Reconfiguring Souls

Towards a Modern View

The soul is a complicated concept that can be easy to be unclear on, and a lot of conceptions of the soul are rooted in a false view of the world. Rather than consider the soul as a real property that humans have, I argue that souls instead are better understood as a metaphor for the life of a person. My hope is to demythologize the concept to bring it in line with a current scientific understanding of the world and open new theological avenues to explore the meaning of what a soul is.

Eternally Existing?

For Plato, the soul is your centre of consciousness which is immaterial and has always existed and will continue to exist after you die. This is a problematic notion on several accounts, but from an orthodox Christian perspective this is just wrong. The second ecumenical council at Constantinople condemns the idea that the soul pre-exists the body. Rather, as St. Maximus the Confessor says, God co-creates the soul along with the body. The soul is not some pre-fabricated “you” that God inserts into a body to animate it, but rather it is something created along with the body that both form “you”.

Centre of Consciousness?

So we see from the Christian perspective of Constantinople II and St. Maximus that it’s actually wrong to believe the Platonic model. What can we say it is then? According to Augustine, the soul is some special substance not made of any materials in the physical world and is the centre of rationality that controls the body. Others may add that human souls are uniquely able to process morality and love. The problem is that a modern scientific worldview simply does not allow for this. Let’s allow that there could be some special unknowable material that souls are made of. There is no reason to think that human beings uniquely experience rationality, morality, or love in a qualitatively different way from animals — especially when we look at the more advanced animals like dogs, chimpanzees, and elephants. Animals may exercise these less proficiently than humans, but humans also have a gradient in their ability to express them. Newborns cannot participate in these in the same capacity of an adult, in fact they are worse than monkeys who can be taught a basic economic system, or elephants who can create art. If you want to say that the human soul uniquely is the space where memories are stored and processed, that’s also clearly false when elephants mourn their deceased loved ones. Animals think, feel, love, remember, and even have important rituals like burying the dead. Even if there were a soul in human beings, it does not impart anything unique to humans as it has been traditionally understand.

What Then?

It seems empirically true from a contemporary understanding of animal behaviour that there does not seem to be a unique human soul. Why then should we believe that there is such a thing at all? There is no empirical reason to believe in souls. Humans are their bodies.

Theological Reflections

But doesn’t the Bible claim that there is a consciousness of “you” after death? It would seem that all sorts of passages, from the thief on the cross to Paul’s being home with the Lord, necessitate some understanding of an immaterial disembodied state of conscious being. Sure, but it also claims that there are giant sea monsters lurking in the ocean. I think we can rework the concept using some principles:

I. We need to acknowledge that all of these non-bodily experiences are outside of time as we understand it. There is no reason to link them to the present moment in time. We can easily assert that a post-mortem experience begins in the resurrected body. Therefore, we eliminate the need to talk about an intermediate state of disembodied consciousness that exists in time.

II. The Hebrew word נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ literally means breath. In the second creation narrative we are told “…then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2.7). We can connect this to the very dense passage about the nature of resurrected bodies in Paul:

1 Corinthians 15.42–49: So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, made of dust; the second man is from heaven. As one of dust, so are those who are of the dust, and as one of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the one of dust, we will also bear the image of the one of heaven.

If we centre our understanding of the soul on these passages, then we can pull out a concept of soul as a metaphor for one’s “living-ness”. We are currently in a state of dust where the source of our life is external to us and hence we die. But in the resurrection we will transform into a different and unexplainable type of body that is animated by the Spirit of Christ directly. There is then no period of a disembodied state of consciousness, you live as a pre-resurrected body or post-resurrected body. This only becomes stronger when we combine this with Paul’s statement in Colossians 3.3–4: “…for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” The soul can then be better understood as the life one has in their body. It’s helpful language to talk about the fact you are alive and experience things — and that is it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Hebrew Scriptures constantly connect breath with spirit — it’s because they were thought of as one and the same. To breathe is to have a spirit is to be alive.

III. Quickly to touch on the Incarnation — it actually doesn’t matter whether one believes in the soul as a real immaterial property of human beings. The point of the Incarnation is that the Word was somehow united to Jesus of Nazareth in some full way, so we can say God truly became man. We can easily say that the Word was somehow integrated with the physical body and mind of Jesus of Nazareth and our Christology remains in line with the spirit of the council proclamations.

Leaving the Past in the Past

Ancient cosmologies, including the one in the Bible, believed that the Earth was a flat disk with edges and that the realm of the dead was physically located underneath and God and the heavens physically located above. We know now that that’s just obviously untrue based on empirical evidence, but we still say things like “the Sun rises and sets” which are residual language reflecting the perspective of a flat Earth sitting in the centre of the universe with everything orbiting around. But the language of the Sun “rising” and “setting”, or people going “up” or “down” when they die helps us articulate what we mean even though we don’t literally believe in the metaphor. My hope is that this reconfiguring of the notion of “souls” as a metaphor for one’s life can help Christian theology be reconciled to a modern scientific view and leave the antiquated notion of humans possessing a unique immaterial part that is the source and centre of consciousness behind.