under, or eliminated in favor of, the concept of mind.” In the authors and sources to be examined, these terms will exchange places with each other, sometimes fruitfully, sometimes disastrously. Nevertheless, what each of these terms share is an inability to be plotted into the material world, because each is used to designate the historically dynamic self that acts over against and within that world, that comes to completion through interaction with it.3 In what follows I will be arguing that the word “soul” does not designate an occult, secondary—or primary, depending upon your squint—substance that accompanies our physical presence in the world. This picture was first painted by Plato, but it was replaced by a much deeper image by Aristotle: that of the human person as an agent acting within the world. And this was subsequently given a magnificent new setting when Aquinas combined it with two fundamental doctrines of Christian revelation: the world as the creation of God and the resurrection of the body. And yet the modern age largely repudiated what it saw as a simplistic, perhaps too spiritual, icon of the human person as one oriented toward God. Instead, it embraced Descartes new picture, that of the human mind set over and against the world. This would lead to two major philosophical dead ends in our attempt to understand our own human nature: physical reductionism, in which everything about the human person is reduced to a mechanistic model of empirical causes and effects, or dualism, in which what is most deeply human, our minds—or our souls if one prefers—are declared “inner” and therefore forever separate from the material world. Both views would vie for supremacy in the modern world, because, as Marilynne Robinson so aptly puts it in her Absence of Mind, “[w]hoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history” (2010: 32). 3

  Diachronically, it should be noted that “the English word ‘soul’ does not have a Latin or Greek root, but instead derives from an Old English and Old High German root (for example, sawol, seel, seol); ‘soul’ was used in the Geneva Bible (1560–1650) and the King James Version (1611 onward) to translate the Latin anima and the Greek psychē. In the LXX the Greek psychē is used almost 90 per cent of the cases to translate the Hebrew nepesh, which means either ‘desire’ or ‘vitality’ or ‘life-force’” (MacDonald 2003: 2).

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Talking Away the Soul Reductionism itself is not the enemy. It’s an essential component of scientific methodology. Indeed, reduction is the expected result of analysis. “It is only by separating complex phenomena into smaller components and analyzing them in detail that larger problems eventually can be resolved” (Anderson 1998: 69). But, of course, analysis always needs to be directed by synthesis. We have to have some picture of the whole in order to perceive that a part is just that: a part (of the whole); as Plato saw long ago, we have to have some idea of the right answer in order to ask the appropriate question. Nancey Murphy offers this helpful distinction: Methodological reductionism is a research strategy of analyzing the thing to be studied into parts. Causal reductionism is the view that the behavior of the parts of the system (ultimately, the parts studied by subatomic physics) is determinative of the behavior of all higher level entities. Thus, this is the thesis that all causation in the hierarchy is “bottom-up”. If this thesis is true, it would follow that the laws pertaining to higher sciences in the hierarchy should be reducible to the laws of physics. (1998: 129)

Reduction, as a stage in scientific methodology, isn’t the problem, but a reductionist world view is, even for the scientist. “It seems likely that a reductionist world view may lead to research designs that restrict the range of questions that are asked and thus the interpretation of the data produced” (Anderson 1998: 70). By their natures, the empirical sciences tend to rely most heavily upon analysis; the humanities, upon synthesis. But both are essential heuristic acts of the human intellect. Science also has to have some vision of the whole. “Experiments are verifications of hypotheses of what we think we will happen. Hypotheses are birthed from theories, holistic views of what we think is the case.” It not unscientific to postulate that “descriptions and explanations formulated at a higher level (e.g. human consciousness) can be seen as supervening on lower-level explanation, even though they presume the necessity of the operation of processes at a lower level” (Brown 1998: 222). In what follows, I will be arguing, along with so many others, that higher levels of complexity, precisely because they emerge from the interaction of human beings with each other, cannot be predicted or adequately explained by lower-level processes. As a world view, reductionism has become a popular, ideological stance. A single technique in scientific methodology has been made to represent the metaphysical notion that reality is always causally determined from below, from basic, constituent elements rather than also from the horizons, or wholes, in which the human person, as a language user, always dwells. Here is how the Scottish philosopher David Braine expresses the divide in contemporary philosophy, where one seems forced to choose between world views that orient around the human person or those which ignore that person’s significance:

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There have grown up two kinds of philosophical worlds. In one, the universe is viewed according to the perspectives suggested by language, by the phenomenology of experience or by each person’s existential situation, and there is no preoccupation with bringing the human into compatibility with a science conceived in purely physical terms and quasi-mechanistically. In the other, it is a primary datum that physical science is to be regarded as self-sufficient within its own sphere and to be allowed entirely free rein so that one must not hold open the possibility that everything physical – the physical aspects of animal behavior and human activity included – is a product and reflection of material process, capable of being brought within a scheme of explanation in physical and quasimechanical terms. Between these two philosophical worlds there has been little sympathy or contact. (1992: 19)

As an undergraduate, I experienced the breach first hand when I transferred from a seminary college, keeping my major as philosophy and enrolling in an introductory course in linguistic analysis at a state university. It was my first, and a very unpleasant, encounter with Wittgenstein’s work. The professor began with Wittgenstein’s famous “picturing theory” of language, from the Tractatus. Listening to a proposition being compared to the model of an accident scene, I couldn’t understand what had happened to the traditional philosophical themes that I had studied in the seminary, themes such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. And the breach isn’t only in philosophy classes. How can the same word “soul” be indispensable in the humanities and yet be considered nonsensical in the sciences? And what happens in a discipline like psychology, which straddles both discourses, but whose own etymological roots reveal its focus upon the soul, the self trying to dwell within the world? I make frequent reference to literary works. This is far from a simple desire to ornament my prose. Rather, I want to illustrate that the questions that literature asks, and answers, however inchoately, are shared by theology. They represent a fundamental human impulse to know what is real and to become the self through interaction with it. How else can Prospero so proudly proclaim, “Me poor man – my library was dukedom large enough” (The Tempest, I, ii, 109–10). The search for what is real spans the globe or it peers into the self. Sometimes it requires a laboratory. Sometimes it needs only a book of poems. Writing of the confidence that we give to literature and the arts, George Steiner links that trust to nothing less than the properly theological: “A semantics, a poetics of correspondence, of decipherability and truth-values arrived across time and consensus, are strictly inseparable from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence. Thus the origin of the axiom of meaning and of the God-concept is a shared one” (1989: 119). It will soon be obvious in what follows that I do not approach language from the post-Enlightenment position that its primary function is representational. I have taken Wittgenstein at his word, that language is usage, and therefore confidently return, though hopefully not naively, to the sort of confidence in language that

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Aquinas and the medievals possessed. Namely, as the Dominican scholar OlivierThomas Venard shows compellingly in Littérature et Théologie: Une Saison en Enfer: language for St Thomas was a graced channel of communication with God, not an instrument for exploitation of the world. More than channel, language is the ocean of meaning in which we dwell. Theology is a type of literature, because, like story-telling, it possesses a dynamism seeking fulfillment. As Kierkegaard would insist, when theology begins to build systems it starts to ape disciplines far from its own, restless heart. And, worse than that, the taunt attention that theology should give to the story that we call revelation begins to lapse. Here is how Jean-Luc Marion expressed much the same in God Without Being: Hors-Texte, suggesting that the words we weave become opportunities for the incarnation of the Word in which we are woven. Christ haunts all of literature, theological or not. One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure. Precisely not the pleasure of the text, the pleasure – unless it has to with a joy – of transgressing it: from word to the Word, from the Word to words, incessantly and in theology alone, since there alone the Word finds in the words nothing less than a body. The body of the text does not belong to the text, but to the One who is embodied in it. Thus theological writing always transgresses itself, just as theological speech feeds on the silence in which, at least it speaks correctly. In other words, to try one’s hand at theology requires no other justification than the extreme pleasure of writing. (1991: 1)

And of course Steiner is also quite right. All great literature expresses the religious impulse: to find meaning and to address it by name. A Look Ahead What follows is a marshaling of some of the best thinkers, each of whom shows us a way to see the human person as more than a mechanism, or as a ghost within such. I am heavily indebted to the work of two sets of scholars: interpreters of Aquinas and of Wittgenstein. Among those of Aquinas, I will frequently cite Etienne Gilson and Anton Pegis. My reading of Wittgenstein is heavily in debt to those who see an affinity between him and St Thomas, people like David Burrell, Anthony Kenny, Fergus Kerr, and Herbert McCabe. At least twice, Father Burrell substantially altered this book, without yet reading it, simply by offering a wellchosen reading recommendation. I will be arguing that when we use the word “soul” we are referencing human beings as psychosomatic wholes. To use a very apt phrase of the great Karl Rahner, we are “spirit in the world.” The human person is an intelligence that emerges in the world, one which knows the world but also knows itself in doing so. Shakespeare puts it so well when Hamlet describes the human person as rooted

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in earth, the paragon of animals, and yet transcending the world with a reach like a god’s. “What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god – the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” (Hamlet, II, ii, 305–08). If one seeks a better picture of the soul than a ghost that accompanies our bodies while we live, and then departs upon death, one should think of the human person as a story. A story has as actor and a plot. Events happen to someone, and he or she is transformed by them in the process. But for the human person, events have more than physical causes. They always come embedded in meanings, and meanings are the unique product of language. The hand of one person strikes the back of another. Only our linguistic worlds determine whether one has received a pat on the back or a shove out the door. Gusdorf writes: “For each of us language accompanies the creation of the world—it is the agent of that creation. It is by speaking that man comes into the world and the world comes into thought” (1965: 39). Or, in two lapidary sentences of Charles Taylor: “To study persons is to study beings who only exist in, or are partly constituted by a certain language … There is no way we could be inducted into personhood except by being initiated into language” (1989: 34–5). One could say that events become the human person, because language allows us to make the world, and what happens within the world, a part of ourselves. So that “concretely to be a human being is to be a character in a life story—this is what is known as your ‘self’” (McCabe 2008: 52). But of course stories must include three essentials: a beginning, action, and an end (cf. Aristotle’s Poetics 7,1450b26). I will be arguing that when we say that the human person has a soul—how much better to say “is a soul”—we mean that, despite the progress of the natural sciences, the first astounding fact about being a human person is the utter gratuitousness of ourselves. We, and the world from which we come, did not have to be. And to say that every story must have an action is to say that we must interact with others, with the world around us. A monad can’t be a story; humanity arose, and continues to exist, as a corporate affair. And every story must have an ending. Of course, in post-modern sensibilities it can be an ending that confounds, that leaves us adrift or hanging, but even then, the ending has been designed for that effect, so it is still quite purposeful. I want to suggest that when we use the word “soul,” we are saying that our stories end in something outside of ourselves, that they are destined to be taken up by God’s story, God’s entrance into human history in the person of Jesus the Christ. One can “picture” the soul as a text, one destined to be incorporated into a larger work, namely the Gospel, when it has been transcribed into, and transformed by, the lives of the saints. In his insightful work Real Presences, George Steiner argues “that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity for human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence” (1989: 3). Of course, one could argue that asserting the transcendence of the human person in the world ultimately rises or falls upon the question of whether or not

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the human person survives the passing of the world, or, more precisely, her passing from the world, if that is indeed what happens. So at the conclusion of this book I will endeavor to marshal the New Testament evidence in an attempt to adumbrate a more adequate horizon. I will suggest that, if the human person is a text, a drama writ into history, then a human person, like a text, can be translated into other mediums. We can remain identities, bound to the physical world but translated into something both radically different and yet relationally identical. I have made no attempt to present an inclusive, much less an exhaustive, history of the concept of the soul. Those seeking such should consult the works I’ve referenced. Instead I have grouped my considerations around the writings of key figures in the history of Western thought, often allowing the intervening centuries and their writings to appear here only as glosses upon these giants. Thus, for example, the early centuries of Christian thought on the soul only appear as commentaries upon Plato, for such indeed they are. This book is not a historical treatment of any of its subjects. It doesn’t even present its thinkers and epochs in historical order. It presumes that the reader already knows something of the Hebrew scriptures, of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Descartes. It has, if you will, a story to tell, and these locales and figures are introduced to play their part in the narration. Because it is my story, with my own plot and purpose, I will often write about what others have said of these figures and then of what I draw from them, though I will give them plenty of opportunity to speak for themselves. The book begins with Ludwig Wittgenstein for two reasons. Because when he confronted what might be called the problem of the self, or soul if you will, he discovered the dualism of Descartes that so bedevils modern thought. And yet the later Wittgenstein provides us, to use one of his own images, a way to show the fly out of the bottle. Wittgenstein helps us to see the human person more holistically, and I will be using his “therapeutic” approach to evaluate and interpret our history. After Wittgenstein, two distorting images of the human soul are examined: one ancient and one modern. Plato correctly realized that human intelligence transcends this world, and yet his approach exalted human intelligence at the expense of the world, essentially separating the human intellect from its source. Of course, as Nancey Murphy notes, “[s]ome Christians believe that body-soul dualism is an essential part of Christian teaching” (1998: 1), and, one could add, they always have. I use Dante to illustrate how deeply rooted such dualistic pictures remain in our culture and in our catechesis, though, with his deep understanding of our historical and relational nature, Dante got more right about the nature of the soul than wrong. Dualism doesn’t die easily, because dualism pays its due to the devil. Stephen Post points out that “a major benefit of dualism has been the argument that the presence of a soul confers equal moral worth on all humans” (1998: 196), but as he goes on to show, positing the soul as a separate substance need not confer equality, not if that ephemeral substance is thought to be less present in slaves or women, and so insignificant in animals as to merit no consideration whatsoever.

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So that, “if the idea of a nonmaterial soul has contributed to the course of Western moral life … there are many examples of its contribution, as well, to all that must be considered discriminatory and exclusionary” (1998: 202). From the ancient problematic picture, I turn to an even more ambiguous one, that of Descartes’ dualism. The mind/brain debate is discussed as not only irrelevant for theology per se but also a philosophical muddle that leads to nothing less than scientific sorcery. Here I will be following the philosophical path blazed by David Braine in his magisterial The Human Person: Animal and Spirit. Braine argues that human beings and animals cannot be reduced to mechanisms explained by empiricism alone. Rather they are psychosomatic wholes, who relate to the world as an irreducible unity. He also argues that language ability in humans can in no way be reduced to a physical substratum, and that therefore human beings, distinct within the material world for this ability, must be recognized as possessing what Aristotle would call a unique nature, a stable congregate of attributes based upon actions. Hence, “the world within which we live – within which, as it were, our soul functions – is not a Cartesian or empiricist inner world of perception or ideas as mental objects but an outer or public world” (Braine 1992: 450–51). Somewhat like Dante making his way out of hell, I then begin to examine more holistic images of the human being, beginning with the Hebrew scriptures. These depict the human person as a whole, yet this psycho-physical unity seeks something beyond itself; it hungers for God. The Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions will then be examined as offering more holistic understandings of the human person. Only when it is clear how much the modern discussion of the soul should rest upon the work done by Aristotle and Aquinas do I turn to the New Testament, and there my interest is not a historical treatment of the soul in its pages, but rather a contemporary pondering of its central proclamation, the resurrection of Jesus Christ and its significance for the soul. A Theological Treatise Publishers like names like “Wittgenstein” or “Aquinas” to appear in the title of a work such as this. Books have to be sold, and for that to happen they need to be located in databases by researchers. Hence the titles of my previous monographs, employing the philosopher’s insights, have contained his name: How Things Are in the World: Metaphysics and Theology in Wittgenstein and Rahner (Marquette University Press, 2003) and Wittgenstein and the Metaphysics of Grace (Oxford University Press, 2007). It’s certainly a responsible expectation, because I do see my work as flowing from Wittgenstein’s; however, it can be misleading if one is primarily looking for an exposition of Wittgenstein’s thought. So, for example, one reviewer of the later work wondered why I did not expend my pages in an exegesis of Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Religious Belief.” There are two reasons: others have done this (though rarely well), and it is not my task, which is the

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construction of a systematic theology for the Christian faith. I am not explicating Wittgenstein. I am recounting my own story as he trained me to tell it. Wittgenstein would not have been comfortable calling himself a believer, though he may indeed have been one, despite what his comfort level suggested. One can’t simply use his thought as though it represented a theological synthesis, or even the conceptual structure needed for such a construction. I never make the claim that what I write about metaphysics, theology, grace, or the soul is what Wittgenstein himself thought or would have written. Presumably, had he wanted to do so, he would have. Unfortunately, philosophical and theological areas of research have become so broad and so deep that one who writes in one area is almost always asked to review the work of others writing in the same area. Hence my work tends to be handed to those schooled in Wittgenstein or Aquinas, contemporary philosophers who often have little interest in the tasks of systematic theology. Good enough, but it should be clear that I do not claim to be channeling the Cambridge philosopher in what I write about grace or the soul. I write as a theologian who seeks to interpret the data of revelation, and I do so as one who has learned much from Wittgenstein and, for that matter, from Aquinas. But no theologian can confine his or her labors to the exposition of a philosopher’s thought, especially when the philosopher in question either repudiated or never came to accept the very notion of revelation. To my mind, what Wittgenstein did was to discover the self that science cannot explain, and that is the subject matter of the next chapter.

Chapter 2

Mapping the World Wittgenstein Tries to Map the World and Can’t Find the Self In the early years of the twentieth century, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein set out to draw what he thought would be the ultimate conceptual map, a philosophical framework for all the essential things that we know about the world. He wanted to set science on the firmest possible of foundations, and to do that he sought to map the meaning of every word that we utter. What good would our words be, if they didn’t correspond to reality? But, if all of our words could be located onto something of a linguistic map of reality, with a word representing every possible item in the world, then every word, or symbol used by science, could be assured of relevance, precisely because of its link to reality. Wittgenstein began writing what would come to be called his Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus while he was a soldier on the Eastern front of the First World War. One might think that his experience of war would have challenged the notion that the world was essentially a rational place. But of course history is the narrative of our souls, and Wittgenstein saw his task as mapping the linguistic structure of the empirical world. He opened his work with these magnificent theorems. One could say that he wanted them to be the magna carta of science, or, to pick up a theme from Chapter 1, the self-evident foundations upon which the empirical sciences would rest. The world is all that is the case. (1961; §1) The world is the totality of facts, not of things. (§1.1) The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts. (§1.11) For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case. (§1.12) The facts in logical space are the world. (§1.13) The world divides into facts. (§1.2) Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same. (§1.21)

“The world is all that is the case” (§1). Here, in its opening words, is the goal of Wittgenstein’s project. To make the world of the mind—our picture of what is— completely correspond to the world outside the mind—what really is. The “world” we map must be “all that is the case” because a map without boundaries would only confound and confuse the human mind. As a map, nature can’t be open-ended. We may not have explored all of nature, but it must be as uniform—in the sense

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of following its perceived patterns of regularity—in one region of experience as in the previous. Or, put another way, if nature were open-ended, like history, what would keep our desire to know from degenerating into frenzied despair? Wouldn’t humanity’s quest for knowledge be Sisyphean? Things may change within nature, but nature itself remains constant. We simply have to explore our way across it, however broad its expanse. We have the time. History, on the other hand, is always open-ended. It’s not waiting to be explored. It’s demanding to be lived. But history wasn’t on Wittgenstein’s mind in the Tractatus: it’s not the picture holding him captive. Descartes’ mental self, one disengaged from the world, is. “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (§1.1). This isn’t the slippery slope of idealism. Wittgenstein is saying that facts are our mental points on the map; we generate them with concepts and then judge their veracity; things, on the other hand, lie within the world depicted by the map. Wittgenstein is again delineating the divide between our intelligence’s appropriation of the world and the world itself. Assertions may be true or false, but the assertion that the dog is at the door is not the same thing, whether true or false, as the dog being at the door. “The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts” (§1.11). Of course that is the goal: to “catalogue” everything in the world, to be able to make a true assertion about everything that is. Note that the goal is far from being complete. This is the seemingly Sisyphean strain that science, in all its forms, sets for itself, but the human mind cannot forgo the task. The sheer desire to know, which science evidences, is one manifestation of the boundless character of our humanity. We never say, “we now know enough.” We are inherently ordered towards appropriation of the world. “For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case” (§1.12). Facts do more than simply enumerate objects within the world. They also state what is “the case” with each element, where it stands in relationship to every other element of the world. There is a dog; there is a door; and finally there is the case of the dog being at the door. Furthermore, facts are bivalent. They can be affirmed or denied, be true or false. Asserting that the dog is at the door may be the case, or may not. “The facts in logical space are the world” (§1.13). The world being spoken of here is a heuristic instrument. It’s our mental picture of what is the case, a picture that itself can never be summoned into the mind’s eye in its totality. We may not know all of the natural world, but if we know the rules of nature, and the logical structure that links them, we have the outline of a map for those regions not yet traversed. “The world divides into facts” (§1.2). To know where each fact fits into those parts of the world already mapped would be of incalculable value. It would allow our mental world to function as a living map of the world beyond the mind. “Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same” (§1.21). Whether an assertion is true or false, its meaning is a function of its capacity to be mapped into the world. Assertions can be meaningful or meaningless. Meaningful assertions can be true or false. Either way, they make

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sense, but a meaningless assertion lacks sense. “Oily feferstucks my or greens.” The assertion not only has no reference within the world, it lacks the logical pattern that would allow it to function as part of a map. It can’t be true or false, because it doesn’t fit into any map of the world. What is necessary for both true and false assertions is that they “fit” into logical space. Of course, science hasn’t yet plotted out the relationship between every element in our theorems and hypotheses and every element within the world. The map at this point is still quite rudimentary, like those early maps of the Americas brought back by the first explorers. But it is growing, with each day, with each scientific advance. The Tractatus may be the most significant work of twentieth-century philosophy, but without doubt it’s also the smallest, in terms of length. Wittgenstein thought of it as something of a masterpiece, and it is, because in its seventy-some pages the hopes of science are explicated and the pretensions of positivism, the belief that science can explain everything needing to be explained, are exposed. How so? Towards the end of the work, Wittgenstein turns mystical. This occurs when he tries to determine the place of the human person on the map—the one who does the knowing—only to discover that he can’t. He writes: If I wrote a book called The World as I found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book. – The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world. Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by the eye. (1961: 57; §§5.631–5.633)

Of course, one can place the human person on the “map of the world” if one is speaking about the human person, even about oneself. I can speak of my body, my genetic makeup, even my psychological dispositions. But my speaking about me is not the same as my act of speaking. When that happens, I speak. I act. There is an actor in the original sense of the word. I hold, and mold, the map of the world, including that portion of it that maps my location—but only my location as an object within the world. I as the knowing subject remain above the world.

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Do Genes Steal the Soul? To see the significance of Wittgenstein’s insight, turn to an area where many who hold a reductionist world view think that great strides are being made in explaining away the human person as a free agent, as one who makes a choice to act or not. Aren’t we the product of genes? Isn’t there a genetic pattern that explains—or one day will explain—why we fall in love, why we believe in God, or why we are the sort of person who reads books like this? Those who limit themselves to assertions about the actual findings of science, and not simply scientific-sounding world views, are not so sanguine. Reviewing the results of genetic studies, Elving Anderson, Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Minnesota, noted: “Evidence suggesting the role of choice is found in the twin studies data. Even in monozygotic twins raised together, the correlations for behaviors never approach 1.00. So not even genes and environment together produce complete uniformity in behavior.” His conclusion is that “[g] enes are necessary for our human existence and for our ability to express those qualities that are thought to be important components of human nature. Genes are not sufficient, however, since interactions with environment are involved at every stage of development” (1998: 69–70). In other words, human beings are never simply the product of nature. They remain creatures of history. Genes may help to map us into the world, but they don’t subsume the human person. Of course, the rabid positivist will respond, “But wait! Genetic studies aren’t finished.” True enough, they’ve only just begun, and their spectacular progress perfectly illustrates the foundational issue. Evolution presents human development itself as the process of random genetic mutations, but ironically, since the advent of agriculture, it has been human intelligence that has been, quite consciously, manipulating genetic structures, so that one can now assert that, while human intelligence is the product of genetic evolution, genetic structure today is itself the product of human intelligence. This is particularly important because the most astounding scientific advances, ones which will profoundly call into question the relationship between humanity and nature, are occurring in genetic manipulation. Genetic science is on the threshold of creating entirely new forms of life, crafting configurations that have the potential to produce biologically created medicines, even sources of energy. In 2003, Natural Biotechnology reported on the success of a team lead by Jay Keasling in putting together a “custom-built” DNA sequence, one not existing in nature (Martin et al. 2003). This was accomplished by using genetic material from several different organisms and creating a new metabolic pathway, the chemical circuitry necessary for a cell to function. Scientists have been manipulating genes for decades; inserting, deleting, and changing them in various microbes has become a routine function in thousands of labs. Keasling and a rapidly growing number of colleagues around the world have something more radical in mind. By using gene-sequence information and

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synthetic DNA, they are attempting to reconfigure the metabolic pathways of cells to perform entirely new functions, such as manufacturing chemicals and drugs. Eventually they intend to construct genes—and new forms of life—from scratch. (Specter 2009: 56)

The issue here is not about the necessary and appropriate expansion of scientific knowledge. Or what mistakes, scientific and ethical, might be made along the way. It is about the human person as an actor within the world. What if we can someday create ourselves—which we already do as a species, rather imperfectly through natural reproduction, but might someday do flawlessly, if one thinks that producing a copy of one’s self would be a flawless activity—through genetic engineering. But then the question again arises, would the new self created through genetic manipulation not be another self—a distinct self, not myself—even if the place that he or she occupies in the map of the world perfectly corresponded, at least initially, to my own? However, the moment either of us acted within that world, a moment that would occur immediately by virtue of the fact that humans can’t fail to act, we would no longer be in the same place in the world. Our places within the world, and eventually our worlds themselves, would have divided on the basis of actions and their consequences. Furthermore, wouldn’t he or she be another self precisely because the identity of the self is not reducible to its place in the world? Wouldn’t he or she necessarily need to be treated as a person, endowed with all the rights of a person, precisely because he or she is a creature of limitless creativity, another actor in the world, a distinct narrative? Responding to these remarkable advances, the editors of Nature wrote in 2007: “Many a technology has at some time or another been deemed an affront to God, but perhaps none invites the accusation as directly as synthetic biology … Only a deity predisposed to cut-and-paste would suffer any serious challenge from genetic engineering as it has been practiced in the past” (Ball 2007). But now, some are asking if “for the first time God has competition.”1 Theologians and philosophers have long argued that God cannot be considered an element within the world, not even in a region labeled the supernatural. This was the twentieth critique offered by the theologian Karl Barth, who argued that doing so imperiled the very transcendence of God. Martin Heidegger insisted that what he called onto-theology ignored the radical difference between God and being, reducing God to one more existing entity, only of a higher sort. Wittgenstein came to realize that neither God nor the self can be mapped into the world, that any possible world seems to presuppose the existence of the two, not because he was positing God as the causal creator of the world that exists, but because he 1   Though they go on to excoriate as “vitalism” the notion that “life is something that appears when a clear threshold is crossed.” I will be arguing that such thresholds were, and still are, the genius of our Greek inheritance, our ability to notice a qualitative difference, in this case, the difference between a living entity that responds to, and initiates contact with, its environment and a non-living entity that cannot act accordingly.

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correctly noted that any heuristic structure, such as the concept of the world is for the human mind, requires a thinking self who is not reducible to the world, someone whose very existence as a terminal reality validates the act of thinking as ultimately purposeful. The self that Wittgenstein references in the Tractatus is not an occult entity, who stands over a divide, either mental or supernatural, from the world that we know. With his later rejection of a private language in the Investigations, Wittgenstein would show that even the images and concepts that we use to reference this inner self are still drawn from the world of communal experience. Wittgenstein doesn’t argue that there is a self which exists as “something different from the human being whose self it is” (Kenny 1988: 17). If this were the case, if there were such a distinct self, that very self would need to be located on our map, albeit at the corner of the map, where it surveys all that is, but that would still put the self within the map that we call the world, though perhaps in a region labeled occult, or supernatural, or private. People tend to think that calling a region of the world either mental or supernatural removes it from the world. It doesn’t. If you can name it, it’s in the world. To use an analogy, it simply becomes part of a separate continent on the map. And this is prescinding from the question whether such a continent actually exists. Anthony Kenny is correct to identify such a self as a grammatical illusion. One could say that he “de-hypostatizes” the soul, just as he does the mind and the will. The move is appropriate. None of these things are entities that can be located within the world. They simply cannot be mapped, which is the only way that elements can take their place within the world. Wittgenstein’s insistence that the self cannot be mapped is a way of indicating that an actor, one not reducible to the canons of nature, is at work, but one cannot picture an occult agent at work in the world, a self invisible to the canons of empiricism. In his work The Soul of the Person, Adrian Reimers says that his thesis “is that because the human being is a rational being, the soul is real, that this term soul refers to the spiritual basis of human nature, a basis that can be reduced neither to the material constitution of the body nor to mechanisms governing its behavior” (2006: 3). It’s an assertion to which a theologian must readily agree. A self that doesn’t transcend empiricism is not a moral agent, not an actor in a drama of damnation and salvation, in short, not a “someone” who can be saved. But the transcendence in question is a grammatical discovery, if you will, not an empirical one. Wittgenstein continues in the Tractatus: “Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’. The philosophical self is not the human being, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it” (1961: 58; §5.641). In contrast, the Cartesian starting point of modern philosophy was a private, interior self, one known only to mental introspection, but Descartes’ ghost in the middle of the machine, the mental self living inside of us, created a great divide in modern thought. Moderns sought to map the world around them, to locate each

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element of the world and thus to identify its relationship to every other element. Indeed, this is the goal of empirical science. But as Charles Taylor noted in his piercing and pellucid study of modern life: “There is something in the move to the mind-centered view which has given us a fatal susceptibility to atomistic theories” (2007: 34). “Atomistic,” because the goal of modern science, and the philosophies that ape it, is to reduce each element of the world to an identifiable and predictable “essence,” one that stands free of the human person’s self interest, but, as postmodern thought has so often shown, that freedom is chimerical. Descartes extolled the promise of his new philosophy, to “make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature” (Cottingham et al. 1984: I, 142–3). But, as Heidegger noted, the motivation is not disinterested knowledge but rather a desire to exploit, to make the world ready-at-hand for human manipulation. Science thus becomes no longer the contemplation of God’s handiwork, but rather the instrument of human utilization of nature. Map the world, and you itemize it for exploration and exploitation. Empirical science is an exercise in mapmaking. A physical model is a multi-dimensional map. A paradigm, a conceptual one. The task in each is to locate a given piece of knowledge within a skein of other known realities, to depict relationship and relevance. Such maps are indispensable in science. They collate and synthesize data that would remain disparate without them. The crux of the modern problem comes with the fissure Descartes introduced between the mind and the world that the mind knows. Where does one find the “mind” on a map of the world? And if one can’t find a place in the empirical map of the world for the mind, perhaps the mind doesn’t exist. I remember a rather obtuse colleague, from the psychology department, who insisted upon correcting anyone who used the word “mind”. “You mean ‘brain’,” he would insist with all the fervor of a fundamentalist—they are not confined to the ranks of the religious—“there is no such thing as a mind.” Perhaps he’s right, even if only about himself, but more likely he’s given way to a reductionistic oversimplification. In her essay “Human Nature: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues,” Nancey Murphy nicely divides current speculation on the relationship between what might be called the physical and the spiritual into four categories: 1.  Radical dualism: the soul (or mind) is separable from the body, and the person is identified with the former. 2.  Holistic dualism: the person is a composite of separable “parts” but is to be identified with the whole, whose normal functioning is as a unity. 3.  Nonreductive physicalism: the person is a physical organism whose complex functioning, both in society and in relationship to God, gives rise to “higher” human capacities such as morality and spirituality. 4.  Eliminative/reductive materialism: the person is a physical organism, whose emotional, moral, and religious experiences will all ultimately be explained by the physical sciences. (1998: 24–5)

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Dualists in the mind/brain debate respond to the difficulty of locating the mind in the empirical world with the same move that theologians once used for theological realities like grace and the soul. Theologians declared reality to be bifurcated into natural and supernatural realms, an assertion inconceivable to the primitive and patristic churches, as Henri de Lubac so convincingly showed. Dualists do the same in declaring the mental to be its own realm, entirely separate from the physical world, thus reinforcing the Cartesian cleft. But it is a categorical mistake to think of the mind as a substance, albeit a strangely unempirical substance somewhere within the world. The mind is neither a ghost nor a shadow undetected by empirical investigation of the world. This sort of Cartesian dualism is roundly rejected today. Anthony Kenny spoke for a generation of post-Cartesian philosophers when he declared in his 1988 Aquinas lecture at Marquette University that “the self of the philosophers is a mythical entity” (1988: 3). He went on: “It is a philosophical muddle to allow the space which differentiates ‘my self’ from ‘myself’ to generate the illusion of a mysterious metaphysical entity distinct from, but obscurely linked to, the human being who is talking to you” (4). The problem is, philosophers tend to weave metaphysical theories even when their intention is to rip older ones apart. And yet there are those who think that the only way to exorcize this ghost is to beat the drums of neurology as loudly as possible. Every form of positivism has its apostle. For eliminative or reductive materialism, it’s a married couple, Paul and Patricia Churchland. Here is how Paul Churchland put the matter in a popular introduction: Reductive materialism, more commonly known as the identity theory, is the most straightforward of the several materialist theories of mind. Its central claim is simplicity itself. Mental states are physical states of the brain. That is, each type of mental state or process is numerically identical with (is one and the very same thing as) some type of physical state or process within the brain or central nervous system. At present we do not know enough about the intricate functionings of the brain actually to state the relevant identities, but identity theory is committed to the idea that brain research will eventually reveal them. (1984: 26)

To think that the words we use to describe the domain of the mind can simply be transcribed into neurological terms would be to flatten an entire realm of reality into another. Speaking scientifically, consciousness may well have emerged from matter, but consciousness is not reducible to it. Indeed, consciousness is not “some kind of stuff” (Hanfling 2001: 37), not even an evolutionary higher stuff. It is certainly not reducible to something else for one who has a stake in consciousness. To reduce consciousness to matter would be akin to reducing living matter to matter that is inanimate. Yes, psychology can often be explained in terms of biology; biology, explained in terms of chemistry; chemistry, of physics. But each discipline represents a categorically higher domain of reality. Eliminative reductionism “makes talk of soul a mere matter of speech—and suggests that as such the notion of immaterial intellect is nonsense, so that all talk of God can

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be dismissed without further thought. Yet it is quite evident that the ideas of the human soul and of God cannot be expurgated from Christian teaching, or from that of other religions” (Braine 1992: xix). And yet, “in all this the materialist has exactly the same picture as the dualist. Indeed, unless the mental can first be represented as inner, logically independent of anything in the ‘outer man’ and the ‘world’, there is no way in which it can be identified with a brain, instead of being the notional prey of deceiving demons as in Descartes’ dualism, it becomes with more seeming realism the possible prey of supposed neurosurgeons; and in this way the origins and status of its private world can be just as obscure as they were in Descartes” (1992: 3–4). Fergus Kerr shows us how Wittgenstein’s approach to the question gets the fly out of the bottle, as the philosopher liked to say. Kerr writes: What is required—where the philosopher comes in, at least in Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical work—is some conceptual investigation, analysis of the use of words such as “thinking,” “intending,” “desiring,” and so on, which will dissolve the supposedly necessary choice between introspectionism and behaviorism and expose each as operating with deeply unsatisfactory pictures of what human beings are really like. No more data are required, either by observing people’s behavior from outside, so to speak, or by observing the content of one’s own mind by introspection. And certainly the last thing that is required is a grand theory of thinking, intending, desiring, and so on, such as behaviorism and introspectionism operate with, in Wittgenstein’s view. Rather, what we need is a consideration of the use of these words that brings out the fact that they gain their meaning in a “language game,” a “form of life,” that is quite unlike what we do when describing or explaining physical phenomena. Psychology as the science of mental phenomena is not parallel to physics as the science of physical objects—which is what Wittgenstein suspects us of almost inevitably assuming, so powerful in our culture are the physical sciences. (2008: 11)

The mind will never be located on the empirical map of the world, because the word “mind” functions as the agent of human intelligence in our narratives. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein wrote that “a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it” (1960: 1). However, he insisted that the problems of philosophy are “not empirical ones; they are solved, rather, by insight into the workings of our language” (1967: §109). The question is not one of locating the mind in the realm of empiricism but of recognizing the impossibility of narrating our own selves, as actors within the world, without reference to it. Roger Teichmann is surely correct in identifying “the temptation to see all linguistic meaning as being on the model of referring to things” (2001: 31). This temptation will confound the philosopher seeking to understand the mind, and it offers no hopeful prospect to a theologian seeking to understand what a soul is.

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As P.M.S. Hacker notes, those who would reduce the mind to the brain ironically still find themselves appealing to human intelligence, which is not itself an organ of the body. One can’t appeal or convince that which is predetermined. The eliminativists look to the anticipated advances of neurophysiology and computer sciences to explain various phenomena—including phenomena pertaining to memory, learning, consciousness, and so on. But explanation is internally related to understanding, as well as coming to know, to well-founded belief, and to reasoned opinion. But these are terms which are on the Index, as far as eliminativism is concerned. However, it is far from clear what they can mean “to explain” if it is severed from its connections with these epistemic concepts. (2001: 81–2)

The issue is that a knowing self remains, and language will continue to reflect this self’s presence. Hence the use of terms such as “to explain,” “to know,” and “to understand.” Here is how Herbert McCabe puts the same: “The brain … could not be the organ of understanding meanings because meanings could not be private, material individual things, like brains and their operations, but belong to language. And they do not exist in language in the way that the special sounds of words or shapes of letters exist in language as part of what it materially is; meanings exist in language as what it expresses” (2008: 132). And, as David Braine points out, this emphasis upon seeing the intellect in dynamic relationship to the world is not the discovery of modern linguistic theory. “Descartes rests his arguments against materialism on consciousness. But the older argument for the special nature of personal beings turned not on consciousness but on intellect, something whose most evident human expression are not in perception, emotions, and the experience of pain, but in speech and writing—in brief in the works of language” (1992: xvi–xvii). If one understands the true significance of what Wittgenstein called “the metaphysical self”—Husserl spoke of the “transcendental ego”—one sees that the relationship between the mind and the brain, so heavily discussed in science today, is not at issue when human beings ask about themselves as selves, that is, as agents active in the world. The mind may well be an epiphenomenon of the brain, which is to say that what we reference when we use words about thinking and feeling, words like “concern,” “attention,” “intend,” “perceive,” “understand,” etc. is a phenomenon that arises out of, and is dependent upon, neurological function. Take away the brain, or impair its activity, and there will be an immediate consequence in what we call the mind. That was already known to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, who understood that brain degeneration led to insanity. The mind is dependent upon the brain, but not reducible to it. Wittgenstein wrote: “Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious” (1967: §281). Oswald Hanfling follows up this insight—that we use language of consciousness for ourselves as actors within

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the world—by noting: “Now if this is right, then the question ‘What makes brains conscious?’ embodies a nonsensical presupposition, since the brain does not in the least resemble or behave like a living human being. It is true that the brain has an important causal role in connection with consciousness and intellectual faculties, but as far as resemblance to any living human being is concerned, it is no better than any other bodily organ” (2001: 39). The issue is doing conceptually adequate justice to the human person as one who acts in the world. Brains don’t fall in love any more than hearts do. And speaking of a heart falling in love is a metaphorical approach and expansion of the human, not a reduction of it. Kerr adds: Wittgenstein seeks to free his students from the temptation to take seriously grand theories such as behaviorism and introspectionism by reminding them that psychological concepts, such as thinking, feeling, desiring, intending, and the like are essentially practical—practices, as we may say, grounded in (145) the kind of lives that we live, and inconceivable then apart from our everyday interaction with other people. Psychological concepts are interwoven with the activities that are characteristic of the creatures we are in the environment that we inhabit. This is why they are so complex, so “ragged”, as he will later say, so indefinable—and certainly not comprehensible or legitimated in the technical jargon of some would-be scientific or metaphysical scheme. The way to show this, so Wittgenstein believes, is to remind ourselves of the manifold ways in which words such as “thinking”, “feeling”, “intending”, and so on are used all the time in ordinary everyday circumstances. That is how we can see the emptiness of mind/body philosophical theories, such as metaphysical dualism (our souls are only contingently linked to our bodies) and behaviorism (we are nothing but bodies), which generate confusion in the science of psychology. (2008: 14–15)

Some philosophers of science hope one day to describe exhaustively the human being, but, even if this dream were to prove capable of realization, someone would still be doing the describing, someone who would choose where to begin the story and where it should end, at least where it should end in that particular recitation. Note that I write “philosophers of science,” and not “scientists,” because the notion that science can explain everything is not a scientific theorem waiting to be validated. It can’t be, simply because there is no way to verify the assertion that everything, every aspect of reality, has been explained. Indeed, where the demarcation line between one aspect of reality ends and another begins isn’t something delineated by science. It’s drawn by the one searching, by her interests, her concerns. Maps can’t capture the map maker, the one who wanted the map, who drew it, who holds it in hand. Or, as John Polkinghorne so nicely puts it, “to cast doubt on the autonomous validity of the I-story is to saw off the epistemic branch on which we are resting” (2007: 109).

