The Twofold Aspect of the Soul

THE TWOFOLD ASPECT OF THE SOUL
Sec. IX.

Every spirit has its doxa, even as God has; but not every doxa is called t?W. Scripture nowhere speaks of souls of the angels, and only anthropomorphically of a soul of God.¹ For Bfej is, in any case, only the doxa of the spirit united with a material body. Man has a soul, and the brute has a soul. The soul of the brute is the individualized breathing forth of the spirit of entire nature; the soul of man is the self-outbreathing of his personal spirit. There are always in bodies living natures, to which Scripture adjudges rrit?W. With respect to such, God is called "IE'3"W> nnnn (Num. xvi. 22, xxvii. 16); and with respect to such, He says, Ezek. xviii. 4 (comp. Job xii. 10), nan 'b rriE'S3rrb jn. I_n the idea of t?W there is thus involved the fact that it is the incarnate doxa of the

¹ Ex ea istud (soil, esse Dei animam) significatione commemorari solitum est, qua et manus et oculi et digiti et brachium et cor incorporali Deo connumerantur. Thus with great propriety Hilary speaks of the Trinity (x. 58). Beidiwi, on the Koran, observes, that God has ruach, but not nefs; and thus if it be said to God, "in my soul is not what is in Thy soul"—that the u£\jt+< (a rhetorical figure similar to the Zeugma) is as if, e.g., the one who possesses a hut were to say to the other who has a castle, I find myself just as well in my hut as thou in thine. When Scripture speaks anthropomorphically of a soul of God, there is brought into consideration, man's soul transferred to God, as the means and link of the spiriteuibodied condition of nature. God swears " by His soul," i.e. by His very own self. God's soul hates this and that (Ps. xi. 5; Isa. i. 14); or abhors it as repulsive (Lev. xxvi. 11, 30; Jer. xiv. 19); or satisfies itself by punishment (Jer. v. 9); i.e. He Himself, in the innermost depth, and in the entire circumference of His nature. It is only once said that God's "soul" delights—namely, in His servant (Isa. xlii. 1; Matt. xii. 18, ttf i» tvloxvoif i) $vxv Even here, soul seems to mean the very deepest

inward self, comprehending the entire condition of nature. Origen (deprine. ii. 5) conjectures that the Son of God, who is God's word and wisdom, is named anima Dei. But this is untenable; and altogether, there is only one single text in which God's soul implies a name of God; and this is allied in meaning to doxa of God, scil. Ps. xxiv. 4, whereupon we have spoken above. Div. II. Sec. IV., towards the end.

spirit—that it is the principle of bodily life in the form of the spirit. In conformity to its nature, it is double-sided:¹ for, on the one side, the spirit is manifested in it in its own sight; on the other side, the unity is effected by the spirit through it, for which the spirit is allied with corporeity.

It is a question of very ancient times, and of history that reaches into the latest periods, how any reciprocal action is possible between spirit and body. We remember the much discussed suppositions of a physical influx (originated by Thomas Aquinas); of a divine assistance (of the so-called Occasionalism of Cartesius: "Deum occasione animae in corpus agere et vice versa); of an action upon one another only occasioning, and furnishing opportunities (of the occasionalism as systema causarum occasionalium of Malebranche and De la Forge); and of a parallelismus inter corpus et animam, by virtue of a harmony pre-established by God (Leibnitz),—even to the later strained attempt to supply the void, either by an idealizing of matter, or by a materializing of the spirit. Even scriptural-minded inquirers have not known how to help themselves otherwise than either by regarding the spirit as the final link in the advancing process of the centralization of matter, and as such for its arbitrary counterpart;² or than by explaining spirit and body as two several modes of manifestation of one power, or one life, as space and time, form and law, perceptibility and perception ;³ or than by seeking to grasp in any other way the last existing element (to inroKeifievov) in spirit and matter, as being essentially one and the same.⁴

The answer of Scripture is none of all these. If God, who is spirit, created matter,—and if God's Spirit, as we read in the first page of Scripture, gave life to matter, and formed it,—it follows of necessity that the creative spirit which is originated from God will be able to exercise a powerful agency upon matter, resembling the creative power of God and of His Spirit.

¹ The soul—Haussmann,m his .Sii/ica/ Doctrine of Man, 1848, briefly and well says—is a twofold and mediate nature, fleshly and spiritual soul in one.

² Rothe, Ethik, i. 170.

³ Heinroth, Psychologic, p. 264.

⁴ Thus v. Schaden, in his work, ilber die Havptfrage der Psychologic fur die Gegenwart (1849), according to which the power of extension is that common substratum.

