Soul and Body - FATHER FRANK’S RANTS

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS

Rant Number 308 19 June 2008

Soul and Body

In Doctor Faustus the poet Christopher Marlowe told the tale of the scholar who enters into a pact with the devil. Faustus summons Mephistopheles and signs with his blood a fateful contract. In exchange for 25 years of magical gifts and powers, he sells his soul to Satan. As it befits a play about the dangers of human hubris, at the end we see demons dragging Faustus away into the maws of hell.

An edifying story. The prince of darkness today has gone one better, though. He has persuaded many, even putative Christian thinkers, that they have no soul. Truly diabolical!

All about messages the priest recently exchanged with an eminent scholar. I’ll call him Dr Faustinus. ‘When I’ll be dead, I’ll be dead’, states Faustinus. He really means that. Literally. No survival. When the body dies, the living being, the person dies too. Because the soul – by which Faustinus simply means the living person – dies with the body. No continued, spiritual, separate existence of the person after bodily death. Death is final. No next chapter – it’s the end of the book. No ‘to be continued’. Death is curtains. Journey’s end. That’s it.

To back up his glum views, Faustinus falls back on authority. That of a heavyweight, Aristotle. The philosopher responsible for the famous definition of the soul as ‘the form of the body’. A purely functional concept. The soul isn’t something over and above the physical body or entity – it is a principle of organisation. To illustrate. Imagine an axe had a soul. That the axe was alive or ‘animated’. That which enables the axe to cut, Aristotle says, would then be axe’s soul. Or conceive the human eye was an animal. The capacity which the eye has to see would then constitute the eye’s soul.

Naturally, if you smashed up the axe into pieces, nothing would be left of the axe’s ‘soul’. Because the axe’s function, its capacity for cutting would be destroyed and that function is all that the axe’s soul can mean. Ditto for the eye. A blind eye, an eye which no longer sees is a dead eye, just like a dead body is a cadaver and that’s the end of it. Upshot: to say that the soul is the form of the body means no more than a live body is organised in a particular way. When that body dies, however, its organisation is broken up and so is the person and…the soul dies too. That’s it.

Faustinus is shrewd. He virtuously attacks ‘dualism’. A Catholic, he invokes the Catechism. A really nice book. Paragraph 366 indeed affirms that ‘one has to consider the soul as the form of the body.’ But next it warns that ‘the Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not produced by the parents.’ Sounds pretty dualistic to me!

Aristotle is super but he was no Father of the Church, that’s for sure. St Thomas Aquinas may have ‘baptised’ him into Christian thought but even my chubby and clever fellow countryman could not square the circle of how the idea of the soul as form of the body is compatible with post-mortem survival. The New Testament is normative for Christians, not any particular Greek thinker. ‘Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell’ says Christ (St Matthew 10:28). Again, pretty dualistic language, methinks…

To be fair, Dr Faustinus sweetens the pill a little. Believers still die ‘into God’, he soothes us. Hmmm…meaning…what? I think we should be told. Hinting at the ‘mystery’ of God explains nothing, I must say.

Of course, the Christian hope is not just in the immortality of the soul. ‘I believe…in the Resurrection of the Body’ reads the Apostles’ Creed. God will resurrect the whole person, not just a discarnate spiritual entity. Because that is what the full person is. Not the soul alone but soul and body, together. Faustinus does not se the implications. For Fr Frank’s resurrected body to count as Fr Frank, there must be a meaningful continuity between the body I was and the one God raises from the dust.

Think this out: imagine Fr Frank’s body is destroyed tonight at midnight by an act of God. However, at one minute past midnight in his mercy God creates another body. Exactly like mine. Endowed with all my memories and mannerisms. Would that be me? Suppose, pray, the same happened to you. Would you feel better at the thought one identical with you would be brought up into existence after your annihilation?

I doubt you would. It certainly would be no consolation to me that a copy or double or clone of me was created after my death. It would be someone like me. But it would not be me. (That wonderful, unique Fr Frank!) For the resurrected person to count as me there’s got to be a continuous link between the pre-mortem Fr Frank and the resurrected Fr Frank. And only the soul can constitute that vital connection. Thus, unless the existence of the soul as a separate, independent substance is accepted, there can be no personal survival after death. Not even the resurrection of the body can constitute that, without the soul.

Dr Faustinus knows all this. He is, after a fashion, a Christian. So was Dr Faustus. But at least the tragic German hero knew where he stood. He craved youth, money, sex. In that, he was everyman. And so he bartered his eternal soul for 25 years of delights of the spirit and the flesh. (There are spiritual vices, too – the most terrible.) A foolish, mindless bargain, of course but I suspect one plenty of men would be happy to rush into, if they could. Dr Faustinus and his anaemic votaries, on the other hand, have surrendered their intellect, their right reason, for no returns, to the dull devils of intellectual fashion. (The ‘non-dualists’.) Devils they don’t even believe they exist.

And obvious devilish ruse, isn’t it?

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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