Readings
7
Anatomy of the Soul
Setting fire to a tub full of kerosene seemed like a great idea at the time. We were twelve years old, filled with the naiveté of youth and didn’t know any better. With the benefit of hindsight I realize it may have been more than a little foolish.
We were enjoying one of those gloriously endless summer afternoons that were apparently so abundant a few decades ago. Now, in my adult life, I discover that they have been made fleeting and filled with an awareness of lawns that need mowing and fences that could use a coat of paint. But then we had eternity at our fingertips and a world of wonders to unearth. Kevin and I had spent a productive morning over at the golf course: hidden in thick undergrowth between a couple of winding fairways we were ideally placed to sprint out from time to time into the rough grass or a nearby sand trap and steal recently arrived golf balls, then race back to cover and watch the puzzled search that followed. Later we wandered back to the nineteenth hole and sold the loot we had so helpfully “found” for a tidy profit, before retreating under a nearby bridge to half choke ourselves to death on an improvised homemade cigarette.
And somewhere in that afternoon we found ourselves in the long garden behind Kevin’s house contemplating a delightfully unguarded barrel of kerosene nestled among his father’s shovels and rakes in the damp and rickety shed. What common sense we had was blinded, overcome, by the simple universal truth hardwired into our genetic code: men want to make fire. And we boys so wanted to be men. Clearly, here before us was two dozen gallons of liquid rite of passage.
Kevin rooted through the junk on the musty shelves and produced a large plastic margarine tub and a cobwebbed box of safety matches. Unscrewing the rusty cap on the barrel, we leaned it forward and filled the tub with kerosene to within half an inch of the top. I carried the tub out into the garden, careful not to spill a drop of this magical fluid, and gently put it down in the very center of the lawn. Kevin followed with the matches. Protocol demanded that Kevin be the maker of fire; this was, after all, his father’s garden and his father’s fuel.
Kevin knelt before the tub, struck a match, and gingerly reached out his hand to touch the flame to the liquid.
I confess the result was initially disappointing. Although Kevin was a good friend, I had naturally hoped that the kerosene would explode violently and noisily, perhaps lifting Kevin from the ground and tossing him across the garden like a rag doll. After all, that’s what would happen in a movie. Instead there was a quiet puffing sound as flames licked across the surface of the liquid, followed by a few seconds of guttering fire. We stood back to watch, pensive and underwhelmed.
And then I noticed the lip of the tub beginning to curl outward as the heat of the flames melted the thin plastic. We watched in appalled fascination as the edges began to soften, as tiny grooves sank down to become deep valleys. The burning kerosene began to trickle through, dripping onto the grass around the tub. Then, very suddenly, the edges gave way and a lake of fire rolled toward us.
It’s incredible how much liquid a single margarine tub can hold. As we scrambled back toward the house a huge flaming circle radiated out across Kevin’s lawn. Time slowed. We watched in horror as every blade of grass became a tiny wick for this roiling, unstoppable flood of fire. Had we read Dante’s Inferno, we might perhaps have realized that we were standing on the edge of one of the deeper circles of hell: the burning sea reserved for the insatiably mischievous. Even without Dante’s help we knew we were shortly destined for the afterlife; if the fire didn’t kill us, Kevin’s father surely would. The circle had enveloped most of the lawn, and surely would spread to the fences, the houses around, across the street—in a moment of panic we realized we may have set the flame that would consume the world.
Those few seconds stretched themselves to the breaking point. And then, suddenly, time snapped back to its normal pace. The kerosene burned out, and with a few whispering pops the fire evaporated. Kevin and I stood looking out over a strangely transformed lawn. The formerly lush green grass was now an odd patchwork of greasy yellows and browns; in the center lay a surreal sculpture of twisted white plastic fused to the scorched earth. It had a peculiar, ethereal appeal (at least to us), but by no reach of the imagination could it ever be called beautiful. It was not, I realized, the lawn Kevin’s father would want to come home to.
And come home he would—soon. I looked Kevin in the eye. His face was imploring. Stay with me, it seemed to say. We are men! Together we have made fire! Now together let us face the oncoming wrath!
“Bye, Kevin!” I yelled as I ran like the wind for the safety of home.
Participants, Not Observers
I learned an invaluable lesson that summer afternoon (although I didn’t know it at the time): there are no disinterested observers in the universe, only engaged participants.