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Philosophers who suggest that advances in neurology have eliminated the human person as agent have simply transferred agency from the mind, which actually does know and act as part of a psychosomatic whole, to nature itself. But nature is not an agent. “Nature” is our term for the atlas, if you will, which contains all our maps; its sheer inclusiveness is responsible for its reification on the part of many minds. We think nature to be synonymous with the world around us. We forget that nature is a system of perceived regularity, our intelligence’s grasp and grouping of the world. Nature is not one more thing within the world, not even the collection of all things within the world. Ironically, we not only reify nature, we turn it into an actor—to use an Aristotelian notion—we make nature an agent, something that moves things from potency to act. But nature isn’t an actor. It isn’t an entity. Nature can’t “do” anything, despite the way our language misleads us into thinking that it does. Wittgenstein insisted that The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. (§6.371) Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both are wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained. (§6.372)

Wittgenstein would himself realize that everything was not explained by evoking the word “nature,” but to understand what he found missing, one needs to appreciate the scope of his original intent. Spirit in the World The idea that science can explain away the self that concerns theology and the humanities is not new, only its current popularization is. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner offered a brief exposition of the soul in Volume XXI of his Theological Investigations, in an article entitled “Natural Science and Reasonable Faith.” He rejected the picture of the soul held by the commonly catechized Christian, refusing to think of it as one part of the Greek dichotomy of body and soul, “which (to put it simply) is repugnant to modern scientific anthropology” (1988: 42). The great insight that Rahner drew from Heidegger is the notion that one can never separate a human from a world. To be Dasein is “to be there”, to be thrown into a world, to be that part of this intensely physical place where consciousness emerges with the task of questioning both itself and its place. So for Rahner, to be human is to be in the world, to be precisely that part of the world that questions. A statement of his perfectly captures his rejection of any hermetic delineation between the human person and the world: “Difficulties can really only arise where one thinks that

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man ceases to be at the point where his skin forms a limit, and that everything is extrinsic which cannot be localized imaginatively within this sack of skin” (1966: 200). We must not think of the human as person ending with the skin. To do so would be to have lost sight of her accompanying world. So Rahner never comes at the question of the soul by presuming that we have an invisible, secondary self that accompanies and animates the one that we and others observe. To see how truly Hebraic and Heideggarian Rahner is on this point, one need only ruminate on the title of his first major work, Spirit in the World (Geist in Welt), which began life as his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. For Rahner, what stands between these two words is more conceptual nuance than ontology, for there can be no human being apart from the world. In Spirit in the World, Rahner established philosophical presuppositions from which he never wavered. He called it an extended analysis of Question 84, Article 7 of the prima pars of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae: “Whether the intellect can actually understand through the intelligible species of which it is possessed, without turning to the phantasms?” But one has to be willfully nearsighted not to see the ready resemblance between Geist in Welt and Heidegger’s Dasein. We can’t be ourselves apart from the world. There have been those who criticize Spirit in the World as Rahner’s surreptitious rereading of Aquinas in Heideggerian terms. Rahner was sanguine about the charge. Everyone rereads Aquinas in some light. Only the fundamentalist thinks himself free of prejudice in the act of reading. What’s important for our questions is that in both systems of thought, Thomistic and Heideggerian, human knowledge occurs through engagement with the world, and in both systems growth in knowledge is seen as the act by which the human person completes the self. Or, as Rahner puts it, “[h]uman beings are bodily creatures who have a fundamentally unlimited openness to being as such in knowledge and freedom” (1988: 42). When speaking of the human person, Rahner will consistently prefer the term spirit (Geist) over that of soul (Seele). It is a significant choice for his theology. For Rahner, any Christian discussion of the soul has to be drawn from revelation itself, not from any cultural patinas overlaying it. And this means that what we say of the soul must be a truly Christian anthropology, one which is formed by meditation upon the God-human, Jesus Christ. What is Rahner’s primordial understanding of the human person, which he sees as underlying the revealed message of Christianity? “The first thing to be said about man is that he is a person and a subject” (1978: 26). To be a person and a subject is to stand over and against the world, to be a part of the world that is not subsumed by a philosophical or empirical appropriation of the world. Here one can see Rahner’s roots in Husserl. There is always a self, an acting agent, which apprehends the world and yet cannot be reduced to the world, cannot be subsumed by our various scientific appropriations of the human person. This is the meaning of transcendence in Rahner’s thought. It is not a secondary or otherworldly strata that overlays the person, but rather our inherent constitution as that intellect that stands over and against the world. “Man experiences himself precisely as subject and person insofar as he becomes conscious of himself as

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the product of what is radically foreign to him” (1978: 29). One could express this by saying that we are that intelligence that knows that it knows. Unlike a computer, we are aware of ourselves as knowing in the act of knowing. Or, in another lapidary statement of Rahner, “[a] finite system cannot confront itself in its own totality” (1978: 30). Here, Rahner does for theology what Wittgenstein did for the philosophy of language when he asserted in the Investigations that the meaning of a word is its usage, not an occult object lying beyond it. In like manner, Rahner frees us of the bewitchment of looking for the hidden “soul” lying beyond what we observe, beyond our own experience of ourselves as those, in the world, who question the world. “The nature of man … is absolute receptivity for being in general, or in other words, man is spirit” (1969: 37). Rahner rejects the notion that when Christians speak of a soul they are citing a surreptitious citizen of a realm that lies beyond or above science. “From the Christian standpoint there is no reason to limit the claims of empirical anthropology within certain materially and regionally defined areas of human life, and to call what lies within the province of these empirical anthropologies ‘matter’ or ‘body’ or something similar, and then to differentiate from this another part which can be empirically and clearly separated, and call this ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’” (1978: 27). For Rahner, the purpose of calling the soul the supernatural element of man is not to establish two spheres within one human being, but rather to attest to the sheer gratuity of the human person’s orientation toward God in Christ. He writes that “this standpoint outside of and above the system of empirical, individual and specifiable data may not be understood as an individual and separable element in the empirical reality of man. This is how the school theology likes to understand it when it speaks of spirit or of man’s immortal soul as though what is meant by this were an element within the totality of man which can be encountered immediately and in itself, and distinguished empirically and in test-tube from the rest of him” (1978: 30). Behind Rahner’s thought here is the work done by his eminent Jesuit predecessor Henri de Lubac, who rejected a two-tiered world, one divided between the natural and the supernatural, as a baroque construct that is meaningless to modern thought and unfaithful to more original Christian witness. He argued with persuasive force in Surnaturel (1946) and again in Le mystère du surnaturel (1965) that something had become jejune in Christianity’s speaking of two realms. De Lubac’s work is clearly behind Rahner’s assertion that to speak of the soul is to reference an intellectual transcendence oriented toward God, not an occult, ontic entity. Rahner writes: “Theologians need only be able to affirm that human consciousness possesses that unlimited transcendentality in which there is present an openness, capable of legitimizing itself to the absolute reality of God” (1988: 43). Some theologians, in contrast, attempt what I would call a “ghost in the gaps” approach to the soul, trying to locate it in some empirically nebulous region of neuropsychology. There are at least two problems with this approach. First, today’s nebula is tomorrow’s network. Where does the soul “go” when the gap closes?

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Secondly, theologians never advance our understanding of revelation by trying to explain it according to the epistemological norms of science. To do so is to commit a categorical error. The soul is not one more thing in the world, not even in a second-tiered occult region of the world.2 When Rahner uses the word “spirit” or we use the word “soul,” what is philosophically referenced is our disposition over and against the world. Also, when we use these words, we theologically assert the ultimate orientation of this spirit or soul towards God. Rahner does not long engage current questions regarding the relationship of what is called the brain to that which we call mind. Obviously the mind is dependent upon what scientists study as the brain. But the philosophical and theological issue for Rahner is that the mind represents the evolutionary emergence of a higher sphere of existence. “[T]he modern theory of evolution does itself recognize a selftranscendence of the lower to the higher which is more than what has preceded and which always implies an element of the unexpected and the unpredictable.” For Rahner, the focus is anthropological: “Because of the transcendentality of human beings, they possess an element in their nature which forbids us simply to reduce them to that reality which otherwise appears in natural science and which also limits its area” (1988: 44). Yet there is a reason to use the words “soul” or “spirit,” even if we reject the notion that in doing so we are positing an invisible self. Language isn’t idling, as Wittgenstein would say, but it does bewitch us into thinking that we are referencing a ghostly or ephemeral reality. For Rahner, our ultimate transcendence of the world is due to the unlimited scope of our questions. Put simply, there is nothing in the world that can satisfy the human desire to know, to complete the self by engagement with what is not the self. “[M]an in his ‘infinitude’ is unable by his own capacities to anticipate and reach the absolute totality of truth” (1969: 26). The term and the terminus of this virtually unlimited desire is God. “Thus God is either the inner meaning and the possibility of the world and the historical existence of man and no more, or the sheer contradiction of man and his world” (1969: 26). To speak of the human person as spirit or soul is really to reference the human as that part of the world that is oriented towards that which lies beyond the world. Hence the question of God. Rahner writes: “Whenever man in his transcendence experiences himself as questioning, as disquieted by the appearance of being as open to something ineffable, he cannot understand himself as subject

2   See “Natural Science and Reasonable Faith” for Rahner’s delineation of the respective expertises of natural science and theology. Hence: “The natural sciences investigate concrete individual phenomena which people encounter in their objective experience” (1988: 19), while theology “makes an affirmation about God as the one absolute ground of all realities. It grounds the multiplicity of all realities which can be experienced as individual realities in an absolute reality, which is not one individual element within this manifold world, but rather its ground, which, although incommensurable with this multiplicity, establishes it and holds it together” (21).

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in the sense of an absolute subject, but only in the sense of one who receives being ultimately only in the sense of grace” (1978: 34). We know that human intelligence exists in the world, but knowing about intelligence and the act of using our intelligence are two separate things. The psychological self, of which Wittgenstein speaks, is the same as the neurological or genetic self of current discussion. These are facts about the human person, but they are not themselves the human person, who evaluates them in search of his or her existence, which is to say, evaluates them as an expression of the desire for a completion outside the self. The awesome task of the empirical sciences is to catalogue, and then to map, the natural world, but the great insight of twentieth-century philosophy, yet never sufficiently appreciated in readings of Wittgenstein, the progenitor of AngloAmerican philosophy of language, is that the self is not part of the world that science studies. The knower cannot be reduced to the known. Western metaphysics is akin to map mapping, in that it seeks to relate every element of the world to every other element, but the world presupposes the self as pivot and God as purpose, which is to say that it presupposes an intelligence around which everything collates, because, without the clearing that human intelligence represents, there would be no skein, no world formed. A world only becomes a world when it is a unity, and unity is a function of consciousness, of intelligence. To use a metaphor, our consciousness is the light in which everything that is, emerges. Without the light, there would be only darkness. When the Greeks spoke of the nature, or essence, of a thing, their purpose was to relate it to every other thing in the world. But human intelligence cannot be so related. It is the presupposition of the very act of relating. As I see it, what David Burrell wrote of God applies equally well to our intelligence in its relationship to the world. “[T]his distinction is unlike any other which we make to understand things in the world, for each of these, however formal, presupposes the world as its background” (1986: 3). I don’t think that human intelligence can be considered one more thing in the world. Again, to adapt what Burrell says of God, replacing that word with our intelligence: “For if the distinction of our intelligence from the world is treated as one in the world, then either our intelligence will be exalted at the expense of the world, or that intelligence will be seen as part of a necessary whole—since in each case the attempt is to understand the entirety: intelligence-plus-world” (1986: 17). I speak of the soul as a narrative to illustrate its utterly unique metaphysical significance, namely that is the presupposition of metaphysics. It “relates” only to others’ souls and to God. It creates itself as it moves through time, toward God, by interacting with others. It is woven of history, not nature. Here, readers of Wittgenstein will rightly charge that I am more under the influence of Heidegger than Anglo-American thought, but I think him quite right in insisting that human intelligence cannot be considered one more object in the world, any more than God can. If human intelligence were an object, it might conceivably be duplicated, but the difference between artificial intelligence and

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what we call human intelligence is not ultimately a distinction between biology and technology. A computer processes information without ever asking about its significance. Information for artificial intelligence has no significance. Only human beings ask about the meaning of this or that piece of knowledge “for me.” One could say that only a human wants something from the world. A computer “processes” information. A knower does this as well, but a human is aware of a self who knows, of a self who can’t help but to evaluate, to ask about the significance of everything in the world for the self. If your intelligence insists that it can map itself onto the world, ask why you feel compelled to do this. Because you, an agent, are the one who insists upon reducing yourself to an item within the world. From where does this—at least from my perspective—mistaken desire come? And if you think you have mapped the act of knowing into the world, have you mapped desire? Your desire?

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Chapter 3

Too Too Sullied Flesh Dante Draws Plato Wittgenstein warned that a picture can hold us captive. He meant that what we call thinking is usually characterized by the drawing of mental pictures. When he is told by the three witches that “none of woman born shall harm Macbeth” (Macbeth, IV, i, 96–7), the usurper presumes that he therefore need fear no man. The picture of Macduff being born by Caesarian section never enters his mind. Read the words “dog,” “door,” and “wag.” You would be quite an unusual person if a picture didn’t form in your mind as you did so. Wittgenstein’s warning would have been readily supported by St Thomas Aquinas, who insisted that human thought is always discursive, moving from concept to concept. He drew a contrast. Unlike the angels, we don’t immediately intuit that which we desire to know. We have to form concepts and then conjoin them, a process called ratiocination, but what are concepts if not mental “pictures”? Aquinas also distinguished between the way human beings come to know and the way other intelligences do so. “Aquinas thought that the reasoning linguistic animal was the highest form of material life because it was able to reason but the lowest form of intellectual life because it needed to reason. Neither angels nor, of course, God needs to reason any more than they need to eat and drink; their intellectual lives are more like pure insight” (McCabe 2008: 130). So, the question is, what comes to mind when you read the word “soul”? Unfortunately, the contemporary reader has inherited two rather unhelpful pictures. One, from the great Florentine poet of the Renaissance Dante Alighieri (d. 1321); the other, from René Descartes, a father of the Enlightenment (d. 1650). Both men were Christians; both, believers. Like every author, each wrote in dialogue with his own time, and each desired to re-explicate the Christian message in order to make it more readily transparent to his contemporaries. Here is how Dante “pictures” the metaphysical character of the afterlife. I add the adjective “metaphysical” because I have spent a lot of time, and written a lot of sermons, talking about all the things that Dante got right in his understanding of the beyond. This passage occurs in the second Canto of the Purgatorio. It’s presented in the wonderful new Hollander translation: The souls, who at my taking breath could see that I was still alive, turned pale with wonder,

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The Nature of the Soul and as people crowd to hear the news around a messenger who bears an olive-branch, no one minds the crush, so all these fortunate souls kept their eyes fastened on my face, as though forgetful of the road to beauty. I saw one of them come forward with such affection to embrace me that I was moved to do the same. Oh empty shades, except in seeming! Three times I clasped my hands behind him only to find them clasped to my own chest. Surprise must have been painted on my face, at which the shade smiled and drew back and I, pursuing him, moved forward. Gently he requested that I stop. There I knew him. And I asked him to stay a while and speak with me. ‘Even as I loved you in my mortal flesh,’ he said, ‘so do I love you freed from it – yes, I will stay. And you, what takes you on this journey?’ Purgatorio, II, 67–90

As Patrick Boyde aptly observed, the Purgatorio is a ghost story in reverse. “Instead of the ghost returning to his earthly haunts to terrify the living, it is Dante, a creature of flesh and blood, who penetrates the realms of the afterlife and alarms the souls of the newly dead who populate the shores and lower slopes of Mount Purgatory” (1981: 270). Of course, the picture that Dante drew has plenty of precedents. The idea that the living can be identified by their breath—their anima in Latin—is as old as history itself. So too is the notion that the dead survive in some sort of shadowy existence. But Dante’s task is to draw a Christian picture of the afterlife, and he has sketched the popular picture, one of shadow-like souls that appear to be similar to the human person, but with something of the corporeal drained away. And although Dante himself often expounded the superiority of Aristotle, here his image of the afterlife owes more to Plato. It’s certainly not drawn from the Gospel accounts of resurrection, which ought to be the wellspring of any Christian reflection on the hereafter.

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That’s not to say that there isn’t a great deal that the Florentine got right. Boyde notes that the above incident is modeled after passages in the Aeneid and the Odyssey, but it also parallels the gospel account of St John, where the Magdalene is warned not to touch the Risen Christ (20: 17). In both stories, Dante’s and St John’s, the characters are separated by the passage from life to death, but still profoundly linked by a personal relationship. Dante and Casella recognize and love each other, despite Casella’s death, just as the Christ and the Magdalene do. Were the story transcribed into a comic book, these souls would be line drawings in black and white. Only the image of Dante would be filled in with color. It’s noted several times that the sun doesn’t shine through Dante as it does the rest; his figure casts a shadow. There’s more going on here than simply making the souls of the dead into shimmering shades. According to the reasoning of Dante the author, because they are in Purgatory, and hence in the hands of God, in God’s realm, the light of God pours through them. Nothing in them blocks those purifying rays of love. Dante the visitor, on the other hand, is still in his time of trial; his soul is still being formed. Hence his figure occludes the light, and he casts a shadow. Great artists find a medium in which to capture the pictures that we carry in our imaginations. Hence our reception of their work. Most contemporary believers— and non-believers for that matter—share Dante’s image of the afterlife. Souls become shadows, missing something—like a cartoon sketch without its colors filled in—yet fully independent of their earlier, corporeal selves. Small wonder that the image doesn’t emotionally pull Christians towards the afterlife and that it’s easily dismissed by non-believers as the stuff of imagination. Descartes and Dualism The second misleading picture may well be worse, due to the consequences of our captivity to it. It comes from Descartes, who sought to set philosophy on a firm foundation. And yet, after him, the search for foundations to human thought would become something of a will-o’-the-wisp for modern philosophy. Descartes thought that he had found the self-evident starting point for philosophical reflection in the human mind, which he “pictured” as something interior, mental, private. Those three adjectives may seem obvious, even redundant, but they perfectly express the seduction that this French father of the Enlightenment would introduce into modern life. That’s not the way a medieval would have thought of the mind. For Descartes, and for the modernity that he bequeathed to us, a simple equation can be drawn. Mind = self, but a medieval would have spoken of the mind as a faculty of the human person, not identified it with the person. As Anthony Kenny points out, “[w]hen Descartes asked himself, ‘What am I?’ he gave the answer, ‘A mind.’ A scholastic would have answered, ‘I am not my soul any more than I am my body; I am a person, but no part of me is a person. My body is a part of myself, and my soul is a part of myself. When I die, even if my soul leaves my body, I shall no

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longer exist, and I shall not exist again unless there is a resurrection of the body” (1988: 8). In contrast, like a true modern, Descartes opts for reduction rather than the integrity of the whole. Of course, we no longer have the option of being medievals, but we can also no longer be moderns of a Cartesian bent. The consequences for philosophical anthropology are too costly. Kenny writes of the categorical confusion of modern thought: “To Descartes’ question ‘What am I?’ my own answer is that I am a human being, a living body of a certain kind. We sometimes speak as if we have bodies, rather than are bodies. But having a body, in this natural sense, is not incompatible with being a body; it does not mean that there is something other than my body which has my body. Just as my body has a head, a trunk, two arms, and two legs, but is not something over and above the head, trunk, arms and legs, so I have a body but am not something over and above the body. I also have a soul; that is to say, I have a mind and a will” (Kenny 1988: 24). But isn’t the nature of the soul the question at hand? Why is the Cartesian conception of the mind bound up with that concern? The words “mind,” “soul,” and “spirit” all share a non-empirical provenance and orientation and, as we will see, they have constantly shifted denotations in history. Descartes sought to distinguish the human person’s mental faculties from the material world, and for him the word “soul” carried with it, via medieval scholasticism, the well-established notion of animation, that which infuses life. He didn’t want to address the animation of the human person; his concern was the deepest personal identity of that person. Hence his substitution of “mind” for “soul” (cf. Frede 1992: 93–5). Note how Descartes reinforces the distinction by responding to Pierre Gassendi in his Fifth Reply: The next question you raise concerns the obscurity arising from the ambiguity in the word “soul”. But I took such care to eliminate this ambiguity when it arose that it is tiresome to repeat myself here. I shall say only that it is generally the ignorant who have given things their names, and so the names do not always fit the things with sufficient accuracy. Our job, however, is not to change the names after they have been adopted into ordinary usage; we may merely emend their meanings when we notice that they are misunderstood by others. Thus, primitive man probably did not distinguish between, on the one hand, the principle by which we are nourished and grow and accomplish without any thought of all of the other operations which we have in common with the brutes, and, on the other hand, the principle in virtue of which we think. He therefore used the single term “soul” to apply to both; and when he subsequently noticed that thought was distinct from nutrition, he called the element which thinks “mind”, and believed it to be the principal part of the soul. I, by contrast, realizing that the principle by which we are nourished is wholly different—different in kind—from that in virtue of which we think, have said that the term “soul”, when it is used to refer to both these principles, is ambiguous. If we are to take “soul” in its special sense, as meaning the “first actuality” or “principle form of man”, then the term

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must be understood to apply only to the principle in virtue of which we think; and to avoid ambiguity I have as far as possible used the term “mind” for this. For I consider the mind not as a part of the soul but as the thinking soul in its entirety. (Cottingham et al. 1984: II, 246)

Here are the seeds of several modern tumors: the distrust of ordinary language, the notion that thought is interior and “different in kind” from corporeal processes like nutrition, and the notion that the word “soul” has served its philosophical purpose, because the core of the human person is thought. Charles Taylor argues that Descartes’ turn inward has no roots in the ancient world. It’s only progenitor is Augustine, who urged Christians to turn inward in reflection. Even in Plato, who disparaged the physical world, there is still a profound connection between the mind and “the order of things in the cosmos” (1989: 122). In Plato, the soul isn’t told to turn inward, as Descartes enjoins the mind to do. On the contrary, “reason reaches its fulness in the vision of a larger order, which is also the vision of the Good” (123). In Plato, the soul is told to look beyond the physical to the metaphysical realities that the physical occludes. “And this is why the language of inside/outside can in a sense be misleading as a formulation of Plato’s position” (123). “The soul as immaterial and eternal ought to turn to what is immaterial and eternal. Not what happens within it but where it is facing in the metaphysical landscape is what matters” (124). And of course, when Augustine urged Christians to look inward, the interior territory that he pictured was memory, the house of history, of decisions that forge the human person. Descartes, in contrast to both Plato and Augustine, told us to look inward as a means of finding what is most real in a desiccated consciousness, one no longer united to its encompassing world. As David Braine points out, the soul as actor, as agent within the world, what he calls the phenomenological soul—because it is directly experienced by each of us, in ourselves and in others who share the world with us—is distorted by Descartes: He supposed (wrongly) that the mental or conscious element in all these workings or operations of mind or soul was conceivable without contradiction, even in the absence of their normal bodily accompaniments, and supposed (again wrongly) that it followed from this that they had a real possibility of existing without these accompaniments—on the ground that God could bring about anything which we could conceive without seeing a contradiction in our conception. In this way he got to conceive these workings or operations of mind or soul as having an existence as operations of a mental substance independent of states and goings on in the material world. This is, he ontologized the phenomenological conception of soul, making the mind or soul simply in virtue of being conscious and having operations of the kind we have picked out into a substance in its own right. (1992: 493)

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Descartes thus made the experiential element in human cognition independent from the objects perceived. The mind was no longer ordered toward the world, either in perception or action. Instead we have “a mind administering a machine, a mind with no natural at-homeness in the body, in the human community, or in its environment—we might say, a mind alienated from its body, community and environment” (Braine 1992: 13). Where Does One Find the Self? The salient issue in terms of the self, however, is that the human mind is also not Wittgenstein’s “metaphysical self” or Husserl’s “transcendental ego.” A neurological misfunction may well produce a mind that hallucinates, a mind that mistakes its relationship to the world, but when we use the word “self” we reference that point in the universe that wants something from the universe, that seeks to know the universe as part of its own act of completion. A self waxes and wanes in relationship to the world, but a self is never reducible to the world. Dasein is always there, never not there, but “there” would be a vast expanse of nothingness without Dasein. A world must coalesce around a self to be a world. This is why Heidegger spoke of “Being” as a clearing. And for him, Being was not the conglomerate of everything within the world. One didn’t discover Being through a line of reasoning such as this: everything exists, therefore everything has being. And if Being is something that can be “had” then Being must be an extraordinary thing indeed. This is precisely the sort of nonsense that Wittgenstein set out to purge from language. It leads us to speak about Being as though it were an incredibly large and diffusive thing, indeed the ultimate diffusion. When Heidegger spoke of Being, he meant our appropriation, in knowledge born of desire, of the world. Being is what we know of the world because of what we want from the world. Hence the title of his magnum opus, Being and Time. As Dasein we only come to be ourselves through our interaction, in time, with the world. Heidegger spoke of Being as a break in the world, a clearing in its density. The purpose of the metaphor is to depict the human person as that spot in the world that can stand apart from the world, survey the world, savor it, want something of it. To combine the insights of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, it’s language that makes this possible. Language allows us to distance ourselves from the world, by mentally reproducing the world within ourselves. A contrast helps. Rocks respond to the world around them. Water will wear them away. Plants, however, respond with self-initiated change. They will grow in response to water. In the same trajectory, land animals sense water. They search for it; change their actions in response to it. A human being does the same, but a human being can also talk about water, tell another where it is, say where it was yesterday at this time. As Francisco Ayala notes: “Animals can learn from experience, but they do not transmit their experiences, their ‘discoveries’ (at least not to any large extent) to the following generations. Animals have individual

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memory, but they do not have a ‘social memory’. Humans, on the other hand, have developed a culture because they can transmit their experiences from generation to generation” (1998: 38–9). With language, water is present to Dasein even though this stream is dry. Water is in his past, in his future. With language, water becomes a part of Dasein. George Steiner moves the discussion forward: “I believe that this capacity to say and unsay all, to construct and deconstruct space and time, to beget and speak counter-factuals—‘If Napoleon had commanded in Vietnam’—makes man of man. More especially: of all evolutionary tools towards survival, it is the ability to use future tenses of the verb—when, how did the psyche acquire this monstrous and liberating power?—which I take to be foremost. Without it men and women would be no better than ‘falling stones’ (Spinoza)” (1989: 36). Being is not something in the world. It’s not the sum total of things in the world. It would be better to say that the world exists in Being. Being is what we want of the world. Dasein is the clearing, because only the human mind can transcend the world. Only in the mind does the density of matter give way to the lift of spirit. Evolution may well have produced human consciousness. It became possible when neurological complexity arrived at a point that allowed language to develop, language that is more than binary, more than a single phoneme indexing a single referent in reality. Animals can make noises that signify to other animals that food, danger, or opportunity is present. But human language allows us to picture, to imagine what is not the case, to make it the case within the mind, so as to exploit the material world around us. Even more than this, language allows the human person to grow, because it allows our stories, our pictures of the world, ceaselessly to expand. Nothing happens in the external world when someone tells a great love story, but something happens in the ever-expanding world of Dasein. Consciousness wants something of the world, reorients itself in desire toward the world. When computers start to tell each other stories, stories that express and nurture their being—make more of them in the telling—then we will have arrived at artificial intelligence. But intelligence without desire is nothing more than computation, the collation of data.

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Chapter 4

A Narrative of Desire: Hebraic Usage Standing Ever in Covenant If the notion of the soul inhabiting an occult world is a modern error, a return to the fonts of Western civilization ought to assist in the formulation of a more integral, holistic understanding of the soul. The two principal tributaries of the contemporary Western concept of the soul are the ancient Greek and the Hebraic. Both manifest an awareness of the self, which is to say that both the Hebraic and the Homeric usages recognize a free agent, acting purposefully within the world, creating a narrative of the self. Certainly there are those who would argue that the Hebrew word nepesh is something radically more than, and distinct from, the Greek notion of the soul as a separate substance from the body, and it is the latter which has come to dominate our contemporary viewpoint, albeit only after having undergone a fundamental transformation by the pen of Descartes. How ancient Hebrews referenced the soul therefore deserves careful attention, not only to counterbalance our Greek inheritance, but also to adumbrate the patterns of usage that descended to Jesus and the apostolic Church. To begin, according to Warren Brown, “[a] critical feature of the biblical portrait of human nature is the potential for personal relatedness. The Bible presumes a unique depth and scope of human relatedness that is not presumed for the rest of the animal kingdom. The term ‘personal’ is meant to capture this uniqueness (in quality or quantity). ‘Relatedness’ is meant to accomplish three important dimensions: (1) subjective processes of self-relatedness and self-representation; (2) inter-individual relatedness; and (3) relatedness to God ” (1998: 102). Indeed, the first anthropological statement about the human person appears in the first chapter of Genesis, when humanity is said to be created in imagine dei. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth’” (1: 26). How are human beings in the image of God? Virtually every aspect of human nature has been claimed by interpreters of Genesis as the basis of this similitude, but note that God directs speech only to humanity and that the use of the plural in the Hebrew has God speaking to self. Language, and the communion that it makes possible, will be the first and most unique bond between God and humanity, just as dialogue is within God’s own self. No one is as elegant on this point as Karl Barth, who saw a prefacing of the Trinity in the creation of humanity:

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For the meaning and purpose of God at this creation were as follows. God willed the existence of a being which in all its nondeity and therefore in differentiation can be a real partner; which is capable of action and responsibility in relation to him; to which his own divine form of life is not alien; which in a creaturely repetition, as a copy and imitation, can be a bearer of this form of life. Man was created as this being. But the divine form of life, repeated in man created by him, consists in that which is the obvious aim of the “let us”. In God’s own being and sphere there is a counter-part: a genuine but harmonious self-encounter and self-discovery; a free existence and co-operation; an open confrontation and reciprocity. (Barth 1958: I, Sect. 41:2, 184–185)1

So the human person mounts the Hebrew stage as one who speaks, and who in that capacity enters into relationship with all of creation and with God. “In essence, language is not of one but of many; it is between. It expresses the relational being of man” (Gusdorf 1965: 48). In the second creation account, Adam names the animals, creating a world of meaning through the use of language and thus participating in the divine mind, which is the source of all meaning (Gen 2: 19). Of course God does not “speak” within God as we speak. Aquinas argued persuasively that the type of discursive conceptual reasoning that is natural to humans cannot be the form of intellect for either God or the angels. Human beings know by ratiocination, the discursive movement from one concept to another. Angels know intuitively and immediately, without ratiocination, once they move themselves, as Aquinas would say, into the act of knowing. God is actus purus and does not move from potentiality to actuality. God is the very union of what is and what is known. God creates humanity as a species that can only be itself through the intercommunion that language makes possible. Nevertheless, one can talk of God speaking, not only in relationship to humanity, but within God’s own self. As Trinity, God expresses self within and to self. Hence, while language need not be discursive, it is of its divine nature, “dialogical,” a place of communion. Note also that it is the human capacity for language that orients us toward the world and toward God. “There is language, there is art, because there is ‘the other’” (Steiner 1989: 137). When the human person speaks, he or she ultimately addresses the silence that once spoke him or her into existence. Indeed, the Hebrew word for the human person nepesh is “used with reference to whole person as the seat of desires and emotions” (Green 1998: 157). To be human is to bespeak desire. “When God acts upon a human nepesh, the latter always has the meaning

  Though creation imagine dei seems to play only a small role in the rest of the Old Testament. It is mentioned in Wis 2: 23–24 and in Sir 17: 1–13, as well as later texts from Hellenic Jerusalem (Green 1998: 157). 1

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‘life’; when the human nepesh acts with respect to God, it always has the meaning ‘desire’” (Seebass 1998: 516).2 In his Anthropology of the Old Testament, Hans Walter Wolff offers a useful overview of the diverse employments of the Hebrew word nepesh and how those usages might be translated into contemporary English. Note how seldom our word “soul” would be an adequate translation. 1. “Throat” or “mouth,” the organ that takes in food, because nepesh stands in need. Psalm 107 speaks of the “hungry and thirsty, their nepesh fainted within them” (v5). It continues in verse 9: “For he satisfies the thirsty nepesh, and the hungry nepesh he fills with good things.” 2. “Neck”, as in Psalm 105: 18: “His feet were hurt with fetters, his nepesh was put in a collar of iron,” though this usage is much less frequent than that of throat or mouth. 3. “Desire”, because the Hebrews envision the human person as one in the world needy and in danger “who therefore yearns with his nepesh for food and the preservation of life; and this vital longing, desiring, striving or yearning can, even when the nepesh is mentioned, dominate the concept by itself” (Wolff 1974: 15; his italics). Hosea characterizes the priests of his day by saying: “They feed on the sin of my people; they are greedy for their iniquity” (literally “they raise the nepesh for their iniquity”). Or Proverbs 16: 26: “The nepesh of workers works for them; their hunger urges them on.” Horst Seebass adds: “The synthetic view of life always thinks of desire as involving the whole person. Thus Genesis 34: 3 says that Shechem’s nepesh ‘was drawn to’ (dābaq) Dinah, and in 1 Samuel 18: 1 Jonathan’s ‘nepesh was so bound up with David that he came into conflict with his father’s enmity toward David’” (Seebass 1998: 506). 4. “Soul”, because the nepesh can be seen as the seat of emotions and other spiritual experiences. “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the nepesh of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Ex 23: 9). The nepesh, of humans and of Yahweh, hates (II Sam 5: 8, Is 1: 14) and loves (Sg 1: 7, 3: 1–4). It grieves (Jer 13: 17) or rejoices in Yahweh (Jer 13: 17). Though, to translate the word as “soul” is correct or appropriate only the more vaguely the word is used (Seebass 1998: 508). 5. “Life” itself, since the vital organs are involved. So Proverbs 8: 35ff: “For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord; but those who miss me injure their nepesh; all who hate me love death.” “To get wisdom is to love one’s nepesh; to keep understanding is to prosper” (Prv 19: 8). “When Yahweh leads up the nepesh from the underworld (Ps 30: 3; 86: 13),

  Seebass notes: “It may well be considered characteristic that the nepesh should thirst and long for God (Ps 42: 2f, [3f.]; 63: 2 [1]; 119: 20, 81; 143: 6 [nepesh thirsts like a parched land]) or for the courts of God’s house (83: 3 [2]).” 2

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the idea is the return to healthy life of the whole man who has, through his illness, already been exposed to the power of death” (Wolff 1974: 20). 6. “Person” because the human being not only is nepesh, he or she possesses it. “And they will be life for your nepesh and adornment for your neck.” The plural is often used here. “For whoever commits any of these abominations their nepāšōt shall be cut off from their people” (Lv 18: 29) (cf. Jer 43: 6, Gn 12: 5). 7. And finally “pronouns.” “Many texts suggest that humans have a relationship with themselves as individuals; this is unmistakenly the case when nepesh denotes the vital self” (Seebass 1998: 510). Since nepesh can mean the individual person, it can also grammatically take the place of the personal or reflexive pronoun. “Typical of the difficulty of this pronoun’s meaning is the alternation with a simple pronominal suffix or preformatively or afformatively formed verbal subject, which we find in the words of Lot in the Yahwist’s account (Gen 19: 19ff)” (Wolff 1974: 23). “Your servant has found favor with you, and you have shown me great kindness in saving my nepesh; but I cannot flee to the hills, for fear the disaster will overtake me and I die. Look, that city is near enough to flee to, and it is a little one. Let me escape there – is it not a little one? – and I (my nepesh) will be saved!” Note that in all of these usages, with the possible exception of the first two— although even here the intrinsically metaphorical and synecdochical character of the Hebrew must be considered—the word nepesh would confound any empirical explanation of its meaning, and yet they all are readily understood by contemporary speakers who realize that a self, one not subsumable to the material world, is being referenced. Seebass adds: “Following an observation by Søren Kierkegaard, we can interpret human beings as creatures related to themselves. If we understand the language of this definition prephilosophically, it catches the essence of the OT noun nepesh extraordinarily well. But human beings in the OT do not think of themselves in a subject-object relationship (spirit and soul); the subject in particular is not thematic” (1998: 503). As Aubrey R. Johnson notes, “the Israelite appears to have shown little interest in speculative thinking,” but rather “is characterized in large measure by what has been called the grasping of the totality” (1964: v, 1). “[I]n Israelite thought man is conceived, not so much in dual fashion as ‘body’ and ‘soul’, but synthetically, as a unit of vital power or (in current terminology) a psycho-physical organism” (1964: 87). So to translate the Hebrew nepesh into the English word “soul,” the latter imbued with Greek dualism, is to miss the embodiment involved in the term. On the other hand, if by soul one means the self, nepesh certainly can be translated as soul, provided that one pictures that self as embodied. Indeed, the Hebrew self is made manifest in the body. The ego communicates itself through use of “the mouth, with its palate, tongue, and lips, or the eyes, and even the forehead, nose, and ears; and attention should be paid to the way in which these may be referred to by synecdoche as themselves engaged in some form of

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personal behavior and therefore as subject in some cases to a moral judgement” (Aubrey 1964: 45). Of course, only a “self,” a moral agent, can be called to judgment; only that which, in view of its intellectual and therefore spiritual transcendence, can stand over against the natural world. In this regard, Wolff notes that “a man’s ‘face’ is far more important than his ‘head’ in the Old Testament. It is always called pānīm, in the plural, thus reminding us of the manifold ways in which a man can give his attention (puh) to his counterpart; events are reflected in the features of the face (e.g. Gen 4: 5); the partner can be already addressed through the play of expression (e.g. Gen 31: 2,5)” (1974: 74). Two other Hebrew words were also often translated by “soul.” The Hebrew word ruach, “translated in 75 per cent of the cases in the LXX by pneuma and Latin by spiritus. Its concrete outward meaning is ‘wind’; variants of ruach occur at least 420 times in the OT. Although nepesh sometimes refers to breathing as an indicator of life, and neshama means the breath of an animal being, ruach refers to the power or force behind the wind or breath” (MacDonald 2003: 7). Of course, the word ruach is often used for the wind itself, and is thus metaphorically used to denote the breath of God, seen to be doing God’s bidding. Remember that in contrast to later Greek thought, “[t]he OT does not concern itself with the ‘nature’ of things. Observations of the physical world are registered, but they are always associated intimately with human experience and put in the service of analogical thought and metaphorical imagery” (Tengström 1997: 381). The word ruach itself “is perhaps onomatopoetic” (Tengström 1997: 367). And “whereas the word nepesh can denote the whole person, ruach is always said to be ‘within’ (bequereb) someone (Isa 19: 3,14; 26: 9; 63: 11; Ezk 11: 19 = 36: 26–7; Hos 5: 4; Hab 2: 19; Zec 12: 1; Ps 51: 12 [10]). Like the ‘heart’ ruach denotes a person’s ‘interior’, the spiritual center from which the entire person is engaged” (Tengström 1997: 375). The term could also be used to express “the whole range of man’s emotional, intellectual, and volitional life” (Johnson 1964: 31). Ruach can also be “used in the sense of ‘mind’ parallel or synonymous with ‘heart’” (Tengström 1997: 377).3 Clearly, behind the word is the prehistoric awareness that when human beings are alive, interacting with the world, they breathe, while the dead do not. Hence the notion that wind or breath is the life-force. Yet another term crucial to understanding the Hebraic sense of the self as ordered toward God is leb, the heart. According to Wolff: “The ‘heart’ in Hebrew describes the seat and function of the reason. It includes everything that we ascribe to the head and the brain—power of perception, reason, sense of direction and discernment” (1974: 51). “The notion of the heart as the seat or focus of human emotions emerged gradually from that of the heart as chest or bosom, the container or enclosure of breath and vitality … this is closely paralleled in the Homeric usage 3

  See Nm 14: 24; Dt 2: 30; Is 26: 9; 29: 24; Ez 13: 3; Mal 2: 15–16; Ps 32: 2; 77: 7[6]; 106: 33; 142: 4[3]; 143: 4 [par leb]; Jb 21: 4; 32: 18; Eccl 7: 9; this usage can include God’s own “mind” or hidden thoughts (cf. Is 40: 13).

