Wednesday, April 23, 2008

A couple of weeks ago a friend emailed me the following question, so I thought I would use it, along with my response, in my blog this week:
Does our soul have a beginning? I know once created (at conception?) we have eternal life which I presume to mean our souls of course. But I have been having a conversation with someone that thinks "we have no beginning, we are eternal". That is not my understanding. Would you enlighten me or perhaps you could blog on this?
Souls are created and so do have a beginning. Only God is without beginning. When we use the phrase "eternal soul," what is meant is that our souls are everlasting, that they have a beginning, but not an end. Thus we also talk about eternal life, that is, life without end (not without beginning). In theology the soul is considered the principle of life, and so would be understood to be created by God at the moment of conception giving life to the baby. For Thomas Aquinas all living things had souls - so plants have vegetative souls that enable the plant to process nourishment, etc., animals have sensitive souls which include the elements of nourishment, etc., but also basic feelings (e.g., an animal can be afraid), and humans have intellectual or rational souls which include all of the above but also intellect and will. For Aquinas, however, only the human soul was immortal. (Interestingly enough, Aquinas thought the human soul was given at the moment of "quickening," which made sense from his perspective in an age before modern science. Quickening was the moment when the woman first physically felt the baby move, and thus at that point the baby must have life, hence a soul.)

The idea of a soul with no beginning is a very dualistic idea popular in the gnostic (from the Greek for knowledge) understanding in which the souls were thought to have pre-existed and that they "fell" into matter which was evil. Thus the goal of life was to find the proper knowledge (gnosis) that enabled the soul to be liberated from the body and return to the spirit world. Gnostic Christianity (combining Gnostic beliefs and Christian beliefs) was very popular in the first centuries of the Church. This way of thinking was condemned by the Church. Nonetheless, the dualistic tendency persists to this day and was especially exacerbated by the dualistic philosophy of Descartes in the 1600s.

Today we try to move away from a dualistic understanding of body and soul to understand the human person as embodied spirit or enspirited/ensouled body. The spiritual aspect of the human person is only lived out in and through our bodies. The unity rather than the distinction is primary. The role of the body is so central to what it means to be a human person that we profess our belief in the resurrection of the body, though we don't know what that looks like or precisely what that means after death.

This is a great question, and I think a lot of people don't understand this, as I have heard of people refer to it as if our souls are waiting around up in heaven until a point where they choose or are assigned to "enter" a person and "come down" to earth. I blame that somewhat on Hollywood as well as the persistance of an underlying gnosticism! On a related note, people often refer to humans who have died as angels, and theologically speaking, angels are a completely different creature from humans. When humans die they are saints, not angels (and in fact while living we are also part of the communion of saints)! Angels, by the way, are also created, and while immortal also have a beginning. Only God is without beginning.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Heidi, I enjoyed your cogent comments about the soul and your historical references. thanks... xo margo