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God has united body and soul for human flourishing
We are ensouled bodies and embodied souls.The body does not compete with the soul; it unites with the soul to produce embodied, soulful experience. Embodied experience feeds the soul, while the soul informs embodied experience. Meaning arises from this union: embodiment allows loving relationship, materiality allows intense sensation, and decisions within time produce moral consequence. Soul and body are as inseparable for vitality as light and heat are for fire.
Despite the early church’s rejection of Marcion, who preferred spirit over matter and soul over body, early Christianity sometimes wavered in its commitment to embodiment as blessed. The church arose within the context of Greek philosophy and Jewish asceticism that sometimes devalued material existence, and the church sometimes absorbed these influences. For example, in the fourth century Athanasius wrote an influential biography of Anthony of Egypt, considered the father of Christian monasticism. According to Athanasius, Anthony “used to eat and sleep, and go about all other bodily necessities with shame when he thought of the spiritual faculties of the soul. . . . It behooves a man to give all his time to his soul rather than his body.”
In the Philokalia, an anthology of early Christian monastic writings, St. Neilos the Ascetic marvels at Moses’s courage: “These holy men achieved such things because they had resolved to live for the soul alone, turning away from the body and its wants.” In the centuries that followed, flagellants punished their bodies, gnostics escaped their bodies, and women were seen as excessively embodied.
Given the above, the term soul has a problematic history, and some theologians have rejected the concept as inevitably anti-body. Yet soulless bodies may prove as unsatisfactory as disembodied souls, especially as we develop concerns about the “soulless” culture in which we live. The Oxford English Dictionary defines soulless as heartless, cold, and mechanical, lacking in warmth and feeling. By way of consequence, soulless culture is passionless, dull, and uninteresting, and a soulless place lacks character, uniqueness, and distinction. By way of extension, a soulless economy reduces human persons to units of production and consumption. Its marketers study our depths to control us, while advertisers manipulate our insecurities, politicians target our identity group, and elementary school students are defined by their test scores. Meanwhile, imperial accountancy translates everything and everyone into a dollar value. Threatened by an ever-encroaching thingness, a universe of hollow surfaces, we yearn for the abundance of life that surely exists somewhere, but certainly not here.
The body alone is ill suited to resist its own objectification. Indeed, separated from any inherent value or meaning, it becomes a vulnerability. Girls and boys are shown computer-altered images of “ideal” types and made to feel insecure. Anxious adults compete in the placement of their bodies, struggling to be seen at the right restaurant on the right vacation with the right people. After this calculated onslaught, we may doubt if we are in the right body.
Cunningly, these bodily insecurities are then offered the topical anesthetic of consumption. Clothes, protein powders, makeup, cars, jewelry, liquor, and “exclusive memberships” all promise to free us from our externally inculcated self-loathing. By design, these anaesthetics offer only a brief numbness after which the pain of insecurity will arise again—and the need for another anesthetic. So continues the cycle of anxiety-driven consumption upon which our economy is based, much of which is founded on our doubts about our own appearance and worth.
Powers and principalities want culture to be soulless, not soulful.
We do not experience this system as disembodied. We experience it as soulless. In this modern day context, we yearn for soulful culture. The Oxford English Dictionary defines soulful as “full of soul or feeling; of a highly emotional, spiritual, or aesthetic nature; expressing or evoking deep emotion. “Soulful” can be used as a noun: “As much as a soul can hold or contain,” as in “she got her soulful of tenderness from the community.”
In these examples, “soul” becomes a synonym for kindness, warmth, and depth, a cipher for our most human sentiments. We sense that our authentic self is at best neglected, at worst endangered, by our soulless culture.
So existentially useful is the concept of soul that the most prominent atheist in the Western tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche, utilized it extensively, even as he attempted to reconstruct a culture in which God had died. Fearing an encroaching descent into triviality, Nietzsche elevated the soul to remind his readers of their most noble aspirations and prevent a descent into the Last Man:
The soul that has the longest ladder and reaches down deepest—the most comprehensive soul, which can run and stray and roam farthest within itself; the most necessary soul that plunges joyously into chance; the soul that, having being, dives into becoming; the soul that has, but wants to want and will; the soul that flees itself and catches up with itself in the widest circles; the wisest soul that folly exhorts most sweetly; the soul that loves itself most, in which all things have their sweep and countersweep and ebb and flood. . . . But that is the concept of Dionysus himself. (Ecce Homo, 306)
According to Nietzsche, we need the soul to create soulful life in a soulless culture. Yet he insists that the soul must fulfill the body, not compete with it.
The concept of the soul has also been criticized due to its association with reward and punishment. In individualist religion, the soul bears the record of our deeds, like a secret police file. Based on this record, God judges the individual soul, sending it to either heaven or hell. But in this account the soul has no inherent relationality. Its function is exclusively eschatological—bearing our eternal destiny. The threat of punishment polices individuals, but does not indicate our basic call to community. For this reason, such legalistic concepts of the soul are inadequate to persons made in the image of the Trinitarian God.
We need a lifegiving, relational concept of the soul.
How could we reconceptualize the soul as interdependent rather than isolated? Any concept of the soul that is faithful to the Trinity must invite us to live for one another. We can recall our previous definition of God as “an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Applying this geometric concept to humankind, we can define the soul as a point with an infinite number of radii, of infinite length, lacking any circumference. By their very nature, our souls radiate outward and seek connection, and connection grants us expansiveness.
Euclid, the founder of geometry, initiated this relational way of conceptualizing the universe. The most basic unit in his philosophy is the point. Euclid defines a point as that which has no parts or magnitude, thus has no existence in and of itself. Instead, points are granted existence by the pattern of relations in which they dwell, combining with other points to form a line, plane, cube, sphere, etc. By itself, the point is an abstraction. United to others, it constitutes reality.
The soul is nothing in itself. Only through its relationship to other souls does the soul come into being, connected and open. It becomes everything, even while retaining its own location, perspective, and identity. The soul can then offer its uniqueness to all other souls, thereby granting them their own uniqueness, a gift that they have already reciprocated. In this conception, the soul becomes a boundless horizon that we wall off only to our own detriment. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 99-102)
For further reading, please see:
Athanasius. “Life of St. Anthony.” Translated by H. Ellershaw. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 2nd ser., 4. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1892. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm.
Copenhaver, Brian T., ed. The Greek “Corpus Hermeticum” and the Latin “Asclepius” in a New English Translation. Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, St., and St. Markarios of Corinth, compilers. The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Edited and translated by G. E. H. Palmer et al. 5 vols. New York: Faber and Faber, 1979–2023.
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