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of phrenes and kardia … In terms of the earliest historical documents concerning the concept of mind, the most important Hebrew usage of ‘heart’ is in passages that clearly indicate intellectual, cognitive, and reflective operations” (MacDonald 2003: 9). Of course such oscillating discourse, shifting the seats of emotion and intellect between the head and the heart, would exasperate any would-be ontologist. And yet Hebraic and Homeric speakers understood immediately what was being referenced, just as we do when another warns us, “Don’t give your heart away”. Here one can’t help but reference Wittgenstein’s maxim that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” (1967: 178). The assertion is made in the context of contrasting a human being with an automaton, a favorite example of his. It deserves to be quoted in full to show that Wittgenstein’s insight is not that we discover some particular occult entity to be present in another, but rather that we perceive another to be engaged with the world as we are, that is, as one who seeks completion of the self through interaction with the world. How is this shown? By the person behaving as a person does, by suffering or avoiding pain, by seeking pleasure and fulfillment. What separates the person from the automaton isn’t a complex of construction or even outward behavior, in as much as this might successfully—at least one day—be imitated by a machine. What imbues the human with a soul is desire, a desire we recognize in the face and actions of another. ‘I believe that he is suffering.’—Do I also believe that he isn’t an automaton? It would go against the grain to use the world in both connexions. (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am certain that he is not a automaton? Nonsense!) Suppose I say of a friend: ‘He isn’t an automaton’.—What information is conveyed by this, and to whom would it be information? To a human being who meets him in ordinary circumstances? What information could it give him? (At the very most this man always behaves like a human being, and not occasionally like a machine.) ‘I believe that he is not an automaton’, just like that, so far makes no sense. My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. Religion teaches that the soul can exist when the body has disintegrated. Now do I understand this teaching?—Of course I understand it—I can imagine plenty of things in connexion with it. And haven’t pictures of these things been painted? And why should such a picture be only an imperfect rendering of the spoken doctrine? Why should it not do the same service as the words? And it is the service which is the point. If the picture of thought in the head can force itself upon us, then why not much more that of thought in the soul? The human body is the best picture of the human soul. And how about such an expression as: ‘In my heart I understood when you said that’, pointing to one’s heart? Does one, perhaps, not mean this gesture? Of course one means it. Or is one conscious of using a mere figure? Indeed not.—It

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is not a figure that we choose, not a simile, yet it is a figurative expression. (1967: 178e)

Note how closely Wittgenstein’s recognition of the dynamism and desire that characterize the human person corresponds to the Hebraic. When one approaches the concept of soul (or mind, for that matter) as a way of asserting the presence of a self, one who interacts with the world, it should come as no surprise that the terms employed will vary widely, just as our experience of the self does. Of course, for one who is seeking to locate the soul within the nexus of nature, this is exasperating. In the key of nature, one has two options: create an occult realm of nature, one beyond the reach of empiricism, a “supernatural” realm of ordered entities, or dismiss all such talk of the soul as an archaic ontology which has no place in modern discourse. But what happens when the soul is read in terms of personal history, of the narrative of the self? “An individual does not have a nepesh in the sense of a separate or separable possession, rather an individual is a nepesh; the human life is coterminous and coextensive with its nepesh” (MacDonald 2003: 6). The title of Aubrey Johnson’s study of the word nepesh perfectly captures the word’s scope, The Vitality of the Individual in the Thought of Ancient Israel. “Further, the fact that the word nepesh could be used in so many different ways to denote various forms of self-expression (amounting sometimes to actual selfishness) makes it possible to understand the frequent use of this term along with a suffix to refer to one’s ‘person’ or ‘self’ and thus to form the equivalent of a personal or reflexive pronoun” (Johnson 1964: 15). When read as a narrative device, a way of speaking of the self as that which consciously completes itself through its interaction with the world, a word like “soul” seems indispensable to human discourse. Aubrey notes that nepesh “is subject to various forms of attraction which move it to activity in one direction or another through the excitation of desire” (1964: 13). That is, unless we deny that a self is active and aware, but even that assertion seems to require the exertion of such a self. But of course, narratives need plot, trajectory, conclusion, and the same is true of a narrative of the self. It posits a conclusion, one which weds the concept of soul to the notion of God. In his Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, Claus Westermann draws attention to: a remarkable and suggestive circumstance: in reference to God’s activity with the human nepesh [it] refers exclusively to “life”; the behavior of the human nepesh directed toward God always in the sense of “soul” … The life that God saves and protects, as well as the desire of the soul for God is life in intentionality. The soul desires life. Both groups occur in the language of the Psalms. God’s inclination corresponds to human devotion; nepesh is human selfhood in its reciprocal event. (1997: 758–9)

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Did Heaven Look on and Would Not Take Their Part? Must a narrative have a conclusion? What about the narrative that one calls the self? It would seem that indigenous peoples, with their concept of shadow lands, or an underworld to which the dead departed, simply viewed the narrative as tapering off, the way a song might as a singer retreats. On one hand, this would seem to repudiate the notion of the soul as story, since it seems to suggest that the story need not have a conclusion. On the other, the Hebrew concept of Sheol, or the shadow lands, which has worldwide parallels, also suggests a human inability to think of the story of the self as simply ceasing. Better that it trail off, be heard someplace beyond the reach of our ears. It should also be noted that, in contact with other peoples of Canaan, the Hebrews retained this notion of shadow lands, rather than imbue death with any process of divinization.4 Israel did not build pyramids. Indeed, the graves of so many of her patriarchs are lost to history. “Israel showed itself to be concerned with the demythologizing of death, which (in view of the country’s neighbors), appears both difficult and essential for believers in Yahweh. In general the Old Testament sees death in all its hideousness. It is surrounded by no halo of any kind. No holiness whatever, let alone divinity, consecrates death, any more than the grave.” As Jürgen Moltmann notes: All dead things represent for Israel the acme of uncleanness. All pollutions of this kind involve exclusion from the service of God. Yet the very rejection of it by Israel shows plainly that the religion of promise must abjure all sacral communications with the dead. The dead are cut off from God and from living communion with him. Because God and his promise are life, the real bitterness of death lies not merely in loss of life, but also in the loss of God, in godforsakenness. (1967: 208)

“If death is ever given any title of honor in Israel’s poetry, it is the cynical one of the ‘king of terrors’ (Job 18: 14)” (Wolff 1974: 101). In Israel’s Sheol “darkness and confusion are linked in striking contrast with the ordered world of light and life, for at death a man’s vital power is found to be broken up in disorder, its unity shattered; and the result is that as an individual he drags on a relatively weak existence, which is opposed to life in its fullness as darkness is to light” (Aubrey 1964: 94–5). Thus the Suffering Servant of Isaiah “pours out himself unto death” (53: 13). Life remains, but in a dissipated form. The shadow lands of indigenous peoples are not yet an attestation of immortality. They are far removed from the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, and yet they do attest our collective recognition that the self does not simply dissipate. 4

  Though Jon Levenson notes that Israelite condemnation of death cults is probably based upon an emergence of Israelite thought from ancestor veneration (2006: 48). There would be no need to condemn that which held no appeal (cf. 58–65).

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With the rise of apocalypticism, itself a response to the injustice of Hebraic suffering at the hands of foreigners, the Hebrew scriptures certainly begin to assert the notion of the soul’s immortality. Essentially the dilemma was this: like the gods of all indigenous peoples, Yahweh was supposed to provide the goods needed for life to be sustained and to prosper. Though Israel’s God began as a warrior God, he nevertheless asserted his providence over all aspects of human life. But what is the meaning of such a God, and of his promises, if Israel is laid waste by her foes? How could the Israelites, like so many others since their time, not make their own that plaint of Macduff, when he learns of the massacre of his family at the hands of Macbeth? “Did heaven look on and would not take their part?” (Macbeth, IV, iii, 224–35). If justice is not offered to the self in this life, is that because this life is only the beginning of the soul’s destiny? Joseph Ratzinger argues, however, that more than the rise of apocalypticism, or a mingling with non-Hebraic sources, is at work in the Hebrew experience. The inner logic of confidence in the power and goodness of the God of Israel eventually demanded a reexamination of the relationship between death and her God. “For the notion that death is a barrier limiting the God of Israel to his own finite sphere manifestly contradicts the all-encompassing claims of Yahwistic faith. There is an inner contradiction in the affirmation that he who is life itself encounters a limitation on his power. The state of affairs which such an affirmation betrays was inherently unstable. In the end, the alternatives were either to abandon faith in Yahweh altogether or to admit the unlimited scope of his power and so, in principle, the definitive character of the communion with man he had inaugurated” (Ratzinger 1988: 82–3). In other words, simply read from the perspective of a history of religions, the New Testament notion that the God of Israel would break the bonds of death seems a natural development. As the notion of God expands, so too does God’s dominion. “Looking on God, being with God: this is recognized as the point from which the ever-present, all-devouring menace of Sheol may be overcome” (Ratzinger 1988: 90). In The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality, James Barr likewise argues that the immortality of the soul is as biblical as it is Greek, and as much a part of Christian faith as belief in the resurrection, and he challenges the common perception that the Hebrew scriptures are not concerned with immortality. He reads the first creation account of Genesis, not as a story of the Fall, its Pauline interpretation, but as a narrative in which humanity almost comes to claim immortality as its own, which is what the Tree of Life represents. For him, the general thrust of the story is a Hebrew acceptance of mortality, “nevertheless, in the Hebrew situation that momentary glimmering of immortality may have been of some importance in the later development of belief” (1993: 21). He finds the argument that nepesh cannot always be translated as “soul” to be exceedingly weak. “When we are talking about ‘soul’, we have to concentrate on those cases of nepesh which do mean ‘soul’, and perceive the possible irrelevance of the many cases where this word means something else” (1993: 38). Therefore, “it seems probable that in certain contexts the nepesh is not, as much as present opinion favours, a unity of body and soul, a totality of personality comprising all these elements: it is rather, in these contexts, a

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superior controlling centre which accompanies, expresses and directs the existence of that totality, and one which, especially, provides the life to the whole. Because it is the life-giving element, it is difficult to conceive that it itself will die” (1993: 42–3). Consequently, “I do not say that the Hebrews, in early times, ‘believed in the immortality of the soul’. But they did have terms, distinctions and beliefs upon which such a position could be built and was in fact eventually built” (1993: 43). In his Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel, Jon Levenson takes a somewhat different tack, though he also calls for a reevaluation of the Hebraic evidence. As he sees it, a Jewish notion of immortality derives “from God’s gracious rescue of worshipers from death and issues in new and renewed intimacy between the worshipers and God. It is, in fact, quite different from immortality that is based on the belief that the human self possesses an indestructible core—a soul, spirit, consciousness, or the like—that survives death naturally” (2006: xi).5 The Greek notion of a disembodied spirit surviving death would have little appeal to a Hebrew, precisely because it was the body that linked one to the people (2006: 22). Restoration would thus need to be both physical and corporate. Levenson argues strenuously that our modern individualism inhibits a proper perspective on Jewish hopes for life after death, which would have been centered upon the people and one’s descendants rather than upon the individual. Of course, given our modern individualism, we find it difficult to understand how an ancient Hebrew would have not only not feared his or her individual death but rather would have found active solace in the corporate continuance of the people. This is why Levenson judges resurrection to be a better understanding of Jewish expectations than immortality. Like Barr, he insists that “resurrection of the dead did not appear as a jarring innovation in Second Temple Judaism but instead developed slowly and unevenly over the preceding centuries” (2006: xiii). Given this Hebraic expectation to look for inner-worldly blessings, it seems obvious that the inherited notion of Sheol would eventually no longer be considered an adequate recompense for fidelity to God’s covenant. Whereas Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) declares that “the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice” (9: 2), the late, Second Temple apocalyptic vision of Daniel will insist that the dead awake, “some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (12: 2). Levenson suggests that an older notion of Sheol as a universal destination gives way to God’s initiative. “In short, resurrection would then represent the extension of God’s retributive justice (a major item of belief in the Hebrew Bible, especially   It should be noted that unlike the Greek soul, the nepesh can die. When the nonIsraelite prophet Balaam prays to die, he speaks of his nepesh (Num 31: 19), as does Samson when he seeks to die in a manner that takes the Philistines with him (Judg 16: 30). Levenson notes: “Indeed ‘to kill the nepesh’ functions as a term for homicide in biblical Hebrew, in which context, as elsewhere, it indeed has a meaning like that of the English ‘person’” (e.g. Num 31: 19; Ezek 13: 19). 5

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among the prophets) beyond the grave. The good could now reliably hope for an ultimate destiny distinct from the misery of Sheol” (2006: 71). Death in the Hebrew bible is the expected, God-ordained destiny of human beings, though not necessarily all human beings, Enoch (Gen 5: 23–4), and Elijah (2 Kings 2: 1–12) being exceptions. And even in the Old Testament, God is shown as one capable of positive intervention, even on the other side of death, as is the case for the son of the Shunammite woman whom Elijah raises from the dead (2 Kings 4: 8–37). Levenson concludes that “long before the apocalyptic framework came into existence, the resurrection of the dead was thought possible—not according to nature, of course, but through the miraculous intervention of the living God” (2006: 132).6 And, “what had been a rare exception in the early period became the basis for a general expectation in the late one” (2006: 175). And as a sense of God’s justice grew—didn’t the righteous have to be rewarded and the wicked punished?—rather than as the destination of all the departed, Sheol came to be thought of as “the prolongation of the unfilled life. There is no equivalent prolongation of the fulfilled life precisely because it is fulfilled” (2006: 78). As Ecclesiastes puts it: “A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death, than the day of birth” (7: 1). What fulfilled one’s life was one’s contribution to the people in the form of descendants, good deeds, and possession of the land, all of which prolonged one’s name. “All flesh leads to the grave,” James Kugel writes, but quite the opposite, says Ecclesiastes, is a person’s name (by which he means, I think, not only a person’s reputation—what other people know about him or her—but rather, more abstractly, the sum total of a person’s accomplishments, what can be said afterward, a kind of condensation of everything that he or she has done. A name, in this sense, is not acquired at birth: the newborn baby quite literally has no name, and even after it has lived for a time, it has no name in the sage’s sense: that name only begins to be acquired as the person does things on earth, starts to show the world what he or she is made of. The more a person lives and does, the more that name grows and becomes more detailed and specific. Quite unlike the body, a person’s “name” in this sense is altogether immune to the inroads of time. A name—in this abstract sense of the sum total of a person’s deeds—is immutable, so that eventually that name is all that remains of our earthly existence; years, centuries after our death, the name—in this abstract sense—is what we are, what our life has amounted to. For this reason, the proverbist says, the day of a person’s death may be a sad day, but it is indeed better in the sense that the process of building that name, which only began on the day of birth, is now at last complete. Just as you concede, says Ecclesiastes, that a good name is better than precious oil in the sense that the precious oil is 6   Levenson also notes that our line of demarcation between life and death was not shared by ancient Israel, where extreme poverty and serious illness and even the state of childlessness were already spoken of as a sort of death, out which God might choose to deliver one (cf. 2006: 169).

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This notion of a name, one forged in history but one that nevertheless survives the ravishes of time, will be an important consideration in the final chapters of this work, where I will suggest that our destinies are fulfilled, and our souls given immortality, when they are incorporated into the Book of Life. The Old Testament is not without its parallels. In Exodus 32: 32–3, dismayed by the impiety of the Israelites with the Golden Calf, Moses prays: “But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of the book that you have written. But the Lord said to Moses, ‘Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book’.” Psalm 69 speaks of “the book of life,” asking that persecutors “be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous” (28). Isaiah evokes a holy remnant, saying: “Whoever is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem” (4: 3). And finally, Daniel offers the prophecy: “At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise. There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since the nations first came into existence. But at that time, your people shall be delivered, everyone found written in the book” (12: 1). Metaphor yes, but the sense that what is forged in history endures is inescapable. Levenson notes another parallel in Jewish thought: one lived on because one’s people Israel maintained fidelity to the covenant in liturgy. “At the communal level, however, the redemption is manifested in the history of redemption that came to constitute the prime self-identification of the people Israel, the people whose liturgical life continually proclaimed that the God who was their rock and their redeemer could, in the end, overcome even the horrors and terrors of death” (2006: 81). He goes on to suggest that “the Temple, too—properly approached and respected—was thought to be an antidote to death, giving a kind of immortality to those who dwell there in innocence, purity and trust. This notion of the Temple as the locus or source of immortality may, in fact, be the point of the conclusion to the enigmatic little poem that is Psalm 133” (90). It reads: How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard, upon the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion! For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life for evermore.

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A New Chapter Turning to the question of the soul in the New Testament, at least as it relates to its precursors, Joel Green offers several reasons why a clear distillation between the Hebraic and Hellenic influences is difficult. First, an affirmation of the monism of the Old Testament is not itself proof that “Hebraic thought” disallows duality. Second, “Greek thought” cannot be reduced to a single viewpoint on our question. Third, in those cultural circles in which the New Testament documents were generated and preserved, “Judaism” itself was not monochromatic and, indeed, had intermingled with Hellenism for some centuries. Even in Palestine, “Judaism” exists on a continuum, more or less Hellenized. Fourth, we must therefore consider that the Old Testament would have been mediated to early Christians via Hellenistic Jewish (and Hellenistic) readings (Green 1998: 159). It is clearly mistaken to think that the Hebrew and Hellenic tributaries of New Testament thought on the soul do not mingle until its pages, or that these two streams are mutually opposed on the question of the soul’s immortality. “[A]s has been amply shown by a variety of writers, when we make a thorough investigation of Jewish ideas of life after death through the period of Daniel and down to the beginnings of Christianity, the evidence shows that a wide variety of opinions existed: resurrection of the body, immortality of the soul, an ‘eternal life’ marked by the quality within the present life, and others” (Barr 1993: 23). Fortunately, discerning the precise direction of their flow and convergence is not at issue here. What is being examined is the conception of the human person that emerges from the New Testament. Nothing more neatly recapitulates the inter-testamental transformation than the Book of Revelation, which speaks of death itself being catapulted into the lake of fire and burned away, forevermore. “And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead in them, and all were judged by what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire” (20: 13–14). Sheol, which had been synonymous with loss of God, must be reevaluated Christologically, because Christ himself has claimed it. Ratzinger writes: “The Just One descended into Sheol, to that impure land where no praise of God is ever sounded. In the descent of Jesus, God himself descends into Sheol. At that moment, death ceases to be the God-forsaken land of darkness, a realm of unpitying distance from God. In Christ, God himself entered the realm of death, transforming the space of noncommunication into the place of his own presence” (1988: 93).

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Chapter 5

Plato Summons the Soul The Soul in Early Greek Thought Dante effectively drew Plato’s picture of the human soul. That it should still be thriving in his time, and indeed into our own, is a potent testament to its attraction. How did Plato come to think of the soul as a separate, and more noble, substance? Before entering into an examination of our Greek inheritance on the soul, a contemporary, Cartesian overlay must first be removed, that of a dualism between the material and the spiritual. There is plenty of that in Greek thought, but the line isn’t drawn where Descartes drew it, between the soul and its body. Joel Green expunges that popular misconception: By and large, the Greeks never took the path Descartes would take—namely, juxtaposing corporeal and incorporeal as if this were the same thing as juxtaposing material and immaterial (or physical / spiritual). Although belief in a form of body-soul duality was widespread in philosophical circles, most philosophers regarded the soul as composed of stuff. Aristotle, for example, considered the soul, the basis of animate life, as part of nature, so that psychology and physics (“nature”) could not be segregated. For him, “soul” was not immaterial: even if “soul” is not the same thing as body, neither is it “nonmatter” but can still occupy “space”. Even Plato thought that the soul was constructed from elements of the world, though he argued for a radical distinction between body and soul. Within Epicureanism, mind and spirit were understood to be corporeal because they act on the body, and all entities that act or are acted upon are bodies. Borrowing in part from Aristotle, Stoicism taught that everything that exists is corporeal; accordingly, only nonexistent “somethings” (like imagined things) could be incorporeal. (1998: 160)

The soul was certainly something subtle, but, at least initially, it wasn’t immaterial, though it did have to be distinguished from the grosser material realities. Hence, breath and warmth became perfect manifestations of the soul to the early Greek mind, precisely because they are subtle, elusive, and yet still discernible to our senses. Thus, when the early Greeks “pictured” the soul, it was not as an immaterial, ghostly double, but rather a physically refined, though physical nonetheless, presence within the body. And, as with Hebrew thought, our single word “soul” stands proxy for quite diverse Greek pictures. In his classic study, The Origins of European Thought, Richard Onians points out that one of the Greek words often translated as soul, θυμός, “expressed a

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much richer concept for the Homeric Greek than our ‘breath’ or mere outer air received and expelled … They must have observed that breath is warm and moist” (1954: 46). And “at the stage of thought when these beliefs emerged there was difficulty in conceiving anything except material entities” (1954: 51–2). Again, what we might call the spiritual or mental, the ancient Greek thought of as the finely, almost ethereally, corporeal. Hence, things like emotions were not mental events that subsequently manifested themselves materially, they were themselves located in the breath. In Homer, “it is not only emotion that the gods ‘breathe’ into men but also thoughts, devices, relatively intellectual. This too we might expect, since it is with his θυμός and ϕρένες or, if our interpretation be right, his breathsoul and lungs, that a man thinks and knows no less than feels” (1954: 56). In fact, Charles Taylor notes, one’s θυμός was thought to play a mediating role between the conflicting demands of desire and reason (1989: 137). Also, when the Greeks of Homer’s time spoke of the soul, they referenced two very different realities. The first usage of the term soul stemmed from the need of the Greeks to recognize a qualitative difference between that which was alive and that which was inert. This “body-soul,” or animating principle, tended to be referenced with words such as θυμός (translated as spirit, soul, courage, breath, mind, or emotions), νουˆς (translated as mind or intellect) and μένος (might, force, spirit, passion). The latter had no correspondence to any bodily organ. It was rather a momentary impulse directed toward a specific action. The common element in all of the above was the notion of a life-force, that which clearly demarcated the living from the inert. So, for example, when Aristotle speaks of the souls of plants, animals, and humans, he uses the term in this sense of animation or “body-soul.” Plants have no personal, which is to say relational, identity, even at a lower place in a hierarchy of personhood. Aristotle speaks of the soul of plants and animals, because they are alive, animated, possessed of an acting agent. Unlike inert matter, they are not simply acted upon. Plants act in relationship to their environment. They grow, wither, reproduce. Animals do the same, but with a qualitative advantage, the ability to relocate themselves and to initiate encounters with their environments. However, it is not this “body-soul” but rather the first sense of the soul, that of the individual “free soul,” that will initially enter Christian thought, because it is Plato, with his emphasis upon the “free soul,” who will first be seen as an appropriate font for Christian reflection, and not Aristotle, despite the latter’s roots in the more ancient of the two notions of the soul. What might be called the “free soul” (psychē) represented a person’s individuality, what made this man or woman distinct from any other. When a person died, this psychē went to dwell in Hades, although it might occasionally make a return to the land of the living in the form of a ghost. And, of course, Hades is simply the shadowy abode of the dead, not another name for the Christian belief in an afterlife of damnation. Also distinct from later, popular Christian views, “the ‘double’ or ‘shade’ does not have the ontological status of an autonomous, selffounding being, the human individual’s soul minus its host’s body” (MacDonald

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2003: 21). Before Plato, the soul isn’t a separate substance from the body, not even a non-corporeal one. It may well be material of some refined sort, but it wasn’t thought to be a substance since that word implied something that could stand alone, and early Greek thought, like the Hebraic, did not think whatever might be left after death could be called a human being; could, in any proper use of the word “substance,” stand on its own. Where the psychē dwelt within the body of the living was not specified in Homer’s Greece. It’s possible that this notion of a free soul, one which could depart from the body, entered Indo-European thought through the experience of dreams, alternative realities in which the dreamer appears, at least to herself, to continue in existence during the dream, even though temporarily freed from the constraints imposed by the body. Werner Jaeger’s close reading is particularly helpful here. Again, he underscores the need not to import our Cartesian picture of the soul, the spiritual or mental element of the human person. “Homer describes the ψυχαἰ of the dead as mere shadows without conscious life or mental activity. They lost all memory of life when they crossed the stream of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Homer calls them ‘idols,’ a kind of ghosts, resembling their former shape and face, but there is no passage in Homer where ψυχἠ is used of a living man and means what we call a soul. For that he uses other words, which are mostly taken from parts of the body such as the heart or the diaphragm, or from affections of the body such as the heat of anger (θυμὀϛ, Latin fumus)” (1965: 99–100). This raises an unresolved tension, one already present in Homer, which continues to our own day. How can the soul be that which animates the body, and yet be something autonomous from the body after death? Macdonald offers what I consider to be an intriguing clue, one which I hope subsequently to exploit: the soul that continues after death is a simulacrum of the person, a representation in another medium. Granted that Homer uses the same word psychē to denominate the mortal lifeforce of each individual human and the appearance of the dead human, there seem to be basically incompatible beliefs at work here, or at least an unresolved tension. How can the soul cease to exist with the person’s bodily death and then reappear from the depths of the underworld? The answer to this dilemma lies with Homer’s archaic use of eidolon (image) and phasma (phantom); the dead Patroklos’ psychē and the dead Antikleia’s psychē are exact replicas of simulacra of the living person’s corporeal appearance. (MacDonald, 2003: 21)

But keep in mind that these shadows are not human beings. This is not yet a belief in what we would call the immortality of the soul. For Homeric Greeks, and certainly their predecessors, the soul is also that which quickens the body. These phantasms have no bodies; the afterlife cannot be seen as something qualitatively better than life itself. That notion, so common in Plato, would need time and circumstance to develop. It would be born of history, of the need to tell the stories of heroes.

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Rouse Him at the Name of Crispian When Shakespeare’s Henry V needs to rally his small “band of brothers” for battle against the overwhelming superiority of French numbers, he reminds them that they are being offered the opportunity to live on in the minds and mouths of men. This day is called the Feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day and comes safe home Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named And rouse him at the name of Crispian … And gentlemen in England now abed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day Henry V, IV, iii, 40–43, 64–7

Remember that history is not the brute record of the past. It’s the response offered by the past to our present-day queries. Even with contemporary resources for research, the vast bulk of the past is quite literally unrecoverable. Try even to record all that happens on a city block in one hour. If you’re going to enumerate everything that happened, you must include the movement of insects, dropped gum wrappers, and trash blowing in the wind. Even modern history is story-telling, in the sense that a narrator, an author, has made a decision regarding what is salient for her reader and what is not. This is why history is always being rewritten, because we pose new questions of the past, confront it with new concerns. Historical narratives help to form our present selves. As we change, so too do our stories, even our stories of the past. We thus translate the past into contemporary narrative. Our souls, as actors in history, exist in narrative. It is their medium. Werner Jaeger points out that “the first time we are told expressly that man will become ‘immortal’ (ἀθἀνατοϛ) is therefore quite logically in martial poetry. This is in one of the few elegies preserved of the Spartan Tyrtaeus (seventh century), who promises this as their future lot to the valiant warriors who have died for their country” (1965: 100–101). Of course, the authors think of these warriors as immortal in an alternative dimension of the afterlife. Good enough, but note that they’ve also become immortal in narrative, in the ability of words to transcend the limits of time and space. The soul as animating principle is not designated the inheritor of this immortality. It is rather the notion of the free soul that becomes the bearer, even in death, of something at least rudimentarily akin to what we might call personhood. To have a history, a history that still impacts the community, is to have an identity. Personhood thus emerges as a construction of narrative rather than ontology. This is a key point in my own reflections on the fate of the soul. Remember that our very notion of the individual—which in post-Cartesian, modern philosophy serves as an obvious starting point for reflection—is quite

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foreign to Greek thought, as it is to indigenous peoples in general. It is communities that survive, and what we might call the individual takes its meaning only in relationship to the tribe. “The individual is socialized as a member of the polis, but, in an ideal sense, he maintains and forever preserves his individuality by giving up his life to the community. It is not accidental that the question of his immortality is raised at this moment” (Jaeger 1965: 101). Although there is a great divide between our modern, post-Enlightenment conception of the individual human person and that of the Greek, it is in Greek thought that the individual first steps forward and, one could say, claims a destiny that is distinct from that of the tribe, one based upon narrative, upon historical acts. Jaeger writes: [T]he idea of immortality takes a more and more important place in the human consciousness of the fourth century B.C.; and although the common good is still the value to which every form of human activity is related and which determines a person’s value, it seems evident that this original authority of the social order is vanishing in real life and that the highly differentiated individual of this century is struggling hard to maintain a value of his own that is independent of the great mass of men because it is rooted in something of eternal validity and in the depth of the human soul. We therefore expect, at this point of historical evolution, to encounter a new conception of immortality, the immortality of the soul. Indeed, the same Plato who interprets the creative effort of the human mind as the innate metaphysical ερώϛ for immortal life, takes the step of declaring the soul itself immortal. (1965: 102–03)

Plato would have precedents to draw upon. “The Orphic religion, the Pythagorean ideal of an ascetic life, and the religion of the so-called mysteries have this in common as against the cult religion of the great mass of the people, that they are concerned with man’s inner life, however material its symbolic representation. They all think of man as being much closer to the divine than was commonly assumed, even as being himself of divine origin. In these circles we find for the first time the belief in the soul of man as something different and separable from the body” (Jaeger 1965: 103). Michael Morgan’s tracking of the concept of the soul at this juncture in Greek thought is worth quoting at length, because it highlights the contribution that Orphic sources made to Greek thought on the soul: A central feature of these mystery rites and the Orphic-Pythagorean conglomerate associated with them was the belief in the soul’s immortality. In the Homeric poems and elsewhere, until the fifth century, the dominant view of soul (psychē) was that of a complex of features and functions associated with different parts of the body, with dreams, trances, and such phenomena, and with death. Although it is clear that Greeks of the Archaic period could say “I”, it is doubtful that they had the notion of a unitary soul that was the locus of conscious events.

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The Nature of the Soul Nonetheless, even in Homer, there is the view that some kind of soul, a shadow or vaporous image of the body, continues to exist after death. But reincarnation only seems to have become prominent through the teachings of Pythagoras of Samos in the late sixth century and then in the Orphic texts of the fifth century. It was in this Orphic-Pythagorean context, moreover, that the soul was taken to be immortal and divine. Whether the Homeric poems entertain the possibility of the soul’s immortality is doubtful, but by the fifth century the idea was available, if not yet widely accepted. (1992: 236)1

Note that an inverse movement occurs in the axial age of Plato. The gods, and their particular characteristics, are coming to be seen as anthropomorphic myths, while the human person as an individual, as a bearer of personal history, steps forward from the tribe. Personality and personal history are transferred from the mythic to the historical, the biographical. The shadow lands may still be the fate of most, but some have stepped forward to claim a sort of immortality, one written in narrative. Jaeger draws a distinction between this view of immortality, due to those who have earned the glory, and that of the Old Testament. “The Hebrew Bible does not know immortality in this sense at all, and the idea of resurrection in the New Testament is quite different. If nevertheless Plato’s ideas of the soul and its destiny seem so familiar to us and have kept their direct appeal, that is because they have been adopted, with inevitable modifications, by the Fathers of the Church” (1965: 112). Jaeger underestimates the presence of immortality in the Hebrew scriptures, but it is certainly true that when Christianity appropriated Greek thought, the first Christian apologists found in Plato a non-Hebraic prophet, one whose genius they felt must be due to divine intervention. That is, when they were feeling generous. Otherwise, he was accounted a thief of Hebrew wisdom. Either way, they were attracted to his teaching and saw it as closely aligned with that of their own. “Of the philosophers who are presented in the Apologists as having had some share in the knowledge of truth Plato is by far the most important, and he was to keep this pre-eminence in Christian eyes throughout the Patristic period” (Daniélou 1973: 129). And “although this belief in the immortality of the soul, the ψυχἠ, is not the 1   He also points out that Plato’s thought on the progressive betterment of the soul had direct parallels in the religious movements of his day, though Plato’s path would be philosophical contemplation rather than ecstatic experiences. “[T]he Orphic-BacchicPythagorean-Eleusinian world assumes that relief from our physical world and its distress could be achieved by human beings becoming as completely divine as they could be. There is an element in human life, the soul or psychē, that has a quasi-divine nature; it is immortal. And that element, through ecstatic ritual performance or perhaps through a life of ecstatic practice, could grow stronger and aid in the attainment of salvation … Plato accepts the ecstatic model, that human beings can, by bringing their souls to a certain state, achieve divine or nearly divine status. But he replaces the emotional character of the ritual process with cognitive content. For Plato, that is, a life aimed at salvation takes the form of a life of rational inquiry, a philosophical life” (1992: 231–2).

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same as the Christian idea of man’s resurrection in the flesh or in a transfigured body, both religious ideas have a natural affinity with each other; and it is therefore easy to understand that the Platonic belief in immortality was regarded as an anticipation of the Christian resurrection and helpful to the faithful who might wish to check their emotional expectations of a future life after death by rational reflection” (Jaeger 1965: 97). But a closer examination of Plato’s writings on the soul is both productive and puzzling. Ambiguity about the meaning of the soul can exist even in the same author, and no less a one than Plato. “Whether the soul is mortal or immortal, material or immaterial, bipartite or tripartite, and so forth, depends to some degree on which dialogue is under consideration” (MacDonald 2003: 37). In Phaedo, the soul is certainly immortal. Socrates asks Cebes—and answers the question himself rather than wait on that plodder—“What is it that, present in the body, makes it living?—A soul” (105c). And since the soul participates in the world of forms, a world of eternal verities, “when death comes to man, the mortal part of him dies, it seems, but his deathless part goes away safe and indestructible, yielding the place to death” (106e). What remains constant in all of Plato’s writings is the assertion that the soul is completely distinct from the body, a notion that may have entered Greek philosophy through the experience of Shamanism. Of course, for Plato, the soul is entirely separable from the body because they represent radically different realms of being. Charles Taylor suggests that in Plato’s thought the Greek soul becomes both more unitary in its operations and more distinct from the corporeal. It is no longer the animating force for the body. “The unity of locus, and hence the new notion of the soul as this single site of all thought and feeling—as against the ‘psyche’ as life-principle—is an essential concomitant of the morality of rational hegemony” (1989: 120). The soul is more refined, intellectual, participating in the eternal realm of ideas. The body is formed of denser matter, the ever shifting dross of illusion. Jaeger notes: Plato’s conception of the soul is the crown of his philosophy of knowledge, and it could not have taken such definite shape without his theory of ideas. If we understand him correctly, this is what he tells us himself in his Phaedo, where he declares that the belief in the immortality of the soul stands or falls with this theory. The more he came to visualize the ideas as the only true being beyond the world of sense-perception, which Heraclitus had in mind when he said that everything is in perpetual flux, the more Plato was led to believe that the knowledge of the ideas, which springs from the soul itself and not from our senses, exists in the soul because it remembers what it once knew in a former life. This way of thinking was suggested to him not by Socrates but by the old Orphic myth about the origin and migration of the soul through several lives, and he expressly mentions the old formula σωˆμα σημα, ̂ which for him takes on a new meaning. The way in which he makes use of various elements of Orphic eschatology in his myths about the destiny of the soul after death at the end of

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his Gorgias, Phaedo, and Republic proves unmistakably that he found truth in them if taken in a nonliteral sense. (1965: 108)

What should be noted is that when Plato turns to the human intellect, he finds in its operation something of the divine, something truly eternal. “The Symposium gives an even more detailed picture of this ascent through knowledge, comparing it to the initiation in the successive stages of the mysteries. The soul thereby becomes more and more similar to the object of its knowledge, and only by this process of gradual assimilation to pure being and to the divine good can the knowledge of it finally be attained” (Jaeger 1965: 110). There is a spiritual/material line drawn in Plato, though not always between the soul and body. Rather, it is drawn between the action of the intellect and the material world in which that intellect dwells. Plato views the mind of the human person as finding something eternal in the passing, though it is submerged beneath the material and must transcend its milieu. In Aristotle, on the contrary, the intellectual will be drawn from the material; the earthly begets the eternal. For the contemporary Christian, Plato offers an unacceptable error and a profound insight. The error is the rejection of the body, indeed of the physical cosmos, as realms unworthy of, and occluding, the deepest reality of the human person, his or her pursuit of eternal verities. For Plato, to assert that “the word became flesh” can only mean that truth has degenerated into illusion. Plato thinks that the nobility of the human soul guarantees its immortality, whereas Christian thought sees the soul as created and therefore subject to dissolution without the intervention of God, without Christ’s resurrection. Yet even the well-known Platonic disparagement of the physical contains an important clue for contemporary theology. Plato insists that the intellectual life, which is itself a fruit of history, rises above nature, to such an extent as to achieve something immortal. It would not be unfair to say that for Plato, rationality equals immortality. It is what the mind, itself immortal, gleans from the transitory. “Plato’s reasoning is of course focused on soul as self-generating motion, but he is explicit that soul is a divinity (Phaedo 897b2; cf. 899a7–c1). Indeed, Plato goes further: Heavenly motions, like rotary motion, reflect the order of rationality; hence it must be ‘the best kind of soul (i.e. rational and supremely virtuous) that cares for the entire universe, and directs it along the best path’ (897c7–9)” (Morgan 1992: 240–41). To Be Or Not To Be More salient and satisfactory than the ontological status that Plato assigned to the soul—one that cannot be accepted by Christians professing the incarnation of God in human flesh—is the philosopher’s recognition that the soul is a historically fashioned reality. Plato offers an insight into humanity that would flower in the history of Western thought. We are temporal beings. In our deepest realities, we

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are more children of history than the offsprings of nature. In our decisions we quite literally form and fashion our very selves. Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be read as the story of souls seeking to complete their narratives, illustrating Plato on the necessity of souls striving to become their own selves. When Queen Gertrude’s sins are spelled out by her son, she echoes Plato in the realization that one’s very self changes in response to history. O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul, And there I see such black and grainèd spot As will not leave their tinct. (Hamlet, III, iv, 90–92)

Plato views the self, or the soul, as thoroughly temporal, it changes as it moves through time. The soul is a “narrative” formed by the decisions that constitute our lives. While the soul is clearly separable from the body, for Socrates in Protagoras (313b) it nonetheless represents the “real” self. There he questions whether one should hand over one’s soul to a sophist, and the term “soul” clearly evokes an intellectual or spiritual self that grows and is responsible for its growth: “But when it comes to something you value more than your body, namely your soul, and when everything depends on whether it becomes worthy or worthless, I don’t see you getting together with your father or brother or a single one of your friends to consider whether or not to entrust your soul to this recently arrived foreigner” (313a–b). The choice of a mentor is particularly important for Plato, because, as Socrates explains in Phaedo, “the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death” (64a). And is death “anything else than the separation of the soul from the body” (Phaedo 64c)? Note that death is now presented as a qualitative improvement of the human condition, not its gradual dissolution. In Phaedo, Socrates teaches that “the soul goes to the underworld possessing nothing but its education and upbringing” (107d). For Plato, a human being is essentially two things: an eternal soul, a true self, which is trapped in a transitory, material body. In Meno, Socrates insists: “Then if the truth about reality is always in our soul, the soul must be immortal” (86b1–2). The individual is becoming so strong in the thought of Plato that in both Gorgias and Phaedo one can substitute the word “self” for psychē without disturbing the scope or sense of either dialogue. Does the Sophist Gorgias, who teaches oratory, impart with that erudition education in the virtues? The question led to a protracted conversation about what it means to live well, with Socrates arguing that one cannot do so without living virtuously, despite all appearances to the contrary. Just as medicine treats the body, so a well-ordered politics, one that fosters and distributes justice, cares for the soul (464b), and the lifelong task of the soul is to improve itself. The soul progresses by shunning the needs of the body,

