507 - Whatever Happened to the Soul?

Whatever Happened to the Soul?
By Patrick D. Miller

A book with the title Soul: God, Self and the New Cosmology (1 993) has just come into the office of this journal for review. I was struck by the title. Then I was struck with being struck by the title. What is so unusual about a book titled Soul being sent to a theological journal for review? Not much in theory. But in practice or "in actual fact," as we are accustomed to say, we don't hear very much about the soul in theological circles these days. One of the most theological of all terms is somewhat out of favor. The only person I know giving serious attention these days to the soul is not a theologian but a sociologist of religion. I confess that, like Karl Menninger when he wrote Whatever Became of Sin? (1973), 1 am both surprised and a little dismayed at this state of affairs.

One would expect that contemporary Christian anthropology would give some attention to the soul as a traditional rubric of Christian theology, but that seems to be little the case if my non-statistical perusal of recent theological literature, including this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY on anthropology, is any indication. A recent conference on the Bible and theology devoted a weekend to a discussion of "The Whole and the Divided Self," without any reference to the soul except in a paper on the dualism of Pauline thought about human nature. The book on the soul referred to above is a notable exception. While that is by a theologian, it grows out of research for a television series by the BBC. It may be a comment on the modern scene that television gives more attention to the soul than theology or that it is a popular, non-religious rock singer who labels his recent album "Soul Cages."

The most extensive reference to the soul I have encountered in recent times is not in theological conversation or reading but in Joyce Carol Oates's new play, "The Perfectionist." A comedy satire of little significance but much amusement, Oates's play has frequent references to the soul. A photographer speaks of primitive peoples being afraid of the camera stealing their souls while contemporary young people let her photograph them because they hope the camera will give them souls. Whichever category of persons you choose, the soul here is a pointer to a dimension of depth in human existence that other terms convey with less directness or clarity. That defining the soul is not easy to do does not necessarily mean the term fails to denote and connote to its hearers.

Oates has clearly perceived this, as her easy and frequent use of the

508 - Whatever Happened to the Soul?

term, even in a comedy, demonstrates. Another of her figures speaks of his colleague's currying up to persons of questionable reputation in order to try to get their money as being "corrosive to the soul." The colleague sees it simply as necessary "kissing ass." One of the main characters is a teenager who is stricken with guilt and speaks of his own experience of "the dark night of the soul" or, as he goes on to say in his more colorful vernacular, "There's some heavy shit in my soul." Whichever cliche' one prefers, the sense of sin and guilt and the feeling of despair express themselves in this sort of language in a way far different from the language of psychotherapy and sociology. The triumph of the therapeutic over the struggle of the soul may mask some authentic differences between the conceptuality of self and that of soul. In fact, it would be a significant gain for the therapeutic endeavor if it were to recover a sense of the soul. The modern sensibility knows about "kissing ass" without being sufficiently aware of the corrosion to the soul, the eating away of the moral fiber of one's being, that dimension of one's personhood that has, at least potentially and often actually, a sense of transcendence and of oughtness.

Years ago, a colleague, writing about T. S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party," described the psychiatrist Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly as a "soul doctor." While my colleague was not himself a religious person, indeed more Freudian than theological in outlook, he correctly described the way in which Sir Henry comprehends the religious depth of Celia Coplestone's behavior that leads to a horrifying martyrdom out of a strange sense of the need for atonement. The rest of the characters, precisely because of their modern sensibility, fail to see the need of the soul in Celia's journey, a failure that leads Sir Henry, in response to their sense of her fate-murdered in an African insurrection while treating "plague-stricken natives"-as "waste," to claim that "it was triumphant."

The disappearance of the soul from theological talk about the human is not without its positive reasons or justifications. Language changes, and fundamental notions get reconceived in different words. That happens and can be helpful. In this instance, however, the shift from soul to self, which seems to be the primary substitute word to talk about some of the same substance, is not simply a linguistic change. It represents in part, and certainly among theologians, a move toward a more unified understanding of the person. Certainly that development is to be applauded. The sense of our selves as wholes rather than component parts is a proper apprehension. The mind-body or soul-body dualism does not ring true in a phenomenology of the self that does not know minds without bodies. It is possible for bodies to exist, even to be born, without minds if the brain is dead or missing. But it is difficult to attribute personhood to such.

