relation to the system they were opposing. By assigning a literal
divinity to a certain small aristocracy of souls, Gnosticism set
aside the doctrine of Creation and the whole Christian idea of God’s
relation to man. On the other side, by its extreme dualism of matter
and spirit, and its denial to matter (i.e. the flesh) of all
capacity for spiritual influences, it involved the rejection of
cardinal doctrines like the Resurrection of the Body and even of the
Incarnation itself in any proper sense. The orthodox teacher had to
emphasize:
the soul’s distinction from God and subjection to Him;
its affinities with matter.
The two converse truths — those of the soul’s affinity with the
Divine nature and its radical distinction from matter, were apt to
be obscured in comparison. It was only afterwards and very
gradually, with the development of the doctrine of grace, with the
fuller recognition of the supernatural order as such, and the
realization of the Person and Office of the Holy Spirit, that the
various errors connected with the pneuma ceased to be a
stumbling-block to Christian psychology. Indeed, similar errors have
accompanied almost every subsequent form of heterodox Illuminism and
Mysticism.
Tertullian’s treatise “De Anima” has been called the first Christian
classic on psychology proper. The author aims to show the failure of
all philosophies to elucidate the nature of the soul, and argues
eloquently that Christ alone can teach mankind the truth on such
subjects. His own doctrine, however, is simply the refined
Materialism of the Stoics, supported by arguments from medicine and
physiology and by ingenious interpretations of Scripture, in which
the unavoidable materialism of language is made to establish a
metaphysical Materialism. Tertullian is the founder of the theory of
Traducianism, which derives the rational soul ex traduce, i.e. by
procreation from the soul of the parent. For Tertullian this was a
necessary consequence of Materialism. Later writers found in the
doctrine a convenient explanation of the transmission of original
sin. St. Jerome says that in his day it was the common theory in the
West. Theologians have long abandoned it, however, in favour of
Creationism, as it seems to compromise the spirituality of the soul.
Origen taught the pre-existence of the soul. Terrestrial life is a
punishment and a remedy for prenatal sin. “Soul” is properly
degraded spirit: flesh is a condition of alienation and bondage (cf.
Comment. ad Rom., i, 18). Spirit, however, finite spirit, can exist
only in a body, albeit of a glorious and ethereal nature.
Neo-Platonism, which through St. Augustine contributed so much to
spiritual philosophy, belongs to this period. Like Gnosticism, it
uses emanations. The primeval and eternal One begets by emanation
nous (intelligence); and from nous in turn springs psyche (soul),
which is the image of nous, but distinct from it. Matter is a still
later emanation. Soul has relations to both ends of the scale of
reality, and its perfection lies in turning towards the Divine Unity
from which it came. In everything, the neo-Platonist recognized the
absolute primacy of the soul with respect to the body. Thus, the
mind is always active, even in sense — perception — it is only the
body that is passively affected by external stimuli. Similarly
Plotinus prefers to say that the body is in the soul rather than
vice versa: and he seems to have been the first to conceive the
peculiar manner of the soul’s location as an undivided and universal
presence pervading the organism (tota in toto et tota in singulis
partibus). It is impossible to give more than a very brief notice of
the psychology of St. Augustine. His contributions to every branch
of the science were immense; the senses, the emotions, imagination,
memory, the will, and the intellect — he explored them all, and
there is scarcely any subsequent development of importance that he
did not forestall. He is the founder of the introspective method.
Noverim Te, noverim me was an intellectual no less than a devotional
aspiration with him. The following are perhaps the chief points for
our present purpose:
he opposes body and soul on the ground of the irreducible
distinction of thought and extension (cf. DESCARTES). St.
Augustine, however, lays more stress on the volitional activities
than did the French Idealists.
As against the Manichaeans he always asserts the worth and dignity
of the body. Like Aristotle he makes the soul the final cause of
the body. As God is the Good or Summum Bonum of the soul, so is
the soul the good of the body.
The origin of the soul is perhaps beyond our ken. He never
definitely decided between Traducianism and Creationism.
As regards spirituality, he is everywhere most explicit, but it is
interesting as an indication of the futile subtleties current at
the time to find him warning a friend against the controversy on
the corporeality of the soul, seeing that the term “corpus” was
used in so many different senses. “Corpus, non caro” is his own
description of the angelic body.
