Vulgarians, or “the many,”1 regard the purpose of the intellect as to think up ways to improve the enjoyment of sensual experience and conceive of novel possibilities for entertainment. In this case, the body proffers desires and the soul strives to satisfy them. Technically, “the body” as it is employed above designates not the biological or anatomical body, but Plato’s ἐπιθυμητικόν, which is, by interpretation, “the appetitive element of the psyche.”2 But in the healthy soul, the pattern is reversed: the soul is the pilot and the body its vessel. In this arrangement, the body is the instrument and vehicle of the soul; the “ruling faculty,” Plato’s λογιστικόν, commands and the body executes. This is not life-denying and is only ascetic insofar as the elements of the psyche persist in harbouring mutinous designs that will inexorably spell the demise of themselves together with rest of the person. Like revolutionaries bankrolled by hostile foreign powers, insofar as these elements continue to commend themselves to the Prince of this World in his bid to topple rightful King and Country alike, and insofar as these disorderly elements set themselves in opposition to the Lord of the Soul, which is Christ, and remain intent on defying his commandments, then the pursuit of virtue will present a constant struggle:
Vice may be had in abundance without trouble; the way is smooth and her dwelling-place is near. But before virtue the gods have set toil.
we can say, with Hesiod.
People imagine that their freedom consists in being able to fulfil their desires, in the eternal “Pursuit of Happiness.” But that is all wrong. Real freedom commences when the illusion of freedom ends and sham-liberty is seen for what it is. Freedom is not for the desires, but from them. Or, more accurately, freedom consists in the ability to identify our own ends and thereby forming our desires rather than being formed by them. Put another way, freedom consists enlisting our will and intelligence to order our desires towards (the) Go(o)d in light of the Idea of (the) Go(o)d. That is the precise and painstaking opposite of allowing souls to be led by the nose and allowing our will and intelligence to be indentured into slavish, instrumental functioning for the attainment of these desires.
When a man makes a choice, he binds himself to the consequences of having made that choice. Someone who is scandalized by this demonstrates that his intelligence is being corrupted by demons, who will always try to conceal the potentiality of our own deliverance from us and rationalize the rejection of moral autonomy on political, ideological, or religious grounds. They might say, for instance, that a man is utterly the product of his circumstances, that the world is fundamentally random, or that salvific Grace is disjunctive with our own agency and that only God decide to raise someone to Heaven or send him to the Other Place by fiat while a man must merely wait around in a bovine state of passivity.
Naïve people imagine that damnation is expression of divine retribution, but in reality, it is just the natural outcome of the intelligible relation between action and consequence specified above and not the result of a special fiat by God. God does not directly punish a soul, or send it to Hell or whatever other place, condition, or state. On the contrary, God has delegated a man’s sovereignty to that man himself.3 A man himself chooses his own ultimate state by what he cleaves to. Sin belongs in Hell with all of the demons and sorcerers and whoremongers. Insofar as we cling to our sins, damnation will be our lot, but that’s not because God chose to cast us into the Outer Darkness, but because we chose to follow our sin to the only place it could ever lead. As all sin belongs in Hell, all blessedness, righteousness, justice belongs in the Upper World with God. That we end up in Hell if we refuse to relinquish our sin is not the result of a fiat by God, but by dint of a decision by us who, having received the spiritual gift of agency from God together with the spiritual gift of intelligence by which to recognize its value, chose to turn our backs to our Creator, Lord, and Benefactor and pervert these gifts to evil. The question is not whether a millstone will sink to the bottom of the sea, but whether we will go with it. A soul is dyed the color of its thoughts; let us think always on the Idea of the Good, which is Christ “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”
hoi polloí, οἱ πολλοί, as Plato and the Ancients would have said
soma, σῶμα, not the biological body per se but the “appetitive soul,” which is a commonplace translation of Plato’s ἐπιθυμητικόν
more on the threefold soul:
