On souls
May 13th 2010 00:33
I've written on this before, but here it is again...
The problem of "grace" is that Christians can't tell you what the word means. Does it mean forgiveness? Benevolence? Generosity? Gift? Courtesy? Power? Mercy? Goodness? ... It seems unparaphrasable, perhaps in similar fashion to "time", which doesn't seem expressible in terms of concepts that don't presuppose it.
The Christian knows this difficulty, recognizes "grace" as something mysterious, realizes it's hard to grasp intellectually. But he/she also feels that "grace" is meaningful. So when they say "by the grace of God", they mean something, not nothing; and the propositions that are asserted whilst using the word have significance for other propositions, are related to them.
Almost as if "grace" means something within the discourse of Christianity, but doesn't mean anything outside it.
In The man who mistook his wife for a hat (1985), Oliver Sacks describes a number of patients with Korsakov's Syndrome, which is basically like loss of the ability to create short-term memories -- think "Memento".
"One tended to speak of him, instinctively, as a spiritual casualty -- a 'lost soul': was it possible that he had really been 'de-souled' by a disease? 'Do you think he has a soul?' I once asked the Sisters. They were outraged by my question, but could see why I asked it. 'Watch Jimmie in chapel,' they said, 'and judge for yourself.'
I did, and I was moved, profoundly moved and impressed, because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before in him or conceived him capable of. I watched him kneel and take the Sacrament on his tongue, and could not doubt the fullness and totality of Communion, the perfect alignment of his spirit with the spirit of the Mass. Fully, intensely, quietly, in the quietude of absolute concentration and attention, he entered and partook of the Holy Communion. He was wholly held, absorbed, by a feeling. There was no forgetting, no Korsakov's then, nor did it seem possible or imaginable that there should be...
Clearly Jimmie found himself, found continuity and reality, in the absoluteness of spiritual attention and act. The sisters were right -- he did find his soul there. And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: 'A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being".
In contrast, another patient with Korsakov's presented as a "confabulator" -- he continuously made up stories, and talked on and on...
"This strikes everyone who has been in contact with him for any time -- that under his fluency, even his frenzy, is a strange loss of feeling -- that feeling, or judgement, which distinguishes between 'real' and 'unreal', 'true' and 'untrue'... important and trivial, relevant or irrelevant. What comes out, torrentially, in his ceaseless confabulation, has, finally, a peculiar quality of indifference... as if it didn't really matter what he said, or what anyone else did or said; as if nothing really mattered any more...
It was this which convinced me, above everything, that there was some ultimate and total loss of inner reality, of feeling and meaning, of soul, in William -- and led me to ask the Sisters, as I had asked them of Jimmie G., 'Do you think William has a soul? Or has he been pithed, scooped-out, de-souled, by disease?'
This time, however, they looked worried by my question, as if something of the sort were already in their minds: they could not say, 'Judge for yourself. See Willie in Chapel'... There is an utter pathos, a sad sense of lostness, with Jimmie G. which one does not feel, or feel directly, with the effervescent Mr Thompson. Jimmie has moods, and a sort of brooding (or, at least, yearning) sadness, a depth, a soul, which does not seem to be present in Mr Thompson. Doubtless, as the Sisters said, he had a soul, an immortal soul, in the theological sense; could be seen, and loved, as an individual by the Almighty; but, they agreed, something very disquieting had happened to him, to his spirit, his character, in the ordinary, human sense."
So, Sacks uses the word "soul" to mean something like "person", "essence of being a person", and desmonstrates use of the word even with theology removed.
Stephen T Asma, in a recent article, I think rehabilitates soul talk in terms of both the above ideas -- that "soul", like "grace", can be meaningful in terms of a particular discourse; and that there's plenty to the word beyond the notion of spiritual substance.
Perhaps "God", "karma", "heaven" can be similarly redeemed.