Medieval psychology prior to the Aristotelean revival was affected
by neo-Platonism, Augustinianism, and mystical influences derived
from the works of pseudo-Dionysius. This fusion produced sometimes,
notably in Scotus Eriugena, a pantheistic theory of the soul. All
individual existence is but the development of the Divine life, in
which all things are destined to be resumed. The Arabian
commentators, Averroes and Avicenna, had interpreted Aristotle’s
psychology in a pantheistic sense. St. Thomas, with the rest of the
Schoolmen, amends this portion of the Aristotelean tradition,
accepting the rest with no important modifications. St. Thomas’s
doctrine is briefly as follows:
the rational soul, which is one with the sensitive and vegetative
principle, is the form of the body. This was defined as of faith
by the Council of Vienne of 1311;
the soul is a substance, but an incomplete substance, i. e. it has
a natural aptitude and exigency for existence in the body, in
conjunction with which it makes up the substantial unity of human
nature;
though connaturally related to the body, it is itself absolutely
simple, i.e. of an unextended and spiritual nature. It is not
wholly immersed in matter, its higher operations being
intrinsically independent of the organism;
the rational soul is produced by special creation at the moment
when the organism is sufficiently developed to receive it. In the
first stage of embryonic development, the vital principle has
merely vegetative powers; then a sensitive soul comes into being,
educed from the evolving potencies of the organism — later yet,
this is replaced by the perfect rational soul, which is
essentially immaterial and so postulates a special creative act.
Many modern theologians have abandoned this last point of St.
Thomas’s teaching, and maintain that a fully rational soul is
infused into the embryo at the first moment of its existence.
THE SOUL IN MODERN THOUGHT
Modern speculations respecting the soul have taken two main
directions, Idealism and Materialism. Agnosticism need not be
reckoned as a third and distinct answer to the problem, since, as a
matter of fact, all actual agnosticisms have an easily recognized
bias towards one or other of the two solutions aforesaid. Both
Idealism and Materialism in present-day philosophy merge into
Monism, which is probably the most influential system outside the
Catholic Church.
History
Descartes conceived the soul as essentially thinking (i.e.
conscious) substance, and body as essentially extended substance.
The two are thus simply disparate realities, with no vital
connection between them. This is significantly marked by his theory
of the soul’s location in the body. Unlike the Scholastics he
confines it to a single point — the pineal gland — from which it
is supposed to control the various organs and muscles through the
medium of the “animal spirits”, a kind of fluid circulating through
the body. Thus, to say the least, the soul’s biological functions
are made very remote and indirect, and were in fact later on reduced
almost to a nullity: the lower life was violently severed from the
higher, and regarded as a simple mechanism. In the Cartesian theory
animals are mere automata. It is only by the Divine assistance that
action between soul and body is possible. The Occasionalists went
further, denying all interaction whatever, and making the
correspondence of the two sets of facts a pure result of the action
of God. The Leibnizian theory of Pre-established Harmony similarly
refuses to admit any inter-causal relation. The superior monad
(soul) and the aggregate of inferior monads which go to make up the
body are like two clocks constructed with perfect art so as always
to agree. They register alike, but independently: they are still two
clocks, not one. This awkward Dualism was entirely got rid of by
Spinoza. For him there is but one, infinite substance, of which
thought and extension are only attributes. Thought comprehends
extension, and by that very fact shows that it is at root one with
that which it comprehends. The alleged irreducible distinction is
transcended: soul and body are neither of them substances, but each
is a property of the one substance. Each in its sphere is the
counterpart of the other. This is the meaning of the definition,
“Soul is the Idea of Body”. Soul is the counterpart within the
sphere of the attribute of thought of that particular mode of the
attribute of extension which we call the body. Such was the fate of
Cartesianism.
English Idealism had a different course. Berkeley had begun by
denying the existence of material substance, which he reduced merely
to a series of impressions in the sentient mind. Mind is the only
substance. Hume finished the argument by dissolving mind itself into
its phenomena, a loose collection of “impressions and ideas”. The
Sensist school (Condillac etc.) and the Associationists (Hartley,
the Mills, and Bain) continued in similar fashion to regard the mind
as constituted by its phenomena or “states”, and the growth of
modern positive psychology has tended to encourage this attitude.
But to rest in Phenomenalism as a theory is impossible, as its
ablest advocates themselves have seen. Thus J.S. Mill, while
describing the mind as merely “a series [i.e. of conscious
phenomena] aware of itself as a series”, is forced to admit that
such a conception involves an unresolved paradox. Again, W. James’s
assertion that “the passing thought is itself the Thinker”, which
“appropriates” all past thoughts in the “stream of consciousness”,
simply blinks the question. For surely there is something which in
its turn “appropriates” the passing thought itself and the entire
stream of past and future thoughts as well, viz. the self-conscious,
self-asserting “I” the substantial ultimate of our mental life. To
be in this sense “monarch of all it surveys” in introspective
observation and reflective self-consciousness, to appropriate
without itself being appropriated by anything else, to be the
genuine owner of a certain limited section of reality (the stream of
consciousness), this is to be a free and sovereign (though finite)
personality, a self-conscious, spiritual substance in the language
of Catholic metaphysics.
Criticism
The foregoing discussion partly anticipates our criticism of
Materialism (q. v.). The father of modern Materialism is Hobbes, who
accepted the theory of Epicurus, and reduced all spirits either to
phantoms of the imagination or to matter in a highly rarefied state.
This theory need not detain us here. Later Materialism has three
main sources:
Newtonian physics, which taught men to regard matter, not as inert
and passive, but as instinct with force. Why should not life and
consciousness be among its unexplored potencies? (Priestley,
Tyndall, etc.) Tyndall himself provides the answer admitting that
the chasm that separates psychical facts from material phenomena
is “intellectually impassable”. Writers, therefore, who make
thought a mere “secretion of the brain” or a “phosphorescence” of
its substance (Vogt, Moleschott) may be simply ignored. In reply
to the more serious Materialism, spiritualist philosophers need
only re-assert the admissions of the Materialists themselves, that
there is an impassable chasm between the two classes of facts.
Psychophysics, it is alleged, shows the most minute dependence of
mind-functions upon brain-states. The two orders of facts are
therefore perfectly continuous, and, though they may be
superficially different yet they must be after all radically one.
Mental phenomena may be styled an epiphenomenon or byproduct of
material force (Huxley). The answer is the same as before. There
is no analogy for an epiphenomenon being separated by an
“impassable chasm” from the causal series to which it belongs. The
term is, in fact, a mere verbal subterfuge. The only sound
principle in such arguments is the principle that essential or
“impassable” distinctions in the effect can be explained only by
similar distinctions in the cause. This is the principle on which
Dualism as we have explained it, rests. Merely to find relations,
however close, between mental and physiological facts does not
advance us an inch towards transcending this Dualism. It only
enriches and fills out our concept of it. The mutual
compenetration of soul and body in their activities is just what
Catholic philosophy (anticipating positive science) had taught for
centuries. Man is two and one, a divisible but a vital unity.
Evolutionism endeavours to explain the origin of the soul from
merely material forces. Spirit is not the basis and principle;
rather it is the ultimate efflorescence of the Cosmos. If we ask
then “what was the original basis out of which spirit and all
things arose?” we are told it was the Unknowable (Spencer). This
system must be treated as Materialistic Monism. The answer to it
is that, as the outcome of the Unknowable has a spiritual
character, the Unknowable itself (assuming its reality) must be
spiritual.
As regards monistic systems generally, it belongs rather to
cosmology to discuss them. We take our stand on the consciousness of
individual personality, which consciousness is a distinct
deliverance of our very highest faculties, growing more and more
explicit with the strengthening of our moral and intellectual being.
This consciousness is emphatic, as against the figments of a
fallaciously abstract reason, in asserting the self-subsistence (and
at the same time the finitude) of our being, i.e. it declares that
we are independent inasmuch as we are truly persons or selves, not
mere attributes or adjectives, while at the same time, by exhibiting
our manifold limitations, it directs us to a higher Cause on which
our being depends.
Such is the Catholic doctrine on the nature, unity, substantiality,
spirituality, and origin of the soul. It is the only system
consistent with Christian faith, and, we may add, morals, for both
Materialism and Monism logically cut away the foundations of these.
The foregoing historical sketch will have served also to show
another advantage it possesses — namely, that it is by far the most
comprehensive, and at the same time discriminating, syntheseis of
whatever is best in rival systems. It recognizes the physical
conditions of the soul’s activity with the Materialist, and its
spiritual aspect with the Idealist, while with the Monist it insists
on the vital unity of human life. It enshrines the principles of
ancient speculation, and is ready to receive and assimilate the
fruits of modern research.
MICHAEL MAHER AND JOSEPH BOLAND
Transcribed by Tomas Hancil and Joseph P. Thomas
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIV
Copyright ? 1912 by Robert Appleton Company
Online Edition Copyright ? 1999 by Kevin Knight
Nihil Obstat, July 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor
Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
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