Years later, while studying quantum mechanics at Aberystwyth University, I encountered the same idea in a rather more rarified form known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In 1927 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that it is not possible to measure accurately all the properties of a single subatomic particle because the action of making measurements causes unpredictable changes in the very system being measured. In order to make any kind of measurement, an observer has to add some kind of energy somewhere—for example, if we want to use a ruler to measure the length of a piece of wood, we need to shine enough light on the ruler to be able to read the scale. We don’t normally notice the effect of such a simple action, but at the incredibly tiny scale of atomic physics even miniscule infusions of energy cause dramatic effects. So the energy used to measure the location and speed of a moving electron causes it to change course, which means we can only determine the speed and location it had before we touched it.
Until Heisenberg’s discovery one of the fundamental assumptions of science was that good researchers would always be objective, uninvolved, standing outside the systems they sought to study. It was almost as though the entire universe were sealed in a sterile bubble while the scientist somehow stood on the outside—looking in, observing, making notes, learning, but never interacting. Any involvement of the researcher in the system might invalidate the results of the experiment.
But the Uncertainty Principle, although it essentially applied only to the very limited field of quantum physics, blew a hole right through this assumption. The effects of this simple discovery are still being felt across the natural sciences to the present day. Heisenberg had demonstrated that, in the end, pure objectivity is impossible. We are involved in the universe, intricately bound into the whole system, and our every act affects both us and the universe around us—even the act of trying to study the universe disinterestedly and objectively. We cannot help being engaged. We are never silent watchers on the sidelines, but always participants, whether we like it or not.
The same is true of our reading of Scripture. The Bible is a vast, intricate and magnificent spiritual universe of stories, ideas, songs, poetry, wisdom and prophecy, within which we can walk and dwell with God. But this is not a universe we visit from a distance, peering in from afar like astronomers searching the distant reaches of the galaxy. We are participants in this spiritual world. The story of Scripture is our story, the story of God shaping our world and our lives; the songs of the Bible echo the song of our souls. Scriptural prophecy reaches into our present and future.
Inescapably, we bring ourselves into our reading. The act of engaging with Scripture changes us, and readers who share their readings change each other. Every act of reading transforms both the readers and the reading community they belong to. Scripture has no objective observers. We are involved. We are participants.
In order to understand the process of reading Scripture, then, we need a clear picture not only of the character of the Bible but also of the nature of the reader of Scripture: ourselves. Just as it is important to understand how the different types of biblical writing weave together to form a coherent whole—how history interacts with prophecy, and wisdom with epistolary writing—in order to develop a sense of the overall message of the Bible, so also we need to understand how the different aspects of the human person are involved in the act of reading, and how Scripture affects each one. We need to clarify the anatomy of the reader. But the anatomy we need to study is not that outlined by physicians and biologists; the location and function of the spleen or liver won’t give us much insight into our engagement with the Bible. We need to understand ourselves as both physical and spiritual beings—to have an integrated view of our mind, our emotions, our will. We need not only an anatomy of the body but also an anatomy of the soul.
A Map of the Soul
This figure sketches out the relationship between various aspects of our inner person—a sketch map of the reader’s soul, if you like.
The interactions of seven aspects of the inner life
Seven different aspects of the inner life interact with one another to enable some of the most important activities of the soul. Our senses and imagination together create the possibility of perception, the ability to experience the world around us and form an intelligent and coherent picture of it. A variety of desires and drives combine to create our emotions, the tools to react appropriately to the world we experience (for example, by desiring healthy food rather than poisonous fungi, or by reacting with courageous drive when our loved ones are in danger). Memory and reason allow cognition or thought, the process of reflecting on past and current experiences in order to discover order and meaning in our lives and our world, and to predict the consequences of events and actions.
Finally the heart is able to take all of these elements—our perceptions, emotions and cognition—and create intention. The original Latin word intendere implied one thing “stretching into” another. Some of our intentions are acts of the will shaping deliberate actions and habits of life; through these we “stretch” into the future. Others are acts of the spirit, when we form relationships with God and other people around us, “stretching” into the life of another. The medieval French writer Jean Gerson once defined prayer as animi extensio in Deum per amoris desiderium: the soul stretching into God through loving desire. This is the work of the heart, orienting us outward to love—although, of course, our fallen hearts rather too often find themselves orienting inward and sinking into destructive self-absorption.