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which occlude its insight and hinder its progress. “It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it was said, in truth and in fact, no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body” (Phaedo 66c). The difficulty in Gorgias is that Socrates’ interlocutors do seem to carry the day when they point out, in response to his questions, that many of those who are seriously lacking in virtue nonetheless seem to live quite well. Socrates argues that, all appearances to the contrary, they can’t possibly be healthy in soul, though they may well be sound in body and personal circumstances. Most importantly, Socrates insists that the human person is responsible for the self, the psychē. This notion of the soul as a personal task, an individual responsibility, is a quite distinct development. Gorgias even closes with a mythic sequence about the judgment of souls. They are dispatched either to Tartarus for “the appropriate sufferings” or to the Isles of the Blessed (526c). Plato employs the myth to explain how it is that a person can lose his very self, even though he appears to be prospering in this world of illusions. The essential self of the wicked person undergoes corruption, though this isn’t apparent to those who can only see the physical and its circumstances. Joseph Ratzinger reads Plato as essentially a political philosopher, one rallying the individual to selfless service of the state, the polis. Hence his anthropology is constructed to serve his politics. “For Plato, what is most important is that justice is truth and so reality. The truth of justice is more real than mere biological life and individual self-assertion. In comparison with justice and truth, mere biological existence appears as outright unreality, a shadow cast by the real, whereas the person who lives by justice lives by the really real … If we try to capture the core of Plato’s discovery we can formulate it by saying that man, to survive biologically, must be more than bios. He must be able to die into a more authentic life than this” (1988: 78–9). This notion that the soul steps forth from biology to biography, forms itself in history, becomes a fundamental Platonic inheritance of early Christianity. “Justin (I Apology VIII, 4), Tatian (Oratio 6), and Athenagoras (Supplicatio pro Christianis 12), all teach that Plato knew the doctrine of the Last Judgment and quote Gorgias 523e on the judges in Hades, Minoas, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus” (Daniélou 1973: 123). Plato speaks of the soul as capable of bearing temporal permutations. It changes in response to the way life has been led, and this would be evident if one could “see” a soul. Socrates teaches in Gorgias: “In a word, however a man treated his body while he was alive, all the marks of that treatment, or most of them, are evident for some time even after he is dead. And I think that the same thing, therefore, holds true for the soul, Callicles. All that’s in the soul is evident after it has been stripped naked of the body, both things that are natural to it and things that have happened to it, things that the person came to have in his soul as a result of his pursuit of each objective” (524d). And so it is that the ghost of Hamlet’s father is

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Doomed for a certain time to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. (Hamlet, I, v, 10–13)

The doctrine of Purgatory, already adumbrated in Plato, is here presented in all its integrity. A soul not yet ready to be scripted into the Book of Life must rewrite itself through the tender agency of God’s purgation. The greatest evil that his murderer has perpetrated, greater than theft of crown or of queen, is to have sent the king, his own brother, unready to his death, not allowed to emend the text of his life. Cut off even in the blossom of my sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, No reck’ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. (I, v, 76–9)

When Hamlet has the opportunity to slay his adulterous and murderous uncle, he stays his hand precisely because the old man is praying. Murdered at that moment would mean and so a goes to heaven, And so am I revenged. That would be scanned. A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, do the same villain send To heaven. (III, iii, 73–8)

Shakespeare has an ironic, yet potently Catholic, sense of forgiveness. The very narrative of one’s life can be rewritten at the last moment; the good thief can still gain heaven. “The play’s the thing,” and if its denouement came at this moment, Claudius would be sent to heaven, where his thoughts have fleetingly turned. And of course, Hamlet realizes that his paralyzing scruple is the inability to write his own story, to play the part that destiny demands. Should he simply exit the stage? To be, or not to be; that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. (III, i, 58–62)

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His problem is that suicide itself will not unwrite his story. Hamlet may scornfully assess it all as “Words, words, words” (II, ii, 195), but the story cannot be rescrolled. Not to act, even to foreclose all possibility of action, is itself an act. This is the essence of what it means to be human. We have unlimited choices, save one. We cannot choose not to choose. Hamlet can oppose his sea of troubles by eschewing the very narrative of his life, but he will still be responsible, with the Word himself as judge, for the course his narrative takes, for its ultimate conclusion. Reflecting on Hamlet’s retreat into linguistic obfuscation—is the Prince mad or not—Gusdorf writes: “The radical revolt of Hamlet inevitably leads him to death. To disavow language is to lose the sense of reality. The Prince of Denmark, at the moment of his death will only say: ‘the rest is silence’ (V, ii, 310), the least meaningful speech of that renunciation of the universe of discourse which is equivalent to a renunciation of being” (1965: 41). Hamlet succeeds in the demands which the play puts upon him. He submerges himself in linguistic madness—is there any other more effective way of judging one mad than the words that come forth from him?—only to emerge as the one who sets his father free, post-death, from his story, while condemning his murderous uncle to his proper script. Hamlet then falls silent, confiding his personhood to the narrative of Horatio. If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story. (V, ii, 298–301)

Of course, it is Shakespeare, not Horatio, who becomes Hamlet’s bard and thus ensures his immortality. Perhaps it’s not surprising that science, whose proper study is the material world of nature, can find no support for Plato’s immortality. The only thing immortal in the empirical sciences is nature, but nature itself is never the object of study. That’s because nature itself isn’t an entity; it’s a perceived regularity, the settled trust that endows study. How odd that philosophies of science don’t spend more time pondering this great constant and its corollary, the never-ceasing human desire to know. What if, one day, the cosmos-creating stability of nature disappeared, or the human desire to know was satiated? What then of science? The humanities, however, are the fruit of history, of human deliberation and decision. Classics create the human person by enlarging us. Hence their work is never superseded. It becomes immortal while the trivial shrinks into history’s silence. Here is how George Steiner draws the contrast: “In aesthetic discourse, no interpretive-critical analysis, doctrine, or program is superseded, is erased, by any later construction. The Copernican theory did correct and supersede that of Ptolemy. The chemistry of Lavoisier makes untenable the earlier phlogiston theory. Aristotle on mimesis and pathos is not superseded by Lessing or by Bergson. The Surrealist manifestos of Breton do not cancel out Pope’s Essay on Criticism,

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though they may well be antithetical to it” (1989: 76). Is it any wonder that the humanities continue to bespeak the immortal? Is this only wishful thinking? Reading Plato centuries later, after Anglo-American philosophy has centered its attention upon language, it’s easy to see why Plato would want to posit at least the direction of human knowledge in the supernal, to make it a drive toward the divine. Humanity’s linguistic ability is precisely the intellectual engine that creates consciousness, that hues the human intellect, lifting it above its surroundings. Compared to those pyschē who merely respond to nature, our ability to use language to imagine, what was and what might be, has clearly taken what we would call an evolutionary advance over what came before. Plato calls it our participation in the divine. We might say that our minds allow us to write history. The play’s the thing.

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Chapter 6

Aristotle’s Actor De Anima At first glance, Aristotle’s De Anima appears to have little in common with Christian discourse on the soul. The treatise does not address what a Christian would consider to be the personal destiny of the human being, and it scarcely employs the word “God.” De Anima is a sustained examination of the second Greek sense of the word “soul,” the animating force that exists in living beings. When the work does come to consider the human person, it can properly be called “the first systematic philosophy of mind” (Annas 1992: 297). Why is that of import for a contemporary Christian understanding of the soul? And why do I place Aristotle on the upward slope, toward a better understanding of the meaning of a soul? Because Aristotle, and Aquinas in his wake, see human intelligence itself as ordered toward God in desire and dynamism.1 Aristotle’s great contribution to Western anthropology was his thoroughgoing rejection of a Platonic duality within the human being. The soul is not the real, albeit ephemeral, self trapped temporarily within the body; it is rather “the principle of animal life” (402a7). Rather than leap towards transcendence, Aristotle begins with observation, though in the case of humans this will indeed lead to the transcendence that Plato so rightly revered. De Anima’s “main concern is to get down to investigating the various types of ability (perceiving, thinking, etc.) which constitute having a soul” (Annas 1992: n297). Perhaps the best entrance to Aristotle’s thought is this seemingly obtuse definition of the soul that he offers at 412a27 of De Anima: “The soul is an actuality of the first kind of a natural body having life potentially within it.” Note that it employs actuality and potentiality rather than the, perhaps more expected, terms of matter and form. Aristotle does examine the soul using his familiar distinction between matter and form, but that itself is a variant on his more fundamental distinction between potentiality and actuality. If one fails to see this, one locks Aristotle’s system into a stasis that strangles the very dynamism that he sought to capture. Matter and form are not two types of thing in the world. They are two ways of describing, two aspects in any description of what we find in the world.

1   I tend to use the word “intelligence” rather than “mind” precisely because of their differing pictorial imports. “Mind” suggests something inside the human person, something requiring a physical correlate, while “intelligence” suggests the human person as ordered toward activity outside the self, toward the world.

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One could say that for Aristotle reality has two aspects. It is, but it is also becoming, or, put another way, something remains constant within ceaseless change. “To Aristotle, one of the most striking characteristics of nature is that it constantly changes. His Physics is an investigation of ‘being’ insofar as it changes” (Cullen 2006: 43). Our world is made up of actual things, things that once had, and still do have, the potential to become something else. Aristotle noted three principles active in any question of change. “Form,” that which does the changing; “matter,” which receives change, all the while remaining itself; and “privation,” when that which is, lacks something that it might have. “For matter, so conceived is supposed to persist through substantial change and to be what (in substantial change) loses and acquires form—in the case of living things, what loses and acquires soul” (Whiting 1992: 75). Hence, a soul is the form which makes a potentially living thing into an actually living thing, whether plant, animal, or human. It actualizes it. If for Plato the word “soul” stands as cipher for personal narrative, in Aristotle it evokes an acting agent. At the beginning of De Anima II.1, Aristotle notes that there are three sorts of substance: 1) Matter, which should not be confused with our notions drawn from contemporary physics. Matter is perceived potentiality; it is not simply undifferentiated physical stuff. Thus, for a brick, straw and clay are its matter while its rectangular sphere is it form. 2) Form, which is also often misunderstood. Form is actuality, not a cookie cutter mold into which matter is poured. So the same brick, once put into a house, is now the matter which is formed into a house. In relationship to its ingredients the brick is form, but in relationship to the structure of the house it is matter. Note that form shifts depending upon the place from which the human intellect assesses it. Form is the intelligibility that the human mind draws forth from reality. And finally, 3) compounds of matter and form, which is what we encounter in daily life. Note that what we call matter and what we designate as form both depend entirely upon where we enter a given cycle of change. From one prospect, a brick is matter; from another, form. Matter and form—and behind them potentiality and actuality—are Aristotle’s systematic solution to the temporal quandary of the one and the many. How does life, the world around us, constantly change and yet retain its intelligible features? To use terms drawn from anthropology, a world without intelligible features would be chaos, not a cosmos in which the human person can dwell and flourish. Or, to illustrate the underpinning of modern science, a world closed to human intelligibility would be one ungoverned by nature, since nature is nothing more than the synthetic appropriation of the world by the human intellect. Here a warning from Wittgenstein’s anti-ontological bent is appropriate. Nature must not be hypostasized. It is not an incredible large entity within the world, or an entity that fills the world. Nor is nature, properly speaking, an actor. As Wittgenstein noted, our contemporaries speak of nature acting as previous centuries spoke of God at work, but both nouns occlude an important insight, that events simply happen; “Es gibt,” as Heidegger would say. We speak of nature “causing” events to happen, when all we mean is that these events occur in a

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perceived pattern, which we call nature, that leads us to anticipate them. Nature does not explain Aristotle’s movement from potentiality to actuality. In De Anima, Aristotle’s concern is with living compounds. This is why he will speak of plants and animals as entities that have souls. Their souls are what animate them, what make them living things rather than inert ones. “At the level of description and experience, it is the human beings and animals which present themselves as the things which are acting causally within human and animal intentional or directed action” (Braine 1992: 203; my italics). Since, for Aristotle, form is what makes matter a “this,” what individualizes it, the soul is the form of any living thing. It makes it a living thing. Note that the form is not its shape, but its actuality, that in virtue of which it is the kind of living thing that it is. And yet, since “form is inseparable from matter: it must be realized in matter, Aristotle tells us, if it is to exist at all” (403b3, b18) (Cohen 1992: 59). Recalling that form is not a “mode” impressed into matter, but our intelligibility interacting with it, for Aristotle that very intelligibility is focused upon action. What do the various things in the world do? What can we expect of them? So, for example, Aristotle writes: “What is a soul? It is substance in the sense which corresponds to the account of a thing” (412b10–11; my italic). Aristotle offers an example: an axe is an axe because it chops. If it can no longer do this, it is not an axe. This is why he presents a tripartite description of the soul, one that corresponds to the types of actor that human thought encounters in the world: “Of the psychic powers … some kinds of living things, as we have said, possess all, some less than all, others only one. Those we have mentioned are the nutritive, the appetitive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the power of thinking. Plants have none but the first, the nutritive, while another order of living things has this plus the sensory” (414a29–33). Aristotle writes: “Certain kinds of animals possess … the power of locomotion, and still others, i.e. man and possibly another order like man or superior to him, the power of thinking and thought” (414b16–19; my italic). Note that the question is one of activity, not occult entities. “It is necessary for the student of these forms of soul first to find a definition of each, expressive of what it is, and then to investigate its derivative properties. But if we are to express what each is, viz. what the thinking power is, or the perceptive, or the nutritive, we must go farther back and first give an account of thinking or perceiving: for activities and actions are prior in definition to potentialities” (415a14–20; my italic). At 412b3–9 Aristotle writes: “If then, we have to give a general formula applicable to all kinds of soul, we must describe it as an actuality of the first kind of a natural organized body. This is why we can dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and the body are one: it is as though we were to ask whether the wax and its shape are one, or generally the matter of a thing and that of which it is the matter. Unity has many senses (as many as ‘is’ has), but the proper one is that of actuality.” In other words, we only experience souls as animating organisms. To speak of the soul apart from the organism will be a conceptual distinction, not one that can be encountered in real life. How tightly Aristotle links the soul to the

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body can be illustrated in two ways. For him, a corpse cannot properly be called a human body, because it lacks the form, an animating soul, which would make it such. Secondly, the soul never acts apart from the body. Aristotle doesn’t employ the term “mind” in anything like our modern usage, one descending from Descartes. The thinkers of the Enlightenment considered thoughts and emotions to be mental events, but for Aristotle the soul never thinks or feels apart from the body. Every thought and emotion has a physical component. “It seems that all the affections of soul involve a body—passion, gentleness, fear, pity, courage, joy, loving and hating; in all these there is a concurrent affection of the body” (403a16). The same holds for thinking, since for Aristotle this is a conceptual process in humans, a linkage of sensory-based phantasms, which would be impossible without the body’s sensory interaction with the world. “To the thinking soul images serve as if they were contents of perception (and when it asserts or denies them to be good or bad it avoids or pursues them). That is why the soul never thinks without an image” (431a15–17). In discussing the thought of his predecessors, Aristotle notes that they universally attribute two activities to the soul: movement and sensation (403b26). He accepts the notion that the soul moves the body, but rejects any idea that the soul is self-moving, like a person riding a horse, who might choose to dismount. Otherwise, “the soul might even quit its body and re-enter it, and with this would be involved the possibility of a resurrection of animals from the dead” (406b3), a prospect rightly ridiculed (without the aid of revelation) as absurd by Aristotle. The soul is not a guest of the body. It is human intelligence active in the world. To illustrate the conceptual confusion that must be avoided, at 408bff, Aristotle says: “to say that it is the soul which is angry is as if we were to say that it is the soul that weaves or builds a house. It is doubtless better to avoid saying that the soul pities or learns or thinks, and rather to say that it is the man who does this with his soul.” This notion of Aristotelian form, and its subsequent usage by Aquinas, is essential in recovering a more adequate “picture” of the human soul, not as an ephemeral guest of the body, but rather as our human understanding of the self, the human person as he or she engages the world. Aristotle gives beautiful expression to this notion when he distinguishes the human soul from that of plants and animals toward the close of De Anima: “It was a good idea to call the soul ‘the place of forms’, though this description holds only of the thinking soul, and even this is the forms only potentially, not actually” (429a27–9). The soul is “the place of forms” because it is our intelligibility that gathers the world to itself. Aristotle Avoiding Cartesian Dualism Aristotle’s thought can easily be misinterpreted by modern thinkers if they approach his treatment of the soul as something needing to be explained on the basis of spirit’s emergence from matter, or, to use the secular equivalent, the mind/ brain relationship. Although he is greatly concerned with how human beings think,

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Aristotle doesn’t ask why they do so. He takes this for granted. And this is why I speak of actors, rather than souls. The word “soul” conjures up ethereal entities. On the other hand, the word “actor” helps to dispel a modern misfit, the notion that Aristotle is thinking of faculties emerging from nature. This isn’t his question. Like the indigenous people before him, Aristotle simply sees the world as being full of actors. They do not disappear under the agency of nature, as they do in modern thought. The distance between Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between soul and body, and our contemporary, Cartesian derived mind/body vexation is aptly illustrated by M.F. Burnyeat: “To be truly Aristotelian, we would have to stop believing that the emergence of life or mind requires explanation” (1992: 26). This is because, like all ancients, Aristotle simply presupposed that the world contained animated (ensouled) beings. The evolutionary emergence of what today would be called the mental from the physical is an issue never pondered by him, nor how the mental interacts with the physical. These are post-Cartesian conundrums, and, as Charles H. Kahn warns, to read Aristotle through Descartes is to lose “the philosophical relevance of Aristotle, by eliminating his chief advantage, namely that he stands outside this post-Cartesian tradition, and hence that a sympathetic understanding of his position may allow us to step outside this tradition long enough to subject it to critical scrutiny” (1992: 359). David Braine concurs, arguing persuasively that the Aristotelian approach is not only viable, but a helpful corrective to modern thought, for two reasons: because “causation cannot be reduced to a relation between events but essentially involves agents, whether animate or inanimate, and second that not all causation is physical causation” (1992: 22). Like nature, psychological states and events are not causes, though language presents them as such. They may well figure in an explanation of why something happened, but they do not, as Aristotle would put it, move anything from potency into act. They aren’t themselves actors within the world. Braine turns to Aristotle in order to combat two errant tendencies of modern thought: dualism and materialism. The basis for considering dualism and materialism together is easily seen: for materialism to get going at all in its main contemporary form it is an absolute condition that one should have established a dualistic pattern of analysis of what goes on in human life. That is, before mental states and events can be identified with brain-states or events, or regarded as “realized in the brain”, these mental states and events have to be conceived in a way that makes them purely “inner”, logically segregated from the “outer world” and the “outer man” with his behavior in a way which is characteristic of dualism. But it is precisely this dualistic analysis which is open to philosophical objection. (1992: 23)

Materialism makes an aligned error. It avoids dualism by admitting only physical causation, but, as we will see, that simply doesn’t do justice to the human person as a linguistic actor.

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Wittgenstein warned against hypostasizing mental states, a fundamental feature of Cartesian dualism. Once one has divided the human person into two distinct halves, it makes sense to speak of two realms of agency, but it is precisely the avoidance of that dichotomy that Aristotle offers. As Wittgenstein pointed out, we don’t know what some would call our mental states by observation. We don’t look inside ourselves for interior actors. There are not two levels of causality needing to be aligned, with the mental eventually being explained on the basis of the physical. We simply don’t discover causality, in Aristotle’s sense, as an actor that causes something to happen within ourselves. The mind isn’t a ghostly effect needing a physical explanation. “That he believes such-and-such, we gather from observation of his person, but he does not make the statement, ‘I believe…’ on grounds of observation of himself. And that is why ‘I believe p’ may be equivalent to the assertion of ‘p.’ And the question, ‘Is it so?’ to ‘I’d like to know if it is so.’” (1980: I, 96e, §504). Wittgenstein’s point is that you don’t observe someone inside yourself before speaking for yourself. You don’t “check with your mind” before issuing a statement. Using Aristotle’s approach to debunk mechanistic reductions of human actions, Braine insists that mechanistic explanations don’t do justice to the intentionality evidenced in human actions, that “there is no general reason for supposing a priori that whenever something is explained in a way which involves teleology there must always be an underlying mechanical substructure which would allow it to be explained mechanically. On the contrary, particularly when the involvement of teleology stems from the involvement of mental or mind involving concepts, the natural presumption is rather the other way” (1992: 249). He goes on to argue, as have others, that reductionism is only one tool of understanding and that the actions of human beings, precisely because language allows them to envision possibilities—what is not the case but might be—cannot be reduced to mechanistic explanation. Human activity issues from consciousness, from awareness of possibilities. Because of language, humans perceive both Aristotelian actuality and potentiality. Otherwise, “if there is no kind of knowledge or appreciation of a goal whatsoever, an activity in a living being may be teleologically directed but cannot properly be described as ‘intentional’ or ‘voluntary’ even in a diminished sense” (Braine 1992: 302). Language forms a horizon, against which all individual assertions precede. With statements involving consciousness, their very meaning gives them a role in teleological explanation. They cannot be reduced to mechanistic explanation. To use a pedestrian but potent example, genetic dispositions cannot account for your teenager’s desire for this particular designer pair of blue jeans rather than for the one that, to most eyes, appears identical. The label and the cachet that the desired designer jeans offer is a function of an elaborate skein of socially determined values, perceptions, and meanings. One can’t look down into mechanistic science to explain the desire, one has to look out into the world of meaning that language creates. In short: “Language is the necessary and sufficient condition for entrance into the human world” (Gusdorf 1965: 4).

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As Braine so aptly puts it: “The stark reality is that nature is full of things which are, from the point of view of materialist and dualist alike, hybrids— things the fundamental law governing whose behavior include uneliminably principles referring to life and consciousness … These natural wholes are such that many things are explicable and some even predictable according to the types of consciousness-involving account which we ordinarily give, but not predictable or determined according to physical law, besides not being explained in the same aspects” (1992: 290–91). If, in the midst of a brouhaha over which jeans to buy, your teenager whines, “You just don’t get it,” you will, of course, have gotten it, but not in a manner reducible to purely empirical explanation. If you cannot enter into the linguistically structured world of the teenager, you cannot perceive the intelligibility of these designer jeans or the Aristotelian actor who is desirous of them. Braine argues that an enduring achievement of Aristotle was his discovery of individual natures, which is ultimately what the notion of a soul explains for Aristotle. Using the example of a severed finger, he takes up why Aristotle would insist that it is not a finger in the proper sense of the word, precisely because it lacks the nature of a living man. “The connection of the two uses of the word is in some way obvious. There is a similarity of shape and internal physiological structure as well as a relation of origin since it was once not severed. But, as Aristotle would have it, it is the same in matter, but not the same substance because not the same nature—that is, not the same in regard to that which is relevant to identity because of the way in which it is relevant to explanation (or more precisely, while the same in respect of the explanation of certain abstracted aspects of behavior, not the same overall, and not the same when considering what makes it a unity)” (1992: 261–2). There is simply no way of separating substances according to their individual parts. What separates substances for Aristotle is substantial forms, a unity of explanation, one which is discerned by our intelligence. “We need to understand that what is meant by ‘not being an accidental unity’ does not have to do with the mode of origin of things, e.g., that they were brought together ‘by Nature’ rather than by the design of an artificer or by chance. The contrast is rather between things whose parts are capable of separate existence without being denatured, such as parts of heaps or parts of chairs, and things whose parts have natures which make them incapable of existence apart from the wholes of which they are parts without changing their natures or their criteria of identity” (1992: 262). So, for Aristotle, a human being is an animal that thinks, and this will mean that one can never arrive at the nature of a human being, properly understand what it means to be human, without seeing thought itself as an irreducible arena of human activity, one governed by its own internal logic and laws. “[W]hat is required for a thing to be a ‘substance existing in complete actuality’ is not complete independence from the rest of nature but only its being a subject of action in its own right. By a subject of action in its own right I mean something with a rounded nature of which the action is a realization, possessing ‘a rounded nature’ in the sense in which subordinate parts do not have rounded nature because

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interdependence and interrelation with other parts is internal to the action proper to each of them” (Braine 1992: 265–6). Braine argues that because “linguistic understanding and thinking in the medium of words have no bodily organ through which they operate, and no neural correlate,” one must conclude that “to be of a nature to have language is to transcend the body” (1992: 447).2 To explain, Braine introduces a distinction “between wordmeaning in langue and word-significance in parole, (the latter) in use in the full speech context which gives language an open-endedness, flexibility and fecundity associated with it, as well as being the root of its unformalizability” (1992: 354).3 A computer program might be able to have limited success with langue, but it can never approach adequacy in parole, because the latter is too context dependent. It relies upon the intellect seeing something of the whole in any usage of a word or phrase. “If we wanted a vivid analogy, we might say that a sentence or complete speech-unit stands to its sense or meaning as the body stands to its life or soul; and we might say that, as the parts of the body have life and movement as functioning parts of the human being in the same act as the whole body has human life and movement, so the parts of the sentence have life or sense and direction in the same act as the whole has life, sense, and direction” (Braine 1992: 371). An Artificial Actor? Here is an example that Braine treats in some detail. “If a bodily thing (e.g., some foreigner or some electronic machine) issues the sounds represented in ‘That is red’, the question arises whether it has made an utterance with the meaning which an utterance in context by an English speaker of the sentence ‘That is red’ would have. Most obviously this has the character of a proposition about which one might ask whether it is true or false, accurate or over-simple in regard to the object spoken of, and suchlike, rather than the character of a command or a question” (1992: 377). Here one can’t help but remember Wittgenstein’s example of our 2   “If by the organ through which a capacity is exercised is meant some part of the organism such that the operation of the organ is internal to or vehicle of the operation of the capacity, then there can be isomorphism between parts, sub-states, or sub-processers and the whole or its state or processes, but nothing corresponding to a critical judgement by the whole upon the operation of the whole. By what we call the ‘allusiveness’ of thought (its ‘intentionality’ in one sense of that word), every utterance or thought is pregnant with the whole inter-connectedness of and structure of language” (Braine 1992: 452). 3   The distinction between the French words langue (language or tongue) and parole (speech) comes from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was published posthumously in 1915, after having been collated from student notes. La langue denotes the abstract systematic principles of a language, without which no meaningful utterance (parole) would be possible. It’s the distinction between language as system and language as actual usage.

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ability to recognize blond hair in a black and white photograph. Clearly, what our eyes see is not anything remotely like a color that we would call blond or yellow, and yet our ability to identify the color is based upon our ability to grasp the skein of relationships at play within the photograph and our language. Braine continues: “In order to be able to understand the word ‘red’ in the meaning it has in its normal context, one has to be able to understand the subject of this predicate within such a sentence as susceptible of other predications, and since ‘is’ is a tensed verb, other types of predication, including ones differing in respect of time (past, present, or future) and aspect (states or episodes of different types reflected in the use, e.g. of continuous, perfective, or aorist ‘tenses’ according to the mode of ‘placing’ in time concerned)” (1992: 378). The issue is that those who imagine, and the word is aptly chosen, artificial intelligence being programmed to sequence units of language have failed to envision all that goes into a properly executed sentence in a real context of usage. Braine continues: It is incoherent to suppose that a bodily being which issues the sounds contained in the sentence “That is red” is engaged in human discourse and uttering a sentence with the meaning which “That is red” would have for an English speaker, and thus involved in propositional discourse, without the at least implicit (i.e. whether or not the appropriate vocabulary has been learned) possession of the concepts such as knowing by sense, knowing, truth, assent, mistake, and so forth, in some form, as well as the concepts of bodily being or substance and of the subject of knowledge and perception. (1992: 381–2)

Artificial intelligence can recognize that you have typed (or spoken) the correct password, but this, beginning its programmed response, is still infinitely removed from human intelligence recognizing that a simple sentence that you might utter, “That is red,” means that you disapprove of the left-leaning politics of your interlocutor. Because artificial intelligence cannot live within a corporealintellectual whole, it would not even be able to distinguish whether you have asking if “that is red?” (as a question) or, with the same sentence, teaching it to assign a value to the object referenced (as a statement). Braine concludes: “Thus, linguistic capacity is unitary in its essentials, and these essentials reach deeply into the structure of human life, including the interrelation of perception, action, and emotion and the integration of these with the procedures of deliberation both ‘theoretical’ and practical” (1992: 382). To return to the example, one can accept the assertion that your teenager has a genetic disposition to low self-esteem, one inherited from your side of the family, and that this genetic disposition contributes to the neurological functions that accompany her decision to purchase these jeans. But whereas cancer can be explained on such a functional, mechanistic level, the decision of a human person involves the entire horizon of linguistically enabled meaning. Hence the assertion that human beings have something holistic about their way of being in the world,

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something that Aristotle quite properly calls a soul. If the word soul sounds supernatural, Braine insists that we are talking “about substances, that is, causal agents exercising different modes of causality … and there is no way in which the admission of causal agency of one kind at one level excludes the admission of causal agency at more macro or more micro levels, typically different modes of causal agency” (1992: 285). Here is another way to approach the same question of linguistic transcendence. Artificial intelligence, to be the sort of intelligence that we call the human—and thus would rightly use the word “soul” to characterize—need never be recognized until that intelligence begins to ask the question, “why?” A computer might request more data to perform properly a function, but it will never ask about an action’s relationship to its own presence in the world. It does not want anything from the world. It does not grow and complete itself through interaction with the world. It will never ask, “What’s it all about?” “Why does this have to be?” In short, it can deal only with actuality, it cannot conceive what Aristotle meant by potentiality. That is the boon and burden of language. Aristotelian potentiality doesn’t apply only to things that we encounter within the world. It applies preeminently to the soul, an intelligence that sees what is not the case, yet desires or dreads it all the same. The Active Intellect Finally, a statement by Aristotle that bears contemplation, not only because it firmly roots Western thought in realism, but also because it would be echoed by Aquinas, and later by Karl Rahner in his deeply penetrating analysis of what it means to be human. At 431b20, Aristotle summarizes his results in De Anima with this description of the human person as one ordered toward the world. Speaking of the Nous poiētikos, the active intellect, he writes: “Let us now summarize our results about soul, and repeat that the soul is in a way all existing things; for existing things are either sensible or thinkable, and knowledge is in a way what is knowable, and sensation is in a way what is sensible: in what way we must inquire.” Even the immediate followers of Aristotle disagreed on the meaning of the active intellect, a disagreement which continues among modern interpreters (cf. Brentano 2003). Was it a faculty inherent within the human person or a divine faculty, one in which the human person only shares? De Anima 430a14–17 distinguishes two aspects of thought, and in doing so positions human cognition against the backdrop of divine intelligence. Human thought is potentially all things, whereas divine thought actualizes all things. “And in fact though, as we have described it, is what it is by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another which is what it is by virtue of making all things.” All later commentators agree that human intelligence appears to be the most spiritual of intellectual faculties, because it transcends and orders the sensual. Ibn Sīnā (c. 980–1037), Avicenna as he came to be known in the Christian West,

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followed Aristotle in dividing the intellect between that which becomes all things and that which produces all things. The former properly belongs to the human subject by virtue of the soul; the latter is divine in origin. These two principles, distinguished within the intellect by Aristotle, Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), Averoës, “takes to be two purely intellectual substances which are by nature distinct from man as sensitive being” so distinct that “each of the two immaterial beings to which we owe our knowledge is a single substance which does not multiply with the number of knowing subjects. All who were, are, and will be, know whatever they know intellectually by the same cognizing faculty and through the activity of the same active power. These two alone are what is eternal in man, while everything that is peculiar to the individual perishes with the death of the body, as it came about with the generation of the body” (Brentano 1962: 316–17). Granted that Ibn Rushd succumbs to the temptation to reify activities and thus feels compelled to implant a divine substance within the human person, the insight that the human intellect, because of its linguistic ability to transcend the sensory, rises above matter itself, nevertheless deserves attention. One can certainly see why, in a language game dichotomy of human/divine, he would want to place the most properly intellectual faculty of the human person on the divine side of the divide. And given the Islamic emphasis upon the transcendence of God, one can also understand why the intellect’s own transcendence is accounted as divine, and is thus only temporarily shared by the human person. Otherwise, human transcendence appears to compete with the divine. Always intoxicated with the implications of the incarnation, Aquinas will insist, however, that the active intellect is a human faculty. He too “takes not only the active intellect (intellectus agens) to be immaterial, but also the potential intellect (intellectus possibilis) (for, in contrast to the expression of the Arabs, this is what he calls the intellect that is all things potentially). Secondly, he too takes not only the potential intellect but also the active intellect to belong to human nature and does not think of it as a purely spiritual substance outside the person, both are faculties of the human soul” (Brentano 1962: 319–20). Note that human thought strives to actualize, to move from potency to act, what already simply is the divine intelligence in act. L.A. Kosman correctly posits the striving that is human thought in De Anima against the horizon that is divine life. He writes, (i) It is important to remember that nous is not simply a principle of intelligibility, but a principle of active conscious. (ii) This active consciousness is (an admittedly intermittent) capacity of human pyschē. (iii) The paradigm of this activity of mind is that divine mind whose substance is energeia, and specifically the energeia of theōria – noēsis noēseōs noēsis as it is called in the Metaphysics, thinking thinking thinking. It is finally, I suggest, that active thinking, thinking

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The human intellect for Aristotle transcends its corporeal limitations “in the Aristotelian sense that potentialities or dispositions are realized in, and understood by reference to, the spread of actualities in which they are fulfilled—not in the sense that they have their reality in certain brain processes or states” (Braine 1992: 461 fn.16). Whether Islamic or Christian, believers have read in Aristotle an affirmation that human intelligence has a validity that survives the cessation of the natural world. In a sense, one could say that they affirm that history, which the human person creates as Aristotelian actor, is not extinguished by nature.

4   Although absent in De Anima, Aristotle’s understanding of God is a “theme which was to remain of primary importance in Christian thought, and its first emergence is worthy of note” (Daniélou 1973: 131–2). That would occur in the Stromata of Clement of Alexandria (I, 4: 26, 4).

Chapter 7

Aquinas Patristic Hesitancy About Greek Patrimony Aquinas inherited two divergent “pictures” of the human soul; three, if one considers the gospel patrimony to be distinctive from the Platonic. The Fathers of the Church did realize that Plato’s conception of the soul, as a separate substance from the body, was untenable, despite their ready resonance with Plato’s exaltation of the soul over the body. Augustine, for example, may have spoken of the soul as “a certain substance, sharing in reason, and suited to ruling the body,” but that does not mean that he endorsed the Platonic separation of the two.1 As he put it in De Trinitate: “Man is a rational substance composed of soul and a body, and there is no doubt that man has soul which is not his body, and a body which is not his soul” (XV, 7.11). Note that the human person is being spoken of as a single substance, not two. Even as late as the twelfth century, “Godfrey of Saint-Victor, who used the whole range of the Platonic imagery in expressing the superiority of the soul to the body, was no less insistent on emphasizing the unity of man and of the soul and body in man. If he was willing to write that the soul occupies the body as a sort of dwelling, he was also careful to say that spiritus et caro una persona, unus homo sint” (Pegis 1963: 13; quotation is from Microcosmus, III, 154).2 Plato may have helped to endorse asceticism, but the Fathers knew that his depreciation of the material made him a problematic philosophical support for Christians professing belief in a resurrected flesh. If Plato’s morality-moored picture of the soul presented difficulties to Christian theology, the biology-based approach of Aristotle was thought to be even more problematic. For Aristotle, the chief attribute of the soul is its animation of the body. Recall that this conviction is so thoroughgoing in Aristotle that he will not call a corpse a body, precisely because it lacks a soul. The Aristotelian attitude certainly guarantees the unity of soul and body, because only a living body has a soul. When the body dies, the soul expires with it. So an intolerable choice seems to presents itself. Which is more foundational to the Gospel: the unity of body and soul or the immortality of the soul? Here is how Aquinas formulated the dilemma in an early text, The Sentences. 1   De Quantitate Animae, 13: 24. “As it is known, this definition of the soul was given wide currency in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the De Spiritu et Anima, commonly attributed to St. Augustine in the Middle Ages, but compiled by Alcher of Clairvaux” (Pegis 1963: 64 n.14). 2   Spirit and flesh are one person, one human being.

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On the union of the soul to the body there was among the ancients a twofold opinion. According to one opinion the soul is united to the body as a complete being to a complete being, so that the soul would be to the body as a sailor in a ship. For this reason, as Gregory of Nyssa recounts, Plato held that man was not something constituted of soul and body, he was rather a soul that has put on a body … But this opinion is not tenable because, if it were, the body would be joined to the soul in an accidental way. As a consequence, the name man, which in its meaning embraces soul and body, would not signify something essentially one but only an accidental unity, and thus would not be a name in the genus of substance. The second opinion is that of Aristotle, which all the moderns follow, to the effect that the soul is united to the body as form to matter. From this it follows that the soul is part of human nature, and not a given nature by itself. (In III Sentences d.5, q.3, a.2)

Here are the terms with which Aquinas will struggle to form his own synthesis: matter, form, and substance. “For Augustine, the immortality of the soul was a given, but the unity of the person always remained a problem. For Thomas, in contrast, the unity of the person was a given, and immortality became a problem” (Murphy 1998: 6). The subtlety of Aquinas’ solution is best illustrated in contrast to those proposed by his immediate predecessors. Bonaventure Bonaventure evidences two strong predilections: adherence to the clear teaching of sacred scripture and the authority of Augustine. One might want to add a third: mistrust of Aristotle, whom he studied but whose influence among his contemporaries he feared. As the Seraphic Doctor saw it, the scriptures are the pure waters of Siloe, much more to be esteemed than the muddy waters of philosophy. And for Bonaventure, “to think that Augustine, such a father and authentically great teacher among all expositors of Sacred Scripture, might have been deceived is clearly absurd” (De Scientia Christi, q. iv, concl.).3 3   Regarding Aristotle, Christopher Cullen identifies six issues of disagreement for Bonaventure with the Aristotelianism of his day: “(1) the denial of exemplarism (or the theory of forms in a transcendent cause, which Bonaventure explicitly associates with Plato); (2) denial of divine knowledge of world; (3) the necessity of all things (which flows from the second, according to Bonaventure, since if God does not know the world, all things happened either by chance or by absolute necessity; the former is impossible, so the later must obtain; (4) the denial of eternal life where reward or punishment is found; (5) the eternity of the world; and (6) the existence of a single intellect for all men (a view

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When Bonaventure turns to the question of the soul, he finds a clear description of its nature in scripture. It is rational (In II Sent. d.). His overriding concern is the soul’s immortality, which is why he will choose to speak of it as a substance composed of matter and form. He can do this because he makes a distinction, one which rings oddly for contemporary readers, between what he calls corporeal and spiritual matter. As Bonaventure sees it, matter applies to beings not because they are corporeal, but because they are created. Thus angels can be spoken of as being composed of spiritual matter and, of course, their proper form as angelic beings. “Although the spiritual creatures known as angels cannot undergo substantial change, they still undergo accidental changes and hence must possess matter” (Cullen 2006: 46–7). This approach to Aristotle is known as “universal hylomorphism.” One can thus draw a distinction between the very nature of matter and matter as we experience it. For Bonaventure, matter itself represents pure potentiality. “In itself and apart from the conditions of its actual existence, matter is absolutely formless and its essence is a pure and absolute capacity for the various forms of existence … Matter thus presents the aspect of a kind of unity and infinity: unity, because it is, in itself absolutely undifferentiated and indeterminate, receiving all of its diversity from the diversity of forms; infinite, because its complete lack of forms is equivalent to an endless possibility and capacity to receive forms (Pegis 1934: 34–5). Yet matter, as we experience it, is always under the aspect of some form. One could say that unformed matter is a postulate, not something we experience. “It is existence, therefore, which introduces distinctions in matter” (Pegis 1934: 6). Hence matter itself is prior to either the spiritual or the corporeal. “Since form is act, matter must be the principle of potentiality that receives act” (Cullen 2006: 45). Bonaventure will speak of the soul as a form of the body, but he qualifies this when questions about the unity of the two arise. “The soul is not only a form, it is also, in the language of Aristotle, a hoc aliquid or substance: non tantum est (sc. anima) verum etiam hoc aliquid. In this way, while the nature or essence of the soul gives the body its perfection as a human body, it is the substantiality of the soul which is the source at once of its immortality (and therefore, its separability from the body), and its power to act on the body” (Pegis 1934: 30–31). It’s easy to see why Bonaventure can be accused of straddling the two systems of thought. If the soul is a substance in itself, which seems necessary to guarantee its immortality, how can it be necessarily conjoined to the body, no matter how suitable that union might be in the light of the Incarnation? Another way of putting the same question is to ask if Bonaventure hasn’t described a human being as an angel, a spiritual substance, confined to a material substance, the body.

that Bonaventure is careful to say Averroës attributes to Aristotle)” (2006: 18–19). And, of course, he also rejected the Averroist view that “reason is closed to revelation and philosophy is utterly independent of theology” (27).