Even this last example, however, raises questions about the disuse of the soul language and the assumption that dualistic language has no connection to reality. There are those who are brain dead and seem to

509 - Whatever Happened to the Soul?

be merely bodies who, in fact, are loved, treated, fed, talked to, and to whom some personality is attributed by parents or others who love them. One can hardly speak about the presence of mind in these bodies, and perhaps with difficulty of the spirit. But to understand such individuals as "endowed with a soul," however inaccurate and imprecise such language may appear to be, is to say something significant about their existence as a human being.

Angela Trilby, author of the book Soul referred to above, articulates a contemporary perspective when she notes that many believe that science has "made the notion of the soul redundant." [For those who are not familiar with British expressions, "made redundant" means "rendered unnecessary" or, in its most common usage, "fired."] Trilby, however, judges this dismissal of the notion of the soul as a mistake. She sees in science a new book of nature emerging that speaks "very directly to people's sense of God and of themselves."

Whether or not that is the case, it is this dimension of soul language and soul conceptuality that is in danger of being thrown out with the bathwater as we relegate this term and this notion to the linguistic and conceptual waste basket. The soul is a way of speaking anthropologically not simply about an outmoded personal dualism but of that dimension of human existence that is addressed by God and understands self and person as features of a God-human relationship. To speak about the soul is to speak about something that is part of us-in a non-defined and non-empirical fashion-that has to do with God, with the moral and religious dimensions of our being, in a way that no other anthropological term quite brings off. Clearly, the self, which seems to be a more holistic and accurate term, does not carry the connotations of the term soul. Its psychological roots make it a rich term or notion for thinking about personhood, but it is able to stay firmly within a notion of the human that takes no account of either morality or transcendence. It is surely no accident that we speak about a "soul brother [or sister]" but not a "self brother." A "soul brother" is one who connects with me in the things that matter most in my being and activity.

In his Church Dogmatics III/4, Karl Barth speaks of the "Thou" as the self created and addressed by God. "This 'Thou-I'," he says, "is the human 'soul,' the [one] who lives by the Spirit of God." He is careful to resist dualistic anthropologies and to insist of human beings that "they themselves are their souls, for their souls are the souls of their bodies." But, for Barth, to speak of self or of subject with reference to human beings is precisely to speak of soul, for one's soul is "in direct relation to God's awakening and sustaining Spirit."

If, therefore, in distaste for dualistic and idealistic categories for speaking about the human, the soul is lost, something more than a linguistic change has occurred. We have relinquished the primary word for identifying our creatureliness as something more than natural. As John Leith has put it aptly in his Basic Christian Doctrine (1993): "The

510 - Whatever Happened to the Soul?

soul is the human being in his or her knowledge of God and in the awareness that human life is not simply animal existence of instinct and impulse. The soul hears the word of God."

Attention to the soul, historically, has focused on the question of ultimate personal destiny, the fate of "departed souls." The immortality of the soul has been the primary doctrine associated with the distinction between body and soul. There is no doubt that soul language has fallen in disrepute to no small degree because of the emphasis in current New Testament theology on the resurrection of the body over against the immortality of the soul. It is worth noting, however, that this distinction has come under vigorous criticism in a recent book by James Barr titled The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (1993). His emphasis is less upon the soul than it is upon the notion of immortality, which, he argues, is indeed a biblical concern. But along the way, he challenges current ideas about the way in which the Bible speaks of the soul and suggests that one can indeed speak of the soul in Scripture as distinct from the body, as that "superior controlling centre which accompanies, expresses and directs the existence of that totality, and one which, especially, provides the life to the whole."

All of this is to suggest that currents in biblical theology together with developments in psychology and related fields that have caused us to drop soul language and soul notions from our vocabulary and our theological formulations may not have served us well. Whether the question is who we are or what we are to become, the notion of the soul conveys in powerful ways a sense of human existence as God-given and God-addressed, morally freighted in our very beings, and transcending all natural categories, even if we are also thoroughly natural. It is a strange sort of paradox that, while the soul is the one anthropological term that is truly theological and does not fit the secular mentality, it seems to have its continuing viability more in secular usage than theological. Perhaps we need to take a cue from the realms of art and literature and restore the soul to a place of significance in our thinking and speaking, theologically, about the human.