Beyond the Old Soul

When I was thirteen, I liked the idea that my soul was distinct from my body.  I was fifty pounds overweight with acne that bordered on leprosy. More than a few people thought I needed braces. I hated my body. I shouldn’t have, but embodiment is a tough nut to crack when you’re crazy about girls and repulsive to them at the same time. I liked my soul, though. My body was just a cumbersome deadweight shell hiding a good lookin’ soul that would knock the ladies dead if they could see it. I’d score for sure once I got to heaven.

When I was fifteen, I lost weight, my skin cleared up, and I got braces. People became more friendly, even other guys. Though I enjoyed this new approval from the adolescent herd, I still thought of myself as a soul instead of a body. My body was a machine, a thing to be managed. It wasn’t really me. Jesus loved my soul, and my body was its warehouse before I died.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “You don’t have soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” Preach it, Jack, I cheered. That was before this spirit-body dualism began to wreak havoc in my life.

The details are ugly and banal. The worst of it isn’t about sex, if that’s what you’re thinking. I minimized all matters of the flesh. Physical needs, including those of others, were trivial. Eternal, “spiritual” consequences meant far more to me than what happened in the here and now.

In graduate school, I encountered the Christian version of a philosophical concept called “physical reductionism.” Christian physical reductionism states that the soul is physical, not spiritual and detached. The modern Christian notion of the soul is more Greek than Jewish. Plato regarded the physical world as a cheap imitation of the perfect Forms. He said that we can imagine the Forms but we never realize them in the physical world. Augustine and other church fathers schooled in Greek philosophy made the soul into the human Form.

The Bible tends to treat the soul as more physical. It gets split from the body a whole lot more when Paul starts writing letters to Greek churches. The creation story, however, acknowledges the soul’s physicality. In Genesis 2:7, the soul is the breath God breathes into Adam. It’s life. A ghost didn’t take possession of Adam’s body. Instead, God’s breath gave us life and made us whole.

In Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, Ray S. Anderson writes, “When the life of the spirit becomes detached from one’s embodied existence, spirituality lacks ethical content with respect to how one views the body, with all of its instincts drives, and potentialities.” Separating the spiritual and physical corrupts our notion of holiness. Experiences of the spirit and soul are associated with “higher” cognitive functions such as insight, self-denial, altruism, and interpersonal experiences. We regard spiritual experiences as more sophisticated, more complex. Too often we fail to see the “spiritual” aspects of the ordinary. I once knew a guy with brain damage for whom bowling and a good burrito ranked as spiritual experiences. The Greeks polluted the soul by making it transcendent. That’s why some people think a fetus isn’t a person until it achieves a certain level of cognitive sophistication. From an embodied perspective, a fetus is a body and, therefore, already a soul.

One of the biggest consequences of the Greek soul is that we tend to relate to people as spirit instead of body. The elements of the person we regard as spiritual are really just their higher cognitive functions. When those capacities diminish or disappear, we sometimes treat the person as if they’re dead. When someone suffers brain damage or dementia and lose the “spiritual” aspects of the self, we often don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to relate to each other as whole people.

I wish I could tell you exactly what that looks like, but I’m still trying to figure it out. I’ve been splitting myself into pieces for so long that it’s taking me a while to put everything together. Problems with my back provide new impetus to denigrate the flesh as I enter middle age. Sometimes it makes me long to be a soul, unencumbered by labor, limitations, and appetites. Other times, however, my bad back reveals my need for total redemption. I don’t long just for purity of heart and mind. I want to be made whole again. In fact, if my back didn’t hurt so much, my heart and mind would work a lot better. If I feel this way, I can’t imagine what it’s like for those who have much bigger problems than back pain. Maybe it’s time to forget about saving souls and figure out what it means to save the whole person.