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Bonaventure responds by arguing that a given substance, obviously composed of matter and form, can enter into union with another substance if its possibilities for development have not been exhausted in the first union. Therefore “the soul, though a composite substance, has the natural inclination and appetite to perfect a corporeal substance, while the body itself, though a composite substance, has an appetite to receive the soul” (Pegis 1934: 40). Of course, this means that Bonaventure is willing to admit a plurality of forms in a single substance, granted that one must reject the misleading picture of form being itself a quasi-material mode into which matter is inserted. Remember that form is the intelligibility that the human intellect draws forth from matter. Even so, it becomes very difficult to see how more than one form can be combined in a single substance. Is the substance one thing under one intelligibility and then another? Bonaventure is quite right to want to solidify the union of soul and body, a requirement that Aristotle meets, but the Stagyrite does so by sacrificing the immortality of the soul. Bonaventure maintains both, but he does so with a move somewhat repugnant to the Aristotelian system. Allowing a single substance to have more than one intelligibility seems to subvert the very genius of the Aristotelian synthesis. Pegis notes: “St. Bonaventure develops a doctrine of substantial unity which appears to require, rather than exclude, the theory of the plurality of forms; for in a doctrine such as his it is not the unicity of the form, but the degree to which matter and form exhaust the latent capacities of each other, which really determines the unity of the composite” (1934: 42–3). At this point, there may be a need to revisit the basics of Aristotelian metaphysics, a system developed to explain the paradox of the one and the many. Bonaventure can’t be faulted for his interpretation of matter as pure potentiality, though Aristotle and Aquinas would here use the term prime matter. Matter is what is common to everything that exists. It’s the one uniting the many. Remember, however, to jettison the picture from modern physics. We aren’t speaking of the most basic form of physical stuff, as opposed to energy. A substance is always composed of matter and form, which together give it a distinct act of existence. When a number of distinct substances share a similar, though not absolutely identical form, we speak of them as sharing an essence, but note that essences per se only then exist in concrete individuals. Aristotle and Aquinas will both reject the Platonic notion that existing individuals are merely “shadows” of real forms or ideas, which exist apart from all individuality. Plato solves the problem of the one and the many by positing the one as dwelling ethereally apart from the many. St Augustine would follow him, simply substituting “for the ideas of Plato the essences of all creatures which he conceived as gathered up in the mind of God, in conformity to which all things were created and by the help of which ultimately the human soul would know all things.” Though, as Étienne Gilson points out, this would predicate of human knowledge that which the souls in heaven should enjoy. “Now it must be said that this theory, taken in a certain sense, is unacceptable. In asserting with St. Augustine that the intellect knows all in the eternal essences and therefore, in God, the expression ‘to know in’ may mean that the eternal essences

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constitute the very objects apprehended by the intellect. But it cannot be admitted that in this life the soul can know all things in the eternal essences … Only the Blessed who see God and see all in God know all in the eternal essences; on earth, on the contrary, the human intellect has as its proper object the sensible, not the intelligible” (1993: 244–5). Aristotle will insist that such a free-floating essence, a Platonic universal, does not exist. It is the human mind that collates the disparateness of the many into its grasp of intellectual unity. All are agreed that matter never exists apart from form, except conceptually. Matter is the conceptual counterpart to form, the many that finds itself united in the one. This being said, to speak of substances having more than one form seems to imperil the very system. Essentially, one is saying that a given thing has more than one essential act of existence by which we recognize it as different from every other thing. One can thus be more than one, and not because it is has had multiple accidents, but because it is a necessary composite. Duns Scotus leaps in where Bonaventure was more reticent. He sees no difficulty in a plurality of forms. “For the Subtle Doctor there is no more incompatibility between unity and plurality of forms than there is between unity and composition: dico quod sicut non repugnant per se uni quod sit compositum, ita non repugant ei quod sit ex aliquibus actualibus entitatibus realiter distinctis.”4 Pegis shows how deeply this cuts into the Aristotelian system. “For Duns Scotus this means that matter is not something purely potential, but an actually existing being … And if it is called ens in potentia, the reason is that the less actuality a being has, the more potentiality it has; and since matter is capable of receiving all substantial and accidental forms, it is in potency with reference to these forms. The potentiality of matter is thus a potentiality of indetermination; it is the potentiality of an actual being which is capable of further distinction and development” (1934: 67). This willingness to speak of a plurality of forms would become indicative of the Franciscan school. It would seem that part of the difficulty is the dichotomy between nature and history. Aristotle was laying the foundations of nature itself, assigning a nature to each substance as its form, its intelligibility. But the Franciscan school seemed to chafe for the same reason that Plato and Augustine did: because the dynamism of the human person doesn’t seem to fit into the stasis of nature, into a sealed system of matter and form. In a post-modern, post-linguistic world, we may be more prone to accept the Franciscan settlement. Does one have to speak of a necessary composite in order to capture the dynamism present in the human act of existence, the dynamism which led existentialist philosophy to reject what it saw as the stasis of the Aristotelian system, with natures, or essences, being bestowed in the single act of creation? Bonaventure and Scotus were not arguing that the human person progressively becomes some sort of mongrel by the addition of forms, an image which seems to be imposed when one thinks of form in a quasi-material way, as 4

  I say that just as it is not in itself repugnant to have unity out of composition, so it is not repugnant to have it out of actually distinct entities.

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a sort of mold or cutter. Yet when form is seen as the intelligibility that the mind draws from matter, one can at least appreciate a metaphysical system which speaks of form as evolving in essential, and not simply accidental, change. Albert the Great St Albert the Great introduces a distinction into his study of the soul in Summa de Creaturis, where he notes that the soul can be studied directly in its substance and nature or indirectly in its accidents. He prefers to begin with the a priori, but notes that the a posteriori is also necessary, lest one never arrive at the soul as we experience it. Using a standard scholastic approach, Albert first asks, Utrum sit anima?5 and then proceeds to marshal arguments against the existence of the soul. When he turns to arguing for its existence, his attention is focused upon the principle accounts for the identity of an entity. Then Albert asks Utrum anima sit substantia?6 He cites his predecessors in the affirmative. Offering his own contribution, he argues that whatever can contain opposites and still remain one in number is a substance. And the soul does this in opening itself to both virtues and vices. Secondly, only a substance can move another substance from place to place, which he sees the soul as doing. Albert is aware of Plato’s “sailor in the ship” metaphor for the soul, and responds by quoting Augustine, that the soul is in the body as God is in the world, filling and animating without itself being moved.7 And since everything is either a substance or an accident, if the soul constitutes the very species of substance, it must be a substance. After all, losing one’s soul would seem to represent much more than accidental change! Here’s how Albert approaches the angel angle. While both may be full spiritual substances, the soul of a human is naturally oriented toward the body, whereas for an angel to assume corporeal form would be unnatural. Note that he fails to answer just what the human affinity for the body is, which the angel evidently lacks. Instead, he argues that the soul can be considered under two aspects, in itself and in its relationship to the body. It must be considered dually, he argues, because of the data of revelation, that souls can exist apart from bodies. He quotes Ibn Sīnā approvingly when the philosopher notes that designating the soul as the motor of the body does not in any way specify its own nature, simply its activity. “It may be considered in so far as it is a soul, that is, the actus of the body and its motor, or, again, in so far as it is a substance contained according to its nature, in the category of substance” (Pegis 1934: 95). When Albert turns to consider the soul in itself, he uses the Neoplatonic simile of the soul illuminating the body as the sun illumines the physical world. In other 5

  Whether the soul exists.   Whether the soul is a substance. 7   Cf. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, VIII, 26, 48. 6

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words, the soul has certain powers and operations that are not accomplished through the body. This is the philosophical ground for the soul’s ability to separate from the body, its intellectual activity. Note that while Albert has given a reason for the soul’s separability, he’s still quite weak on its necessary orientation towards the body. Essentially Albert accepts both the Platonic and the Aristotelian definitions of the soul, depending on whether one is considering the soul in itself, in which case he opts for the Platonic notion of a separate, spiritual substance, or its relationship to the body, where he sides with Aristotle and speaks of the soul as form. Albert will not, however, call the soul a hoc aliquid, because Aristotle uses the term for a composite of matter and form, and, in Albert’s view, unlike that of Bonaventure, the soul cannot be considered material. Bonaventure viewed matter as the essentially receptive existence of creatures, but Albert limits it to the realm of physical changes. It cannot have a place in spiritual substances. Albert goes on to draw a further distinction from Bonaventure, between nature and form, quo est, and the suppositum or individual substance, quod est. No creature is its own essence. Creatures only participate in their forms; they do not perfectly express them. “There is a similarity between the quod est and matter, because both receive as subject what they do not themselves include and what is therefore different from them. There is also a similarity between quo est and form. In the case of the quod est, however, the receptivity is different from that of matter, because the quod est is receptive in the act of being which gives it real existence in a species” (Pegis 1934: 115–16). As creatures, both angels and humans have a form bestowed upon them, which can be distinguished from their individual act of existence. In this line of thought, it is not matter that distinguishes the individual, as it does for Aristotle and Aquinas. Again, it is only the human inclination toward the body which distinguishes human from angelic existence. Thomas When Thomas takes up the question of the soul, his chief concern is to show why a spiritual or intellectual substance can be joined to the body as its substantial form. He knows that picturing human beings as angels temporarily encased in bodies doesn’t adequately represent the Gospel tableau of resurrected life. Amazing, though, how often contemporary Christians speak in just this way, saying things such as: “We mustn’t grieve. Our little girl has gone to be an angel with Jesus.” The very dignity of the Incarnation, to say nothing of the glory of the resurrected Christ, has been lost when believers speak as though heaven were an advancement to a entirely different form of being, rather than the full possession of our own, glorified humanity. In De Spiritualibus Creaturis Thomas recapitulates the metaphysical problems that his thirteenth-century treatment of the soul faced:

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The difficulty in this question arises because a spiritual substance is a given reality that subsists through itself. A form, on the other hand, has the requirement of being in something else, that is, in matter, of which it is the act or the perfection. Hence it seems to be contrary to the nature of a spiritual substance that it be the form of the body. That is why Gregory of Nyssa, in his book On the Soul, imputed to Aristotle the view that the soul was not a reality subsisting through itself and was corrupted with the corruption of the body; the reason was that Aristotle held the soul to be an entelechy, that is, the act or perfection of the physical body. (a. 2)

In the existence of angels, Christianity, like Judaism before it and Islam after it, had always affirmed the possibility of purely spiritual substances. To call angels spiritual substances is to designate them as complete within themselves. If a human being were just such a substance, there is no reason why we should be conjoined to bodies, except perhaps as a temporary burden, to employ Plato’s metaphor. All of Aquinas’ Christian predecessors had affirmed a deeper unity of the human person, but they lacked the metaphysical structure necessary to express it, which is what Thomas gained from Aristotle. In De Spiritualibus creaturis he declares his intention to use the Stagyrite philosopher to affirm Christian teaching in this formulation: “In the individual man there is no other substantial form than the rational soul, and that through the rational soul man is not only man but also animal and living and body and substance and being” (a. 3 in corp.). Note the double-time dichotomies that Thomas introduces in that sentence. Because of the rational soul we are both human and animal. The soul animates, but it is also quite bound up with the corporeal. It can be delineated from other entities, so it is a substance, yet its chief characteristic is the power or ability to act as an agent. Each dichotomy is essential for the balanced edifice Aquinas intends to construct. Human and Animal Begin with the human and the animal. Thomas’ breakthrough lies in the depth of his reading of Aristotle and his trust in that philosopher’s critique of Plato. Aristotle had realized that in Plato’s approach the world lacks individual substances, or unified essences, because everything that we experience is simply a participation in a realm beyond this one. Such an approach may capture the transcendence of the human experience—we are that spot in the world which, by virtue of language both knows the world and knows ourselves as knowing it—but it does so at the price of disengaging the human person from the world. The ethereal or otherworldly is made the standard of truth. Thomas accepts that the world of sensible objects is much more reliable than Plato had estimated. Aristotle had argued, against Plato, that forms are to be found in matter, and in matter alone. So Thomas begins his consideration of the human

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person as something material, specifically animal. The senses, which we share with animals, are not part of the intellect for Aquinas. Following Aristotle he insists that the mind or intellect has no bodily organ. He considers the senses in Question 78 of the first part of the Summa, calling them the preambula ad intellectum. Note the inversion that this represents from Descartes, who presumed that it was interior consciousness that was most self-evident, the exterior world most subject to doubt. But as Herbert McCabe notes, “Aquinas thought the opposite: that the natures of material things were what we knew best and it was difficult to talk about our mental life (and even more difficult to talk about God)” (2008: 19–20). The senses are one of the powers of the soul, and Thomas divides sensory powers into two categories: outer and inner senses. The first are the traditional five; the inner are called the sensus communis, phantasia, vis aestimativa, and vis memorativa. (These will be considered subsequently.) Thomas distinguishes the senses not by the organs underlying them but by diversity of function. A sense is a passive power, one which undergoes change in response to some external senseobject. And here is Aquinas on the nature of the change: Change is of two kinds, one natural, the other spiritual. Natural change takes place by the form of the change being received according to its natural existence, into the thing changed, as heat is received into the thing heated. Whereas spiritual change takes place by the form of the change being received, according to a spiritual mode of existence, into the thing changed, as the form of color is received into the pupil which does not thereby become colored. Now, for the operation of the senses, a spiritual change is required, whereby an intention of the sensible form is effected in the sensible organ. Otherwise, if a natural change alone sufficed for the sense’s action, all natural bodies would feel when they undergo alteration. (Aquinas 1947–1948: 1, 78, 3c)8

Note the distinction that Aquinas draws. The type of passive change, which the senses undergo, is distinct from other, physical changes. Aquinas calls it “spiritual,” though modern commentators are more likely to use the word “intentional.” With either word, the consciousness that is particular to animal life is being referenced. To illustrate: inanimate objects passively change in response to stimuli. A pot left on a stove will become warm. But a hand, hovering over a stove to check its temperature, does more than simply become warm. It allows the mind to know that it has encountered warmth. Anthony Kenny insists: “Aquinas does not mean that anything ghostly or immaterial is happening. On the contrary he frequently emphasizes that the powers of the senses, unlike the powers of the mind, do not transcend the world of matter and can only operate under the appropriate physical conditions” (1993: 34). The point here is that, to use Aquinas’ terminology, animal and human souls react to external stimuli differently than either plants or inanimate 8

  I have substituted variants of the English word “change” for the Latinate “immutation” employed in the Blackfriars translation.

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objects. As McCabe notes, “Aquinas does not hesitate to say that the perception of brute animals are ‘spiritual’, meaning that an animal acts in terms of such relations of relevance and not simply as, say, a billiard ball is pushed physically by another. ‘Spiritual’ then, because belonging to the first move in transcending matter” (2008: 36). Here, “spiritual” or “intentional” is, at root, what could simply be called “awareness.” “Another way of putting this is to say that in an organic structure any of the organs has both an operation and a meaning to its operation. The meaning of the operation of the eye or the heart or the leg is the part it plays in the whole structure—just as the meaning of a word is the part it plays in the structure of the whole language” (McCabe 2008: 13). Science correctly subdivides the body of the human person into distinct fields of study, but one cannot say that one has captured the meaning of any part of the body without some reference to the whole of which it is a part, the operation and striving that we call human life. “When we talk of the operation of the eye with reference to the operation of the whole animal, when we talk of it as seeing, when we talk of it as meaningful for the whole structure, we are talking of it as a vital operation, as part of the life of the whole animal. Another way of putting this is to say, as Aquinas often does, that seeing is an operation of the soul … So a living body, a body with a soul, is one in which not only events happen but meaningful events” (McCabe 2008: 14). And this awareness is immediate. There is no gap, especially not on this, properly animal, level between what is known and that which knows. Kenny writes: “In Aquinas’ theory there are no intermediates like sense-data which come between the perceiver and perceived. In sensation the sense-faculty does not come into contact with a likeness of the sense-object. Instead, it becomes itself like the sense-object, by taking on the sense-object’s form; but it takes on form not physically, but intentionally. This is summed up by Aquinas in a slogan which he takes over from Aristotle: the sense-faculty in operation is identical with the senseobject in action (Sensus in actu est sensibile in actu)” (1993: 35). For David Braine, Aquinas’ approach is salutary because it is holistic. Aquinas “argues in effect: firstly, the perceiver is none other than the thinker (that which thinks is the same as that which perceives); secondly, the perceiver is a bodily being in the world (that which perceives is not a mere soul, but that which moves); therefore, the thinker is a bodily being in the world (that which thinks is the animal which moves and perceives)” (1992: 329).9 9   Braine notes that this coordinated use of the senses, which Aristotle and Aquinas call the “common sense,” also helps to root human cognition in animal awareness. In “explaining the intentionality of human emotion and perception, we must not over-intellectualize and say that whenever we aim or desire, are angry at or fear, see or hear something, we only do so under some description as if all the attitudes and states concerned presupposed language. Rather all that is required is that these ways of being mentally directed toward something should involve some teleological directed pattern or re-patterning of behavior, such as we readily subscribe to animals” (1992: 303–04).

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And yet, from the point of view of Christian theology, Aquinas hasn’t yet used Aristotle to show why this substantial form, which he calls the soul, is also the necessary Aristotelian form of the body. He will do that, however, when he argues that human intelligibility is essentially sensory based, and thus to know apart from the body and its senses can have no meaning. Animal and Corporeal Note the strong Aristotelian ring in the subtitle, one which Braine correctly argues is simply irreducible because it is a complex whole. Animals and humans act differently in response to their worlds. They intend. Possessing awareness, they are repelled or attracted to elements of the world. Animals and humans grasp something in response to their environments, and here I deliberately employ a verb that requires an actor, or subject, one who interacts with the world and is not subsumed into it. Aquinas calls this grasping a vis aestimativa, an estimative power which is the basis of instinct in animals and rationality in humans. Part of the transcendence enjoyed by humans and animals is due to what Aquinas calls the phantasia, the power to create phantasms, which seem to have two irreducible meanings in Aquinas, a duality that can lead to confusion: phantasms are either current sense perceptions or the recalled or created images of the imagination. For example, the senses of a cat experience movement, color, and size, but a cat knows that it has encountered a mouse because it combines these into a phantasm, a mental picture, if you will, of a mouse. According to Aquinas, the cat can also remember the mouse, which is why she will return and watch its mouse hole. Note that phantasms, whether animal or human, are not simply sensedata, in the modern use of that term. They have already been transformed, through the agency of what Aquinas calls the sensus communis, into what McCabe very accurately translates as information, because the brain has transformed inchoate data into a gestalt (McCabe 2008: 124–5). So for Aquinas the modern reductionist account wouldn’t be sufficient to explain even animal behavior, because it seeks to disengage the animal from its surrounding world, using the model of a self-enclosed mechanism. McCabe points out that animal behavior itself cannot be sundered from the meaning it draws from its interaction with the world. In this case the movement of the cat is mediated by sensations, by awareness, by the cat having a sensuous interpretation of its world. It moves because of what the world means to it. To say this is to suggest that talk of a stimulus “triggering” the response of the cat is misleading because it oversimplifies the situation. The metaphor of the pressure on the trigger making the gun fire won’t do, because the effect of the stimulus to the cat is to produce not a movement but a tendency to move. The stimulus enters a whole pattern of other stimuli … To say, then, that the cat “has a soul” or “has life” is not to say that there is an extra invisible

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The Nature of the Soul organ or an “entelecy” that the Pavlovian or behaviourist has overlaid. It is not to add to the description of the cat; it is to say what sort of descriptions are appropriate to it; it is to say “what it took for it to be a cat” (to ti en einai) in the first place. It is to say which investigative techniques are appropriate to it, and which are merely dealing with abstractions from the total reality. (2008: 30)

Kenny helpfully asks whether “it makes sense to attribute mental images to animals, as Aquinas seems to do, since they do not exhibit the linguistic behavior which provides the criteria by which we attribute the presence of mental images to each other” (1993: 39–40). He’s certainly correct on one score. I’ve never seen a cat tell another cat where to find mice. On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s thrust seems to be that language itself, while it allows for a transcendence over the physical, is itself quite corporeal, arising out of our bodies’ interaction with their environments. “Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men / may read strange matters,” says Lady Macbeth to her husband (Macbeth, I, v, 61–2). And having learned from her, he enunciates what every successful liar must learn, that “false face must hide what the false heart doth know” (I, vii, 82). Humans know how to read other humans corporeally, and the fact that they can be mistaken doesn’t invalidate this form of knowledge any more than a mistake does in any venue. When Miranda first espies her future love Fernando arising from the sea, she asks, “What is’t? A spirit? / Lord, how it looks about! Believe me sir, / it carries a brave form. But ’tis a spirit.” Her father Prospero quickly dispels the notion by drawing her attention to commonality of life: “No, wench, it eats, and sleeps, and hath such senses as we have, such” (The Tempest, I, ii, 413–15). Being satisfied that he, Ferdinand, is a man, she goes on to commit the most common error in literature and in love, attributing moral qualities on the basis of external appearance: “There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. / If the ill spirit have so fair a house, / Good things will strive to dwell with’t” (I, ii, 460–63). All venues of knowledge are susceptible to error. Rejecting the corporeal underpinnings of thought in favor of a more mental, Cartesian approach does not guarantee infallibility. It only loosens human thought from an essential anchor. To see how profoundly language is rooted in corporality one need only ask how our language would be different if we had eyes in the back of our heads, or if we could fly. This would seem to be the thrust of Wittgenstein’s point about a lion speaking and our inability to understand her if she did (1967: 223). We don’t live lion animality. As animals, we don’t interact with our environment as a lion does. Though it certainly is the case that, if one wants to speak of intentional or spiritual knowing that is common to both animals and humans—and Braine repeatedly insists that the two forms of knowing must be seen as on a continuum, one quite distinct from the non-animate—human knowing nevertheless represents a categorically higher level precisely because it is linguistic. McCabe is worth reading at some length on this point:

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Human animals are animals in a new sense for this reason. Other animals are organic bodily structure and moreover they belong organically to the greater structure which is the species; but the structures in question here are given. For any animal to be alive, is for it to be structured in these particular ways. Within these structures the animal operates in terms of meanings—for meaning just is the relationship of part to whole in a structure. Now the human animal not only shares in much of this but it operates in structures that are of its own making. It is the special characteristic of the human animal that it operates in terms of structures, and thus of meanings, which are its own spontaneous creation. We are not born with language; we create it. We are born with (genetically given) a capacity for language (the right kind of body, a complex nervous system, etc.). And we learn it. Other animals are simply born with a repertoire of signals. We too have some “natural gestures” but not many. (2008: 45)

McCabe writes: “It is because the leopard cannot analyze its action in words (not just does not, but cannot) that, while it can act willingly or unwillingly, it cannot act intentionally, with an intention … This is why intentional action is the most thorough kind of self-moving or, if you like, the highest kind of vitality, of life, for any material thing. The life or soul of the linguistic animal, the one that can have intentions, is the most lively kind of life, the highest kind of soul” (2008: 46–8). And finally: “It is because, and to the extent that, we act not simply in terms of how we have to sensually experience the world, but of how we symbolize it, that our activity is free” (McCabe 2008: 50).10 Note that by beginning with the corporeal, with a consideration of the senses, Aquinas, like Wittgenstein after him, is setting up a structure that does not allow for the contemporary mind/brain divide. Aquinas’ “mind” or “intellect” is not corporeal, but it cannot function without union with the corporeal. A mind apart from its senses simply cannot know for Aquinas. One may be tempted to dismiss one half of Aquinas’ dichotomy. Why not make everything physical, from sensory input to synaptic firings in the brain? The answer is: because the intellect for Aquinas is able to transcend the physical, and Herbert McCabe is his usual 10   Braine adds that, after Descartes, human souls were no longer seen to be in any real relationship to those of animals. Indeed, that we now use the word “soul” only for human natures. “But it is the peculiar vice of talk about ‘souls’ in post-Cartesian times that has reinforced the theory which divorces human beings from the other animals, representing the animals as mere bodies and mechanical automata and the human being as a soul in ill-understood relationship to just such an animal body … It is one of the weaknesses of the treatments of human personhood in Anglo-Saxon philosophy over the last fifty years that, although it has made plain the psychophysical nature of human beings, its exposition has so turned upon its account of language in its full human-found structure as to open no bridge to understanding the community of human beings with other animals—and indeed also no bridge to the understanding of the community of human beings with each other” (1992: 300).

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trenchant self in offering one way to understand the assertion. He argues that both Aquinas and Wittgenstein are concerned to criticize a doctrine which assimilates meanings or concepts to sensations. “Aquinas thought that one of Aristotle’s greatest achievements was to make a clear division between the two and to conclude that understanding a meaning could not be a bodily operation—however much it needs the concurrence of bodily events (phantasmata), as is shown by the fact that linguistic intellectual life is impeded by some bodily conditions such as being drunk” (2008: 60–61). Distinguishing concepts from sensations is the very point of Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Sensations properly belong to the individual person. No one can feel the very pain that you feel when you stub your toe, if for no other reason than her lacking possession of your physical appendage itself. On the other hand, when you or I begin to speak of pain, or nausea, or the frisson of love, we begin to use language which is the common inheritance of us all. “If by being animate or animated or having a soul, we mean acting as a whole and not simply a set of smaller things that are in contact with each other (as with a machine), and thus to be in a certain way self-moving, auto-mobile, in possession of itself, then the capacity to symbolize our world, to express experience linguistically, is to make us even more in charge of our behavior and of ourselves” (McCabe 2008: 31). Substance and Agent What one can glean from both Aquinas and Wittgenstein is that neither reductionism nor dualism adequately explains the human person, or even animals, as they relate to their environments. Dualism locates cognition in a realm standing apart from, and above, the biological. The body is only needed to create a dwelling for the mind, which learns and lives on its own. In contrast, for Aquinas—though the same is equally true of Wittgenstein—the human intellect “requires a body to achieve its proper operation” (Gilson 1993: 205). On the other hand, reductionism correctly locates the roots of animal cognition in biological processes such as the senses, but never acknowledges the transcendence over the biological that the phantasms allow for animals and language, for humans. Aquinas’ third dichotomy makes the greatest advance over his predecessors and can be read as a response to reductionism, because he insists that forms simply subsisting in matter are not yet intelligible, since for Aristotle it is immateriality that confers intelligibility. Recall that for Aquinas the senses themselves are not part of the intellect. So how is it that human beings come to recognize forms? Another way of putting the same question is to ask what it is that allows human cognition to transcend the animal. The interpretation of Aristotle offered by both Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd had located this intelligibility in God, arguing that the humans simply share this power. As Pegis explains, for Ibn Rushd the intellect

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was absolutely unmixed with matter, and it did not belong as a form within the domain of material forms. In short, the nonmateriality of the intellect likewise involved its total separation from matter and from the conditions of matter: the intellect could not be a form that acted as an intellect through a body. Thus, the immateriality of the intellect ultimately rested for Averroës on the fact that it was a separate essence. Averroës had no principle other than the separateness of the intellect to ensure its incorruptibility; just as it seemed to him that a non-separate form, that is, a form united to matter, could not be a totally material form. Surely the substantialism of Aristotle, which Averroës carried out to the letter, could lead to no other result. (1963: 36)

Note again, as Thomas did, the Platonic impulse, even in these ardent Aristotelians, to assign a divine quality to what is proper to human intelligence (SCG II.55). How else does one illustrate its transcendence over the material except to reckon it with that which is most spiritual? McCabe reads the move in the light of Wittgenstein: these Islamic philosophers, noting “that meanings are not the private property of anybody’s mind, decided that they existed only in a common universal Mind” (2008: 140). And there certainly is something transcendent about language. It preexists every individual human; it quite literally forms the growing child. The Genesis Breakthrough One could say that Thomas’ solution lies in a deeper reading of Genesis and of Aristotle. In Aristotle the material was defined as potential, whereas form bestowed existence. It made the potential into something actually existing. Thus, as Pegis notes, “being had been form and pure being had been pure form” (1963: 35). But Aristotle saw the world as eternally existing in its own right, whereas Thomas, on the basis of Genesis, viewed it as coming forth from God. Hence, for Thomas, being itself is a gift, not something existing in its own right. So Thomas will define God, and not form, as the pure act of being. One could say that for Thomas form is the venue for the act of being, but it does not itself bestow being. Put another way, something lies beyond our intelligence and its grasp of the world (form), something that exists for both as their efficient and formal cause. When Thomas turns to the soul then, unlike his Islamic predecessors, his insight is not to approach the soul simply as a substance, but as an act of being. Recall that Bonaventure, when he sought to place angelic beings midway between the divine and the human, said that angelic beings represent a potency in relationship to divine being, which is pure act. Since matter for Bonaventure represented potency, he spoke of angels as being composed of matter and form, albeit spiritual, not corporeal matter. Bonaventure was not positing some sort of angelic bodies. Gilson illustrates the reasonableness of the solution, provided one distinguish between corporeality and matter itself. “By matter in this case must be understood, not necessarily a body, but, in the widest sense, any potency combined

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with an act in the constitution of a given being. Now, the only existing principle of movement and change is to be found in matter; there must consequently be matter in everything capable of being set in motion” (1993: 173). In contrast, Aquinas feels that angelic change, or activity, is capable of being explained by potency alone, without making matter the very basis of potency. “The modifications to which they may be subject, affect in no way their being itself, but only their intelligence and will. To explain these changes it is therefore sufficient to admit that their intellect and their will may pass from potency to act, but there is no need to assume a distinction of form and matter within their essence which remains unchanged” (Gilson 1993: 174). Note that Aquinas thus sufficiently locates angelic being below that of the divine, because the angelic act of being is also a gift of God. “It yet has but a limited quantity of being, and must therefore be admitted not to be, but only to have that very being which it possesses” (Gilson 1993: 175; italic his). Again, the Genesis emphasis is that all of creation, including the angelic, is a gift. As a spiritual substance, the soul receives the act of being in itself, hence its incorruptibility. Because “intellectual substances not being composed of matter and form, are simple and consequently incorruptible” (Gilson 1993: 209). Therefore, like angelic being, the human soul is a subsistent form in its own right (Aquinas 1947–1948: I.50.5). And if an intellectual soul has its own act of being as a divine gift, then its immortality is not threatened if it is a substance in its own right (like the angelic) and yet also the substantial form of the human person. Read in the light of a traditional Thomistic interpretation, as Pegis does, one might say that Thomas makes a valid point in adjusting how Aristotle should be read. His Islamic interpreters had read form as eternal, which is not an incorrect reading of Aristotle. Whereas for Aristotle prime matter is presupposed as always existing, in Aquinas, it needs to be seen as sustained by God. “Materia prima, he is quite clear, is nothing actual; it is the perishability of actual things. It is a passive openness to new actuality, new forms. It is the potentiality which will be actualized by new form to be a new thing. For Aquinas potentiality can only occur in what is actual: ‘Act is prior to potency.’ He has no use for sheer vacant possibility. It is always the possibility of some existing thing” (McCabe 2008: 43). Drawing upon the revelation of Genesis, Aquinas sees the potentiality that we experience in the world as rooted in the actuality of God, and he argues that form itself is created and is thus a divine gift. Hence, if God can give form, he can also allow it incorruptibility when it is separated from matter. Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd viewed intelligibility as a divine attribute, one in which human beings share. If forms are intelligibility, then forms have always existed. They represent, one could say, the very mind of God, and we know them only by participation, by the gift of God. Hence the subtle Platonism creeping back into their synthesis. Aquinas, however, wants to read being, and hence form, and hence intelligibility itself, as gifts of God, or, more properly, the same gift of God seen under diverse aspects. In the syntheses of all his predecessors, whether Plato or Aristotle, whether his Christian or Islamic predecessors, the answer to the

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question how do we know, is that we know because God shares knowledge with us. In Plato and his Christian interpreters we already have intelligibility implanted within us; we only need to recall it despite the dross of illusion that is the material world. In Aristotle and his Islamic interpreters we draw intelligibility forth from the material world, but as we do so we simply participate in the intelligibility that already exists in God. Reading Aristotle in the light of Genesis, Thomas makes intelligibility itself into a free gift, something given over to humanity. None the less, it is a gift; moreover, for Aquinas it involves a distinct bestowal after that of creation alone. In De Potentia he argues that “[i]t is impossible for the action of a material force to rise to the production of a force that is wholly spiritual and immaterial: because nothing acts beyond its species, in fact the agent must needs be more perfect than the patient” (III, 9). “He is arguing that the production of a form which is subsistent because it has an operation which is not through any bodily organ is outside the power of things whose operations are all through bodily organs” (Braine 1992: 295). This is why Aquinas will argue that the soul is a distinct gift from God, one not given in the bestowal of the body. He insists that the soul is the person’s own. It is not a divine intellect operative within us, but it nevertheless cannot be reduced to the physical.11 Braine argues that this Aristotelian notion of nature, here developed and applied by Aquinas to the soul, remains valid today, simply because what the human person does intellectually is not reducible to the deterministic mechanics of empiricism. Our point, then, is that for such living beings to have natures, to be substances, and not to be material things, even though still possessed of bodily parts and subjects of bodily predicates, is not at all for them just to be material things about which certain types of discourse involving non-physical concepts, conformed to our modes of experience, can go on so as to “keep our intellects happy.” Rather, it is for such living beings to be nodes of explanation and prediction in regard to things not explained or predictable, nor even “determined in principle,” in physical terms, so that these types of discourse are doing some real explanatory work. In brief, it is for such living beings to be causal agents qua persons or qua psycho-physical beings, exercising a mode of causality different from that exercised by “material bodies,” making their difference in nature and thereby a difference in what we should say exists. (Braine 1992: 296)

  Maimonides likewise “advanced the idea that the nepesh that survives death is the acquired intellect” (Levenson 2006: 18). 11

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Agent Intellect The role of what Aristotle called “the agent intellect” would become the ground upon which Thomas would mount a defense of his reading against previous Islamic interpretations. In Question 79 of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas takes up the relationship of the soul to knowledge. Obviously the soul has other powers. Thomas inherited the Aristotelian picture of the soul as the agent responsible for all of the human person’s actions. “The nutritive and augmentative powers produce their effects in the being in which they are placed; it is precisely the body united with the soul which the soul increases and maintains” (Gilson 1993: 225). Yet for Aquinas, as for Aristotle, the chief activity of the human person, and thus of the agent soul, is knowing. He writes that the “intellectual soul is sometimes called intellect, as from its chief power; and thus we read (De Anima i, 4), that the ‘intellect is a substance’” (Aquinas 1947–1948: I, q. 79 ad. 1). The intellect is a power of the soul, because, as Aquinas has already explained, he regards thought as an activity not performed by a bodily organ (Aquinas 1947–1948: I, q. 77, a. 5).12 He writes: But Aristotle held that the intellect has an operation which is independent of the body’s cooperation. Now nothing corporeal can make an impression on the incorporeal. And therefore in order to cause the intellectual operation according to Aristotle, the impression caused by the sensible does not suffice, but something more noble is required, for “the agent is more noble than the patient”, as he says (De Gener. i, 5). Not, indeed, in the sense that the intellectual operation is effected in us by the mere impression of some superior beings, as Plato held; but that the higher and more noble agent which he calls the active intellect, of which we have spoken above (79, 3, 4) causes the phantasms received from the senses to be actually intelligible, by a process of abstraction. (Aquinas 1947–1948: I, 84, 6)

The intellect is that power which delineates the human from the divine above and from any form of life below the human, and yet at the same time, for Aquinas, it orients all of human knowledge toward the divine. Arguing that it is “necessary to say that the intellect is a power of the soul, and not the very essence of the soul … But in God alone His action of understanding is His very Being. Wherefore in God alone is His intellect His essence: while in other intellectual creatures, the intellect is power.” God knows all of being. The essence of God is intellect (at least one can say this when considering being not a collection of things but consciousness of action). Humans, however, are ordered toward knowledge of being, but they 12   Or as Braine reflects, “Aquinas says that no material faculty can reflect upon itself. Let us reformulate this: there can be isomorphism between part of the material faculty and the whole but nothing corresponding to a judgement of the whole in regard to the whole— no reproduction in the material organism of the structure whereby the organism in critical judgement reflects upon itself or critically (reflectively) judges” (1992: 472).

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remain what Aquinas would call a potency, a partial power that must constantly exert itself. “The Philosopher says (De Anima iii, 5), ‘As in every nature, so in the soul is there something by which it becomes all things, and something by which it makes all things.’ Therefore we must admit an active intellect.” David Burrell writes: “This capacity, moreover, to relate (potentially) to all there is, is what defined mind for the medievals—intellect and will—as a spiritual power. Spirit referred not in the first instance to an unfamiliar mode of existence, but to a capacity for relating on different levels and across the space-time parameters endemic to bodies” (1986: 23). Indeed, the active intellect becomes a key in understanding why the human soul survives death. “Aquinas argues that because the soul has its own operation—the power to abstract from material conditions— it is independent of any bodily substance and capable of subsisting separately from the body, even though it is not itself a complete substance” (Reimers 2006: 270). Yet the agent intellect is not a separate thing inside the body. It is quite properly a uniquely human form of intelligence, one which finds the universal in the particular. Burrell writes: “For it amounts to an even greater praise to affirm a creator able to constitute creatures to function as agents in their own right, having existence as a gift, to be sure, but de jure, as it were. In fact, Aquinas never employs esse as a specific perfection, and always considers essence the principle of intelligibility” (1986: 30) Therefore, truth “does not ‘come to’ statements any more than existence ‘comes to’ natures; but represents their culmination as asserted by a responsible knower, much as esse expresses a thing’s coming into existence by the creative power of a gracious God.” For Aquinas, the human intellect is a potency toward all of being, but some active power must move this potency into act in order for the intellect to encounter forms in matter, to draw them forth. This virtus, or power, Aristotle also called the “active intellect.” What separated him from his Arabic predecessors was the question whether this intellect stands outside the human person in God, with the human person only participating in it, or whether this intellect is truly the human person’s own. Aquinas: According to the opinion of Plato, there is no need for an active intellect in order to make things actually intelligible … For Plato supposed that the forms of natural things subsisted apart from matter, and consequently that they are intelligible: since a thing is actually intelligible from the very fact that it is immaterial. And he called such forms “species or ideas” … But since Aristotle did not allow that forms of natural things exist apart from matter, and as forms existing in matter are not actually intelligible; it follows that the natures of forms of the sensible things which we understand are not actually intelligible. Now nothing is reduced from potentiality to act except by something in act; as the senses as made actual by what is actually sensible. We must therefore assign on the part of the intellect some power to make things actually intelligible, by abstraction of the species from material conditions. And such is the necessity for an active intellect. (Aquinas 1947–1948: I, 79, 3)

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It is important, reading Aquinas almost seven centuries later, not to reify what is essentially an ability. Otherwise, one runs the danger of dismissing Aquinas’ understanding of the mind as positively medieval. Anthony Kenny couldn’t be more on target than when he writes: “The intellect is most helpfully thought of as the capacity for operation with signs, and the will as the capacity for the pursuit of rational goals” (1993: 15). “It is helpful to think of the agent intellect as being in essence the species-specific power which enables human beings to acquire and use language in their interaction with the world which we perceive around us … An animal with the same senses as ours perceives and deals with the same material objects as we do; but he cannot have intellectual thoughts about them, such as a scientific understanding of their nature, because he lacks the light cast by the intellect. On the other hand, for Aquinas, a being with an agent intellect but without the senses that we share with animals would be equally impotent to think even the most abstract and intellectual thoughts (1993: 51).13 This is why David Braine insists that the human person be seen as a unity, or, to employ the traditional word, a “substance,” a distinctive nature within the world. The “focalization” involved is therefore not a matter of a part of the animal or human being (e.g., the mind or brain) being a focus in respect of the whole animal or human being, but of the animal or human being as a unity being a focus or centre in its relations with the world. A psychological subject is qua psychological subject in key relations with the world, not just as a distributed body all of whose parts have relations and interactions with the world, but precisely as a unity subject in the way indicated. The focalization is not upon a part of the animal or human being, but simply upon the “I”, the “he or she”, as such. The animal or human being is a “focalized subject”, not in having a head, brain, soul, or mind as a focal centre within it, but in having its relations with the world (or those which differentiate its nature) focalized upon it as an anima, a psychological subject, as such undivided and indivisible (1992: 317–18).14

An atheist might read the predecessors of Aquinas and decide that the concept “God” has two functions. It denotes the transcendence that the human intellect has over materiality and it operates as a teleological locus. Human thought strains

13

  Though Kenny is careful to note that for Aquinas it is this intellect which makes language possible, not language the intellect. A person, a child for example, can use language unintelligently, though, in my reading of Wittgenstein, one has to ask if such a child isn’t in the process of developing the very scaffolding of thought. 14   And, in contrast: “In Descartes and in the empiricist tradition following him, the mind, self, or consciousness is thought of as standing above or over against the world in order to desire and choose or to experience and judge, the relation between mind and world being wholly contingent” (Braine 1992: 320).