Where did this picture of our inner anatomy come from? In large part the diagram draws on the classical Christian understanding of the inner life, developed over the centuries from the foundations laid by the writers of Scripture. Since neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament writings contain any systematic analysis of the faculties of the inner self, this traditional Christian understanding of human nature was created by incorporating the scattered clues found throughout Scripture into the prevailing intellectual models developed by the great Greek philosophers and the medieval theological tradition. Three writers in particular played critical roles in shaping this Christian view of the soul: Plato, Aristotle and (of course) the apostle Paul.
The Chariot
Plato, in the Phaedrus (a dialogue written around the same time as the more famous Republic) uses a compelling image to describe his view of human nature. Imagine a flying chariot being drawn through the sky by a pair of winged horses, each with a very different character. On one side of the pair, as Plato describes it, is a noble white horse, disciplined and strong, which seeks to pull the chariot heavenward; on the other is a horse dark and wild, unpredictably dangerous and longing to drag the chariot down to earth. These two horses, Plato tells us, represent two sets of conflicting impulses or emotions. The noble horse symbolizes our drives, our forceful courage and determination—the kind of spiritedness that might succeed in drawing us beyond our own limitations and into a richer experience of reality. But this is constantly at war with another powerful impulse within us, an inner force represented by the dark horse: our base appetites and desires. These, Plato argued, are constantly seeking to lure us back down to the grime of earth, to corrupt and demean us by smothering our divine nature with the banalities of the material world. (Plato, of course, was heir to a Greek philosophical tradition that accepted a much sharper opposition between the spiritual and material world, between soul and body, than we see in the biblical worldview.)
As these two horses drive the chariot forward in two conflicting directions, it becomes the responsibility of the charioteer to control and maneuver them so that their energy can be harnessed, rather than allowing it to tear the whole arrangement apart. This charioteer of the human soul, Plato wrote, is reason: the thinking faculty within the human soul that is able to discern how the forces exerted by conflicting human emotions will affect the whole person. Usually reason will seek to allow the nobler emotions—the courageous and determined human spirit—to prevail over the baser passions, but at times it will be necessary to allow the appetites and desires greater freedom to prevent the whole person from becoming unbalanced. Neither horse is capable of moderating the other in Plato’s allegory; only reason, with a firm grasp on the reins, is able to hold a steady course. (Readers of the Republic, where Plato developed these ideas in some detail, will readily recognize this threefold picture of the soul.)
An Image of the World
Plato’s student and successor, Aristotle, accepted some aspects of this picture, changed a few and rejected yet others. But his main contribution to the Christian tradition came through his study of aspects of the soul Plato had overlooked.
First, Aristotle paid far more attention to the question of perception: How does the human soul experience and interpret the material world? Aristotle’s first step in analyzing this was to identify the familiar five physical senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. Each of these senses enables us to receive information about the world around us. But how does the mind integrate the very different sensations presented to it into a single, coherent mental representation?
Think of eating a slice of lemon, for example. As you bite into it your mind is battered by a volley of sensory experiences. You see the bright yellow half-moon slice. Your fingers touch the thick, rough rind and feel the wet, sticky juice. You smell the sharply refreshing lemon odor. And your tongue is shocked by the fruit’s tart sourness. But in your mind all these sensations blend together into one single idea: the lemon itself.
Aristotle suggested that the senses are integrated by the imagination, the aspect of the soul that creates an inner image of realities in the external world. Once this inner representation is created it can be manipulated by the mind and combined with other similar (or dissimilar) images to create new ideas, perspectives and views of reality. Through our cumulative experience of actual reality, we gather the mental tools not only to imagine what is materially present to us through our senses but also to imagine the merely possible. Having seen a red flower and a gray elephant, for example, I find myself easily able to imagine a red elephant, even though I’ve never seen or heard of such a beast. Art feeds on this faculty of imagination; almost all forms of artistic endeavor depend on this ability to conceive of and somehow express possible realities that we have not experienced.
Then Aristotle began to explore the subject of memory (he devoted an entire short treatise to the subject of memory and recollection). He saw our memories as a kind of repository of all the integrated images produced by our imagination’s acts of perception; a storehouse of experiences available to the rational mind. By drawing on the memory our reason is able to fashion a framework for understanding the world around us. By studying past experience it can begin to predict the way future experiences will unfold. If I have hurt my hand every time it has been closely exposed to flames, my reasoning mind can safely deduce that putting my hand into this fire will also be painful.