Freud’s tripartite theory of the soul is largely just a scientific (or pseudo-scientific, if we follow Popper) reworking of the Classical conception of the soul that is present already in Plato’s dialogues. In the Republic, for instance, Plato lends imaginal elaboration to his theory of the soul according to the following scheme:
(1) the rational element or λογιστικόν (logistykon), symbolized by the form of a human
(2) the emotive element or θυμοειδές (thymoeides), symbolized by the form of a lion
(3) and the desiring element or ἐπιθυμητικόν (epithymetikon), symbolized by a many-headed monster or hydra
Let’s call these logos, thymos, and epthymia, respectively, for short. The purpose of Plato’s metaphor is to indicate that a proper order or relationship amongst these three elements of the soul is the key to a good life. In brief, the rational soul or logos fulfills its function by identifying ends that are good and educating the the epithymia in its desires while ordering the emotional soul or thymos to repel any obstacles to their realization. In other words, the lion and the many-headed beast are meant to serve the man. Cormac Jones elucidates the true nature of these dynamics, which Plato intimated and strove to depict, but did perhaps not fully comprehend:
Thinking of epithymia and thymos in terms of attraction and repulsion — which struck me as completely correct — blew open doors for me in my mind, and all of a sudden I could see a host of connections. I’m not going to be able to write about all of them at once, but let me at least give a couple insights. Thinking of thymos in terms of a repulsive power is major. When you are sitting on your couch and craving ice cream, it’s the epithymetic faculty that does the craving, that locks its powers of attraction onto the object of its desire. It’s your thymic faculty, however, whose job it is then to repulse all the obstacles between you and the object of your desire. If there is distance between you and your freezer, your thymos repulses that obstacle by getting up and overcoming that distance. Your thymos thereby is the provider. Your logos, meanwhile, is supposed to be overseeing this whole volitional process… but you know, sometimes in this passionate life, things just don’t work out that way. The undertow of desire can pull the logos under and make it serve its whims. Or the madness of anger, the drive to repulse all obstacles for the sake of supremacy over others, may likewise subjugate the logos to achieve this aim alone.
As Plato attempt to illustrate in the dialogue, internal conflict is the result of disorder amongst these dynamics of the soul. The Republic largely consists in an extended conceit in which the state or republic is made to represent the soul. Thus, the condition of internal coherence, or “justice,” is represented by a harmonious republic while internal disorder is represented, in turn, by tyranny and civil war.
A similarly threefold concept of the soul is also present in Paul’s letters in the New Testament, where he speaks of anthropos somatikos, anthropos psychikos, and anthropos pneumatikos. These terms can be roughly translated as “carnal man,” “psychic” or “soul man,” and “spiritual man,” despite that we lack very clear concepts of any of those words in our time. What, for instance, is the difference between the soul and the spirit, according to the popular conception? Perhaps Freud has taken a step towards regaining some of the significance of these concepts. It is possible to see the birth of psychoanalysis as the reversal of a trend toward reductionism that had seen the 3-part man become the 2-part man (i.e. beginning from the 8th Ecumenical Council or 4th Council of Constantinople in 869 AD1and continuing with the Early Modern thinkers like Descartes) become purely biological man (i.e. beginning with Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871).2
Many people today still speak in this way, when they, for instance, equate “human nature” with “the human genome,” or invoke evolutionary biology to explain ever facet of human life. Perhaps we will begin to see a richer concept of the human being in our lifetimes. I would be happy to see such a development and I try to contribute in the ways that I am able.
“Hell is to be contemplated strictly as a matter which concerns me alone. As part of the spiritual life it belongs behind the ‘closed door’ of my own room. From the standpoint of living faith, I cannot fundamentally believe in anyone’s damnation but my own; as far as my neighbor is concerned, the light of resurrection can never be so obscured that I would be allowed or obliged to stop hoping for him.”
—Hans Urs von Balthasar [Prayer, p. 266, Ignatius Press, 1986.]
“Every human being who comes to share in some virtue by firm habit, certainly participates in God, who is the substance of all virtues.”
—Maximus Confessor