When as little children we made our first acquaintance with Catholic doctrine, we recited in the Catechism that a human being consists of a body of clay and a soul made in the image of God. At death, body and soul separate－the former decays and returns to earth, while the latter, which is immortal, comes before God for trial and reward or punishment eternal. The Catechism, true to its nature, did not tell us about the development of this doctrine from its ancient roots to its mediaeval fruition; rather, we were simply, and simplistically, handed the doctrine in its Tridentine fossilisation. Those were the days before Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council.

More recent developments in the Church have called for a broadening of the intellectual foundations of our understanding of the Catholic Faith. Such a task involves, among other things, breaking out of the confines of Western philosophy (which is not divinely inspired, but only accidentally grafted on to Christian teachings) towards more ecumenical interpretations of the Faith. This essay is an attempt to outline the evolution of the concept of the soul, in the hope of contributing to a popular appreciation of the role of Greek philosophy in the making of the Catechism doctrine. (1)

The concept of the soul that we have inherited was born of a fusion of a Jewish eschatology with Greek myths and speculations, and then nurtured in generations of Christian minds.

THE OLD TESTAMENT

The notion of a soul surviving after death is not readily discernible in the Bible. Hebrew monotheism, or the worship of Yahweh, was an ethnic religion; its central message was the contract between God and Israel, and the individual Israelite had significance only as a member of the Chosen People. It was the people as a whole that was rewarded or punished for its conduct, in this world. Belief in an individual hereafter was left rather vague.(2)

The Old Testament distinguished four elements in a human being.

1. There was the neshamah or 'breath' which comes and goes in the act of breathing.
2. There was the nephesh. The basic meaning of this word was 'throat'; eventually, the meaning expanded to include 'breath', 'desire', 'appetite', 'life', or 'self’. For example, the Book of Proverbs has: "A righteous man has regard for the nephesh [life] of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel." (RSV, Prov. 12:10). In Psalm 103: "Bless the Lord, 0 my nephesh [being]." And in Genesis 2:7; "Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (ruach); and man became a nephesh [living being]."
3. There was the basar or 'flesh', which denotes the stuff of which the different parts of the body are made. This word was not used in a perjorative sense in the Old Testament.
4. Finally, there was the ruach, literally 'wind', a kind of life force bestowed from above, without which the psychophysiological composite of the nephesh-basar would have no life and no consistency. Sickness and sleep were considered loss of ruach; death was an almost total loss of it. The use of this word only became common with Ezekiel, during the Exile.(3)

These elements together formed a single psycho-physical organism. There was no dichotomy of body and soul. So long as a person was alive, each of the four constituents, including 'flesh', was alive too. Upon death, the composite whole was irreparably dissolved. Although the Yahwist thinkers could not envisage a complete personal extinction, they never defined what part of a human would survive death. Whatever it was (sometimes vaguely identified as the nephesh), descended beneath the earth to She'ol. This place of the dead was also variously described in different parts of the Old Testament as an awful pit, a walled city, or a land of dust and darkness. Descent to She'ol was the common fate of all, regardless of social or moral standing; and She'ol and its denizens were considered to be outside the interest or care of Yahweh. Thus, the life of the individual in the hereafter was not an important concern for the Yahwist religion, whose main business was the collective vigour of the Chosen People.(4)

This belief began to change during the Baby-lonian Exile(5th century BC), when questions began to be raised. If Yahweh had the power to save his Chosen People, why did he allow them to be overthrown and suffer in this way? Faced with this criticism, the emphasis on retribution began to shift from the communal to the personal, and from the this worldly to the hereafter. The concept of an almighty and just God demanded an eschatology that promised individual Israelites vindication after death for injustices suffered before it. This new trend was reflected in Ezekiel's vision of a post-mortem judgement and the resurrection of the dead: it was a restoration of the entire psycho-physical being, not immortality of a soul. By the time of Daniel (2nd century BC), these beliefs had received more concrete, if still largely communalistic and apocalyptic, treatment. In the Book of Enoch, however, a new development became evident. Not only was there going to be a final universal judgement at the end of the present world order, there were also individual judgements at the point of death. Instead of being a shadowy, undifferentiated place where all the dead were treated similarly for an indefinite time, She'ol was now compartmentalised into a place of refreshment, and other, hollow, places for the dead of different moral calibres. Thus the nephesh began to take on personality, as well as continuity with life in this world. The Pharisees around the time of Jesus Christ probably believed in rewards and punishments between death and the apocalyptic resurrection.

Among the Hellenised Jews of Alexandria, a very different concept arose. In Wisdom 9:15: "A perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind." This dichotomy, in which the soul is all that counts, has more affinity with Plato's Phaedo than with the Hebrew tradition, as will be seen. Thus, it was not until late Old Testament times that the Jews came to believe in personal survival beyond death; except in a few instances, there was as yet no well-defined idea of an immortal soul.(5)

GREEK MYTHOLOGY

In the Hellenic tradition, the initial position was similar to that of the Hebrew. Homeric Greeks regarded the human being as a living organism compounded of three parts: a body (soma), a thymos or conscious self, and a psyche or life principle. A human being was only truly a human being when all three components were functioning harmoniously together as an inter-related whole, which was shattered by death. With the dissolution of the body, the thymos merged with the air, while the psyche was transformed into a shadowy replica of the living human known as the eidolon, and descended into Hades, an underground cavity rather like the original She'ol. These eidola had no memory, and were completely unconscious, insubstantial, and apathetic. Thus, the Greeks also had no notion of a personal survival after death, and Homer could speak of "the strengthless heads of the dead". Life in this world was the only full full and proper life.(6)

But there was another set of ideas about the soul among the Greeks, that of Orphism, a religious reform movement in the 6th century BC. The Orphics held that the key to human nature was the mythical murder and eating of Dionysos-Zagreus by the wicked Titans, sons of Earth, who were then blasted by the victim's father, Zeus. Because of their last meal, the ashes of the monsters contained elements of both Dionysos and the Titans. Out of these ashes arose humankind, with a dual nature－a material body which was a child of Earth, imprisoning an ethereal and immortal soul derived from a god. For the soul, the body (soma) was a tomb (sema). This soul or psyche combined the conscious self (thymos) and the unconscious life－principle (psyche) of the older Homeric conception, and came to be regarded as a preexistent conscious self that survived the death of the body. Because this divine psyche was tied to matter and to the evil inherent in it, it had to pass through a number of human or bestial incarnations lasting many centuries before it was sufficiently purified to return to the divine realm. This awful burden of births, deaths, and miseries, known as the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis) could be reduced only if an enlightened soul lived for three successive incarnations as a phi-losopher. Among the Pythagoreans, who formed one branch of the Orphic movement, the soul was associated with the 'higher' or intellectual faculties: for them, devotion to science was the highest form of purification of the soul.(7)

Thus arose a dichotomy between a divine, individual and immortal soul, and a material body. The soul and the body did not form one person: rather, they were an antagonistic duo, each with its own personality. This dichotomy was to become prominent in Plato's thought, and also influenced the Old Testament Book of Wisdom.

1.Jorg Splett, “Immortality”, in Karl Rahner, ed., Encyclopaedia of theology (NY, 1975), 678-689. New Catholic Encyclopaedia (NY, 1967), “Soul, Human, Immortality of”, XIII, 464-470. Cf. Ch’ien Mu, Linghun yu hsin (Taipei, 1978).

2.S.G.F. Brandon, The judgement of the dead (NY, 1967), 56-58. Cf. New Catholic Encyclopaedia, ibid.,467.

3.New Catholic Encyclopaedia, ibid., 449-450. C. Ryder Smith, The Bible doctrine of the hereafter (London, 1958), 1-9. Albert Gelin, The concept of man in the Bible (NY, 1968), 13-19.

4.Brandon, Judgement, 59. Smith, 3.

5.Brandon, 60-75. Gelin, 21. New Cath. Ency., XIII, 449-450, 467-468.

6.Brandon, 76-87.

7.Brandon, 88-96. Gelin, 20.