It is implied in its nature that it is super-ordinated to matter, as in its appointment to act through and to pervade matter; and there is no insurmountable barrier between them: for although they are opposites, yet, in respect of the unity of their final source, they are no absolute opposites;¹ so little, that the son of Sirach, in an absolutely scriptural sense, is able to express the proposition, that sounds so entirely pantheistic, To irav iarlv avro<; (Ecclus. xliii. 27). The powers of spirit, as of matter, had, in a like manner, the actual presence of God in every created thing as the background that supports them (Jer. xxiii. 24). All life, individual as well as universal, has, as its „ ground of origination and subsistence, as its root and its link, God's X070? (Ecclus. xliii. 26), and God's irvevfia (Wisd. i. 7, xii. 1). There is therefore no need of a pre-established harmony. Everything lives, and moves, and subsists, closely united, and reciprocally attracted to itself in one element, eu airrai (Acts xvii. 28). "As an army is organized by its general, and is arranged according to his plan of battle,"—thus speaks a theological scholar, who stands at the summit of the present scientific knowledge of nature,—" even so are banded together the starry hosts and the groups of atoms according to the will of the one eternal Spirit. This creating and ordaining Spirit pervades every cell, generates and regulates the flight of every working bee, according to the eternal purpose of the whole. Everywhere in nature, the relative contrasts stand in the closest reciprocity, by means of their higher united nature. That which generates the galvanic current in the most opposed elements of the voltaic pile—that which gives the living weapon of defence to the electric eel, by the contact of moist heterogeneous parts—that which inclines the magnetic needle to the north,—precisely the same creative principle orders and controls the whole fabric of the world—creates and vitalizes the organic cell—arranges the intercourse between spirit and matter, the association between soul and body. Everywhere the inner living unity of the larger system rules over all the parts that

¹ It is true (as in Div. II.) we have already ascertained, as E. Harless said in his Grenzen u. Grenzgebiete der physiol, Forschung, p. 27, "the unity of the foundation of all things suggests a homogeneity of the things with one another, and thus is assured the possibility of their substantive reciprocal action."

belong to the whole."¹ Above the material stands the power as the material of materials, and above the power stands life as the power of powers, and above life stands the spirit as the life of life, and above all spirits stands God as the Spirit of spirits; and there is no solution for the enigma of the reciprocal action of all things, but this all-effecting and pervading chief monad, which unites all contraries in itself and through itself, and has united them in man as in a microcosm, as even in itself it is no monad in the sense of the doctrine of monads, but the absolute unity of diverse and infinitely manifold life.

The reciprocal action of spirit and matter is thus explained on the one hand by reference to the origin and the destination of the spirit, on the other by reference to the common ground of existence in God, which systematically includes together all things (Col. i. 17). The influence of matter upon spirit is, however, essentially of a different kind from the influence of spirit upon matter. Spirit acts upon matter by the power of a conscious will, but matter acts upon spirit when spirit makes matter the object of its cognizance, which it is able to do by virtue of its eminence above it (Ps. xciv. 9), and allows it to act upon itself. There is in matter no will which overpowers the will of the spirit, but matter becomes manifest to the spirit in its own light, as when, e.g., the narrative of creation says of God, K"|5; and the impressions which were made upon Him by that which was manifest to Him are feelings, thoughts, determinations, to which He is decided by reason of that manifestation, as when, e.g., Ps. civ. 31 says that God rejoices in His works, or when, according to Gen. vi. 2, the daughters of men became an object of attraction for the sons of God to sin. Matter with its power is incapable of carrying action over into the region of the spirit. But in that the spirit takes up this or that material fact into its consciousness, or enters into it with its consciousness, it may allow the matter of which it is conscious to become a moving impulse to one of its three fundamental powers. Briefly, matter has no power over the spirit, except so far as the spirit itself makes it to have, for it is the power over matter.

But hitherto we have only had in view the relation of

¹ Bohner (pastor in Dietikon at Zurich) in his work, Naturforschung und KulturUben (1858), p. 216.

