Loss of Transcendence - Lesson 12

We saw yesterday that Biblical exegesis and commentary in the early Church among the Fathers was very much influenced by the Classical world around them and so it’s not surprising that the Classical interpretation of the soul also had a profound influence upon their thinking. There’s no doubt that Greek teaching on the soul has made the most lasting impression ever since. The earliest of the Greeks that taught and wrote about the soul was Pythagoras and Pythagoras elaborates that the soul is divided into different parts. He would explore different aspects of the soul and he also taught about the immortality of the soul in the terms of its transmigration. So whether Pythagoras was himself influenced by Hindu thinking on transmigration, or certainly other aspects of Asian thinking, he certainly believed in the transmigration of the soul.

He himself does not have much influence on the Church because of this. But Plato has a powerful influence, for Plato is building on the work of his master, Socrates, arguing that the soul is the principle of human life. It’s also the principle of divine life and so the soul is that divine part of the human. It’s that bridge between God and man. But the spiritual and divine nature of the soul, argues Plato, is imprisoned within the body. And so Plato’s speculation was that only after a series of subsequent births and deaths that once again it becomes one with God, so in this respect he’s taking up the Pythagorean idea of transmigration as well.

In complete contrast, Aristotle defines the human [body 00:02:20] as both body and soul, but not in the divisive way that Plato does. He doesn’t have a dualistic system. He’s much more monistic in his thinking. So he sees that the soul could be interpreted as the living quality of the body. The soul is what makes the body alive; the fact that it has spirit or soul is that it’s not a dead corpse. And so Aristotle is very much more of the view of what neuroscientists or secular neurophysiologists would represent today.

The person who is very interested in this whole aspect in the history of the Church is Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century/early 14th century, who builds to some extent on Aristotelian philosophy. And so Thomas Aquinas presents the soul as the body’s form. It’s the soul that gives our personality and so when we encounter each other, it’s not our body that we encounter so much but as the vitality of the soul that gives us our uniqueness that we make an impression on each other. But what has happened in these two ways, the way of Plato and the way of Aristotle, has been divided ever since and they’re still divided. And so going back to that incident of saving our soul as an evangelical, this is much more neo-Platonic than these good, worthy believers realised.

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The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria also reflected upon the nature of the soul. And, for him, he sees death as the friend of the soul, for what death does is to restore the soul to its ordinal condition, its precondition in immortality. He speculated that while many lose their souls in the labyrinth of living in a material world, the intent of the true philosopher is to save his soul. This of, of course, Socratic. That’s why he’s a philosopher. And so the true philosopher’s soul survives bodily death and assumes a higher existence that’s immortal and incorporeal as well as being asexual.

Origen, who as we saw yesterday is the first great Biblical scholar, was very much influenced by Platonic or neo-Platonic thinking and he too taught on the pre-existence of the soul, which is still part of Mormon belief. And the spiritual teaching of Origen is where sometimes people are suspicious of it and certainly the Church condemned him for the next four centuries. This was a foolish speculation in the midst of a man of such great brilliance. Tertullian also speaks about the soul, but he follows the Stoics in their teaching that the human soul is corporeal. In other words, the Stoics are more like Aristotle. They’re accepting that the soul is generated with the body and so instead of having an eternity within one’s self, Tertullian accepts that we inherit our souls from our parents. And so because we’ve inherited our souls from our parents, we have therefore this continuity of sin in our lives, a continuity that goes back to the original fall of Adam and Eve—that we’ve inherited the fall, in other words, in a kind of genetic way.

Jerome is much more matter-of-fact and he just simply says our soul was created at the time of our conception. So in this session, we’re now saying that there were sown the seeds of utter confusion about the soul in this Classical heritage that we’ve never really got rid of even till now. Another alternative to this Classical thinking is Plotinus. And Plotinus had contact with Eastern pantheism. In fact, he have travelled there, but we’re not sure about that. He says a lot about the soul. He sees the soul as immortal, but not eternal. He doesn’t see it as being imprisoned by a mortal body like Plato. Rather, he sees that the soul has two levels. There’s the lower soul, which is a composite mix of the body and the soul, so within its features are to be found the passions, the fears, the desires, the pains and the pleasures that the body experiences. He sees that the lower soul is the emotional soul; we might say the passionate soul. Or as neuroscience is teaching us today that the basic human emotion is fear. In other words, we can speak of the soul as being the fearful agent of the human condition.

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But he also sees that there’s a higher level of the soul, which is the inner or the spiritual man. And here is where the will is superior. It’s very interesting to discover that today many neuroscientists are saying that the drive or the will is really the issue of coherence within neurophysiology. That the will is really the driving force and, as one contemporary neurophysiologist is saying, that this is Descartes’ error. It’s not the reason that’s in the driving seat, says Damasio; it’s the will. It’s the passion to know that makes us rational, but it’s not reason that makes us passionate. It’s the will that makes us passionate about reasoning. So Plotinus would, in a sense, agree with some of our contemporary neurophysiologists in this regard. The passion to think is, for Plotinus, the higher soul.

And, of course, by thinking, Plotinus wasn’t thinking, he was contemplating because, for him, the highest form of thinking is contemplating the ineffable. It’s contemplating God. So he’s unlike the philosopher that my daughter, Penny, when she was five years old used to go and visit across the street a couple who were without children. And he was a famous philosopher called Robinson. So she asked him who Mr Robinson, what do you do for a living? Oh, Penny, you know, I simply think. My job is to lecture about thinking and I write books about thinking. And so she turned on him as a five-year-old in disgust and said, is that all you are? Is that all you do—to think? But Plotinus would have agreed that this was the focus of the human being. The focus was the divine: contemplating the eternal, contemplating God. It’s the contemplative life of the gods where the soul resides. So for Plotinus, death is not an evil. It’s a good. And again, like Socrates, he was prepared to see that the better life is the life to come.

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One of the people where I’ve followed his thinking with great sadness is Pierre Hadot, who has been a brilliant philosopher at the College de France in Paris. And he started as being ordained as a Jesuit priest and he ended his days as totally a Plotinian philosopher. All other sense of the reality of life had evaporated. The whole theme of the Biblical faith had just simply been like scent in an empty scent bottle. So it’s tragic today to see how easy it is for people to totally evaporise their understanding of transcendence by their own speculations.

One of the Early Fathers that struggles very much with this whole theme of the soul is the Bishop of Lyons at the beginning of the 2nd century, Irenaeus. He’s writing in a period of tension, a period when Lyons was the commercial heartbeat of the Roman Empire. It was the wealthiest city at the time. It was the most powerful, therefore materialistic, culture . And so many of the Christians of Lyons were affluent, well-travelled and when the persecution broke out against them in 175–177 AD, they were, in a sense, shattered to realise that all this enjoyment of the good life on this Earth was over. But it was in their thinking that they now saw that the good life that was to come is a kind of extension of the good life here. So if you have lots of good food and good wine and banqueting all the time on Earth then that’s what Heaven is going to be—an eternal banquet. And so there again, there was a misunderstanding of transcendence in terms that transcendence was simply a projection into something better in the life to come, but it was determined in your understanding of Heaven by your understanding of what you’re enjoying on Earth. That one was a continuum of the other.