On the Soul and the Elements, or, Farewell to the Tripartite Anthropology, Part I

Last updated on: April 23, 2013 at 2:53 pm by Aidan Kelly

On the Soul and the Elements, or, Farewell to the Tripartite Anthropology, Part I 2013-04-23T14:53:25-07:00 Aidan Kelly

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“Tripartite Anthropology” is a standard, although pompous, name for the concept held by the pre-Socratic philosophers 2500 years ago (and no doubt by people long before then) that humans consist of body, soul, and spirit. Using those terms now is as inadequate for our times as using Empedocles’ four-element model would be for doing chemistry. We do have a physical body, obviously. The problem is with the other two terms.

People now use the terms “soul” and “spirit” more or less interchangeably, but for the Greeks they were distinct. The Greek for “body” is soma, for “soul” is psyche, and for “spirit” is pneuma. Psyche also meant “mind” (as in psychology) or “personality”. Pneuma actually meant “air” (as in pneumatic), as did the Latin anima and the Hebrew ruach, which is what God blew into Adam to animate him.

Back then, these terms were used to explain the difference between life and death: Body plus soul is alive; body minus soul is dead. In Greek, soma plus psyche plus pneuma was the living person; soma lacking psyche and/or pneuma was a dead person. We do not now need that sort of concept to explain the difference between live and dead bodies. We explain it instead by the concept of process. Actually, Herakleitos understood the concept of process quite well. That is what he meant when he wrote Panta rhei, “All things flow,” as well as his “You cannot step twice into the same river.”

It has taken quite a while for the concept of “process” to become the basis for biology. It wasn’t long ago that someone tried weighing people as they died, in order to find out how much the soul weighed. What we understand now is that life is a process comprising a hierarchy of processes; our bodies must continually change in order to stay the same. In fact, after seven years, every molecule in our bodies has been replaced. For that reason, my dear friends Larry and Catherine Shaw have renewed their marriage vows every seven years since 1963, when I had the honor and pleasure of writing a Goddess wedding ritual for them.

There is no “soul” that leaves the body at the moment of death. Instead, at that moment the processes of life end and the processes of decay begin. But, of course, we are not just physical bodies that can be described completely in terms of the laws of science. I know there are fundamentalists (Humanists, largely) who devoutly believe we can be thus described. They also tend to believe that human consciousness and thinking can ultimately be duplicated by computers (that’s the quest for “artificial intelligence”) and that consciousness cannot exist except within a human (or at least mammalian) brain. A person can hold such beliefs only by denying the existence of the facts to the contrary, on the assumption that denial is an adequate explanation. And of course such people always, these days, call themselves “scientists.” I will now cease wasting your time and mine on snarkiness.

In order to deal with the eternal issue of “life after death,” we will do better to consider the other meaning of psyche, that is, “mind” or “personality” (not butterfly; that’s a different story) or, more broadly, “consciousness.” In other words, since there is no “soul” that survives death, is there any aspect of ourselves that might? In yet other words, the actual question is always, “If something survives death, would that something still be me, my self-awareness of myself as a person who is different from all other persons?” The proposal in some Eastern philosophies that the something melts into the substrate of reality and is no longer a distinct, separate, self-aware entity is definitely not attractive to the Western mentality. Perhaps the Western traditions value individuality more than some Eastern traditions do. One thread in the Jewish scriptures is the idea that God calls us each by name, that is, values us as distinct individuals; I believe this is connected to the Jewish saying that “To take a human life is to destroy the entire universe.”

Obviously there is not now and perhaps never will be a definitive answer to that question of “Will I, the real me, somehow survive death?” I can offer here only my own experience, from my own Awakening at age 14: in that moment of bliss, I was aware that I was simultaneously, paradoxically, incomprehensibly both myself and yet not different from the vast caring person I was immersed in. I suppose that knowledge is a corollary of the conclusion, reached by the pre-Socratic philosophers 2500 years ago, that the ultimate reality needs to be simultaneously One and Many.

Just in case you don’t get that, let me summarize their reasoning. They said, suppose the ultimate reality is just a Oneness. Then why is there so much diversity? Why isn’t our cosmos just a homogeneous blob like a sea of mud? On the other hand, if our cosmos is formed out of the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, why doesn’t it fall apart into four separate universes, each consisting entirely of just one element? They concluded that a Oneness must be holding the Manyness together, that the ultimate reality, the “Zeus,” must be both One and Many.

Perhaps someone else might experience an Awakening quite differently from me, might see and hear and feel in utterly other ways, but I conjecture from my experience that in the reality we can almost never be consciously be aware of, we are each simultaneously ourselves and inseparable from that compassionate consciousness I felt. Further,our paradoxical twofold nature need not be experienced only after death. Instead, I know—and this is what makes me a Gnostic—that any person can fall into that bliss and yet be given themselves back, now with total freedom, simply by letting go absolutely and allowing that to happen. “Pride” is the traditional name for our inability to just let go; the “mystics” figured that out centuries ago.

None of this should be hot news. Kant deduced about two centuries ago that our concept of ourselves as being different from God is not an objective reality, but instead is one of the a priori assumptions built into our consciousness—but, I know, who reads Kant these days?

The point I want to make here is to challenge you, dear reader, to consciously, purposely, and stubbornly stop using the word “soul.” It is obsolete. If you use it, you might as well be assuming that the Earth is flat, that the Sun revolves around the Earth, that the stars are points of light on a crystal sphere that surrounds our solar system. If you use it, you are not dealing with reality—and that’s a common-sense definition of mental illness. If you use it, you are contributing to maintaining the endemic mental illness of most people. Is that an exaggeration? Unfortunately, it is not.

Next, or soon, I will deal similarly with the word “Heaven.” More will be revealed. (And I must thank my old friend Robert Mattheisen for assuring me he thinks what I’m doing with these blogs is important. Myself, I don’t know. I hope he’s right.)

Previous Post

April 16, 2013

How I Learned to Be Psychic

Next Post

April 29, 2013 Empower the True Muslims;They Are Hope for Humanity

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Gnostics Pagan Paganism Poetry Social Justice Theology Uncategorized Witches

Select a Month August 2018 April 2018 February 2018 January 2018 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 November 2015 September 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 September 2014 August 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz