I got (a) soul! But, uh, no rhythm.
Apologetics · Natural Theology
I Got (a) Soul! But, Uh, No Rhythm
What Christianity Really Teaches About the Human Soul
We have shown that God exists, and what reason can tell us about what God is like. Now the question turns around and points at us. What are we?
Everyone senses there is more to a human being than meat. We feel it before beauty, in the weight of a moral choice, in the strange fact that we can wonder about our own existence at all. But what is that "more," and where on earth is it?
That last question, as we are about to see, is the wrong question. And the history of people asking it is instructive.
René Descartes was confident the soul sat in the pineal gland, a small structure deep in the brain, where it pulled the levers of the body from the inside.
Shakespeare, following the medical folklore of his day, put the passions in the spleen.
The implications are comic. If Shakespeare were right, a splenectomy would leave a man passionless. If Descartes were right, the soul is essentially a very small pilot in a very large ship, and we should be able to go find it.
Aristotle is usually thrown onto this pile for "putting the soul in the heart," and that is not fair to him.
Aristotle did think the heart was the body's primary organ rather than the brain. That was a biological mistake, and a forgivable one in the fourth century BC.
But on the metaphysics he was exactly right, and it is his book De Anima that gives us the framework the Church still uses. Aristotle did not think the soul was located anywhere, because he did not think the soul was a thing in a place at all. Descartes made a category error. Aristotle made a lab error. These are not the same, and the difference is the whole subject of this article.
Here is the most important paragraph on this page, and the place where most popular Christian writing on the soul goes wrong, including an earlier version of this very article.
Every material thing is a union of matter (what it is made of) and form (what makes it that kind of thing rather than a heap). The form is not a separate ingredient sitting inside the matter. It is the organizing principle of the whole.
The human soul is the substantial form of a human body. So asking "where is the soul?" is like asking which part of the statue the shape is in, or where in the poem the meaning is kept. It is not in a part. It is the principle of the whole.
This is why the Church condemned the idea that the soul is merely attached to the body. The Council of Vienne (1312) taught that the rational soul is truly, of itself, and essentially the form of the human body. Not a tenant. The form.
Take this seriously and much falls into place. You do not have a body. You are a body, and also a soul, and these are not two things stapled together but one living human being. Your hands are not tools your soul reaches through. They are your hands. When you are hungry, you are hungry, not your body while your soul looks on.
Christianity is the most stubbornly bodily religion there is. God took a body. He rose in a body. He feeds us with His Body. And He promises us our bodies back. None of that makes sense if the body is a costume.
In this tradition, "soul" (anima) simply means the principle of life, whatever makes a living thing alive rather than inert. So a dandelion has a soul. This is not a compliment to the dandelion; it is a definition. What matters is what kind.
Powers of nourishment, growth, and reproduction. A sunflower turns toward the light and a root drives toward water, but nothing in there is aware of anything.
Everything above, plus sensation, appetite, memory, and emotion. A dog knows its master, feels fear, remembers the vet. This is real cognition and we should not sneer at it.
But note precisely what it grasps: particulars. This bone. That threat. My master. It never rises to boneness.
Everything above, plus two powers that change everything: intellect and will.
Your five senses have been called the five gates to the fortress of the mind, and through them pours the warmth of sun, the smell of bread, the crunch of its crust. All of that is particular, and animals have it too.
But you also think about justice. About triangularity. About infinity, being, nothingness, God. Not this just act, but justice itself. You grasp universals, and no scalpel, microscope, or scanner will ever find one, because they are not made of anything.
It is not enough to assert that the soul is immaterial and therefore survives. That is the conclusion. Here is the argument (ST I, Q.75, A.6), and it is tighter than most people expect.
- The intellect grasps universals: justice, triangularity, being. These are immaterial. A universal has no size, no location, no weight, no color. "Triangle" is not somewhere.
- A thing acts according to the way it exists. Whatever operates immaterially must exist immaterially. You cannot get an immaterial operation out of a purely material power, any more than you can get sight out of an ear.
- Therefore the intellect is an immaterial power. It is not simply the brain performing brain-things, because no arrangement of matter, however clever, is a universal or grasps one as universal.
- A power belongs to a subject. An immaterial power requires a subject that is not wholly dependent on matter for its own existence. Such a subject is called subsistent: it can exist in its own right.
- Therefore the rational soul is subsistent. Unlike the plant and animal soul, it does not merely ride on the body's existence. It has its own.
- Now, what makes a thing perish? Corruption is dissolution into parts. A body dies because its parts come apart. But the soul, being immaterial, has no parts to come apart.
- Therefore the rational soul cannot corrupt. It is immortal, and not by wishful thinking but by what it is.
This is not special pleading for humans. It explains the difference. The dandelion's soul and the dog's soul perish because every single thing they do is done by a bodily organ. Take away the organ and there is nothing left to act, and so nothing left to be.
The human soul survives for exactly one reason: it performs an operation that no organ can perform. Immortality is not a bonus prize awarded to our species. It is the direct consequence of the fact that you can think about justice.
And now the move that separates Catholic teaching from Plato, from the Gnostics, and from every spirituality that treats the body as a shell to be shed. It is a sentence of Aquinas that ought to be far more famous than it is.
Anima mea non est ego.
"My soul is not me."
Commentary on 1 Corinthians 15
Read that again, because it is startling. Aquinas has just spent an enormous effort proving the soul is immortal, and now he tells you the immortal soul is not the person.
And it follows necessarily from everything above. If you are a body-soul composite, one substance, then a soul without a body is not a complete human being. It is a human being in a maimed, unnatural, violently incomplete state. It persists, it knows, it is conscious, it is with God or apart from Him. But Matthew is not a ghost. Matthew is a man, and a man has hands.