This leads to a threefold picture of the mind (or soul—the same Greek word, psyche4, is used for both concepts). Our physical senses receive all kinds of strange and wonderful sensations from the universe around us. The imagination integrates this sensory input, allowing us to experience the present, the world immediately around us. Over time the images created by the imagination form our memory, allowing us to re-experience the past; our memory is the story which sets our trajectories, variously warning, encouraging and comforting us in the present. Our capacity to reason allows us to manipulate images both from our memory and from our immediate perceptions of the present and combine them to understand more fully the world in which we live—and, of course, to make reliable predictions about the future.
Paul’s Perspective
These six different aspects of the inner life—drives, desires, reason, senses, imagination and memory—became crucial elements of the Christian understanding of the human person. With a framework somewhat along these lines in their minds, our ancestors in the faith—from the writers of the New Testament onward—approached Scripture to explore the nature of the soul. The model with which they emerged from that study of the Bible retained all these elements but, crucially, saw them all in an entirely fresh light.
Of all the New Testament writers Paul offered the richest and deepest thinking on the nature of the human person. But Paul was not a systematic writer, even though texts like Romans might initially seem to suggest otherwise. The only writings of Paul that have survived are in the form of either open letters to communities or more personal letters to individuals, almost always written in response to specific crises and questions. These epistles were composed during his extensive travels around the eastern Roman empire, often from the discomfort of a prison cell. These were not conditions conducive to producing an academic thesis on systematic theology. Reading his letters, though, is like peering through scattered openings into an extraordinarily fertile mind; while we cannot always arrange his ideas into neat rows and columns, we will always find ourselves stimulated and challenged to think afresh. This is especially the case when we consider Paul’s perspective on the human soul.
Paul’s theology is worked out in the tension between two opposing realities about humanity: we are created in the image and likeness of God, and called “good” (Gen 1:26-27, 31), but we are utterly fallen and corrupted by sin (Rom 3:10-18). Because of the latter, Paul cannot be as sanguine as Plato about the ability of both reason and our noble “spiritedness” to keep in check our base desires. He understands that our desires and appetites are natural and appropriate in themselves (there is no sin in feeling a desire for food or water!), but that they have been warped and twisted by sin into something far more destructive: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, . . . drunkenness, carousing, and things like these” (Gal 5:19-21). But in the same passage in Galatians, Paul also notes that our forceful drives, which Plato symbolized as a majestic white stallion, have been equally tainted by sin; he warns his readers against “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, dissensions, factions, envy.”
What of reason, the charioteer who is expected to guide these wayward beasts? Unfortunately, says Paul, our mind has also become depraved, has lost its bearings; hence the need to “destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and . . . take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:4-5).
We can easily extend Paul’s line of thought to include Aristotle’s additions to this model: our perception is skewed (both senses and imagination) and our memory distorted. Every aspect of the soul, although made good by God, has been dragged down and soiled by sin.
Paul also injects an extra dimension of human experience into the mixture. He distinguishes, as any Greek might have done, between the body (so4ma)—the expression of a human being in the material world—and the soul or mind (psyche4), the inner life of that person. But he also distinguishes carefully within that inner life between the soul and the “spirit” (pneuma). In 1 Thessalonians 5:23 Paul writes: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit [pneuma] and soul [psyche4] and body [so4ma] be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” A similar distinction is made by the author of the letter to the Hebrews (traditionally identified as Paul, but now regarded by most scholars as from a separate, anonymous hand): “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul [psyche4] from spirit [pneuma]” (Heb 4:12).
Paul never formally defines the distinction between spirit and soul. But it is clear from his letters that, like other Greek writers, he very closely aligns the soul with the mind; it is in this part of our inner world that we are able to construct ideas, combine them with other ideas we have formed in the past, and make deductions about the universe around us. The soul, or mind, is where imagination, memory and reason combine. The spirit, though, seems to be something more—although Paul doesn’t state precisely what that something more might be. It clearly is related to our being made in the image and likeness of God, since God is essentially spirit. It is also what allows us most fully to know ourselves and know God, as Paul tells the Corinthians:
For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. (1 Cor 2:11-13)
Paul also draws a close connection between the spirit (pneuma), the will (thele4ma), and the heart (kardia). We tend to think of the heart as the seat of emotion and passion—influenced by the lingering legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism, which sought to place emotions and feeling at the very center of human experience. But for Paul, our emotions, our desires and drives are hardwired into our bodies as a whole (see, for example, Rom 7:5); they are not the center of our personality but means by which we express that personality. For Paul, the heart is the seat of the will; it is in the heart that we form our intentions and purposes (1 Cor 4:5). But it is also in the heart that the Spirit of God most closely dwells with us (2 Cor 1:22). These three—heart, will and spirit—seem intimately bound together in Paul’s thought.
