~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notions of body, soul and spirit have coevolved in Western culture since they met each other in the pages of the New Testament. All three had lengthy careers before Christianity; but their conjunction in early Christian literature led philosophers to frame descriptions of human nature in their terms, and there have been variations on this theme ever since. Theologians never reached consensus about what body, soul and spirit are and what they have to do with each other. But they won’t go away, it seems – all three ideas are as popular, vague, and tangled as ever. For students of the history of thought, this trinity means trouble.

As an experiment, I ask you to set aside for a moment your habitual understanding of ‘body’, ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’. Then we can explore an alternative. If this move doesn’t entirely shave the semantic fuzz off our troubling terms, it at least frees them from abstraction and gives us a way to feel them.

*

Try this on: ‘Body’, ‘soul’, and ‘spirit’ are names for different ways of paying attention to things. We could also say they are "perspectives" or "forms of knowing" or "modes of relating". My purpose in suggesting this type of definition is to avoid freezing body, soul and spirit into things. When we view a human being as made of ways of relating rather than fixed structures, we gain a more dynamic framework within which to study the great train of meanings that these words have gathered through the ages.

We relate to something as a body when we attend mainly to its sensory characteristics, and don’t attune ourselves to the feeling that it has an inner life. In this mode, the relationship feels mutually exclusive – self and object do not overlap. The object is an "it".

We relate to something as a soul when we attend both to its outer features and to the sense that it harbours an interior life just as we do. This extra sensing seems to happen within ourselves, a kind of resonance linking the animation of self and object. The object is a "you" or an "us".

We relate to something as a spirit when we attend to the feeling of inner commonality so intensely that the object’s presence within us starts to merge with our sense of self. This identity between self and object tends to spread, to hold all objects, so that our thoughts and actions have a flavour of universality and spontaneity. The object is an "us" or even an "I".

It helps to think of these three modes as continuous rather than distinct. By analogy, we can take a spectrum of light and arbitrarily split it into seven parts: red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet. Likewise we can segment a musical scale: do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do. But we mustn’t forget that the spectrum and the scale are in fact unbroken ranges of light and of sound. These divisions let us think and speak about light and sound in many useful ways; but light and sound in themselves can’t be thought or spoken about. And so, our modes of body-soul-spirit can be taken as zones of a spectrum or scale of attention.

*

Each mode has its functions and pitfalls:

The function of the body-perspective is objectifying. Relating to the object objectively lets us focus on its instrumental qualities, that is, on what it can give us, how we can use it. We can objectify without losing touch with the soul and spirit modes – think of the body-experience as "foreground", and the soul and spirit aspects as "background". We can thus behave efficiently and even enjoy the limits of a situation, because we sense "in the background" that there is more to the object than its appearance as a body, almost as if it is faintly haloed. If objectifying becomes extreme, eclipsing the soul and spirit modes entirely, we dwell in a shattered universe of percept-things, thought-things, feeling-things and image-things, to which we can relate only instrumentally – as a self-thing, flat and loveless. In extreme objectifying, body, soul and spirit are just dots on the map, and how to connect them is quite problematic.

The function of the soul-perspective is personifying. Relating to the object as "you" permits us to focus on its presence and depth, to broaden our repertoire from sheer instrumentality to more embracing relations, such as community. One can experience a presence without personifying, an impersonal presence; but clearly there is a strong pull within humans to experience "presence" as "person". We auto-personify, knitting the flux of our own mind into a self. And we personify others, transcending the isolation of a lump in a cosmos of lumps. If we objectify the soul we cast it into the evaluative field of science, the formal study of objects by manipulating and measuring them. Over the past four centuries, scientists have found very little trace of soul-objects. Beware of concluding from this result that the act of personifying itself is somehow discredited, that sensing soul in non-human and objectively inanimate things is primitive or childish. Stretching the mode of the soul beyond the human race swells our feeling of community – think of St. Francis. If personifying becomes extreme, the flood of presences can blur reality’s contours to the point where boundaries are mush. We can lose our path in a swamp of fantasy, and never get the dishes done.

The function of the spirit-perspective is identifying. Relating to the object as "I" lets us focus on events in their broadest context, which is unity. The objective study of the world (science) amply shows the interlinkage of things. But the reality we sense inside ourselves is often dismissed as "mere subjectivity", as an obstacle to insight rather than a means. Little wonder that, since the Scientific Revolution, sensitive types have complained that the connected cosmos we objectively know doesn’t feel like home. (Of course, this sentiment isn’t just modern. Ancient Gnosticism also played a motif of cosmic alienation.) Without the spirit-mode we can know connectedness, but we can’t feel it, because something vital to the self is excluded. This exiled aspect happens to be the place where the separation of self and other, of inner and outer, is bridged. When the note of spirit sounds loudest, with soul and body as undertones, our own and others’ actions feel like effects or expressions of a single source. Energy seems to flow through us rather than being exerted by us. Mystical experiences are intense waves of the spirit-perspective. But if spirit becomes chronically deaf to body and soul, there is a threat that our yearning for the pure sun of generality beaming serenely above the muck of conflicted things will uproot us. We become "otherworldly", obsessed with escaping from the density and frailness of our things. Icarus take heed.

I suggest that to engage the object of our attention fully, we must be able to shift attention back and forth along the range of modes, inviting the object to reveal its many facets. To do this well, we need attentional dexterity. A body clenched in one position becomes rigid. So with mind. A healthy muscle has flexibility, strength and endurance. So with attention. Regular exercise and wholesome diet are good.

*

This approach to body, soul and spirit isn’t "correct". There are no final definitions of these terms. Taking them as ways of relating does help to open up some of their historical meanings. For example, a common motif in Western spirituality is that of the circuit of the soul. The soul falls from a spiritual domain, lives in a body for awhile, then rises back to heaven, leaving the body behind. Depending on one’s dogma, this is thought to occur only once, or perhaps repeatedly. From a scientific viewpoint this tale is nonsense - no surgeon has ever been startled by finding a soul-object nested in a body. But from our modal angle, falling and rising refer not to movements of a thing through space, but of awareness along the spectrum of attention. The journey from spirit through soul to body is a ratcheting of awareness from the unitive to the diverse – as we descend, objects become more other, deanimated and thing-like. Conversely, ascent happens as the objective qualities fade and the communion of souls comes into focus.

In her brilliant book Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive thinking in the texts of Plotinus, Proclus and Damascius, classical scholar Sara Rappe wrote the following passage about the philosophy of the fifth century Neoplatonist Proclus:

"The soul, as the channel of cosmic manifestation, reads the world under one of two signs: the world is ‘other’ than or outside the soul when it is engaged in the process of descent, whereas it is ‘the same’ as and within the ascending or returning soul (p.181)."

I find the modal perspective helps me to grasp this idea and many others in the history of the soul, and I hope it helps you too.

*

Now let’s go and practice our scales.

Leonard George

February 2002