matter to the spirit as such; in man it is otherwise. In him, spirit and matter are combined into a personal unity, by means of which the spirit, as we saw Sec. VIII., is not only brought under the law of natural development, but also is in many ways conditioned by matter in a fashion alien from its own spontaneity. Here, for the first time, the relation of spirit and matter becomes really for us a closely veiled mystery; and Augustine is quite right in saying that this mystery is in no respect less deep—nay, if possible, is still deeper—than that of the personal union of God and man in Christ.¹ We must not indeed forget that the present condition of man represents to us a conditioning of the spirit by matter, which is a deplorable caricature of the original relation. But even apart from this, spirit and matter in man are in such wise fenced in, that the spirit is limited by matter; for development and limitation, which the former is gradually overcoming, are altogether inseparable. How are we to explain to ourselves this conditioning of the spirit by matter in man? Holy Scripture gives us the disclosure on the subject with which we may be satisfied. It explains to us that which is inconceivable, not physically so, but as it were from God's design.² It teaches us that the body is an image of God, and that God has established the spirit under conditions of this body, wherewith it may prove itself in progressive strengthening as a power over matter. That is the distinctive task allotted to it, the importance of which, in connection with theworld's entireness and the world's history, we know. This present crass materiality is no original creation of God. It came into existence by the perversion of this (vid. Div. II. Sec. I.). Man is destined to overcome this perversion. For this purpose the spirit of man is absorbed into this crass matter, that it may raise it up again to the lost standing, and to its completion,—a result, however, although it has devolved upon him, which could accrue in no other way than by the Logos Himself becoming flesh.

¹ Gangauf, Psychologie des h. Augustinus, p. 308; v. Thomasius, Dogmatik, ii. 63. On the other hand, it has lately been maintained by Lotze with much truth, that " in the reciprocal action between body and soul there subsists absolutely no greater enigma than in any other instance of causality, and that only the idea of knowing more in that other matter has begotten the astonishment that here nothing is known."

* Thus, for example, also Gregory of Nyssa, in Moller, I.e. p. 33.

Scripture opens up to us the mystery, at least so far as that it gives us to apprehend the reason in the history of redemption for that which is physically inconceivable. For that destined vocation man is created, and indeed et? yfrv^rjv ^waav. The soul is the link between spirit and matter in man, as he himself, as the unity of both, is the link of all created things. Only, in man, spirit and matter are united in one individual life, standing in mutual reciprocity of action; and that which effectuates this reciprocal action is the soul, which only in man is an individual manifestation of an individual spirit; but in the brute world, on the other hand, is the individual manifestation of the general spirit that pervades it. The soul, indeed, is not less immaterial than the spirit; but yet, on account of the object of its existence, it is more nearly and more immediately related to matter.¹ It is, so to speak, the outside of the spirit, whereby the spirit is personally united to the externality of the body. It is the speculum conveying to it, the speculator, the spectra of the outer world; or, moreover, as Augustine permits himself to say, specula mentis, the watch-tower whence the spirit looks forth, and receives objects of sight. It is the mirror of the spirit in twofold relation, as well in respect of the spirit reflecting itself in it again, as in respect of the outer world reflecting itself in it to the spirit. Besides this one soul, man has no other. It is this by which the powers of nature, operative in the body,

¹ E. Harless, I.e. p. 26, denounces those who, proceeding from the erroneous supposition of a specific opposition between spirit and matter, wish to arrange this opposition by means of an interpolated phantom which is neither fish nor flesh. This does not concern our biblical-psychologic view, for (1) we indeed separate spirit and matter specifically, but still recognise a profound homogeneity of both in the unity of their original ground; (2) we do not interpolate the Psyche between spirit and body as a third element, but it stands to us as a phenomenon of the spirit itself; and (3) to the question whether it belongs to the side of the spirit or of matter, we give the decided answer that it is not a mongrel thing, but of a spiritual nature. The appendix of E. Harless, on the Apparatus of the Will, Zeitscfir. ftir Philosophie, 1861, i., is in favour of this our subdivision. For the nervous system, which is stimulated from without, still has the Psyche, in which the stimulus becomes a reflex of sensation, as its background; and the Psyche, on the other hand, has as its background the self-conscious spirit, to which it conveys the sensations, and which governs the physically caused ideas (perception, form, and inducement of motion) with the light of thought and the freedom of the will.

are comprehended into a united life. There is no especial fleshly soul. And the hypothetic nervous aether, if there be such a thing, is no soul.¹ Man consists only of three essential elements, which the Latin language appropriately designates by the masculine animus, the feminine anima, and the neuter corpus. The spirit vivifies the body by endowing it with soul. As God, the eternally Triune, reveals Himself in eternal doxa, in order to fill eternity, and to fashion it into his heaven; and as, within the range of history, He lowers His doxa to fill the temple of Israel; and as at last the whole earth is to become the vessel and reflex of His doxa (Isa. vi. 3, comp. Ezek. xliii. 2),—so the human soul is the doxa proceeding by the power of the creative impulse from the human spirit, for the purpose of filling the body as its house, and of absorbing² it into the region of spiritual life. The trine of the fundamental powers of the spirit is here developed by the power of creative arrangement into a septet of powers, by means of which the spirit takes possession of the body, and propagates upon it even its psychical image. As the seven spirits of God on the one side are turned to God as the sevenfold glorious mirror of His threefold nature, on the other side, to the world as the powers that carry out the process of the glorious realization of the world-idea; so the seven spirits of the soul, or powers of the soul, are on the one hand turned to the spirit as the sevenfold glorious mirror of its godlike threefold nature, on the other hand, to the body as the powers that effectuate the process of its becoming united into the life of the spirit, or more briefly, of its spiritualization: for the body may become pneumatical, because matter and spirit are only opposites relatively, not absolutely. The soul is the double-sided mid-nature which unites the two; as the sevencoloured rainbow, originating from the effect of the sun on the dark cloud, symbolizes the willingness of the heavenly to per