"[T]he sentences 'James Brown has soul' and 'My soul is anchored in the Lord' rely on a very different system of meaning -- they don't correspond to anything particularly. Instead they take their meaning from a coherence they have with other terms, concepts, values, connotations, and associations. 'This song has soul' means: This music restores us, this music has integrity, there's something authentic and natural in its style, this music contains strong emotion, the repetition is hypnotic or ecstatic, there are elements of the African-American experience in this music and these lyrics, this song draws on gospel and R&B genres, this song is so funky you can smell it, and so on. That is the matrix of connotations that make up the context of soul talk -- and the soul talk is coherent to the extent that it coheres in some way with all these other experiences and meanings. In that sense, the soul is meaningful to many of us without any scientific verification of its existence... We can 'debug' soul talk. We can detach it from its now unwarranted metaphysical history".
-- "Soul Talk", The Chronicle Review, 2 May 2010
The problem of "grace" is that Christians can't tell you what the word means. Does it mean forgiveness? Benevolence? Generosity? Gift? Courtesy? Power? Mercy? Goodness? ... It seems unparaphrasable, perhaps in similar fashion to "time", which doesn't seem expressible in terms of concepts that don't presuppose it.
The Christian knows this difficulty, recognizes "grace" as something mysterious, realizes it's hard to grasp intellectually. But he/she also feels that "grace" is meaningful. So when they say "by the grace of God", they mean something, not nothing; and the propositions that are asserted whilst using the word have significance for other propositions, are related to them.
Almost as if "grace" means something within the discourse of Christianity, but doesn't mean anything outside it.
***
Oliver Sacks
"One tended to speak of him, instinctively, as a spiritual casualty -- a 'lost soul': was it possible that he had really been 'de-souled' by a disease? 'Do you think he has a soul?' I once asked the Sisters. They were outraged by my question, but could see why I asked it. 'Watch Jimmie in chapel,' they said, 'and judge for yourself.'
I did, and I was moved, profoundly moved and impressed, because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before in him or conceived him capable of. I watched him kneel and take the Sacrament on his tongue, and could not doubt the fullness and totality of Communion, the perfect alignment of his spirit with the spirit of the Mass. Fully, intensely, quietly, in the quietude of absolute concentration and attention, he entered and partook of the Holy Communion. He was wholly held, absorbed, by a feeling. There was no forgetting, no Korsakov's then, nor did it seem possible or imaginable that there should be...
Clearly Jimmie found himself, found continuity and reality, in the absoluteness of spiritual attention and act. The sisters were right -- he did find his soul there. And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: 'A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being".
In contrast, another patient with Korsakov's presented as a "confabulator" -- he continuously made up stories, and talked on and on...
"This strikes everyone who has been in contact with him for any time -- that under his fluency, even his frenzy, is a strange loss of feeling -- that feeling, or judgement, which distinguishes between 'real' and 'unreal', 'true' and 'untrue'... important and trivial, relevant or irrelevant. What comes out, torrentially, in his ceaseless confabulation, has, finally, a peculiar quality of indifference... as if it didn't really matter what he said, or what anyone else did or said; as if nothing really mattered any more...
Stephen T Asma
This time, however, they looked worried by my question, as if something of the sort were already in their minds: they could not say, 'Judge for yourself. See Willie in Chapel'... There is an utter pathos, a sad sense of lostness, with Jimmie G. which one does not feel, or feel directly, with the effervescent Mr Thompson. Jimmie has moods, and a sort of brooding (or, at least, yearning) sadness, a depth, a soul, which does not seem to be present in Mr Thompson. Doubtless, as the Sisters said, he had a soul, an immortal soul, in the theological sense; could be seen, and loved, as an individual by the Almighty; but, they agreed, something very disquieting had happened to him, to his spirit, his character, in the ordinary, human sense."
***
So, Sacks uses the word "soul" to mean something like "person", "essence of being a person", and desmonstrates use of the word even with theology removed.
Stephen T Asma, in a recent article, I think rehabilitates soul talk in terms of both the above ideas -- that "soul", like "grace", can be meaningful in terms of a particular discourse; and that there's plenty to the word beyond the notion of spiritual substance.
Perhaps "God", "karma", "heaven" can be similarly redeemed.
-- "Soul Talk", The Chronicle Review, 2 May 2010
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