So, religion certainly comes with a bevy of confusing questions. We’ve only scratched the surface on this site- Can you have sex in heaven? Why does God feel so insecure that he must have us remind him of his might constantly? Will heaven ever overflow? How can so many religions tout themselves as “the one true religion”? Why does God communicate his message so poorly? And so on. Far from giving people answers and stability in their lives, religion brings confusion and worry.

I had a friend in high school who found one religious question particularly disturbing. His question doesn’t delve into difficult biblical interpretations or complex logical processes. It shouldn’t require a theologian or high-ranking church official to answer. It sounds pretty straightforward, really: “What is the soul?”

This question irked my friend to no end, because no one had an answer. “People can only tell me what it isn’t,” he complained “They can tell me that you can’t see it, feel it, control it, or measure it, they can tell me it is not of this world, they can tell me that it is impossible for me to understand, but they can’t tell me what it actually is.”

I found his complaint intriguing, and decided to undertake the same search as he: to find someone who could explain the concept of the soul. Whenever the term has come up in religious discussion over the past few months, I’ve tried to elicit an answer. Some of the responses I’ve gotten include:

“It’s what part of you goes to heaven.”
“It’s, like, this eternal spirit.”
“It’s your essence, like what makes you, you.”
“It’s God’s spiritual connection with you.”
“It’s like your personality, and your mind, but it can’t die.”
“It’s the most important part of you.”
“It’s this vital part of you that man can’t see or measure, but that you can feel in your heart.”
“Do you even believe in it? If you don’t believe in it, you won’t understand.”

Correct me if I’ve missed something, but these responses all have a few things in common: they use exceedingly vague language, and they don’t make much sense. They often use synonyms for soul, like spirit or essence. And then you have my favorite response of all, the last one, which claims that I can’t understand the existence of a soul unless I believe in it in the first place. But maybe, just maybe, the concept of the soul has a lot more to it than I realize. Perhaps only a religious authority can fully grasp the idea, and I shouldn’t leave defining it to a layperson. With that in mind, I consulted a few online resources:

The Catholic Encyclopedia says: “The soul may be defined as the ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies are animated.”

But, the current Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the soul: “the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God’s image: ’soul’ signifies the spiritual principle in man.”

AskMoses.com says: “A soul is Divine energy. It is existence beyond matter. It is that part of you that exists beyond matter, beyond your body and your five senses.” (Notice that this site commits the crime my friend so often noticed- they tell you traits the soul doesn’t have, rather than the ones it does.)

Aristotle said: “. . . the soul does not exist without a body and yet is not itself a kind of body. For it is not a body, but something which belongs to a body, and for this reason exists in a body, and in a body of such-and-such a kind…”

The Qur’an (66:8, 39:20) calls the soul: “The intangible part of an individual’s existence [that] is “pure” at birth and has the potential of growing and achieving nearness to God if the person leads a righteous life. At death the person’s soul transitions to an eternal afterlife of bliss, peace and unending spiritual growth.” (Wikipedia interpretation)

Wikipedia itself says: “The soul…is a self-aware ethereal substance particular to a unique living being. In these traditions the soul is thought to incorporate the inner essence of each living being, and to be the true basis for sentience.”

For the sake of clarification, I’ll attempt to list what we know about the soul so far:

• We can’t perceive it
• It has some kind of supernatural property. (“Divine”; “Spiritual”; etc)
• Each person has one inside of them.
• It has something to do with a person’s self-identity, their personality, or their mind.
• It (possibly) can leave the body and last forever.

Why don’t we have any certain definition for the soul? What does the Bible say on the matter? As it turns out, we cannot fall back on The Bible for a definition in this case- we can’t rely on The Bible for any information about the soul in fact. As even the Catholic Encyclopedia attests, no word for “soul” existed at the time of Jesus. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the Old English root for the word soul didn’t appear until 971 AD. Wikipedia explains the words used in soul’s place this way:

“The word “soul” did not exist in the times of Jesus, Socrates or Aristotle, and so the quotations, interpretations and translations of the word “soul” from these sources, means that the word should be handled very carefully. One might go as far as saying that the word “soul”, in the sense we use it today, did not exist in Hebrew or Aramaic, but it existed in Greek.

Ancient Greeks typically referred to the soul as psyche (as in modern English psychology). Aristotle’s works in Latin translation, used the word anima (as in animated), which also means “breath”. In the New Testament, the original Greek word used is “Psyche” which in Ancient and Modern Greek means soul…

The Latin root of the related word spirit, like anima, also expresses the idea of “breath”. Likewise, the Biblical Hebrew word for ’soul’ is nephesh, meaning life, or vital breath.”

So it seems that the very understanding of the soul has changed over time. We can’t possibly know what Jesus would have said about the soul, for instance, because the term didn’t even exist in his day. And soul had nothing to do with heavenly essence originally; it just suggested some kind of life force, or maybe the psyche. But psyche and vital breath hardly mean the same thing, either.

So what does soul mean? Can you sell it? Can it become tainted in any way? Do despicable people enter this mortal coil with evil souls? What about conjoined twins- do they have one soul or two? When does the soul enter the body? I suppose it depends on your totally arbitrary definition.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Language, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.