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toward the divine, which means no more than to say that human thought constantly evolves into something deeper, richer. If one takes this critique seriously, one has to acknowledge Aquinas as a father of modern atheism, because in making form, and hence intelligibility itself, a gift of God, he sets it free from the previously imposed picture of human intelligence slowly filling in an already established structure of intelligibility. We will know someday what God already knows. Forms exist in the mind of God; when we discover them, we discover something of that mind. But to say that intelligibility itself is free is to say that what we come to know is as “free of God” as being itself is. In other words, it would function according to its own powers even without God. An atheist could argue that Aquinas has unwittingly set human thought free from its last vestige of a divine illusion, which is the divine as final form, final teleology. But Aquinas might respond that this is the very kenosis, to use a term of St Paul’s, the very emptying that Genesis itself represents, when God allows being to be something other than God. Ultimately, to assert that God created the world is to assert that God will never be found in the world, and that a worldly intelligibility can never arrive at knowledge of God. And, in fact, this is precisely what Aquinas is willing to do. Since the human intellect is materially based, it can never arrive at a knowledge of purely spiritual substances. When Aquinas lets Genesis play itself out, he must exorcize any sort of immanent, ethereal presence of the divine within us. Unlike Augustine and Bonaventure, Aquinas will insist that we do not intuit God. We do not sense God. When we think we do, the atheist is quite right in calling us delusional. And yet for a Christian, Jesus, when he dies on the cross, arrives where it all began, at the Genesis moment where nothing joins earth to heaven save desire itself. Enthusiastic interpreters of Aquinas quite rightly applaud his analogy of being. We are not God, but as we “possess being” we have some participation in God who is defined as the fullness of being. Heidegger and Barth saw this as an attempt to locate God within an all-too-human nexus. We make the hierarchical map and simply assign God the spot at the apex. But remember that for Thomas, “being” is the poor gerund that stands in for the act of existence. God is pure Act in Aquinas. One would do just as well to speak of an analogy of act. We participate in God, because we strive. Striving itself—Aquinas would say the movement of humanity from potentiality to actuality—is our participation in God, so that the believer would have to query of the atheist: are you saying that we do not act, that we are not “striving,” and that this striving is not purposeful, that it has no possible completion? If you are, then you have truly denied what we mean by the word “God.” Herbert McCabe illustrates both Aquinas’ achievement in calling the soul the substantial form of the body and the questions that the accomplishment itself— this union of Plato immortality and Aristotelian corporeal integrity—leaves unanswered. He writes:

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The Nature of the Soul Because … the meaning of a giraffe’s soul is exhausted in being the physical, sensitive life of the giraffe, it follows that the idea of a giraffe’s soul as having a subsistence of its own apart from the subsistence of the giraffe makes as much and as little sense as the Cheshire cat’s grin having a subsistence distinct from that of the Cheshire cat, or the height of a building remaining when the building has been knocked down. But if the human soul has an operation of its own that is not in itself an operation of the human body, then it is not the same kind of nonsense to say that it has a subsistence of its own which does not have to be that of the body. This, thinks Aquinas, at least leaves open the possibility of what Aristotle would call “some part of the human soul”, the rational part, still subsisting after the corruption of the body. But Aquinas is clear that this would not be a case of me surviving beyond the grave, “Anima mea non est ego.” he says flatly: “My soul is not me.” Moreover there are deep puzzles about how such an independently subsisting soul could have any operations, even thinking, without any body to animate. (2008: 122)

So Aquinas takes his departure but leaves us with questions. The human being does not survive death, but the soul does. But what does it mean to say that the substantial form of the body, a substance in its own right, lives on. What sort of life should we picture? This is the subject of the final two chapters.

Chapter 8

A New Name and a New Future The Undiscovered Country If our embodied presence within the world and our linguistic capacity both to form and to transcend the world make the human person into what he or she is, what can one say of death, in which the empirical evidence alone shows that the body loses animation, loses that which we call “soul” as the form of the body? What would it mean for the soul to survive death, and the verb “survive” is well chosen, because one cannot present death as a matter of indifference or as merely a transition. Whatever existence the soul might have after death clearly cannot be its natural, created state. When Hamlet ponders the sheer weight of his tortured existence, “the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks / that flesh is heir to,” death tempts him with thoughts of release, with the peaceful rest that dreams offer, and yet he knows that death is “the undiscovered country from whose bourn / no traveller returns,” about which we cannot speak with any self-found confidence. Recognizing that the country is undiscovered should give anyone pause, especially those who seek to picture the possibility of life after death. There is no empirical evidence that human transcendence of the world survives death. Of course, death, and the possibility of there being an other side to death, is not an event in life about which evidence can be gathered. As Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus: “So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end. Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the same way in which our visual field has no limits” (1961: 72; §§6.431, 6.4311). It’s a mistaken picture to think of death as merely a transition, say, from one place to another, even from one time to another. Death is not one more event in life. To be an event in life it would have to be surrounded by other events in life, and death is sui generis. Nothing surrounds or domesticates it. Wittgenstein’s point is that we can’t look around death any more than one can see a limit to one’s visual field. We can’t see a limit of our visual field, because it doesn’t have one. Logically, a limit can only be discerned (at least conceptually) by looking beyond one. We cannot look beyond all that we can see, and we cannot look beyond death. However, the fact remains that eternal life, or life after death, does play a role in this life. Wittgenstein continues in §6.4321: Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption

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The Nature of the Soul completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (It is certainly not the solution of any problems of natural science that is required.)

For most people, the hope of life after death, presuming upon things such as the survival of the soul and the judgment of God, does help us to live in this life. These expectations help us to make decisions “in the light of eternity,” as they say. But Wittgenstein’s point is that eternal life is usually viewed as nothing more than an endless continuation of this existence, one stretched out in space and time, in which case it is open to the same question that it was supposed to solve, namely, what’s it all about? If life itself, whether temporal or eternal, has a meaning, if the yearning that we experience as sentient life is meaningful, it must have some meaning outside itself. Simply saying that we survive death is both an unprovable and a gratuitous assertion. We can’t test it, and, if surviving doesn’t include a response to human desire, we’ve only asserted something akin to the transmigration of souls. We’ve only prolonged the human problem. A solution has not emerged. In his Theology of Hope, Jürgen Moltmann offers several helpful warnings regarding questions of eschatology, the Church’s teachings about “the last things,” the fate of the soul being one of them. He parallels Wittgenstein’s warning that when we consider death and what may, or may not, lie beyond it, we have no basis in our experience from which to draw. “There can be no ‘doctrine of last things’, if by ‘doctrine’ we mean a collection of theses which can be understood on the basis of experiences that constantly recur and are open to anyone” (1967: 17). We can poetically carp that death is like falling asleep, but in doing so we are projecting our experience of daily rising from sleep into the afterlife. And simply calling it the afterlife already betrays a subtle transfer; namely, that death is something from which one awakes. The inability to make death an analogical experience is reason enough for many of our contemporaries to refuse to consider an afterlife. But if one considers envisioning the future to be an inescapable part of what it means to be human, one has to ask if they only assert their outward refusal, all the while engaging in their own imaginative flights into the beyond. To be human is to project one’s self into the future, to imagine what will be, to weigh scenarios so as to be ready when decisions arise. Heidegger saw our projection into the future as a fundamental characteristic of the human person, our way of being in the world. We constantly look out onto the world that is and see worlds that one day might be. The very notion of the “present” exists in the human person precisely because language makes us aware of a past and future. In Book X of the Confessions, Augustine reads his own life as narrative and discovers memoria, and his notion of it is more than simply taking a mental look back. It is rather a summoning up of the past as one pries open the future. Augustine is astonished that, in what he calls memory, he can both call his life to mind and,

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at the same time, realize that this life is more than the mind itself can compass. This is why memoria, for the saint, is the dwelling place of God. Why? Because for Augustine “God is to be found in the intimacy of self-presence” (Taylor 1989: 134). The presence of God is adumbrated when memoria allows one to survey the whole that is a life. This I do within myself in the immense court of my memory; for there sky and earth and sea are readily available to me, together with everything that I have ever been able to perceive in them, apart from what I have forgotten. And there I come to meet myself. I recall myself, what I did, when and where I acted in a certain way, and how I felt about so acting. Everything is there which I remember having experienced for myself or believed on the assertion of others. Moreover, I can draw on this abundant store to form imaginary pictures which resemble the thing I have myself experienced, or believed because my own experience confirmed them, and weave these together with images from the past, and so evoke future actions, occurrences or hopes; and on all these as well I can meditate as though they were present to me. In that same enormous recess of my mind, thronging with so many great images, I say to myself, “That’s what I will do!” And the action I have envisaged follows. “Oh, if only this or that could be! Pray God this or that may not happen!” I say to myself, and even as I say it the images of all these things of which I speak pass before me, coming from the same treasure-house of memory. If they were not there, I would be quite unable to conjure up such possibilities. This faculty of memory is a great one, O my God, exceedingly great, a vast, infinite recess. Who can plumb its depth? This is a faculty of my mind, belonging to my nature, yet I cannot comprehend all that I am. Is the mind, then, too narrow to grasp itself, forcing us to ask where that part of it is which it is incapable of grasping? Is it outside the mind, not inside? How can the mind not compass it? (§§14–15)

Here, past, present, and future are gathered together, but always in relationship to one another. Indeed, the faculty Augustine calls memory creates the present, because the present must be distinguished from that which has happened and that which has not yet occurred. As spirit, the human person doesn’t simply measure time. We come to be ourselves in time. Our humanity expands with each experience, each decision, each response. Memory isn’t the wake of a moving ship, something we discern when we look back in time. We are Augustine’s notion of memory. To be thrown into a world (Heidegger) is also to be thrown into a temporal trajectory. Just as the human person can’t be distilled out of the environing world, we likewise cannot be sundered from our temporality. We don’t possess memory, any more than we possess a soul. We are memory, a gathering in of time, past and future. Indeed, Augustine writes his Confessions as a way of summoning up memory in order to marshal his own self. Likewise, Dante begins his Inferno with the

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explanation that only narrative can help him find his way to salvation. “Midway in the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood, / for the straight way was lost” (I, 1–3). A narrative isn’t told without purpose. It draws its direction from our desires for the future. To be human is to project one’s self into tomorrow. This is why one has to wonder if the imaginative faculties that we possess as linguistic creatures can, to put it sharply, cease being human, even in the face of death. Freud suggested that no one truly imagines his own death as a true termination. One might well picture himself on his death bed, surrounded by love ones, but, as he draws his last breath, the angle of vision moves from inside the dying eyes to a space above the bed, as though the escaping self now surveys the scene. This is the very picture Cardinal Newman summons to the service of faith in The Dream of Gerontius. I had a dream; yes:—someone softly said ‘He’s gone’; and then a sigh went round the room. And then I surely heard a priestly voice Cry ‘Subvenite’; and they knelt in prayer. I seem to hear him still; but thin and low, And fainter and more faint the accents come, As at an ever-widening interval (II).

But where is memory headed, especially as it crosses the frontier of the undiscovered country? Where is memory’s home? Where does it come to rest? This is what prompts Wittgenstein himself to insist that “How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world. The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution” (1961: 73; §§6.432, 6.4321). One would have to step outside life, as Dante and Gerontius do, to know if it does have an answer, and Wittgenstein is quite right in presuming that we have not done that. Indeed, if empirical proof of God were possible, one would have to question whether or not a sufficient notion of God is in play. A God, or goal of human life, given within this life cannot be the purpose of life, not if one defines the human person as that narrative whose desire cannot know a limit. If life as we experience it is endless yearning, then a satisfaction within this life would represent its extinction, not its fruition. In this life God must allure but not asphyxiate. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is that that is mystical” (§§6.44, 6.45). And human beings do feel the world as a limited whole. Death is the limit that we intuitively perceive to be a far point, meaning that it does have another side; there is an undiscovered country. For the Jesuit giant Karl Rahner, the human being is that intelligence oriented towards completion of self in the world, despite its recognition that the world, in the sense of what science calls nature, calls for

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its own biological death. Yet Rahner insists that human intelligence can’t help but envision itself as ordered towards a completion that will not be obliterated in death. In other words, we can’t ultimately view our deepest activity as purposeless. “An act of hope in one’s own resurrection is something that takes place in every person by transcendental necessity either in the mode of free acceptance or of free rejection. For every person wants to survive in some final and definitive sense, and experiences this claim in his acts of freedom and responsibility, whether he is able to make this implication of that exercise of his freedom thematic or not, and whether he accepts it in faith or rejects it in despair” (1978: 268). Thus it is the total person, who lives and animates his or her world, and around whom that world constitutes itself, who hopes for survival. The human person has what Rahner calls a transcendental hope for resurrection; transcendental, for Rahner, because it characterizes the life of every human being. As Rahner sees it, we can’t help but hope for resurrection, and Christianity is the revelation, in and through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that the complete human person and the world, by which he or she came to be, are destined to be taken into, and ultimately find permanence in, that which lies beyond the world, namely, its creator God, the one whom the New Testament identifies as “Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead” (Gal 1: 1). Hence, in Christ human aspirations encounter God’s fulfillment of them. So the need to ponder an afterlife is not drawn from our experience of what follows death, but rather from our experience of ourselves as living. Ultimately, the question is whether or not the world itself is indifferent to the hope it has engendered within the human heart. Of course, the notion that human beings can’t help but hope is as old as the gospel itself. Paul writes in Romans: “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (8: 24–5). As he began the fifth volume of his Theo-Drama, which he called The Last Act, Hans Urs von Balthasar warned: “Anything we say … that involves heaven and earth is nothing more than an astonished stammering as we circle around this mystery on the basis of particular luminous words and suggestions of Holy Scripture” (1998: 13). True enough, but for the mystical to be present in this life, for it to exercise its allure, which is an essential feature of human life, at the very least, an appealing picture of what life beyond life might mean must be offered. Remember that for a human being not to be able to picture is simply not to be able to engage, much less fathom. And human beings can’t stop picturing what Wittgenstein called the mystical. The question is not one of cessation but of growing adequacy. Is it any wonder that most of our contemporaries are neither frightened by hell nor moved to desire heaven, given the images that come to mind when either word is employed? To hope for life after death is to imagine life after death. I almost wrote, “to attempt to imagine” but there is no “attempt.” The human person will imagine life after death; the attempt will always be successful if one means that some picture

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will arise, regardless of its correspondence to what will be. Here the task is seeking a better picture. The Soul Felt its Worth To imagine life after death is not only fundamentally human, it lies at the core of the Gospel. The earliest Christian preaching presents the resurrection of Jesus as the pivot of its proclamation. And the New Testament, from opening to close, is the proclamation and the pondering of the death and resurrection of Christ. Indeed, “in the New Testament there is no faith that does not start a priori with the resurrection of Jesus” (Moltmann 1967: 165). The transitus from death to resurrection is its reason for existence, the radical novum that creates this “new” testament to the fidelity of Israel’s God.1 Even the immediate interpretation of the event—that this is the fulfillment of God’s fidelity to Israel—is an attempt to domesticate the absolutely unexpected and forever inconceivable, to locate it within the skein of previous revelation, which of course also transcends our comprehension. One cannot simply assert that the resurrection of Christ validates our hope in an afterlife and then begin to speculate upon such an afterlife without reference to resurrection itself. Before the resurrection of Christ, an afterlife was nothing more, or less, than a hope. Christ’s resurrection itself is the revelation of life transformed in death, of death transformed into life, though it retains the transcendental character of all revelation in that it constantly exceeds our grasp. “Hope’s statements of promise, however, must stand in contradiction to the reality which can at present be experienced. They do not result from experience, but are the condition for the possibility of new experience” (Moltmann 1967: 18). Christian revelation should always be read from the resurrection, its foundational event. In other words, one can’t begin with the soul and then ask what sense one makes of the resurrection (though admittedly that is the trajectory of this book, because, as a work in fundamental theology, it seeks both to root Christian revelation in human self-understanding and thus to make it accessible to those who have not yet encountered it). But a Christian must begin with the resurrection and then, in its light, define what one means by the soul. In this sense, eschatology is not the final subset of Christian theology. It’s the font. This is why, Rahner insists, 1   Christian theology has not always seen the resurrection of Christ as the privileged portal into revelation. As Gerald O’Collins noted in one of his many works on the resurrection: “In the bad old days before the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) the resurrection often got treated as an introduction to Christian apologetics. It proved splendidly Jesus’ claim to be a divinely-authorized messenger or else his claim to be the Son of God. But then his resurrection frequently dropped out of sight as theologians systematically articulated Christian beliefs in the Trinity, the Church or whatever else they were treating. The resurrection had done its work as a preliminary proof for Jesus’ claims” (1987: 48).

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“Christ himself is the hermeneutic principle of all eschatological assertions. Anything that cannot be read and understood as a Christological assertion is not a genuine eschatological assertion. It is soothsaying and apocalyptic, or a form of speech which misses and misunderstands the Christological element.” And so, “[w]e can derive from our experience of Christ all that can and may be said objectively in the Catholic theology of eschatology” (1974: 342–3). And Rahner himself links resurrection to the complete human being. This is not simply the survival of a soul. “Resurrection is not an additional assertion about the fate of a secondary part of man, an assertion which could not be known in hope from a primordial understanding of man” (Rahner 1978: 268). Resurrection is so much more than the survival of only one part of the totality that is the human person. The notion that we await a glorified, reconstituted creation, not a departure from it, is the very witness of the New Testament. “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21: 2). For the Christian, the meaning of the word “soul” is birthed in that empty tomb, even if its ultimate explication awaits the eschaton. “Long lay the world in sin and error pining, ’til He appear’d and the soul felt its worth.” From first to last the meaning of our human nature, like our fate in the world, is linked to his, just as it had previously been linked to that of Adam. “If, however, the event of the raising of the one who was crucified is recognized to be creatio ex nihilo, then it is not a case here of possible changes in existing things, but of all or nothing. Then it becomes clear that the world ‘cannot bear’ the resurrection and the new world created by resurrection” (Moltmann 1967: 226). That fundamental and radical novum must be underscored. One cannot approach the New Testament on its terms, hear its voice, without a willingness to expect from history that which is startlingly new. “A one-sided interest in the similar, ever-recurring, typical and regular, would level down the really historic element, which lies in the contingent and the new, and would thus end up by losing the feeling for history altogether” (Moltmann 1967: 178). Were it not for the missionary need to give witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we would have no new movement in the history of religions to juxtapose to the Hebraic and the Hellenic. The novum of the New Testament is not a religious wisdom. Its proclamation of the resurrection of Christ confounds speculation. “The mission and call do not reveal man simply to himself again for what he really is. They reveal and open up to him new possibilities, with the result that he can become what he is not yet and never was. This is why according to Old and New Testament usage men receive along with their call a new name, and with their new name a new nature, a new future” (Moltmann 1967: 286). To understand our disposition over and against the world, or—to use a different phrase—our evolution and emergence from the world, is to raise the question of both our freedom and our ultimate orientation towards God. When this is done, one has set the stage for a discussion of resurrection, because resurrection is the radical future of the human person before God. The resurrection of the flesh,

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which we affirm in the creeds, is the soul’s destiny, provided that one has begun to think of the soul as the human person in the world, as one who is oriented through this world towards the world that will be when it has come to dwell in its creator. One could say that Christ’s resurrection in the flesh is the revelation that finally exorcizes the ghost in the gaps, because it reveals a cosmos destined to be drawn into the Trinitarian life of God, not an ephemeral ghost escaping into another dimension. Thus, the deepest meaning of the soul is to be sought in the empty tomb. What happened to creation there, to the enfleshed spirit of Jesus as it entered death, is the destiny of the soul. We cannot see the resurrection as something that his soul experienced passively, much less as simply one more event, leaving as much, or as little, of an impression as occurs in a lifetime full of events. When we ask the meaning of the word “soul” we must begin by asking what happened to that human being who had a destiny before God, the one crucified and laid in the tomb. Seeds of Time Though the New Testament goes to great efforts to disabuse us of the notion, believers continue to suffer from the impression that what the Church came to celebrate as “the Ascension” of Christ somehow removed his person from our midst, and consequently made the nature of his soul after death and resurrection unknown to us. Far from it. In Christ’s being “exalted at the right hand of God” (Acts 2: 33) eternity claimed time as its own offspring. Eternity entered time, and one does not have to wait for time’s cessation in order to experience either eternity or the soul’s immortality. And yet to ponder resurrection more adequately, one must dispel inadequate notions of eternity and the human person’s relationship to it. One cannot think of the soul as some parcel of the human person that rides into eternity, leaving behind what we have called “spirit in the world.” Rahner writes: Hence if we have to speak in Christian eschatology of the dead who are still alive, we have to say first of all what this means, or better, what it does not mean. It does not mean that all things continue on after death as though, as Feuerbach put it, we only change horses and then ride on—that is, as though the dispersion and the empty, indetermined and even determinable openness characteristic of temporal existence continued on. No, in this respect death marks an end for the whole person. If we simply have time continue beyond a person’s death, and have the “soul” survive in this time, so that new time comes to be instead of time being subsumed into its final and definitive validity, then we get into insuperable difficulties today both in understanding what the Christian doctrine really means and also in living it existentially. (1978: 436–47)

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Eternity cannot mean an endless temporal sequence, as Wittgenstein also noted, since the very nature of the human person calls for completion. Sartre flawlessly illustrated this in his play No Exit, when he created hell out of a harmless hotel room, simply because growth gives way to endless stasis when three people are condemned to spend an eternity with each other, without any possibility of advance or fulfillment. Time is a condition of our growth into God, into eternity. To be condemned to time, to ceaselessly change, might well be immortal life, in the sense of being a life that does not die, but it would be an intolerable life, a thirst never sated, a desire never fulfilled. Heidegger was absolutely correct when he understood death to be an essential element of what it means to be human. We must be set free from time and the development that occurs within time. So, argues Rahner: “We may not understand the existence which arises out of death as a mere ‘continuation’ in the characteristic dispersion and the indeterminate openness of temporal existence, an openness which can be determined ever further, and thus is really empty. In this respect, death marks an end for the whole person” (Rahner 1978: 271). However strongly we assert that death ends time for the human person, we must with equal vigor maintain that death does replace time with stasis. This is the strong emphasis of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s sustained discussion of eternity in The Last Act. His premise in discussing the question of eternity is to ground earthly events in Trinitarian ones, insisting that “all earthly becoming is a reflection of the eternal ‘happening’ in God, which, we repeat, is per se identical with the eternal Being or essence” (1998: 67). He thus distinguishes between events happening in time and those which happen in what he calls “super-time,” essentially using the processions of the Trinity to reject the traditional Greek notion of God’s absolute stasis. “Unless we see eternity being in terms of eternal event, we are condemned to see the form of its duration as mere nunc stans, which deprives it of everything that makes world-time (in all its transience) exciting and delightful” (Balthasar 1998: 91). Put another way, who would trade the thrill of time for the utter stillness of eternity? Thus, while time itself is limited, events, because they occur in the Trinity, which exists outside of time, also exist outside of time. In the relations between the three persons, something of an event character is eternal, and this pattern is repeated for creatures. Hence one cannot view eternity as stasis. “This means that ‘in God unity and distance are not opposites’ and that God’s fruitful love is a further reason why his essence is ever greater” (Balthasar 1998: 82). So what is eternity? It is “not an incalculably long-lasting mode of pure time, but a mode of spirit and freedom which have been actualized in time …” Or, in a more lapidary sentence: “In reality ‘eternity’ comes to be in time as its own mature fruit” (Rahner 1978: 271). As von Balthasar puts it: “There is a deep analogy between time and eternity, so eternity can always be inside time, just as time can participate in eternity” (1998: 101). Aquinas himself aligns our experience of temporal change with God’s fullness, as that which is pure act. “Eternity is simultaneously whole; which cannot be applied to time: for eternity is the measure of a permanent being; while time is a measure of movement” (ST 1, 10, 4). Of course, not all of human life is destined to be taken into God’s own. Certainly, sin and its attendant suffering have

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no place there. The difficulty lies in existential discernment of the eternal from the ephemeral, which is why Banquo abjures the witches in Macbeth: “If you can, look into the seeds of time, / and say which grain will grow, and which will not, / speak then to me who neither beg nor fear / your favours nor your hate” (I, iii, 56–9). A Christian reconciles eternity and its energy through belief in the resurrection of Christ, when God’s goodness carried time to its fulfillment in the resurrected flesh of Christ. Eternity is not endless time; it’s not the cessation of time; it would be better to call it the flowering of time. Something happens in eternity. A thing increases without another diminishing. The resurrected face of Christ grows more beautiful, without growing older. The vine brings forth a fruit that doesn’t spoil. Dante captures this nicely in the fourteenth canto of his Paradiso. He’s marveling at the beauty of the light that emanates from the saints, and King Solomon tells him: ‘Just as long as the festival of Paradise shall last, that is how long our love shall dress us in this radiance. ‘Its brightness answers to our ardor, the ardor to our vision, and that is given in greater measure of grace than we deserve. XIV 37–42

It’s a beautiful image of growth without diminution. The saints grow ever brighter in heaven, because they love God more and more, because they see more and more of God, as God never ceases to be poured out upon the saints in love. And Dante is thoroughly Christian. He knows that heaven is the destiny, not only of souls, but also of the flesh. ‘When we put on again our flesh, glorified and holy, then our persons will be more pleasing for being all complete, ‘so that the light, granted to us freely by the Highest Good, shall increase, the light that makes us fit to see Him. ‘From that light, vision must increase, and love increase what vision kindles, and radiance increase, which comes from love. ‘But like a coal that shoots out flame and in its glowing center still outshines it so that it does not love its own appearance,

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‘just so this splendor that enfolds us now will be surpassed in brightness by the flesh that earth as yet still covers. XIV 43–57

It’s a wonderful image of heaven. Growth without growing old; a waxing illumination that comes forth from the love of God and then makes us love God all the more. And the good news of the Gospel is that our flesh itself will take its place in this blossoming vine that time cannot wilt. This is Augustine’s memoria having crossed over into the undiscovered country. What the saint could only do interiorly, move within the dimensions of his temporal being, Dante’s saints in heaven do effortlessly. Wax without wearying, expand through all eternity. Beneath the Altar Two questions remain. They are interwoven, because the first inevitably raises the question of the second. The first concerns the intermediate state of the dead, before the consummation of history. The second asks how human intelligence survives the biological disintegration of the human person in the world before, and at, the consummation of history. In a way, each question is about those seeds of time. The first asks, what must yet happen within time for those seeds to sprout? The second, the consideration of the next chapter, inquires about the nature of the fruit to come. I would argue that the notion of an intermediate state is not an optional addendum to the question of resurrection. On the contrary, it is a necessary conclusion drawn from the very meaning of resurrection, which is why I treat it first rather than as an addendum to the question of the general resurrection. One may not view the resurrection of Jesus as a resurrection from history, as though the Risen Christ escapes and eschews the vicissitudes of time. No, the Lamb must carry a vanquished history in his vanguard, gathering up his own, which is why one cannot treat the intermediate state of the dead without any regard for the meaning of time. Regarding the intermediate state of the dead, namely, what happens to the dead between the time that they die and that time in which they find themselves reconstituted before God in a glorified cosmos, Jesus and the early church seem to have shared the Jewish notion—then prevalent— of Sheol as a dwelling place for the dead, which, by the time of Christ, had been divided into distinct fates reserved for the just and the unjust. What should be noted, however, is that, for the early Christians, Sheol would become an intermediate state, rather than a final one. It attended the disposition of the resurrected Christ and the completion of human history. Previously, the Ethiopian Book of Enoch (c. 150 bce) had the dead awaiting final judgment, not in the earth’s interior but rather in the land of the setting sun, the West. Here, the just and unjust are separated from each other, much as they are in the Lucan

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parable of Dives and Lazarus (16: 19–31). The Fourth Book of Ezra (c. 100 ce) shows a development on this. Whereas Enoch defers the punishment of the unjust until the final judgment, here they begin to suffer immediately upon death. The New Testament is rooted in this Jewish milieu. Besides the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Luke also gives us the good thief, to whom Christ says from the cross, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (23: 43). The same author records the cry of Stephen: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7: 59). Note the distinctive Christological character that this new testament is imparting to the notion of the afterlife: it is life with Christ. As the Roman catacombs of Santa Priscilla attest, Jesus himself, as the Good Shepherd, is the source of refreshment and rest. The Beloved is paradise. The Shepherd is shown amid palm branches and fruit. For the Christian, paradise is thus more relationship than region. When Paul takes up the question of the afterlife for Christians in First Thessalonians, he underscores this Christological character. “For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we wake or sleep we might live with him” (5: 9–10). In Philippians the Christological character is also dominant. Paul speaks of deliberating for himself between life or death; both choices represent union with Christ. It is in Second Corinthians that the apostle goes into much more discussion about the afterlife, but not in a way that offers a satisfactory picture of it. Again, its most salient feature is life with Christ. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens … So we are always confident; even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord—for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we do have confidence, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body. (5: 1–10)

Note that for Paul the earthly body is distinct from the resurrected body. Indeed, the earthly one precludes union with Christ. The patristic centuries that follow do not fundamentally alter the picture inherited from Judaism and the Apostolic Church. Even the belief that Christian martyrs immediately enjoy the reward of their deaths is a Judaic inheritance. The Eleventh Council of Toledo (675 ce) produced a symbol of faith, which, although never approved by a pope, gives good expression to the faith as formulated. “Thus, according to the example of our Head, we confess that there is a true resurrection of the body for all the dead. And we do not believe that we shall rise in an ethereal body or in any other body, as some foolishly imagine” (ND 2302; DS 540). Yet another warning about imagining eternity. But, as we’ve seen, to be human is to

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imagine. How can human beings expect themselves not to be themselves when it comes to the question of their destiny? Benedictus Deus In the fourteenth century, acting as a private theologian, prior to his election as pontiff, Jacques Duèze preached a series of sermons suggesting, in contrast to earlier Christian belief, that the dead see only the glorified humanity of Christ and must await the general resurrection for access to the Triune God. A significant controversy arose, with Franciscans supporting and Dominicans opposing him. After Duèze became Pope John XXII, the University of Paris appealed to him to re-address the issue, but, after studying the writings of the fathers, he was only able to retract his previous errors, those made as a private theologian, before dying. His successor Benedict XII took up the issue in his constitution of 1336, Benedictus Deus, writing: By this constitution which is to remain in force for ever, we with apostolic authority, define the following: According to the general disposition of God, the souls of all the saints who departed from this world before the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ and also of the holy apostles, martyrs, confessors and other faithful who died after receiving the holy baptism of Christ—provided they were not in need of any purification when they died, or will not be in need of any when they die in the future, or else, if they then needed or will need some purification, after they have been purified after death—and again the souls of children who have been reborn by the same baptism of Christ or will be when baptism is conferred on them, if they die before retaining the use of free will: all these souls, immediately (mox) after death and, in the case of those in need of purification, after the purification mentioned above, since the ascension of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ into heaven, already before they take up their bodies again and before the general judgement, have been, are and will be with Christ in heaven, in the heavenly kingdom and paradise, joined to the company of holy angels. Since the passion and death of the Lord Jesus Christ, these souls have seen and see the divine essence with an intuitive vision and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature by way of object of vision; rather the divine essence immediately manifests itself to them, plainly, clearly, and openly, and in this vision they enjoy the divine essence. Moreover, by this vision and enjoyment the souls of those who have already died are truly blessed and have eternal life and rest. Also the souls of those who will die in the future will see the same divine essence and will enjoy it before the general resurrection. (ND 2305; DS 10000)

Commenting on the constitution, Ratzinger aptly notes that “according to this text, then, the Lord’s ascension is essentially an event of a kind which may be called

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‘anthropological-historical’. It signifies that now, after Christ, there is no longer a closed heaven. Christ is in heaven: that is, God has opened himself to man, and man, when he passes through the gate of death as one justified, as someone who belongs to Christ and has been received by him, enters into the openness of God” (1988: 138).2 There is no theological reason, and no New Testament warrant, to view the Ascension as the departure of a loved one whose return we await. Rather, Christ carries his and our humanity into the fullness of the Godhead. Aquinas, already in the thirteenth century, was thoroughly in line with Benedictus Deus, even though his own Aristotelian anthropology makes it difficult to see how one can describe the dead, awaiting the general resurrection, as happy, as they no longer possess a complete human nature, since for him the soul acts as the substantial form of the body. But Thomas responds to the objection: I answer that, happiness is twofold; the one is imperfect and is had in this life; the other is perfect, consisting in the vision of God. Now it is evident that the body is necessary for the happiness of this life. For the happiness of this life consists in an operation of the intellect, either speculative or practical. And the operation of the intellect in this life cannot be without a phantasm, which is only in a bodily organ, as was shown in the I, 84, 6, 7. Consequently that happiness which can be had in this life, depends, in a way, on the body. But as to perfect Happiness, which consists in the vision of God, some have maintained that it is not possible to the soul separated from the body; and have said that the souls of saints, when separated from their bodies, do not attain to that Happiness until the Day of Judgment, when they will receive their bodies back again. And this is shown to be false, both by authority and by reason. By authority, since the Apostle says (2 Corinthians 5: 6): “While we are in the body, we are absent from the Lord”; and he points out the reason of this absence, saying: “For we walk by faith and not by sight.” Now from this it is clear that so long as we walk by faith and not by sight, bereft of the vision of the Divine Essence, we are not present to the Lord. But the souls of the saints, separated from their bodies, are in God’s presence; wherefore the text continues: “But we are confident and have a good will to be absent … from the body, and to be present with the Lord.” Whence it is evident that the souls of the saints, separated from their bodies, “walk by sight”, seeing the Essence of God, wherein is true Happiness. Again this is made clear by reason. For the intellect needs not the body, for its operation, save on account of the phantasms, wherein it looks on the intelligible truth, as stated in the I, 84, 7. Now it is evident that the Divine Essence cannot be seen by means of phantasms, as stated in the I, 12, 3. Wherefore, since man’s perfect Happiness consists in the vision of the Divine Essence, it does not depend on the body. Consequently, without the body the soul can be happy. We must, however, notice that something may belong to a thing’s perfection in two ways. First, as constituting the essence thereof; thus the soul is necessary 2

  While he was a private theologian. Hence my use of the surname.

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for man’s perfection. Secondly, as necessary for its well being: thus, beauty of body and keenness of perfection belong to man’s perfection. Wherefore though the body does not belong in the first way to the perfection of human Happiness, yet it does in the second way. For since operation depends on a thing’s nature, the more perfect is the soul in its nature, the more perfectly it has its proper operation, wherein its happiness consists. Hence, Augustine, after inquiring (Gen. ad lit. xii, 35) “whether that perfect Happiness can be ascribed to the souls of the dead separated from their bodies”, answers “that they cannot see the Unchangeable Substance, as the blessed angels see It; either for some other more hidden reason, or because they have a natural desire to rule the body.” (Ia–IIae, 4, 5)

Thomas thus asserts both the happiness of the justified dead and the incomplete nature of that happiness. They are not yet reconstituted human natures. One could say that they fully possess God, but they do not yet fully possess themselves. But note that the souls of the dead do live on as intelligences. The notion that the dead immediately experience God seems to have survived the Reformation in much of popular piety. Macbeth can say of Banquo, whom he is about to murder, “Banquo, thy soul’s flight, / if it find heaven, must find it out tonight” (Macbeth, III, i, 142–3). And, just before the sword fight that will lead to the death of his undesired nemesis, Romeo enjoins, “Now, Tybalt, take the ‘villian’ back again / that late thou gav’st me; for Mercutio’s soul / is but a little way above our heads, / staying for thine to keep him company. / Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him” (Romeo and Juliet, III, i, 125–9). Luther had argued that the dead literally, rather than merely metaphorically, “sleep” until the general resurrection of the dead, though his reading of the New Testament seems heavily influenced by his rejection of purgatorial practices on their behalf. And such a usage of the word “sleep” has no analogue in human life; we don’t hibernate through winter, much less through history.3 The Westminster Confession (1646) spoke of the human soul as “an immortal substance” and taught of the dead that “their souls (which never die nor sleep), having an immortal subsistence, immediately (after death) return to God who gave them.” This was also a reaction against purgatorial practices. If the soul went directly upon death to God, and hence to judgment, then there could be no reason to intercede for the dead, their fate having been determined. Yet even today, those who believe that the dead continue to exist tend to assign consciousness to them, often treating them as interlocutors. 3

  Likewise, Jon Levenson notes that the identification of the dead “as ‘those who sleep in the dust’ tempts us to say that they are not really dead at all but only asleep, enfolded in God’s protective grace until they are at last revived. The temptation is best resisted. For neither in the Hebrew Bible nor in rabbinic literature is sleep generally seen as such a benign state. It is more than occasionally associated with death … just as waking up is associated (in both literatures) with resurrection” (2006: 5).