¹ V. Rudloff (Lehre vom Menschen, p. 90) regards the nervous spirit as the anima, the principle of animal life.

¹ Goschel (Letzte Dinge, p. 181) strikingly calls it Personation: "The personality which has its root in the self-consciousness of the spirit, is in man the principle of development; for the process of development subsists essentially in progressive penetration and personation of the entire organism." Augustine has previously used personare in a similar way, when, for example, he says, Deus est qui n»s personat.

meate the earthly, and, according to the tradition, is the bridge (tpi? from etpeiv) between heaven and earth.

I think that thus we gain a profounder glimpse into the essential condition of man, than when Philo regards the soul, considered in Plato's sense, as tripartite (X07o?, dvfi6<;, evidvfiia),—as ^u the reflected brightness of the blessed, thrice blessed nature of the Godhead" (ii. 356); or when Augustine (de symbolo) says, " Homo habet tres partes, spiritum, animam, et corpus, itaque homo est imago S. S. Trinitatis" (although he elsewhere limits the resemblance to the three fundamental powers of the spirit-soul), and when later writers suppose, in conformity with this fallacy, that the body corresponds either to the Holy Spirit¹ or to the Son.² Both views are prodigies. That the human body should correspond typically to one of the three persons of the Trinity, is in itself a notion unworthy of God. If we say, on the other hand, spirit, soul, and body are related as are God, doxa, and the world, we therein maintain as well God's supramundane spirituality as man's likeness to God, and microcosmic world-position closely connected therewith. For man's resemblance to God does not merely subsist in the fact that God's nature is imaged forth in him, but, moreover, that God's relation to the world is so typified. As it is the object of the world's development that the thrice-Holy should, so far as it. was permitted by creature limits, assimilate it to Himself by filling it with His doxa; so it is the purpose of

¹ J. F. Von Meyer, Glaubenskhre, p. 71, and previously Goschel, in a wholly peculiar manner. V. Rudloff (Lehre vom Menschen, p. 102) also places spirit, soul, and nefesch (= nerve-spirit) in typical relation to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Even Witt draws the nerve-spirit herein into the parallel, remarking, p. 138, that if anything in man corresponds to the divine doxa, it is not the soul, but rather the nerve-spirit (sa vore det viil snarare nervanderi).

¹ Thus the author of the work, Der Mensch nach Geist, Seele, und Leib efargesteUt, Diisselthal 1844. And equally (Seele Abbild des Voters, Leib Abbild des Sohnes, und Geist Abbild des h. Geistes) Zockler, Naturtheologie, i. (1860), 727, where (p. 739) more ancient defenders of this conception of the relation are named, among whom, however, J. Bohme is reckoned only according to expressions entirely misunderstood. According to Bohme, the

body is an image of the essentiality effected by the spirit, which

forms the dwelling, the enclosure, f / V\ and, as it were, the body of the Ternary. The emblem thereof is I / * \ J

the development of corporeity, that the spirit, which bears in it the form and the idea of the thrice-Holy, should, so far as is permitted by the boundary drawn between matter and spirit, assimilate it to itself, by taking it up into its own region, and imprinting upon it the full effect of its own likeness to God. This is the scriptural parallel. Between its two members there subsists, according to Scripture, even the closest causal relation. For, in proportion as the body of man is the reflection of the spirit-resembling soul, the world also is the reflection of the God-resembling doxa. The glorification of the world has its point of issue in the glorification of the human body. This latter is a microcosm, not alone in respect of its construction:¹ it is so, moreover, as the first object of man's worldly calling, and as the historical centre to which the circle of the microcosm is contracted; for, according to the fundamental view of Scripture, the history of man is the heart of the history of the world. In it is decided the future of heaven and of earth.

But if the body is destined to become spiritual as the microcosm, and in it the world as the macrocosm, it will now of necessity be shown how the soul—which in the septenary of its powers reflects the nature of the spirit—possesses in the body an organ conformed to this septenary, by means of which it can bring itself, and mediately the spirit, to living manifestation.