Becoming Fully Present
Here we are then: creatures of two worlds, of the physical and spiritual universes, blended into a single person. We are physical beings, made of cells, bones, blood and organs. We can sense the material world, move in it, interact with it. But we are also spiritual beings; we perceive the inner world too, move freely within it, relate to it and affect it. And these two are intimately bound together. Our emotions, memories, reason, even our will can be shaped by diet, injury or illness. Conversely, our state of mind, our will, our prayer seem to be able to mold our health and physical well-being. We are bodies and souls—and spirits too, fashioned to extend our lives into one another and finally into God.
The pressing question is: how can we bring the entirety of our being to the reading of Scripture? As we learn to approach the Bible as lovers rather than as theorists, we discover the startling degree to which God reveals himself, makes himself known, manifests himself to us through the act of reading. God is fully present to us as we meet him on the holy ground of Scripture.
We, on the other hand, are often rather less fully present to God. In the contemporary Western church we have a strong tendency to read the Bible as a largely intellectual exercise. We examine, analyze, categorize, systematize. Our minds—especially our ability to reason—are fully engaged. But how do we bring the rest of our selves into the presence of God through reading? How can we involve our senses and imagination? Our emotions, those desires and drives that pulse through us so strongly? Our memory? And, most of all, our heart—that fount of intention which so longs to stretch into God through loving desire?
We cannot come to the Bible as disinterested observers. How then can we throw ourselves into its world as eager participants? The remainder of this book explores a variety of ways in which Christians throughout the ages have sought to read Scripture as a means to encounter God. These different approaches tend to emphasize one or another of these aspects of the soul. First we consider our perception of the biblical text, looking particularly to the teaching of Ignatius of Loyola on imaginative immersion in the narratives of Scripture. We then turn to the ancient practice of lectio divina, rooted in the Benedictine monastic tradition, which engages our cognition of the Bible through the faculties of memory and reason. After that we look at classical Christian teaching on holiness and virtue, summarized so adeptly by Thomas Aquinas, and reflect on the ways in which Scripture can help shape our emotional and behavioral life. Finally, we swim into the deep waters of the contemplative tradition as we consider how our reading of the Bible can realign the intention of our hearts and wills, drawing us into an ever deeper intimacy with God.
Readings
Legend tells that over the gateway to the sanctuary of Apollo, which in ancient times held the Delphic oracle, were inscribed the Greek words gno4thi seauton: know thyself. While self-absorption and navel-gazing are rarely helpful occupations, a little self-knowledge can be indispensable as we seek to orient our whole person toward life in Christ. As any physician will tell you, understanding how the various parts of a person fit and work together is essential if you want to make them (or keep them) fit and healthy.
The seven passages of Scripture below might help you reflect on the nature of a human person, especially that hidden, inner world we think of as the “soul” or “mind” or “heart.” Remember that the Bible doesn’t present a single, simple anatomical description of the soul, the way a medical textbook would describe the physical body. While these passages can offer us enlightening insights into our inner nature, we should be cautious about hardening those insights into a fixed, unalterable system. The model presented in this chapter is just that—a model—which can be helpful when used wisely, but it didn’t come down from Sinai carved on stone tablets. The judicious person knows to apply an idea when it is helpful and set it aside when it no longer serves its purpose.
Day 1
Job 2:1-10
(Satan attacks Job’s body, but not his spirit)
Day 2
Psalm 139:13-18
(the forming of the body)
Day 3
Ezekiel 37:1-10
(the valley of dry bones)
Day 4
1 Corinthians
15:35-49
(the body, before and after resurrection)
Day 5
2 Corinthians 6:14–7:1
(the body a temple of the Spirit)
Day 6
1 Corinthians 2:6-16
(spiritual knowledge)
Day 7
Romans 12:1-2
(offering ourselves to God)