Soul

Miracles 4.1 Soul -- one of four hard words.

Man is a rational animal, and therefore a composite being, partly akin to the angels who are rational but--on the later, scholastic view--not animal, and partly akin to the beasts which are animal but not rational. This gives us one of the senses in which he is the 'little world' or microcosm. Every mode of being in the whole universe contributes to him; he is a cross-section of being. As Gregory the Great (540-604) says, 'because man has existence (//esse//) in common with stones, life with trees, and understanding (//discernere//) with angels, he is rightly called by the name of the world'. This is almost exactly reproduced by Alanus, Jean de Meung, and Gower.

Rational Soul, which gives man his peculiar position, is not the only kind of soul. There are also Sensitive Soul and Vegetable Soul. The powers of Vegetable Soul are nutrition, growth and propagation. It alone is present in plants. Sensitive Soul, which we find in animals, has these powers but has sentience in addition. It thus includes and goes beyond Vegetable Soul, so that a beast can be said to have two levels of soul, Sensitive and Vegetable, or a double soul, or even--though misleadingly--two souls. Rational Soul similarly includes Vegetable and Sensitive, and adds reason. As Trevisa (1398), translating the thirteenth-century //De Propriefatibus Rerum// of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, puts it, there are 'thre manere soulis... //vegetabilis// that geveth lif and no feling, //sensibilis// that geveth lif and feling and nat resoun, //racionalis// that geveth lif, feling, and resoun'. The poets sometimes allow themselves to talk as if man had, not a three-storied soul, but three souls. Donne, claiming that the Vegetable Soul by which he grows, the Sensitive Soul by which he sees, and the Rational Soul by which he understands, are all equally delighted in the beloved, says; all my souls bee Emparadis'd in you (in Whom alone I understand, and grow, and see). (A //Valediction of My Name//, 25.)

But this is merely a trope. Donne knows he has only one soul, which, being Rational, includes the Sensitive and the Vegetable.

The Rational Soul is sometimes called simply 'Reason', and the Sensitive Soul simply 'Sensuality'. This is the sense of these words when the Parson in Chaucer says, 'God sholde have lordschipe over reson and reson over sensualite, and sensualite over the body of man' (I. 262).

All three kinds of soul are immaterial. The soul--as we should say, the 'life'--of a tree or herb is not a part of it which could be found by dissection; nor is a man's Rational Soul in that sense a 'part' of the man. And all soul, like every other substance, is created by God. The peculiarity of Rational Soul is that it is created in each case by the immediate act of God, whereas other things mostly come into existence by developments and transmutations within the total created order. Genesis ii. 7 is no doubt the source for this; but Plato had also set the creation of man apart from creation in general.

The soul's turning to God is often treated in the poets as a returning and therefore one more instance of 'kindly enclyning'. Hence Chaucer's 'Repeireth hoom from worldly vanitee' in //Troilus//, v, 1837, or Deguileville's To Him of verray ryht certeyn

Thou must resorte and tourne ageyn

As by moeving natural. (//Pilgrimage//, trans. Lydgate, 12,262 sq.)

Such passages perhaps reflect nothing more than the doctrine of man's special and immediate creation by God; but it is hard to be sure. The doctrine of pre-existence (in some better world than this) was firmly rejected in the scholastic age. The 'inconvenience' of making the Rational Soul begin to exist only when the body begins to exist and also holding that it existed after the body's death, was palliated by the reminder that death--one of those 'two things that were never made'--had no place in the original creation. it is not the soul's nature to leave the body; rather, the body (disnatured by the Fall) deserts the soul. But in the Seminal Period and the earlier Middle Ages the Platonic belief that we had lived before we were incarnate on earth, still hung in the air. Chalcidius had preserved what Plato says about this in //Phaedrus// 245. He had also preserved //Timaeus// 35a and 41d. These very difficult passages may not really imply the pre-existence of the individual soul, but they could easily be thought to do so. Origen held that all those souls which now animate human bodies were created at the same time as the angels and had long existed before their terrestrial birth. Even St Augustine, in a passage quoted by Aquinas, entertains, subject to revision, the view that Adam's soul was already in existence while his body still 'slept in its causes'. The full Platonic doctrine seems to be implied--with what philosophic seriousness I do not know--by Bernardus Silvestris when Noys sees in Heaven countless souls weeping because they will soon have to descend from that splendor into these glooms.

At the Renaissance the recovery of the Platonic //corpus// and the revival of Platonism re-awoke the doctrine. It is taken with full seriousness by Ficino and, later, by Henry More. Whether Spenser in the //Hymne of Beautie// (197 sq.) or in the Garden of Adonis (F.Q. III, vi, 33) has more than a poetic half-belief in it, may be doubted. Thomas Browne, not venturing on the doctrine, would gladly retain the flavour of it: 'though it looks but like an imaginary kind of existency to be before we are', yet to have pre-existed eternally in the divine foreknowledge 'is somewhat more than a non-entity' (Christian Morals). Vaughan's //Retreate// and even Wordsworth's //Ode// have been diversely interpreted. Only with the late nineteenth century and the Theosophists does pre-existence--now envisaged as the 'wisdom of the East'--recover a foothold in Europe. //The Discarded Image//, chapter 7, Section C Human Soul, paragraphs 1-8