This is why the resurrection of the body is not an optional extra bolted onto Christianity. It is the necessary completion of what a human person is.
Plato would have found the resurrection appalling: why would a liberated soul want back into the prison? Gnostics said matter was the problem. Every "we're really just spirits having a human experience" spirituality says the same thing more gently.
Christianity says the exact opposite. Heaven is not the soul escaping the body. Heaven is the whole person, body and soul, restored and glorified. That is why we confess "I look forward to the resurrection of the dead" and not "I look forward to getting out of here." The body is not the cage. The body is you.
"I think I can, I think I can," says the little engine. Only a human being can say something stranger: "I think I should." And, later and more painfully, "I did, and I shouldn't have."
The will follows the intellect. Because you can know the good in the abstract, and not merely be drawn by this or that pleasant thing, you can choose among goods. An animal pursues what appeals to it. A man can turn down what appeals to him for the sake of something he judges better. That is freedom.
"If our wills are not free, then counsels, exhortations, precepts, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain." Every time you advise a friend, pass a law, praise a hero, or blame a villain, you have already assumed free will. The determinist cannot even scold you for disagreeing with him.
The Will Always Seeks the Good
Here is a subtle and liberating point. You cannot will evil as evil. The will is by nature ordered to the good, and nothing is ever chosen except under some aspect of goodness, real or apparent.
The thief does not want badness. He wants money, which is a real good, pursued in a disordered way. The adulterer wants love and pleasure, which are real goods, sought where they do not belong. Every sin is a good thing wanted wrongly. Evil has no positive existence of its own; it is a privation, a lack of a good that ought to be there, the way blindness is not a thing but the absence of sight.
Which means that even in your worst moments, you were reaching for something real, and reaching badly. And it means that the restlessness underneath every wrong desire is a restlessness for God, who is Goodness itself, misdirected. As St. Augustine put it: our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.
Freedom Behaves Like a Muscle
Choose well and choosing well gets easier; this is what a virtue is, a stable disposition worn into the soul by repetition. Choose badly and choosing badly gets easier; this is what a vice is. Freedom is not a switch that stays in the same position forever. It is a capacity that grows or wastes according to use.
This is why the Church has never treated education as mere information transfer, but as formation. A well-formed intellect makes the good easier to see, and what you cannot see, you cannot choose.
Here is where most Christian answers reach for a bad analogy: "the soul plays the body like a musician plays a violin." Do not use it. That is Descartes's ghost in the machine, and it concedes the whole game by making you a spirit that operates a machine.
The Thomist gives a stronger answer, and a stranger one: we predicted this.
On the Catholic view, the intellect in this life is entirely dependent on the senses and the imagination for its raw material. Nothing gets into the intellect that did not come first through the body. So brain damage must disrupt thought, because the images the intellect works on are supplied by bodily powers. A man with a damaged brain is not a soul trapped behind a broken window; he is a wounded human being, and the wound is his.
So correlation between brain states and thoughts is exactly what hylomorphism expects. It is not evidence against us. It is the position.
The question neuroscience has not touched, and cannot touch with its instruments, is a different one: how does any arrangement of matter grasp a universal? Show me the neuron that is triangularity itself, rather than a representation of some particular triangle. Not a smaller one. Not a faster one. That gap is not a gap in our data. It is a gap in kind.
Animals are far cleverer than the old textbooks allowed, and Catholics should say so cheerfully. We are animals, and we should not be embarrassed about it.
But the claim is not that we are smarter. It is that we do something categorically different. Animal cognition, however impressive, operates on particulars: this tool, that fish, my offspring. A crow solves this problem.
No animal, ever, has contemplated justice in the abstract, asked whether being is univocal, wondered what happens after death, or argued about whether it has a soul. You are doing that right now. That is not a higher score on the same test. It is a different test.
Follow the metaphysics and the answer follows. If the soul is the substantial form of the body, and not a passenger who boards later, then a living human organism has a human soul for as long as it is a living human organism. There is no moment when a human body is present but unformed by a human soul, because without a human soul it would not be a human body. It would be something else, or nothing at all.
This is why the metaphysics is not an academic hobby. Get the account of the human person right, and the ethics are not a separate argument you have to win afterward. They are already implied.
- Human dignity is immeasurable, and it is not earned. It rests on what you are, a rational creature made in God's image, not on what you can do, produce, or contribute. Which means it cannot be revoked by illness, age, disability, or usefulness. (Note: "immeasurable," not "infinite." As we saw last time, only God is infinite. A creature's worth is beyond price without being unbounded.)
- Your choices are writing something permanent. Not because God keeps a ledger, but because every act shapes the soul that will endure. You are becoming someone.
- Your body is not your equipment. It is you. How you treat it, feed it, use it, and offer it is not a side issue in the spiritual life. It is the spiritual life, because there is no other you to have one.
- Death is real, and it is an amputation. Catholics do not say "she is in a better place" as though the body were an inconvenience finally shed. Death tears apart what God joined. It is an enemy. And it is a defeated enemy, which is a different thing from a friend.
- You are made for God, and you cannot help it. The intellect is built for truth and the will for goodness, and only Infinite Truth and Goodness will finally satisfy either. Everything else you have ever chased was a rehearsal.
Looking Ahead
We have now reached, by reason alone, three conclusions: God exists. God is infinite, simple, one, and perfectly good. And you are a rational animal with an immortal soul, made for Him.
Notice the shape of the problem this leaves us with. Here is an infinite God, and here is a finite creature built to know Him, with no natural means of doing so beyond the faint outline reason can trace. The gap is not small, and we cannot cross it from our side.
Which raises the only remaining question, and it is the hinge of everything: has God spoken? And if He has, how would we tell the difference between a real revelation and a counterfeit?
That is where we go next.
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