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Giving History Its Due As von Balthasar reads the Definition of Benedict XII, and even as he reads Ratzinger and Rahner, “whether there is an ‘intermediate state’ between death and his resurrection ‘on the last day’ is an open question, and not one of great moment” (1988: 356). Von Balthasar, with his Johannine approach to eternity as something already present within history, seems ready to abolish any notion of an intermediate state. He judges that “theology, by pursuing an ever more systematic elaboration of the doctrine of an ‘intermediate state’, has thought itself into a corner where it finds itself obliged to posit two judgments: man faces a particular judgment immediately after death and a general judgment at the end of the world. Biblically and speculatively, however, such a twofold judgment—if indeed ‘judgment’ is seriously being proposed here—is unacceptable” (1988: 356–7). Benedictus Deus declares the justified dead to enjoy the immediate vision of God. “So the final Judgment occurs after the death of the individual, which means that, as Karl Rahner puts it so well, it takes place ‘along’ the temporal history of the world” and so coincides “with the sum of particular judgments undergone by individuals” (1988: 357). But it would seem that von Balthasar reads Rahner too much in the light of his own presuppositions about time being nestled into eternity, which for him essentially means human life in the bosom of divine life. Ratzinger himself sees the notion of an intermediate state to be both grounded in our history and indispensable in grappling with the very meaning of the soul. As he points out, many twentiethcentury theologians, following the leads of Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Barth, saw the relationship between time and eternity as such that one can speak of resurrection occurring immediately upon the death of a justified person. This has the apparent advantage of dispensing with the “dualism” of Greek thought, since one doesn’t have to speak of a soul surviving death. But as James Barr points out, the twentieth century’s theological emphasis upon an immediate resurrection (into eternity) rather than the immortality of the soul (in time) was as much a response to modern sensibilities as it was a more attentive reading of the New Testament evidence. Modern philosophy with its Cartesian emphasis upon the mind had found the soul to be a superfluous term, and it somehow seemed easier for moderns to accept the credibility of a one-timeonly event rather than the notion that every human person is destined to survive death. There were even theologians who chided believers in immortality as being selfish. Was the preservation of personal identity that important to the Gospel message, the hairs on one’s head and sparrows not withstanding? Thus, “much in the turn against the immortality of the soul was not a return to the fountainhead of biblical evidence but a climbing on the bandwagon of modern progress—the very thing that was at the same time being excoriated when it had been done in liberal theology” (Barr 1993: 99). But trying to purge the New Testament of what was thought to be a Greek notion had the effect of undermining several teachings

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common to Catholics and Protestants. How could a human be judged upon death, if nothing survived death as an active person? Writing in an appendix to his work on eschatology, and subsequent to a 1979 “Clarification from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the Question of Eschatology,” Ratzinger again took up the question of those who reject any notion of an intermediate state, and his reasoned response is worth quoting. If a human being is a unity of body and soul, at death, should we really speak of the body being left to time while the soul eschews it? Or does the soul, until the general resurrection, retain relationship with time? But here a question suggests itself. According to this idea, a human being is simply indivisible. Without the body he just does not exist: that belief is what makes people seek out this way of thinking. Now no one can doubt that after death man’s body remains in the world of space and time. It does not “rise”, but is laid in the tomb. That abolition of time which reigns beyond death does not, then, hold good for the body. But in that case, for what does it hold good, granted that nothing in man is separable from the body? Or is there in fact something which, amid the spatio-temporal disintegration of the body, is distinguishable from the body and makes its sortie from a temporal order which now for the first time takes the body wholly into its own possession? And if there is such a something, then why not call it the soul? Indeed, with what right can one call it the body, when it obviously has nothing to do with man’s historical body and its materiality? And how can there be no dualism if one postulates a postmortem second body (which one surely must, on this hypothesis), whose origin and mode of existence remains obscure? (1988: 252–3)

As Ratzinger notes, many Catholic theologians writing at the same time found the notion of an intermediate state to be dispensable, but Ratzinger’s rejection of this approach runs deeper than his apparent defense of “Greek dualism,” a charge which he happily accepts, since his evaluation of Plato is so positive as to make him a Hellenic John the Baptist. For Ratzinger, the greater danger is an eschatology that reduces “Christianity to individualism and other-worldliness” (1988: 12). If that part of us which is most truly ourselves is “set free from time,” what reason is there for the living Christian to struggle to transform the temporal into something worthy of God? “Indeed the irony is that as Christianity becomes ‘existential’ speaking of a new state that is entered into immediately upon death, it renders the early Christian eschatological hopes for this world quite meaningless. Is it any wonder that the West turns to secular forms of progress, Communism being one example, when Christian faith reduces itself to the fate of an individual rather than a cosmos?” (1988: 13). Liberal theological thought in the twentieth century seemed behind its own zeitgeist (when isn’t it?) since the effect of existentialist philosophy on the continent and language analysis in Anglo-American thought was highlighting the essentially communitarian nature of the human person. We enter eternity as a people, not a person. As the Scottish theologian John Baillie reminded

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his confreres, “there can be no complete consummation for the individual until there is consummation also for society.” As he saw it, this “is the real significance of the conception of the ‘Last Day’” (1933: 299). I have argued that the soul must be seen as fully worldly and fully communitarian. As the human person directed towards completion in God, the human soul loses its meaning when sundered from its relationship to the material world, to others, and to time. All of these are drawn into God, because they are the human person. Human beings are, to use the lapidary phrase of Heidegger, “being and time,” they complete themselves through their interaction with the material world and with others in time. To suggest that they step free of time, while time continues to exist, portrays the resurrection of Christ as a Narnia-like door out of time, in this case one hidden in a tomb rather than a wardrobe. But resurrection must be the fulfillment of time, not escape from it. The question is whether the souls of the dead no longer have a stake in time, but, if that would be the case, why should the souls of the living take any interest in temporal affairs, seeing them as truly ephemeral when compared to eternity? Are the injustices committed in time simply erased in eternity, or must time itself, as it surrenders to the justice of Christ, be their undoing? At the beginning of King Lear, Cordelia, because her love refuses to feign affection, is wronged by her aggrieved father. Exiled and mocked by her savvy sisters, she confides her fate to history. “Time shall unfold what pleated cunning hides / Who covers faults, at last with shame derides / Well may you prosper” (King Lear, I, i, 281–3). Many envision eternity as the place that bears no relationship to time, but of course that would obliterate the very possibility of petitionary prayer, which the gospel clearly enjoins. Dante deals with the conundrum of God’s providence verses God’s willingness to respond to a humanity immersed in history in the twentieth canto of his Paradiso. There he encounters four kings in the Empyream, two of whom, Trajan and Ripheus, died as pagans, but Dante believes the legends that they were raised from the dead by the prayers of Christians in order to embrace Christ and then “do dying right” the second time around, so to speak. This isn’t simply eternity attending history, it’s eternity rewriting it. But the eagle, in whose eye these souls are held, responds that this is part of God’s own kenosis, allowing the divine will to be moved by a love which it itself sets in motion. ‘Regnum celorum suffers violence from fervent love and living hope. These conquer the very will of God. ‘not as man may master man, but conquer it because it would be conquered, and, once conquered, itself conquers by its goodness. (XX 94–9)

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Ratzinger seems most on target when he argues that an intermediate state is required lest eternity smother time, or, to put it another way, God must attend time as a condition of allowing humanity its own maturation, which is not only individual, but, I have consistently argued, corporate, due to its linguistic and thus historical nature. It does not seem sufficient to speak of the dead entering eternity, because they enter resurrection, upon their death. My own way to illustrate the temporal relationship between individual and collective salvation is to turn to what at first appears to be a disparate topic, but I link it to theme of this book, that the best way to think of the soul is as a narrative. In his writings on scripture, Ratzinger has insisted that a text must always be read in community. What he writes of the reception of scripture is analogous to my understanding of the human person as a narrative formed by history and therefore inseparable from it. Ratzinger consistently argues against what he calls Biblicism, whether that be the effort of the early reformers to set text against community, by naively presuming that what they read in scripture was its sole meaning, or the work of their successors—first in liberal Protestanism but eventually in Catholicism itself—to see the reading of the historian, the one who approaches the text as an historical artifact rather than a living cell in a still-living organism, as replacing that of the interpretive community, the Church. The fundamental and all-important hermeneutical insight here is that subsequent history belongs intrinsically to the inner momentum of the text itself. That is: it does not simply provide retrospective commentary on the text. Rather, through the appearing of the reality which was still to come, the full dimension of the interpretation of the texts must be, by its very nature, incomplete … The open nature of the relationship between schema and reality invites the reality of subsequent history to enter into the text. Only through the harvest of historical experience does the word gradually gain its full meaning. (1988: 42–3)

Texts unfold themselves in time, and, just as one must not truncate a text from its temporal unfolding, in like manner, a human being, as a narrative, cannot be severed from history, even in death. I am essentially arguing that we retain an ordination towards history in death, just as we retain an ordination towards matter, that both are ordered towards relationship with God and others. Only when history fulfills itself does this ordination cease, and cessation is the proper concept, because history does have a beginning and an end. Langue and Parole Another way to approach the issue that Ratzinger raises, that eternity must respect the temporal, not simply replace it, is to view human history as a narrative and then to apply the now common distinction between speech as langue and as

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parole. Langue is the system of interrelated meanings that form a language. Syntax regulates the formation and deformation of semantics, of meaning. All of this is in place before, and when, any person speaks; it both limits and makes possible what can be said. In contrast, parole is the act of speaking, and this occurs in an entirely additional network of meaning, one in place at the moment of usage, and only at the moment of usage. “I love you” has a stable meaning in langue, a function of syntax, but its meaning varies widely in parole, according to the linguistic context in which it is uttered. “I love you,” means one thing when said to a fiancée. It means quite another when uttered by a basketball player to his team mate who has just scored a three-point basket. In similar manner, those who think of eternity beginning at the moment of death seem to be operating with an understanding of history that makes of it something thoroughly ephemeral, without lasting consequences for the eternal. Stephano, the drunken butler of The Tempest, opines that “he that dies pays all debts” (The Tempest, III, ii, 134). Death may release one from earthly creditors, but it certainly doesn’t erase the effects of one’s life upon others. Does thinking that the eternal “begins” the moment it escapes the temporal do justice to the Christian doctrines of Creation and Incarnation, which seem to suggest that the eternal allows space within itself for the temporal? To employ the langue/parole distinction, one would want to say that a human being, and humans collectively, must perform their individual and collective speech acts, their paroles. It is not enough to say that they have a meaning given to them by God and that therefore eternity can claim them at any moment. They also have a meaning that must be forged in history, in relationships, in language, which is to say that it must be enunciated, enacted into history. The human soul “must be spoken,” if you will, to be a soul, to be a narrative. One cannot simply say that the collective essence of humanity, or even of the human person, is ready at hand, like a langue. Both become what they are through parole, through acts of enunciation. Anything can be said, according to syntax, in langue; what matters is what has been said in parole. “Each act of speaking is in its own way situational, each word is a historic word” (Gusdorf 1965: 85). We can use all of the tools at our disposal to recreate the langue in which a given text functioned. It should have had this meaning, we say, given its nexus in the skein of language as we have been able to reconstruct it. But what we can never reproduce is the parole, the actual act of speaking performed by the text. This will vary each time that it is encountered. It may have come from a single source, lost in history, but its effects on those who subsequently encounter it will never cease being new instantiations of parole. “A living man, writer or not, always has something to say, as a contribution to the reality of the world in which his task is to declare himself” (Gusdorf 1965: 70). To see humanity as an interwoven narrative, a langue, is to realize that until the last speaker has fallen silent, paroles continue. “Each of us is charged with realizing himself in language, a personal echo of the language of all which represents his contribution to the human world” (Gusdorf 1965: 76). We must take seriously the

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soul’s historical nature; we must allow it to enunciate itself, and the redemption that follows must take into account that utterance. The New Testament is its own symphony of paroles. That we comprehend its meaning is due to the continuity of the fundamentally human questions that we and its authors share. We still speak the same anthropological langue, if you will. But when we take the New Testament upon our lips, when we live it in our time, new acts of parole occur. Every saint speaks the gospel for his or her time. Dante makes this very point in the fifth canto of his Paradiso. He and Beatrice ascend from the first heaven, the lunar sphere, to the second, where the planet Mercury reigns. As they come closer to God, their faces brighten; so does the planet Mercury. In heaven, what might be called nature responds in harmony with humanity to God’s presence. Then I saw my lady so radiant with joy as she passed into that heaven’s brightness that the planet shone the brighter for it. And if even that star then changed and smiled, what did I become who by my very nature am subject to each and every kind of change? V 94–9

Dante then sees an array of redeemed souls approach, and he adds something that has puzzled his theologically inclined readers: As to the surface of a fishpond, calm and clear, the fish draw close to what they see above them, believing it to be their food. so I saw more than a thousand splendors drawing toward us, and from each was heard: ‘Oh, here is one who will increase our loves!’ V 100–05

How can the souls of the blessed experience an increase in love? Why does the arrival of Dante represent a boon to them? Don’t we define heaven as the fullness of bliss, as the beatific vision, the very possession of God? Then how could Dante think that his presence in heaven could add to its joy? Because Dante realizes that a new citizen of heaven increases paradise itself. Paradise is relational before it is regional. Heaven is a Christological concept, but the Incarnation demands that heaven be a temporal concept as well, as least as long as part of the Body of Christ remains in time. “Heaven’s existence depends upon the fact that Jesus Christ, as God, is man, and makes space for human existence in the existence of God

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himself” (Ratzinger 1988: 234). The denizens of heaven rejoice because they think that Dante’s word, his parole, has joined their own in the chorus of divine praises. Ratzinger links an intermediate state of the dead to anthropology. To be human is to be both temporal and relational. “[I]t is not a relationless being oneself that makes a human being immortal, but precisely his relatedness, or capacity for relatedness, to God,” hence “a being is the more itself the more it is open, the more it is in relationship” (1988: 155). Dialogue with God is never simply between the individual and God, because the individual becomes herself through interaction with others. Every parole occurs in langue, because langue is the required supposition of parole. “Before speaking any particular tongue, man speaks, man is a relational being, and that relational nature of human reality is the most general condition for any spoken exchange” (Gusdorf 1965: 63). “God’s dialogue with us becomes truly human, since God conducts his part as man. Conversely, the dialogue of human beings with each other becomes a vehicle for the life everlasting, since in the communion of saints it is drawn up into the dialogue of the Trinity itself” (Ratzinger 1988: 159). There is a related anthropological issue of identity. If the individual soul does not survive death, if our identity, our narrative does not enter God’s own, then what would be the reason to identify the newly reconstituted humanity on the last day with that which has gone before? Like the novum of the New Testament, there must be some continuity with the past, otherwise one cannot reasonably speak of God’s having fulfilled divine promises. “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!” (Job 19: 25–7). Nature renews itself even while it vanquishes our identities, but the God of Israel, and Jesus, seem consumed with these individualities: “I have called you by name, you are mine” (Is 43: 1). “You did not choose me but I chose you” (Jn 15: 16). What would it mean for a soul to fall silent, while it awaits the Last Day? If it lacks instantiations, paroles, do we not speak of it as dead? Must not the dead continue to speak in Christ? If one were to see langue/parole as analogical to potency/act, esse/essence, then one would have to assert that God is purely parole. God does not speak within any system, does not act within a skein of potentialities, which is what a langue is. Recall that in Aquinas God does not engage in discursive language, with one concept being linked to another. Rather, every utterance of God is a complete expression, without any dependency upon any system of meaning. But everything a human being says, every act of parole, finds its meaning in a double skein of langue and parole. It is not thus with God. God completely expresses God’s self, gives God’s self, in a single parole, Jesus the Christ. However, because of their historical, relational nature, human beings must constantly utter new paroles in order to continue to be themselves, in order to give themselves, however inchoately and impartially, to others. This is why if the dead fall completely silent, silent

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even in Christ, they lose their identities, their very selves, which are intrinsically relational. Ratzinger’s anthropological difficulty with resurrection following immediately upon death is that resurrection thus conceived is stripped of both time and matter. He asks, “is there such a thing as the end of time? Beyond the ‘being with Christ’ which awaits the believer after death, should one posit something more? This is the paramount question: Must faith assert that there will be an end to history, to history comme tel and as a whole, a truly ‘Last Day’? And secondly, does the resurrection have anything to do with matter? Does faith expect a transformation of matter, and thus something like corporeality in the risen state?” (1988: 166). Clearly, if one posits entry into resurrection upon the death of the just one, their bodies do not participate, since they are clearly left behind in a temporal process of decay. By way of solution, Ratzinger directs his reader to a text from Origen, pondering why it is that the Lord will not drink again until the coming of the kingdom. Why must the Lord wait? Because in the Incarnation, God has bound himself to attend, to await the development of the human race, to allow us to become ourselves in our temporal history. A resurrected and glorified cosmos must await its own inner law of development. Because every human being is temporal and relational, he is the result of temporal relations, and effects them in turn. He inherits dispositions and temperaments. He leaves behind decisions and their consequences. “It is possible to suppose that by his life and death a man endows the whole of history and even of creation with tendencies which continue to operate even after his separation from history” (Schmaus 1977: 244). The question is: how can anyone, even Christ himself, fully live resurrected life while his fellows remain behind, still in time, still suffering the effects of sin in time? Here is how Julian of Norwich answers that question: “For insofar as Christ is our head, he is glorious and impassible, but with respect to his body, to which all his members are joined, he is not yet fully glorified or wholly impassible. For he still has that same thirst and longing which he had upon the Cross, which desire, longing and thirst, as I see it, were in him from without beginning; and he will have this until the time that the last soul which will be saved has come up into his bliss” (Colledge et al. 1974: 230–31). One can make sense of all this in realizing that, when the early Church called Christ the Logos, it was not simply because he is the inner code that makes sense of every langue. As Christ, he is the collective gathering-in of every parole. Christ raised from the dead is “the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor 15: 20). He is the one who must harvest history, sort wheat from husks, make good its defects (Mt 13: 30). He has definitively spoken his name; he must redress and redeem our faltering pronunciations. “Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed / shall lodge thee till they wound be thoroughly healed” (Two Gentlemen of Verona, I, ii, 115–16). Because of the word he speaks, his parole, because of its eternal validity, despite having been uttered at a specified and precise moment, all further speech acts are performed in him and are to be judged by him.

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The Nature of the Soul Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. In the presence of God who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will bring about at the right time—he who is the blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords. It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen. (1 Tim 6: 12–16)

If one conceives of the human person as a narrative, one has to grant that narrative its end. It must play itself out, deform, develop, and reform. One can’t think of history as simply something the human race does while awaiting the eschaton. The eschaton implies a completion. “Thus the completion of the whole is not something purely external to the individual, but a reality which determines him or her in the most interior way” (Ratzinger 1988: 207). God is eternal, but because humanity is corporate, our entrance into the divine life revealed in the resurrection is historical. Thomas Hardy offers the worst possible interpretation of the relationship of the deity to history at the close of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The innocent, and terribly wronged, girl is condemned to death, and: Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag. “Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on. (1891: 508)

Hardy the prophet castigates an eternity that does not redeem time, because it is unworthy of time. Whether God pluck us from time into bliss or blister, if eternity is not the fruition of time, it is not the fulfillment of the human person. Life is not simply a test to find us worthy, or not, of God. Life as relational, temporal, and material is what it means to be human. The cosmos has a destiny in Christ that cannot be sundered from the fate of the soul. When Shall we Three Meet Again in Thunder, Lightning, or in Rain? Karl Rahner’s approach to an intermediate state may appear to be quite speculative, but it is deeply woven from his anthropological presuppositions. He suggests

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that in death, the spirit, which was in the world, remains oriented towards the world, but now does this in a mode of appropriation characteristic of those who are no longer becoming themselves in time. This is clearly a consequence of his consistently seeing spirit and matter as mutually interpenetrating, their relationship hierarchically shifting as one moves along a scale from insensate matter towards the deity itself, but a scale never sundered in the human person. He writes: Precisely in virtue of its openness to reality as such the spirit is not wholly removed from the world at death; indeed, the underlying unity of reality as a whole actually opens up to it, so to say, at a new and deeper level. All things become present to it immediately and without distortion. For this reason, the dead man is more closely and intimately united to the inward meaning of all that is real. But this totality of the real is still present to it in a peculiarly dim and remote manner. For the dead man this experience of the world in depth, as it were, is painful rather than joyful. He cannot really entertain it or express to himself that in it which is the object of desire to world and finite spirit alike, namely to come to themselves. Everything has become less real, has receded into remoteness, has become more alien and more lonely. (1971: 148)

For Rahner, it makes no sense to conceive of death as an escape from the material world. That world is the very womb of the human person as spirit. Rahner’s conception of death is far removed from Socrates’ immortality of the soul, who died noting that he owed the sacrifice of a chicken to Asclepius, presumably for delivering him out of the dis-ease of the material world into the contemplative rest of eternity. What stands behind Rahner’s ruminations for the future is the same deep conviction with which he views the current world and our place within it. Namely, that physical matter cannot be conceived as spiritual detritus. If it comes forth from God who is pure Spirit, then it cannot be conceived as the converse of the Spirit, as it is in neo-Platonic thought. On the contrary, one would have to say that what is material is always oriented toward the spiritual. The cosmos represents an ascending ratio of matter and spirit. Rahner reads the Thomistic affirmation ens et verum convertuntur as ultimately asserting that all of matter is oriented towards intelligence, or spirit (De Veritate 1.1).4 “[M]atter, by virtue of its origin and the end toward which it tends, must, after all, be quite ‘spiritual,’ inasmuch as its creator is absolute spirit and can hardly be the cause of something that is purely spiritless” (1988: 29). Rahner suggests that the dead person is oriented toward God and yet at the same time retains a profound connection to the world. The difference between a living person and one who is dead has to do with the way in which spirit orients itself toward matter. In the living human being, the union between the two is localized in a stable, physically distinct human substance. A way of putting this is 4

  Being and truth are convertible.

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to say that my spirit can only access that part of the world available to it through immediate interaction with my matter. In death, human intelligence, individual spirit, takes on one attribute of the angelic. It is no longer localized, but rather finds itself for the first time as permeating all of matter. If this is so, it would mean that human intelligence would come to share a second characteristic of angelic knowledge as it is understood in Thomistic thought. It would be intuitive rather than discursive, which is to say that it would know reality not through ratiocination based upon the senses, as we know it in this life, but rather that it would, in the divine dispensation, know intuitively, in a more direct manner. Note that in the intermediate state Rahner sees this form of knowing as burdensome, “more painful than joyful.” How can we know all of the world in a manner never before experienced and still be sad? Precisely because in the intermediate state we are no longer in a process of self-creation through our interaction with the world. We still know the langue, but we have no parole yet to offer, save in Christ, who spoke from the tomb. What the dead have become in the world is complete, though its effects still reverberate. They are now those who watch the world. They follow the dance from the side. Thornton Wilder beautifully expressed something akin to this in his classic of the American theater, Our Town. As the stage manager gives the audience the lay of the land for the Grover’s Corners cemetery, he says: Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars … everybody’s knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. (Pause). You know as well as I do that the dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth … and the ambitions they had … and the pleasures they had … and the things they suffered … and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that’s the way I put it—weaned away. And they stay here while the earth part of ’em burns away, burns out; and all that time they slowly get indifferent to what’s goin’ on in Grover’s Corners. They’re waitin’. They’re waitin’ for something that they feel is comin’. Something important, and great. Aren’t they waitin’ for the eternal part of them to come out clear? Some of the things they’re going to say maybe’ll hurt your feelings – but that’s the way it is: mother ’n daughter … husband ’n wife … enemy ’n enemy … money ’n miser … all those terribly important things kind of grow pale around here. And what’s left when memory’s gone, and your identity, Mrs. Smith? (2007: 196–7)

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Indeed, the dead “dwelling” in the Grover’s Corners cemetery have become more enamored of cosmic occurrences than human ones: the coming of the dawn, storm fronts, the movement of the stars. This is quite interesting, because scholars have amply shown that, historically, metaphysical schemas explaining the operation of the cosmos can be linked to corresponding ethical demands. We see the cosmos mirrored in ourselves. Here, as in Rahner, one finds an imagined future in which human minds set aside earthly polity and rise to the height and concerns of the “heavenly powers.” In the glorified cosmos, at the end of time, human intelligence remains free of its temporal and spatial limitations, but now the totality that is the spirit of the individual person finds itself effectively united with the totality that is the redeemed and glorified cosmos, namely matter itself, and dwells in corporate union with the other human intelligences that came to fruition in the world. The Home Place Allow me to draw my picture of Rahner’s speculations. A few months before he died, my father asked me if I would drive him to Rush County, Kansas, to see the farm where he grew up. The request was extraordinary for several reasons. First, my father rarely asked anything of me. Secondly, about the only time that I can remember anyone in our family going for a ride—just to go for a ride—is in the Christmas season, when we drive around town looking at decorations. This was late Autumn, and the farm was in the next county, about forty miles away. We had never driven to another county, just to be driving. My father was unusually talkative on the trip. That’s something else we don’t do in our family, at least not without a reason. As I drove, he let one memory after another rise to the surface. I knew that I was encountering the mystery of death in an entirely new way. His death would be my death, because unlike the many other deaths I had witnessed as a priest, this one would take a part of me with it. My father and mother were both more attuned to this reality than I. Mom had been reading books on hospice care, just one of the many odd things about life at that point, because my mother doesn’t read books. And here was my father, talking, quite aware that the time for talking was passing. We don’t often drive down Kansas State Highway 4, in the north part of Rush County. When we had on previous occasions, my father would point out, as we passed it, the dirt road leading from the highway to what he always referred to as “the home place.” I was amazed that he could identify it. The topography of northern Rush County varies very little. It’s flat, treeless prairie. A dirt road comes off the highway every mile, on the mile. Now, for the first time in my life, we took that dirt road and headed north, my father talking about walking the same road in deep snow, on his way home from some country school. We drove onto the Ficken Farm, got out of the car, and began to walk around. I was aware of our being on someone else’s land, but I don’t think

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that my father was. This was his land; he was this land. He was busy showing me where the coral had stood, where the water well had been. A woman looked out from one of the windows, but she seemed to take our presence in stride. My father simply said, “Probably Wayne Ficken’s wife,” and began to talk of hanging meat in the attic of the house during the winter months. How strange, to think that my father had been off this land for some sixty years, and still thought of it as the home place, the place defining his existence. We walked a small distance north into a pasture, my father talking of cows, horses, and his brothers. It wasn’t all that long, indeed much too soon, before we got back into the car and drove back to the place that I’ve always thought of as home. We live our physical lives forever in one moment, always at one spot, though as spirit, as Augustine’s memoria, we somehow encompass any given moment and spot as we see fit. As hard as it is to picture, Rahner suggests that after death our physical selves will be both more united and more diffused into the physical world that surrounds us. In a way that we can’t adequately imagine, the souls of the just are more united to the cosmos, more intimately interwoven into its texture, than we are. I don’t think that my father’s soul is confined to any place or time, as it once was, but I do think it retains an orientation to the created world into which God first summoned it. My father is present in Connecticut leaves and South African ocean waves, but I think something of his spirit still hovers above Wayne Ficken’s farm simply because it is the home place. Ironically, it’s more the home place now than it was in the thirties, because the souls who call it home infuse their spirits into its dirt, its crops and weeds, its wind and sunshine. However you picture the afterlife, don’t imagine something ethereal, up in the sky. That’s not who we are in life, and it’s not who we will be in death. One could say that only when matter itself will have become deified in the Parousia will the Incarnation of the Christ have run its course. The world will have found its completion in God, which is another way of saying that matter will have been drawn up entirely into that which is spirit. The material world will have found its voice in humanity. It will have become fully Rahner’s “spirit in the world.” “Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel” (Ps 22: 3). And that is where we must turn in closing. We must consider the Liturgy of the Lamb.

Chapter 9

Shuffled Off This Mortal Coil The Revelation of the Soul To the eyes of his Jewish contemporaries, Jesus enters the tomb a broken body. His soul has been dispersed. He is reckoned as one without portion in the faithfulness and goodness of the God of Israel. “For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise thee; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness” (Is 38: 18). He comes forth from the tomb not as apparition, not as heroic saga whose message must be spread even though the hero himself has been crushed, but as soul, as substantial form of the body, as the intellect still in relationship with God and with others, still linguistically formed, still formed and articulated in the flesh, in the material world, albeit in a manner not fully decipherable to us. “Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands. Reach out your hand, and place it in my side; do not doubt but believe’” (Jn 20: 27). The only way to understand the nature of the soul is to see the Risen Christ as the revelation of the soul’s future and hence of its nature, though the word “nature” requires a caveat. Aristotle’s notion of nature is based upon actions to be expected. The problem in speaking this way of human nature is that our linguistic transcendence, our ability to encompass the past and the future in purposeful engagement, makes the soul an open-ended nature, which of course, subverts Aristotle’s very notion of expected acts. The significance of the soul—to use a different, but not unrelated, term—is that it has a destiny. Its material prerequisites may emerge from evolutionary processes, but scripture assures us that it came forth from the Word of God and was created to be the singular vehicle of that Word dwelling within us. This intelligence is not destined to disappear in death. On the contrary, it endures, and death becomes the shedding of one type of corporeal existence for another. Christians have too long read the post-Easter apparitions as primary, seeing the Eucharistic, pneumatic Lord as something of a consolation upon the cessation of the apparitions. I am in no way denying the reality of the apparitions. They cannot be explained away as previously anticipated or merely as an expected part of the grieving process. In the light of the historical-critical method, the New Testament evidence is quite the contrary. There seems to have been little to no expectation of resurrection on the part of his disciples. And yet appearances without words would be nothing more than paranormal phenomena. Alone, they do not establish relationship; they would only frustrate it. But this is a Lord of Life, the one who speaks, who summons others into Eucharistic communion, into the liturgy. The apparitions serve only as transition, as a temporary lexicon that aids in translation.

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This is not in any way to deny the absolute reality of the resurrection, quite the opposite. The difficulty with explaining away the resurrection as yet another example of the hero or god reborn is the fact that Jesus died a ghastly death. There is no basis upon which to grant him a hero’s status. The death of Jesus “is, precisely, a death by violence, and in particular by enormous injustice: exactly the conditions under which the Old Testament did see death as something like ‘enmity with God’” (Barr 1993: 86). One can’t argue that the status of hero is both consequence and catalyst of the stories of resurrection. It can’t be both. If he did rise from the dead, the stories are a comprehensible result. If the stories create resurrection, then what is their catalyst? Why make a hero of someone who clearly is not? And, as we’ve seen, wouldn’t the status of the martyr be sufficient immortality for such a man? Why claim that eternity itself has interrupted time? We cannot read the New Testament as suggesting that for a short time—say forty days—the disciples enjoyed a better, more realistic, more substantial presence of their Risen Lord than we do. Indeed, the New Testament testimony is quite the opposite. He is among them in faith, in word, and in sacrament. Jesus taking his place at the right hand of the Father is not a diminishment of his presence among us. On the contrary, it is linked to the bestowal of the Spirit. “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (Jn 16: 7). If Jesus is soul in proclamation, if he remains corporeal soul in his body the Church, in his sacraments, then we cannot speak of his presence as being lessened among us. It becomes a question of faith being able to discern the soul of another in the new visage that the other has assumed. “My attitude toward him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul” (Wittgenstein 1967: 178e). And this is, of course, precisely what faith does. It recognizes and reverences the Christ still among us. How else can one explain a Corpus Christi possession, kissing the hand of a priest, or reverently opening the leaves of a well-worn Bible? Aren’t these acts in which a Christian approaches, not a symbol, not a set of data, but a personal presence? Talking Our Way Out of Time To return to the opening chapter, even at the risk of seeming to unsay what was said there, our linguistic ability to tell stories may provide an analogical entry into eternity. No one would allow a contemporary author to rewrite a classic. Try even to find a successful example of a sequel to a sensation. In a classic, we recognize an expression, a revelation of what truly is, one that cannot be reformed or recalibrated. Humanity may well have changed in the ensuing centuries, but we insist upon returning to that part of our humanity captured, crystallized by the classic. We say that the classic has a “time-less” quality. We force our young to undergo the sometimes strenuous effort to approach the classic on its own terms, learning its language, saturating the reading of the classic with all that we can reproduce of its original sitz-im-leben. We do this because, in the classic, language, that ever-growing

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and ever-related skein of human creativity, creates something that stretches its skein into the immortal. Age after age, we return to the classic, because we recognize that something crystalline has been born from what was originally inchoate. In the classic, the dead continue to speak, to act. If to speak is to create communion, then to create art is to defy death, because death cannot still art’s voice. In creating art, human beings give something to, and from, themselves that death cannot undo. They make their own voices as enduring as humanity itself. Steiner writes: Hence the immemorial logic of the relations between music, poetry and art on the one hand and the affront of death on the other. In death the intractable constancy of the other, of that on which we have no purchase, is given its most evident concentration. It is the facticity of death, a facticity wholly resistant to reason, to metaphor, to revelatory representation, which makes us “guest-workers”, frontaliers, in the boarding-houses of life. Where it engages, uncompromisingly, the issues of our condition, poetics seeks to elucidate the incommunicado of our meetings with death (in their terminal structure, narrations are rehearsals for death). However inspired, no poem, no painting, no musical piece—though music comes closest—can make us at home with death, let alone “weep it from its purpose”. But it is within the compass of the arts that the metaphor of resurrection is given the edge of felt conjecture. The central conceit of the artist that the work shall outlast his own death, the existential truth that great literature, painting, architecture, music have survived their creators, are not accidental or self-regarding. It is the lucid intensity of its meeting with death that generates in aesthetic forms that statement of vitality, of life-presence, which distinguishes serious thought and feeling from the trivial and the opportunistic. (1989: 140–41)

Of course, in saying that a work of art survives death, even saying that in a work of art the voice of the artist speaks to us, we have not said that the intelligence of the creator remains a living human intelligence, because such an intelligence is always about the business of becoming more of itself through its interaction with the world. We may put new questions to Shakespeare, which his plays answer, but Shakespeare the intellect, the spirit in the world, is not growing as a result of our encounters with his work. And yet every time that the classic is reread, reenacted, re-presented, all of the dynamism that characterizes language is present. That dynamism is strangely set free from time, which is where we normally think that all dynamism must dwell, since we associate action with change. But in the encounter with the classic, we have fecund creativity, dynamism, and immortality, all based upon the sheer stasis of the classic. The classic doesn’t change, but we never encounter the same classic twice. Again, I grant that we don’t yet have the eternal, unless human intelligence itself is eternal. If not, when the last human turns the last page, the creativity of the classic ceases. Unless, that is, human creativity is rooted in divine creativity. If our words are taken up into God’s word, then our words are eternal.

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I want to say that in the classic we have what Christians could call the cosmically Christic, simply because we have wrestled meaning from chaos in the service of, in the search for, the Logos. We have what could be called the world’s response in words to the Word spoken by the Father. The abundance of divine creativity has overflowed into human inspiration. Picking up a favorite patristic theme of the Logos, von Balthasar writes: “The fact that man, the dependent other, exists in the Son, the original Other, implies something else: The world as an expression and an image of God can only be rooted in the word; its inmost essence rests upon the word. If creatureliness is the question God poses to the world’s essence in the form of the Word, so too there is a creature’s answer to God in the word” (1998: 106). The difficulty is that Christians often seem to read “Word” as only a particularly apt Johannine metaphor for God, but its full ontological significance can only begin to be assessed with the realization that for humans, biology is always biography, and biography is woven of language. We never possess ourselves, we never act teleologically, without acting over and against a linguistic horizon. For Christians, that linguistic horizon has a name and a face, a face Saint Thomas gazed upon in silent contemplation, a name he whispered. Olivier-Thomas Venard urges: “We need to recover the sensibility to a certain magnetic condition of language, the incandescence of language which renders it capable of speaking God: in effect, it’s perhaps the faith in a mysterious linguistic contact between God and humanity that situates Thomas in his epoch” (Venard 2002: 113; my translation). Venard insists that “we are able to believe in words because God himself has guaranteed their usage. Because they do more than disclose the everyday process of signification: they are based upon an ontological rapport of language revealed in a divine paradigm. The sacred text from which theology emanates, though multiple in literary genres, is characterized by the recognition of the reality of the symbol in ‘sacred history’—the predication of Christ, his own identity, requires such a correspondence” (2002: 219; my translation). We have examined a tendency in Western thought, running from Plato through Aquinas (resurrected in Heidegger and Wittgenstein), that sees in our intellectual natures, natures woven of language, a transcendence over and against the world out of which that intelligence arises. In Plato that transcendence is so emphasized as to divorce human intelligence from the world, to make of it something divine. Clearly the impulse is understandable. Through language we appropriate the world in a uniquely human way. We come to see the present in the light of the past and the future. We view what is at hand against a horizon of what is not. Because of language, we step free of the world in hope and in anxiety, both uniquely human experiences. Aristotle and Aquinas realized the same transcendence, but they also recognized that we are animals, not specters trapped within bodies. As Wittgenstein would insist, our languages, our ways of thought, arise out of a physical, corporeal interaction with our surrounding environment. Nevertheless, the same transcendence noted by Plato is affirmed, the difference being that we are not an intelligence imported into a material world, we are an intelligence evolving from that world. And yet

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the material world has produced consciousness, a reality so radically distinct from the natural world that one must employ all his or her efforts even to deny that distinction. The transcendence of language led Aquinas to speak of the soul as the substantial form of the body, an intelligence that is as startling in its emergence from living matter as matter itself was in emerging from energy. And, of course, Aquinas would add, seeing everything in the light of Genesis, as that which did not have to be from that which alone truly is. When the Fathers of the Church sought to explain the significance of the Christ to Hellenic thought—proclaiming him the long-expected Messiah of the Jews hardly assigned him a universal significance to the rest of the world—they seized upon the notion of the Logos, the rationality that Greek thought had come to think of as ruling, informing, and permeating the world. Something similar to the immortality bestowed upon Greek heroes occurs in this process. Biology is transformed into biography. Life is made into narrative—not into the legends of the hero but into the Gospel of the one crucified and risen—and narrative achieves an immortal nature. The Christ lives in the proclamation of the Gospel. This is why, when the Gospel is proclaimed in liturgy, the assembly stands, in recognition of a presence. The Play’s the Thing Of course, the presence of every author is timelessly preserved in a text, even a ritualized text like a drama or a mystery cult. Dante lives when he is read; Shakespeare, even more so when he is performed, but whereas in literature the movement is from author to recipient, the evangelists insist that something new has entered human narrative in the resurrection of Jesus. A spirit—an interlocutive intelligence first encountered in proclamation and subsequently in narrative—has come to dwell among us. “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (Jn 16: 13). This experience of the Spirit is fully linguistic, because it comes forth from the empty tomb as narrative, with the proclamation of that tomb’s significance. Whenever and wherever the story is told, and men and women respond, the Spirit is active and present. Remember that in the earliest proclamation of the Easter events, there is as yet no distinction between what would later be called the Holy Spirit and what at that point is simply being called the Spirit of Jesus. But one might still insist that this presence is no more or less than the presence of any author in any text, a hero in any popular narrative. As George Steiner points out, every address, whether verbal or textual, demands what he calls an “answerability” on our part. “The authentic experience of understanding, when we are spoken to by another human being or by a poem, is one of responding responsibly. We are answerable to the text, to the work of art, to the musical offering, in a very specific sense, at once moral, spiritual and psychological” (1989: 8).

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Yet something more is at work in the Gospel. We can speak figuratively of Dante answering our deepest questions or of Shakespeare revealing us to ourselves, and even of our responsibility not to spurn the grace that is art, but we do not mean, after we have put our questions to them and received their answers, that their intelligence is communicating with our own in a temporally bilateral exchange. We speak metaphorically of a text calling to us, but a text is not completing itself in the world through dialogue with us. And yet the conviction of the Easter Church is that its narrative is fully interactive in a manner that only an interlocutor can be. It is as though an early, existentialist version of a Turing test is being performed, and the disciples have become convinced that he who was once dead now lives. The questions they put to this intelligence, this presence, the new situations into which it leads them, and its responses, leave them with no choice but to confess that Jesus lives. “When they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say” (Lk 12: 11–12). Even in their deepest acts of self-comprehension, in the understanding of self that emerges from memory and hope, and from the silence in which these two confront and commune, the disciples are convinced that an interlocutor has emerged from the stillness of the tomb and into the silence of their thoughts. St Paul records the same experience. “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Rom 8: 26–7). “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (Jn 6: 63). Yet this Spirit, because it is the spirit of Jesus, is the Spirit of the Word. It is the Spirit that testifies to the truth, that cannot be sundered from the scriptures, from the testimony of the Word, because it is bound to him in the heart of the Trinity itself. “True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (Jn 4: 23). And of course the Gospel would be only an historical artifact, a stilled text, if men and women today did not sense the same interlocutive Spirit present in their own lives, responding to their prayers, sending consolations in the face of difficulty, urging forward the search for meaning in the silence of prayer. This new presence of Jesus, because it is linguistic, is fully relational. In each resurrection account, the communion that traverses death is born of language. Christ speaks. As Moltmann notes, it is direct address that lifts his resurrection appearances out of the realm of mere ghostly appearances, that establishes a common, though radically transformed, identity between the human life of Jesus and his resurrected life. “Without words spoken and heard the Easter appearances would have remained ghostly things. The appearances—for such things exist elsewhere in the history of religions—would have been hierophanies of a strange, new heavenly Being, if they had not been coupled with the speaking of the one who appeared” (1967: 198).

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Hamlet refuses to grant that the ghostly visage, encountered on the battlements, is that of his father, though it clearly has his form and face. His companions think him to be deranged and fear for his safety in following the specter, but he insists that only discourse will validate identity. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thou intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. I’ll call them Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane. O, answer me!’ (Hamlet, I, iv, 40–46).

There are those who think that the resurrection would be validated in their lives if they could see the Christ, as the scriptures record some of his disciples having done, as Hamlet sees the ghost of his father. The unbeliever sees contemporary visual confirmation of the resurrection as a bar of verification too high to be met, which thus disproves, or at least calls into serious question, the truth of resurrection. The believer, on the contrary, realizes that a such an availability of Christ would reduce the resurrection to one more phenomenon within the world, either to be questioned as hallucinatory, as when the bereaved see their loved ones, or absolutely unquestionable and therefore lacking all of the transcendence necessary for the relationship of God and humanity to be sustained. Such a resurrected God would be at our disposal, or we would be entirely at the deity’s. Either way, the very relationship between creature and creator, freely communing with each other, would be impossible. Of course, even Hamlet recognizes that language can deceive—the New Testament calls Satan “the Father of lies”—this is why the Dane arranges for the players to enact a theatrical murder in front of the guilty king. I’ll observe his looks, I’ll tent him to the quick. If a but blench, I know my course. The spirit that I have seen May be a devil, and the devil hath power T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy – As he is very potent with such spirits – Abuse me to damn me. I’ll have grounds More relative than this. The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. (II, ii, 598–607)

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In the end, the greatest testament to the veracity of the resurrection narrative is its ability to make life more livable. Either what we learn of our human nature— from any source, including the Gospel—expands our humanity or it does not. The play’s the thing, and in this case the stage is our humanity. The resurrection either gives us cause to hope, or it eventually reveals itself as nothing more than taxing delusion. This is why the Church has always insisted that one must discern the Risen Christ in her members, in the communion of saints, in the manner in which lives subsequent to his are lived. In the end, we either give ourselves to each other, or we deceive the other, in words. Only humans can make their animal needs—eating, sleeping, sex—into spiritual realities by way of endowing them with significance, by enveloping the carnal within a canon of linguistic meaning. And of course, only human beings can lie to one another. In sacramenta transivit It is in language that human beings enter into communion with one another, and it is in language that Jesus remains in communion with his followers. Aquinas correctly insisted—and Wittgenstein only underscores—that all communion between human beings occurs in language. Unlike the angels, we do not intuit each other’s thoughts. My experience of the world can only be accessed by another through language and, of course, as Wittgenstein showed with his rejection of a private language, it can only be accessed by me through language, which is essentially communitarian. The soul of Jesus comes forth from the tomb, mustering his followers, reestablishing communion when he calls them by name. Indeed, upon reflection, they will become convinced that even within the tomb he summoned souls to himself. “The hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (Jn 5: 26). This communion in the Word, in language, remains the medium of believers’ communion with their Lord. Pope St Leo the Great would perfectly capture the thrust of the Easter narratives when he would later write: “Quod Redemptoris nostri conspicuum fuit, in sacramenta transivit” (Serm 2, de Ascen. c.2).1 With the Emmaus incident, St Luke insists that narrative, in the power of the Spirit, makes Christ present, and not only in memory. The Q saying, that where two or three are gathered in his name, is enacted at Emmaus. In the Breaking of the Bread, the preferred Lucan name for Eucharist, the Christ is recognized. In sacrament, which is to say in language rooted in corporeality, his presence is discerned. In the Emmaus incident, Luke adumbrates all of sacramental life. Like the Easter appearances themselves, which validate his presence in the exchange of words, no sacrament is celebrated without proclamation and prayer. A sacrament cannot exist without proclamation of the Word and a calling forth of the 1

  What our savior accomplished has passed over into the sacraments.

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Spirit. It is impossible to conceive of Eucharist without envisioning a community centered upon the Word. The Eucharist begins, as did the synagogue liturgy before it, with the proclamation of God’s Word, a declaration whose adequate response can only be found in the psalms and in the Church’s exuberant, non-syntactical “alleluia.” The words of the Eucharistic prayer, which the medieval and reformation churches, though with distinctly different ideologies, had both reduced to an almost incantatory recitation of the “words of institution,” is the great narrative of thanksgiving, in which salvation history is summoned to testify to God’s presence and faithfulness. It is Augustine’s memoria collectively voiced by the Church, and thus is Christ’s memoria, Christ’s summoning all time to himself, taking it beyond itself. In the words of the Didache (10), perhaps itself our first recorded Eucharistic prayer, the Church cries: “May grace come, and may this world pass away” (Jasper and Cuming 1975: 24) Even when the believer steps forward to receive the Eucharistic Lord, the gesture of giving and receiving is accompanied by proclamation—“The Body of Christ”—and verbal affirmation—“Amen.” The Church’s daily corporate prayer, a glimpse of which we see in the Spanish pilgrim Egeria’s account of the fourth-century Jerusalem church at prayer, is constituted by psalms and hymnody. It grows out of the Hebraic practice of the daily recitation of the Shema (Dt 6: 4). Israel, and after her the Church, enter the presence of God primarily by means of words, not sacred places or rituals. Today, the Jew rightly realizes that Temple sacrifice had to pass away, not only as a purgation of Israel’s infidelity, but also as a purification of her spirit. God must be sought in the Word. And the Christian realizes that the meaning of the Eucharistic sacrifice is a proclamation, an attestation of God’s Word in the Spirit. In liturgy, history opens to eternity. It does not touch us as a weak reverberation from centuries past. It proclaims itself the deepest reality of today, the hope of tomorrow. This is the meaning of the Hebrew word ziccaron, which “recalls” the Passover not as memory but as agent of change. The Church calls both Eucharist and her daily duty (officium) of prayers liturgy—leitourgia, from the Greek words laos (people) and ergon (work)— meaning a public work. How else might one come into contact with the Father of humanity than through that most human of realities, language? Those who sought perfection, East and West, were told to mark the hours with psalmody. When vast numbers of the Western Christians grew too illiterate for this, the genius of the Church birthed the rosary, a recitation and a pondering, the couplet that is forever the core of Christian prayer, of God’s presence among us. King Claudius captures its essence when he admits his inability to pray: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (Hamlet, III, iii, 97–8). We must give ourselves over to the words, ponder them, in a humble act of submission to the Word. Indeed, the early Church was convinced that Spirit and Word were in the process of remaking the very cosmos itself. Instead of turning toward the temple in Jerusalem, as they had been taught to do as Jews, in its daily prayer the nascent Church turned toward the dawn, eastward, where the sun rises. Baptismal liturgies

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record catechumens spitting into the darkness of the West, where the Sun dies, as they rejected the subjugation of Satan. Liturgy is literally the refashioning of the cosmos, imbuing it with Spirit and Word, with a new power and a new meaning. The dead are spoken of as lying under the altar, because they have entered into this cosmic liturgy (Rev 6: 9). And of course, the bones of the martyrs were brought quite literally to rest here, because definitive witness to Spirit and Truth, which the martyr offers, is the perfect sacrifice, the liturgy lived, the great work of the people in Christ brought to its fulfillment. Only at the close of the Middle Ages, with the rise of the movement that came to be called the Devotio Moderna, does one begin to think of prayer as primarily an emotional encounter with a numinous reality whose presence titillates consciousness. This is the root of the current Western fascination with the spiritual as stimulant, as a personal commodity that masks itself as a psychically exhilarating experience. What is prayer for the Christian? How is it a work of the Spirit, a union with God in Christ? In its most foundational stages it is the nursing of words. With memorized prayers, we make the words of another our own. In the Our Father we take his words. In discursive prayer, we speak to God in words that we fashion. We remind God of God’s faithfulness; we present our needs; we offer praise. Even in the higher forms of prayer the word remains the medium of communion. Meditation, whose most preeminent form is Lectio Divina, is a grinding out of meaning from a patient mulling of words. And nothing brings us into greater communion with the saints, even more so than the narrative of their deeds, than meditation upon their own writings. In contemplative prayer, whether active or passive, when the words fall silent, the stillness is a communion with a presence, rather than silence alone, because this silence rests between two testaments of narrative presence. We do have communion without words, but for the Christian this contemplation is not an act of self-stilling, the quelling of the ego. This is union with God through the power of the Spirit and in the name of the Son. As St John of the Cross insisted, in the Son the Father has spoken the one word necessary. We cannot expect some subsequent revelation, some further word, when all that can be spoken has been spoken, when all that can be given has been given, because, for God, to speak is to give. His word is creative, fecund, power itself. In contemplation the believer gazes upon God with the eyes of the Son. And yet a mystery without a surrounding nebula of linguistic meaning cannot be discerned, cannot even be contemplated. It would remain enveloped in darkness. This Christian silence speaks precisely because it is imbued with narrative. “Silence … has meaning only at the core of an existing communication as a counterpart to it, or as the final sanction of an established language … Silence gives voice to the depths, when they are in play, and to distances, if there are any” (Gusdorf 1965: 90).

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The Liturgy of the Lamb The New Testament presents a Christ risen in both word and spirit, now incarnate within the nascent Church’s liturgical life, and of course liturgy itself is a language. Even as a human reality, should it not be called the preeminent form of human language? George Steiner defines “literature (art, music) as the maximalization of semantic incommensurability in respect of the formal means of expression. Here an object, the description of whose formal components can be finite, demands and produces infinite response” (1989: 83; original emphasis). But what exceeds liturgy in being relational, in being corporeal, in being imbued with meaning? Every word, gesture, and object in liturgy is suffused with layers of historical and cultural significance, which is why liturgy never allows for explication. We do not say in liturgical commentary—despite the ignorance of many post-Vatican II practitioners—that what we are doing at this moment in the liturgy means this or that. No, every element of the liturgy is a legacy from our ancestors in faith. Like any text or symbol, its meanings are multivalent. We can never adequately trace its system of langue, and we certainly have no control over its acts of parole. The text cannot be temporally confined. It must be allowed to utter itself repeatedly throughout history. Like a classic performance, liturgy is historical. It occurs over and over again in time, but it is never of time. It is the pneumatic presence of the Church’s Lord in her midst. Gusdorf writes: “Perfect expression would signify for a person the full manifestation of what he is, with no reservation. Perfect communication would consist of a communion with others in which personality would lose the sense of its own limits” (1965: 77). Is this not the Christ that we encounter in liturgy? Liturgy can be thought of as a text, but liturgy must be performed, enacted, lived. It cannot simply be enunciated; one certainly cannot merely read it. Indeed, the Eucharistic liturgy of the Roman Rite is two ceaseless cycles, one weekly and one yearly. This means that a single liturgical celebration is complete in itself, but it is always part of a larger whole, what has, and has not yet, been celebrated in the liturgical year. Liturgy at its best involves the maximum of physical participation. Its nature calls out for singing, procession, prostrations, bows, and genuflections. There is no communion of language without a corresponding commitment. The “universal translator” of science fiction is a will-o’-the-wisp. Only infants enter the communion of life that is a language without decision, but not without unrecorded mental exertions as they learn it. Adults, for whom the task of learning a language is even more difficult, know that it demands commitment but offers the reward of communion. As the preeminent form of linguistic communion, liturgy cannot be performed by the curious dilettante. The ancient church practiced a disciplina arcana, barring from its doors the unbaptized. One does not testify—and all participation in liturgy is a testimony—without commitment. How the Church would agonize over those—especially her ministers—who had lapsed during the persecutions! Could they be readmitted to the liturgy? What testimony could ritual offer when the witness of martyrdom itself had been foresworn? It would take the

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genius of Augustine to convince Christians that their testimony would always be lacking, that Christ alone was the Word of Truth who could not be false. To be a soul is to be one summoned to the Liturgy of the Lamb. The Book of Life reveals itself, not as a staid directory, but as the text of a living tableau of worship. Text and performance, langue and parole, become one in human life, because the Spirit speaks out the Christ in the utterance of the saints. This Spirit makes of them history’s parole. This is why those who have died and who await the Parousia do not lose their place at the table. They remain under the altar, still testifying, still related to us in this corporeal bond. But isn’t speaking of departed souls as entering the Liturgy of the Lamb nothing more than a metaphorical conceit? Can one use such a deeply human activity to speak of the souls of the dead? After all, the sine qua non of liturgy, like language, is personhood. One has to realize that one is an actor, a self, standing in relationship to others, in order to speak. “[I]f we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say it was its use” (Wittgenstein 1960: 4). Certainly, in order to offer earthly worship one must be alive. “So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name” (Ps 63: 4). We can speak of the stars and the animals offering praise to God, but this is metaphorical excess. They glorify God in their grandeur, but praise is a linguistic act, and that grace has been given only to humans. The question then would seem to be, do the souls of the dead speak? Because if they do not, they are surely dead. “Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you” (Ps 88: 10). Has the resurrection of the Christ reversed the greatest curse of death? Has it given the dead back their voice? How? Return to Rahner’s picture of the dead as still some union of matter and spirit, and consider the notion of translation. Translation/Transfiguration On the one hand, no two languages are alike. They arise out of the cultural histories of peoples, which is why even the same language never stays the same as it moves, diachronically, through time. It evolves with each passing day, with new instantiations of usage. You don’t have Shakespeare or Goethe when they are translated, but then you also don’t have them centuries later untranslated, precisely because language is rooted in historical communion. And yet we do read them, in translation and separated by centuries, because something crucial, though not original, is still communicated. So one must admit that langue, upon whose stability each act of communication depends, is nevertheless quite fluid when considered diachronically. And yet there is no speech act performed in one language that cannot be performed in another, using different syntactical tools. You cannot say, when you abandon one language for another, that your ability to give yourself to another has been truncated. The very same paroles are available in any language. They are as infinite as the instantiations that occur when we speak in any language.

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Wittgenstein first took up the question of translation in the Tractatus. “A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world. They are all constituted by a common logical pattern” (1961: 20; §4.014). Here, the issue is that language is patterned and that patterns can be reproduced in different mediums. There is a general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule, to derive the score again. That is what constitutes the inner similarity between these things which seem to be constructed in such entirely different ways. And that rule is the law of projection, which projects the symphony into the language of musical notation. It is the rule for translating this language into the language of the gramophone records (§4.0141). The possibility of all imagery, of all our pictorial modes of expression, is contained in the logic of depiction. (§4.015) (1961: 20)

Of course, at this point in his own development, Wittgenstein still thought of language as an instrument of thought, one which “pictures” reality. He would come to insist that language is our uniquely human way of dwelling in the real, that nothing stands surety beyond it. One could say, we live in the real through language. George Steiner writes of the fundamental human conviction that speech and reality correspond. Their relationship is an act of divine covenanting, one which makes the human intellectual enterprise fecund. It draws reality into itself; or rather, as Plato saw it, reality gives itself to us in an act of kenosis, emptying. The covenant between word and object, the presumption that being is, to a workable degree, “sayable”, and that the raw material of existentiality has its analogue in the structure of narrative—we recount life, we recount life to ourselves—have been variously expressed. There are different stories of the story. In Adamic speech, the fit is perfect: all things are as Adam names them. Predication and essence coincide seamlessly. In Platonic idealism, to which the main Western metaphysics and epistemology have been satellite, the dialectical discourse, if critically and stringently pursued, will elevate the human intellect towards those archetypes of pure form of which words are, as it were, the transparency. The correspondence between articulate consciousness and the matter of our perceptions and intellection, a correspondence indispensable to the very possibilities of rational thought and of social modes, is postulated in Descartes’ Third Meditation. How else, asks Descartes, could we inhabit reason? The self-realization of “spirit” (Geist) in Hegel’s Phenomenology is an Odyssey of consciousness, of human understanding and human self-understanding via successive stages of conceptualization. This voyage is made in and through speech. What is meaningful in history is gathered into dynamic, elucidative custody of the rational sentence. (1989: 90–91)

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In the Ninth of his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke moves the same thought a step further. Our language doesn’t simply record or capture the cosmos. It is the manner in which the cosmos itself finds immortality, gives itself over to spirit. – And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into—O endlessly—us! Whoever, finally, we may be. Earth, isn’t that what you want: to arise in us invisibly? Isn’t it your dream to be invisible someday? Earth! Invisible! What, if not transformation, is your urgent charge? (2008: 57)

Following Heidegger, Rahner saw the human person as that spot in the cosmos where matter became spirit, where matter entered into consciousness. I would say, where matter speaks. And of course, Wittgenstein helped us to see that human consciousness itself is linguistic. Here the, admittedly thoroughly speculative, question is this: is it possible that human beings continue to speak themselves, to be present to themselves in linguistic structures unknown to us, in structures with much greater semantic power? Noting that mathematics has a seemingly quite universal reach with very little semantic latitude—the meaning of numbers doesn’t vary—Gusdorf noted that “one can argue endlessly whether the perfection of human speech is found in the language which says most or in the one which says least. Besides, perhaps the language that says the most is after all the one that says the least—a language based on the objectivity of things but not on the personality of human beings, an inhuman language” (1965: 66). Consider the semantic superiority of music over the spoken word. As Steiner insists: “Music means. It is brimful of meanings which will not translate into logical structures or verbal expression. In music form is content, content form. Music is at once cerebral in the highest degree—I repeat that the energies and form-relations in the playing of a quartet, in the interactions of voice and instrument are among the most somatic, carnal and a searching out of resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness” (1989: 217). One might want to suggest that music is matter, the materiality of the cosmos, at its most meaningful. The concentric circles of Dante’s heavens are suffused with music. The very business of heaven is corporeal, full-throated praise of God. The Ave Maria is heard on the moon (Paradiso, III, 121–2). Hosannas ring out in both Mercury (VII.I) and Venus (VIII.29). “The singing of the souls in the Sun is referred to a good half dozen times.” Robert Hollander continues:

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next we learn that the unidentified song in Mars contains the words Risurgi and Vinci (XIV.125) and that the souls in Jupiter sing to God (XVIII.99) … the final three heavens are also marked by song: the Starry Sphere by Gabriel’s song for Mary (XXIII 103–108) and by the other members of the Church Triumphant crying out, to the ascending mother of God, “Regina celi” (XXIII.128). In the succeeding sphere, various moments in Dante’s progress among his saintly interlocutors are punctuated by voices raised in song: “Dio laudamo” (XXIV.113), “Sperino in te” (XXV.73), “Sperent in te” (XXV.98), “Santo, santo, santo” (XXVI.69), “Al Padre, al Figlio, a lo Spirito Sancto, gloria” (XXVII.1–2); in the Crystalline Sphere the angelic choirs resonate with “Hosannah” (XXVII.94); in the Empyrean we hear once more the “Ave Maria” (XXXII.95). (Hollander 2007: 520, fn. 58–60)

If we consider the human person to be a narrative, then we must say that at death, every human being is a completed narrative. Or, if one were to summon every act into a unity, at death life becomes a completed parole. The word that is a life, the “yes” or “no” spoken to the gift of creation and its giver, has been uttered. A Testimony has been rendered, a life lived, a unique individual formed. In The Tempest, Caliban chides Prospero: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language” (I, ii, 365–6y). Every human life exists ultimately to utter praise or profanation. But cannot a completed parole be translated into a different language? Christ was translated into the liturgy. He doesn’t simply use liturgy as a form of utterance. He is truly present within it. Can a soul not be translated into the harmony of the spheres? Into the skein of subatomic activity? We obviously need a better picture of resurrection than simply the reconstitution of our physical selves, simply subsequently immune to the normal destabilizing effects of nature. Such a picture does not do justice to the resurrection accounts of the gospels. Christ is transformed, glorified, not merely resuscitated. Theologian and physicist John Polkinghorne speculates on the “reconstitution of the whole person in some other environment of God’s choosing,” writing: Clearly such an idea goes beyond our direct experience, but it seems to me in no way to run counter to it. There is nothing particularly important in the actual physical constituents of our bodies. After a few years of nutrition and wear and tear, the atoms that make us up have nearly all been replaced by equivalent successors. It is the pattern that they form which constitutes the physical expression of our continuing personality. There seems to be no difficulty in conceiving of that pattern, dissolved at death, being recreated in another environment in an act of resurrection. In terms of a very crude analogy, it would be like transforming the software of a computer program (the “pattern” of our personality) from one piece of hardware (our body in this world) to another (our body in the world to come). Paul Davies, who cannot readily be suspected of being unduly influenced by Christian theology, has written, “Though some of these ideas [sc. The relation

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Is it possible that the meaning of history is the personalization, the spiritualization of the cosmos? The speaking, or, better yet, singing of the cosmos? Is matter becoming spirit, though it remains unchanged to the eye and, if physics is correct, empties into entropy? We are told that matter and energy remain constant in our cosmos. Is it possible that both are becoming progressively personal, more and more imbued with meaning, and what is meaning but the expression of our humanity? Here Steiner turns prophet when he writes, “[w]e cannot devise a systematic theory of meaning in any but a metaphoric sense. Meaning is, in terms of proof, no more decidable, no more subject to the arrest of experimental demonstration that is the purpose (if there is any such) or ‘sense’ of our lives in the unbounded script of time and the world” (1989: 164). Is the purpose of the human enterprise that our words come to mirror reality or that reality comes to be an expression of our words, or rather, comes to express the Word which called it into being? Is this proposition fundamentally different than saying that the world comes forth from God and returns to God, the exitus and reditus of Aquinas? “I can only put it this way (and every true poem, piece of music or painting, says it better): there is aesthetic creation because there is creation. There is formal construction because we have been made form” (Steiner 1989: 201). Is the Christ the symphonic masterpiece who finally sings all of creation? Is he not only the Word that calls it forth, but also the Word that fully expresses what has come to be when nature has been played out in history? Steiner writes: “The truth-functions of the revealed in Christianity, such as Transubstantiation and Resurrection, lead a double-life. They are, at once, and for the literalist believer, narratives of verity; and they are the translatio, the ‘carrying-over’ of systematic inexplicability into the more elusive, intermittent and self-querying inexplicability of mythical narration” (1989: 219). Is the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist—he takes bread and wine and calls them himself—not the proleptic sign of the transubstantiation, the transfiguration of the cosmos? Is not the imbuing of matter with meaning the fundamental human act? Why is it not destined to be the act of the cosmos itself? And can this occur without confidence in that absolutely other, that completion, that humanity calls the Divine? Steiner asks: “Can there be a secular poetics in the strict sense? Can there be an understanding of that which engenders ‘texts’ and which makes their reception possible which is not underwritten by a postulate of transcendence, by Plato’s ‘aspiration to invisible reality’?” (1989: 223).

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What still delights readers of Dante is the deep personalism that runs through his vision of the afterlife. Real, historically fashioned personalities pass through death intact. Indeed, in the Inferno and Purgatorio, it is precisely their historically fashioned selves that torment them. Personalities remain in heaven; indeed, for Dante, they remain the very image of God. The visage of the beloved is Christic for Dante. It is the power of Beatrice’s face, her incarnate love, that carries Dante into heaven. In Canto XVIII he writes: when that lady, who was leading me to God said: ‘Change your thoughts. Consider that I dwell with Him who lifts the weight of every wrong.’ At the loving sound of my comfort’s voice I turned, and the great love I saw then, in her holy eyes, I have to leave untold, not just because I cannot trust my speech, but because memory cannot retrace its path that far unless Another guide it. This much only of that moment can I tell again, that, when I fixed my gaze on her, my affections were released from any other longing as long as the eternal Beauty, shining its light on Beatrice, made me content with its reflected glow in her fair eyes. Conquering me with her radiant smile, she said: ‘Turn now and listen: not in my eyes alone is Paradise.’ Paradiso, XVIII 4–21

It’s very clear that, for Dante, eternity embellishes the beauty of the earthly. And increasingly in the Paridiso Dante finds himself drawn to images from the material world to explain the fate of souls, almost suggesting that our destiny is to envelop this world itself in our historical arc. Only a canto later, in the nineteenth, Dante sees what he calls the lucenti incendi de lo Spirito Santo “the Holy Spirit’s fiery lights.” Of course, that image is drawn from the scriptures themselves. And at first Dante only burnishes it by collecting these lights into the form of an eagle. Before my eyes, its open wings outstretched, appeared the lovely image of those interwoven souls, reveling in sweet enjoyment.

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But notice that these rubies, which collectively form the corpus of the eagle, are individual souls. Dante is suggesting that the best image of the Holy Spirit are the faces we’ve known in our own lives, in the history of our race, yet now they have been drawn into some new pattern, one larger than their individuality but one that orchestrates rather than obliterates their stories. When Dante tries to picture redeemed humanity, he uses the image of a white rose, its many petals the individual human lives lived, and living, before the Christ, who is attended by his ministering angels. In form, then, of a luminous white rose I saw the saintly soldiery that Christ with His own blood, took as His bride. But the others—who, even as they fly, behold and sing the glory of the One who stirs their love, and sing His goodness that raised them up so high, as a swarm of bees that in one instant plunge deep into blossoms and, the very next, go back to where their toil is turned to sweetness — these descended to the splendid flower, adorned with its many petals, and then flew up to where their love forever dwells. Their faces were of living flame … Paradiso, XXXI, 1–13

One has to wonder if Dante realized his own genius. He pictures humanity becoming, to his mind, the most perfectly beautiful thing in the material world, a white rose. But what if the destiny of the cosmos is for matter to become the most perfectly beautiful thing in human life: spirit, and what is spirit but the Word come in power, come to rest in its own? And what higher destiny can the soul have than to hear itself summoned into life by the Lamb, to hear its new name spoken, the identity it always possessed but also had to forge in its history. Is not Mary, “our sometime sister, now our queen” (Hamlet I, ii, 8)? Is Simon not now and forever Peter? Saul, Paul? What name will we hear, when the Lamb calls, ready to write us into the Book of Life.

Bibliography Quotations from Classical and Ancient Works Holy Bible. Catholic Edition, Anglicized Text. (1989). New Revised Standard Version. New York, Harper Catholic Bibles. Aquinas, T. (1947–1948). Summa Theologica. Trans. Dominicans of the English Province. 3 vols. New York, Benzinger Brothers. Barnes, J. (ed.). (1984). The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. I–II. Colledge, Edmund, James Walsh, and Jean Leclercq (eds). (1974). Julian of Norwich: Showings. Mahwah, NJ, Paulist Press. Cooper, J.M. (ed.). (1997). Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis, Indiana, Hackett. Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (ed. and trans.). (1984). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. I–II. Harbage, Alfred (ed.). (1969). William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. New York, The Viking Press. Hollander, Robert (ed.). (2000). Dante Alighieri. The Inferno. Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander. New York, Doubleday. Hollander, Robert (ed.). (2003). Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio. Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander. New York, Doubleday. Hollander, Robert (ed.). (2007). Dante Alighieri. Paradiso. Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander. New York, Doubleday. Jasper, R.C.D. and G.J. Cuming (eds). (1975). Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed. New York, Pueblo Publishing Company. Rotelle, John E. (1997). Augustine. The Confessions. Trans. Maria Boulding. The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. Vol. I/1. Hyde Park, New York, New City Press. References Anderson, V. Elving. (1998). “A Genetic View of Human Nature” in W.S. Brown, N. Murphy and H.N. Malony (eds), Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature. Minneapolis, Fortress Press: 49–72.

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Index

active intellect, see intellect agent intellect, see intellect Albert the Great 90–91 Summa de Creaturis 90 Alighieri, Dante 16–17, 37–8, 59, 109–10, 116–17, 124, 127–8, 139–40, 148–9, 151–2 Inferno 109, 151 Paradiso 116, 124, 127, 148, 151–2 Purgatorio 37–8, 151 Anderson, Elving 12, 22, Aquinas, Thomas 4, 8, 11, 14, 16–18, 26, 31, 37, 46, 73, 76, 82–3, 85–6, 88, 91–106, 115, 120–21, 128, 138–9, 142, 150 De Anima 102 De Potentia 101 De Spiritualibus Creaturis 91–2 De Veritate 4, 131 phantasia 93, 95 sensus communis 93, 95 Sentences 85–6 Summa Theologiae 31, 93, 102 vis aestimativa 93, 95 vis memorativa 93 Aristotle 3–4, 8, 11, 15–17, 38, 59–60, 66, 70, 73–9, 82, 89, 91–5, 98–103, 106, 135, 138 Aristotelian nature 3–4, 11, 16–17, 22, 24–5, 28, 32–4, 40, 45–6, 49, 64, 79–80, 83, 86–93, 97, 101–4, 109, 113–15, 117, 120–21, 123, 125, 127–8, 135, 138–9, 142, 145 De Anima 73–6, 82–4, 103 Metaphysics 83 Physics 74 artificial intelligence, see intelligence Ascension 114, 119–20 Augustine of Hippo 7, 41, 85–6, 88–90, 105, 108–9, 121, 134, 143, 146

Confessions 108–9 De Trinitate 85 memoria 108–9, 117, 134, 143 Averoës, see Ibn Rusd Avicenna, see Ibn Sīnā Ayala, Francisco 42 Baillie, John 123 Barr, James 53–4, 57, 122, 136 Barth, Karl 23, 45–6, 105, 122 Being, see Heidegger, Martin Benedict XII 119, 122 Benedictus Deus 119, 120, 122 Blue Book, see Wittgenstein body-soul, see soul Bonaventure 86, 87–9, 91, 99, 105 De Scientia Christi 86 universal hylomorphism 87 Boyde, Patrick 38–9 Braine, David 12, 17, 27–8, 41–2, 75, 77–82, 84, 94–7, 101–2, 104 Brown, Warren 12, 45 Burnyeat, M.F. 77 Burrell, David 14, 34, 103 Cartesian, see Descartes Churchland, Paul 26 Comedy of Errors, see Shakespeare, William Confessions, see Augustine consciousness, see mind Cullen, Christopher 74, 86–7 Dasein, see Heidegger, Martin De Anima, see Aristotle and Aquinas de Lubac, Henri 26, 32 De Potentia, see Aquinas De Scientia Christi, see Bonaventure De Spiritualibus Creaturis, see Aquinas De Trinitate, see Augustine of Hippo

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De Veritate, see Aquinas Descartes, René 11, 16–17, 20, 24–5, 27–8, 37, 39–42, 45, 59, 76, 77, 93, 97, 104, 147 Cartesian 17, 24, 26, 40, 59, 61–2, 76–8, 97, 122 Devotio Moderna 144 Didache 143 disciplina arcana 145 divine intellect, see intelligence dream (s) 61, 63 dualism / duality 11, 16–17, 25–7, 29, 39, 48, 57, 59, 73, 76–8, 95, 98, 122–3 Duèze, Jacques, see John XXIII Duino Elegies, see Rilke, Maria Rainer Duns Scotus 89 Egeria 143 Eleventh Council of Toledo 118 entelecy 96 eschatology 65, 108, 112–14, 123 evolution, evolutionary 22, 26, 33, 43, 63, 71, 77, 113, 135 free soul, see soul general resurrection, see resurrection genes 22–3 Gilson, Etienne 14, 88, 98–100, 102 Godfrey of Saint-Victor 85 Gorgias, see Plato Green, Joel 46, 57, 59 Gusdorf, Georges 5, 7–8, 15, 46, 70, 78, 126, 128, 144–5, 148 Hacker, P.M.S. 28 Hades 5, 57, 60, 68 Hamlet, see Shakespeare, William Hanfling, Oswald 26, 28 Hardy, Thomas 130 Tess of the d’Urbervilles 130 heart / kardia / leb 7, 14, 29, 49, 50, 61, 70, 94, 96, 107, 111, 128, 140, 148, Heidegger, Martin 3, 23, 25, 30–31, 34, 42, 74, 105, 108–9, 115, 124, 138, 148 Being 31–4, 42–3, 66, 70, 74, 92, 99–100, 102–3, 105, 115, 124, 131 Dasein 30–31, 42–3

Henry the Fifth, see Shakespeare, William Heraclitus 65 history 1, 3–5, 8–9, 11, 15–16, 19–20, 22, 34, 38, 40–41, 51–2, 56, 61–2, 64, 66–8, 70–71, 84, 89, 113, 117, 121–2, 124–6, 129–30, 138, 140, 143, 145–7, 150, 152 Hollander, Robert 37, 148–9 Homer 10, 45, 49–50, 60–61, 63–4 Husserl, Edmund 28, 31, 42 Ibn Rushd (Averoës) 83, 98, 100 Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) 82, 90, 98, 100 image / eidolon 61, 64 immortality, see soul indigenous people (s) 52–3, 63, 77 Inferno, see Alighieri, Dante intellect 12, 16, 26, 28, 29, 31–2, 37, 49–50, 60, 65–7, 71, 74, 80–84, 86, 88–9, 91, 93, 97–105, 120, 135, 137–8, 147 active 82–3, 102–3 agent 102–4 divine 46, 101–2 potential 83 intelligence 1, 8, 14, 16, 20, 22, 27, 28, 30, 32, 34–5, 43, 73, 76, 79, 82, 84, 99–100, 103, 105, 110–11, 117, 121, 131–3, 135, 137–40 artificial 34–5, 43, 80–82 divine 82–3 Jaeger, Werner 61–6 John XXII (Jacques Duèze) 119 John of the Cross 144 Johnson, Aubrey R. 48–9, 51 judgement 49, 80, 102, 119 Julian of Norwich 129 Kahn, Charles H. 77 kardia, see heart Keasling, Jay 22 Kenny, Anthony 14, 24, 26, 39–40, 93–4, 96, 104 Kosman, L.A. 83 Kugel, James 55, language game, see Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Index langue 80, 125–9, 132, 145–6 Lear, see Shakespeare leb, see heart Lectio Divina 144 Leo the Great 142 Levenson, Jon 52, 54–6, 101, 121 Levinas, Emmanuel 6 liturgy 56, 134–5, 139, 143–6, 149 Logos 129, 138–9 Luther, Martin 121 Macbeth, see Shakespeare, William Marion, Jean Luc 14 McCabe, Herbert 8, 14–15, 28, 37, 93–100, 105 MacDonald, Paul 10–11, 49–51, 60, 61, 65 map, see world materia prima 100 memoria, see Augustine Meno, see Plato menos / μένος 60 metaphysics 1, 3, 10, 13, 17–18, 34, 83, 88, 147 mind consciousness 12, 26, 28–30, 32, 34, 41, 43, 54, 63, 71, 78–9, 83, 93, 102, 104, 121, 139, 144, 147–8 mind / body 29, 77 mind / brain debate 17, 25–9, 33, 76–7, 84, 97, 104 and world-map 1, 3, 19, 21, 24–5, 27, 29, 34–5 Moltmann, Jürgen 52, 108, 112–13, 140 Morgan, Michael 63, 66 Murphy, Nancey 12, 16, 25, 86 name 5, 55–6, 113, 128–9, 138, 142, 152 “Natural Science and Reasonable Faith” see Rahner, Karl nature, see Aristotle as empirical supposition 3, 5, 8, 19–20, 22, 24–5, 30, 34, 51, 55, 59, 66–7, 69–71, 74–5, 77, 79, 84, 89, 101, 110, 127–8, 149–50 nepesh 11, 45–9, 51, 53–4, 101 Newman, John Henry 110 nous / νους 60, 82–3

161

O’Collins, Gerald 112 Onians, Richard 59 Origen 129 Orphic mysteries 65 religion 63–4 Our Town, see Wilder, Thorton Paradiso, see Alighieri, Dante parole 5, 80, 125–9, 132, 145–6, 149 Paul (Pauline) 53, 105, 111, 118, 140, 152 Pegis, Anton 14, 85, 87–91, 98–100 phantasia, see Aquinas phantom / phasma Phaedo, see Plato phantasia, see Aquinas Philosophical Investigations, see Wittgenstein, Ludwig phrenes / ϕρένες 50, 60 Physics, see Aristotle Plato 11–12, 16, 37–8, 41, 59–61, 63–71, 73–4, 85–6, 88–90, 92, 100–103, 105, 123, 138, 147, 150 Gorgias 66–8 Meno 67 Phaedo 65–8 Protagoras 67 Republic 66 Polkinghorne, John 29, 149 Post, Stephen 16, potential intellect, see intellect Protagoras, see Plato psychē / ψυχαἰ ψυχἠ 11, 43, 60–61, 63–5, 67–8 Purgatorio, see Alighieri, Dante Purgatory 38–9, 69 purgatorial practices 121 Pythagoras 64 Rahner, Karl 14, 17, 30–33, 82, 110–15, 122, 130–34, 146, 148 “Natural Science and Reasonable Faith” 30, 33 Spirit in the World 14, 30–31, 114, 134, 137 Ratzinger, Joseph 53, 57, 68, 119, 122–3, 125, 128–30 reductionism 26, 78, 98

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Reformation 121, 143 Reimers, Adrian 24, 103 Republic, see Plato resurrection of Christ 1, 17, 38, 66, 111–14, 116–17, 124, 130, 135–6, 139–42, 146, 149 of human person 2, 11, 40, 52–5, 57, 64–5, 76, 111, 113–14, 117–23, 125, 129, 137, 149–50 revelation 1, 5, 6, 8, 11, 14, 18, 31, 57, 76, 87, 90, 100–112, 114, 135, 144 Richard II, see Shakespeare, William Rilke, Rainer Maria 148 Duino Elegies 148 Robinson, Marilynne 11 Romeo and Juliet, see Shakespeare, William ruach 49 science 1, 10, 12–13, 15, 18–22, 25, 27–30, 32–4, 70, 74, 78, 94, 108, 110, 145 Seebass, Horst 47–8 sensus communis, see Aquinas Sentences, see Aquinas Shakespeare, William 2–7, 9, 14, 62, 67, 69–70, 137, 139, 140, 146 Comedy of Errors 5 Hamlet 14–15, 67–70, 107, 141, 143, 152 Henry the Fifth 2, 62 Lear 124 Macbeth 4–5, 37, 53, 96, 116, 121 Richard II 7–8 Romeo and Juliet 1, 9, 121 The Tempest 13, 96, 126, 149 Two Gentlemen of Verona 129 Sheol 52–5, 57, 117, 135 sleep 108, 118, 121, Socrates 1, 65, 67–8, 131 Soul as acting agent 3–4, 7, 9, 11, 15, 41, 51, 62, 67–8, 74, 77, 125–6 as occult object 10–11, 16–17, 24–5, 29, 32–3, 38–9, 45, 59, 73,77 body-soul 60–62, 73–6, 85, 90, 102 free soul 60–63 immortality of 4, 5–7, 10, 15, 32–3, 53–7, 61, 63–7, 86–8, 100, 103, 106–8, 113–14, 119–22, 128, 131

Spirit in the World, see Rahner, Karl Steiner, George 13–15, 43, 46, 70, 137, 139, 145, 147–8, 150 Stoicism 59 substance 11, 16, 26, 41, 45, 56, 59, 61, 74–5, 79, 81–3, 85–92, 98–106, 121, 131 Summa de Creaturis, see Albert the Great Summa Theologiae, see Aquinas Tartarus 68 Taylor, Charles 7, 15, 25, 41, 60, 65, 109 Teichmann, Roger 27, The Tempest, see Shakespeare, William Tess of the d’Urbervilles, see Hardy, Thomas thumos / θυμός 59–60 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, see Wittgenstein, Ludwig transubstantiation 150 Trinity 45–6, 112, 115, 128, 140 Troeltsch, Ernst 122 Two Gentlemen of Verona, see Shakespeare, William universal hylomorphism, see Bonaventure Venard, Olivier-thomas 14, 138 vis aestimativa, see Aquinas vis memorativa, see Aquinas von Balthasar, Hans Urs 111, 115, 122, 138 Westminister Confession 121 Wilder, Thorton 132 Our Town 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1, 3, 6, 9–10, 13–14, 16–24, 27–30, 32–4, 37, 42, 50–51, 74, 78, 80, 96–9, 104, 107, 108, 110–11, 115, 136, 138, 142, 146–8 Blue Book 27 language game 3, 9–10, 27, 83 Philosophical Investigations 9, 24, 30, 32 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 9, 13, 19–21, 24, 107, 147 Wolff, Hans Walter 47–9, 52 World mapping 1, 3, 19–25, 27, 29, 30, 34–5, 105