Zadok Paper S100 Winter 1999
The Nature of Humans-Mind and Brain; Body, Soul and Spirit
by Alan Gijspers

The soul and the spirit

In discussing meta-language, Anna Wierzbicka19 describes the differences between the Russian and the English ways of describing the essence of a person. Russians very readily use the word dusa. Though translated soul (or mind or heart), the word is used much more widely in Russian and has a wider application than the English equivalent. A person's soul is their very essence, their feeling, their love, their personality. (Some Russians describe the English as soulless, but there may be an English criticism of the Russians as mindless!)

There was a time when it was felt that a person had a soul, as if the soul was a separate entity. The theological debate about when the unborn child 'receives its soul' still wages. The dominant understanding of the Hebrew view of humanity is that a person is a soul, that a person is an indivisible unity.20 Partly as a reaction against the Platonic concept of an idealised soul separate from the body, the word soul has been lost in the newer English translations. Thus Luke 12:19 in the King James Version reads, "I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry". But in the New International Version this has been rendered, "I'll say to myself, 'You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.'" Thus in the 17th century the soul spoke to itself but in the 20th century the person speaks to him/herself. However, not all biblical scholars would agree. John Cooper, a philosophical theologian from Calvin Seminary analyses the issues in great detail.21 He concludes that in the Bible there is a strong element of unity about the person but that especially when we consider life after death, that the Bible suggests that there is something in us that, like John Brown, just keeps marching on. We will return to this issue later.

I personally think that our Western reductionistic way of thinking has lost a lot in the demise of thinking about the soul. Western living seems so soulless. There is a loss of the human in favour of the economic in health, education, politics, sport, art . . . management; reductionism pervades every aspect of modern society. We seem to have lost our humanity. Thank God for sensitive souls and prophets like Tim Costello, Michael Leunig and Jim Wallis, the last with his The Soul of Politics,22 who are trying to bring a greater humanness into our society. With these prophets the concept of our souls is hopefully making a comeback.

A fresh impetus to this movement is books such as Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul.23 A book like this tries to encourage people to explore the depth of their personhood, how to bring beauty, meaning and love into drab modern existence. As a therapist I am very sympathetic to Moore's aims, but as a scientist I am appalled at the gratuitous unsubstantiated statements made therein.

For example, Moore states that "Christmas is the celebration of Jesus as infant and divinity entering the human arena. This motif of the divine child is common to many religions, suggesting not only the childhood of the God, but also the divinity of childhood. Just as the mythical mother is a foundational principle of all life, so the divine child is an aspect of all experience."24

However, these statements are presented as if they are intuitive and self-evident, but I find this and other generalisations sweeping and unconvincing. How can we explore the depth of our being and the depth of meaning satisfactorily? If we can't, do we take Jeeves' position of scientific scepticism or are there other ways of exploring our personal reality-our soul? I have no answer to that, but it is an intriguing question.

Meanwhile, it is valuable for those working in nursing homes or those having relatives with dementia to recognise that the essence of a person (their soul!) does not reside in the mind. Thus the painful mental deterioration does not diminish the value of the person as a person, even if it becomes increasingly difficult to make contact with that person.

In the field of counselling, there is a resurgence of interest in the area of spirituality.25 The twelve step program published by Alcoholics Anonymous is an example. In my clinical drug and alcohol practice, I find that a spiritual history and the exploration of spirituality can be a powerful tool to aid recovery.

What constitutes spirituality? Some feel spirituality is a right brain concept and the call for a definition a left brain bias! Stephen Biddulph, however, states: "Spirituality simply means the direct experience of something special in life and living."26 He talks about men finding themselves, finding a purpose for living, a sense of the ineffable and unspeakable, giving in to that deep desire, feeling our grief our joy and our anger. C.S. Lewis described it as the quest after Joy.27

Existential psychiatry deals with the meta-questions-Why are we here? Where is my life going? Victor Frankl's quest for meaning in work, relationships and suffering is central to his scheme of psychotherapy. And Jean Vanier describes spirituality as love. When you love you find the need to be loved. This love, he believes, comes from God.

Put simply: Christian spirituality is encountering God in Christ. The New Testament talks in terms of repentance (changing one's ideas and hence one's behaviour) and discovering God's forgiveness and new life. It is described as the infusion of the spirit (pneuma, breath) of God. A person filled with the life of God is enthusiastic (literally: God within). The quest after God is described in the Bible in many terms. Jesus talks of thirsting after the water of life,28 hungering after the bread of life29 and being grafted into the vine which is Christ.30 There is a thirst for God that is not satisfied by anything else. Augustine's moving "Thou awakest us to delight in your praise for you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it repose in thee"31 captures most beautifully both the longing and the rest of seeking and finding God. The history of Christian spirituality is a very rich one best summed up not just in terms of God and I but in terms of loving God, ourselves, our neighbours and our environment.32 Along with this, however, is the inner resources of the Spirit of God as a powerful force transforming and renewing sinful human beings.33

So where does the spirit begin and the soul stop? George Eldon Ladd suggests that the soul is the essence of a person, who they are in relation to themselves and others, whereas the spirit defines who a person is in relation to God.34 However, the biblical data would suggest that, in keeping with Hebrew woolliness of definition and a testimony to Hebrew holism, the word spirit and soul are virtually interchangeable. Thus in Psalm 143, both soul and spirit are used to express the God-ward direction of the person's essence.

Charles Sherlock reminds us that spirituality is not "whatever is left over when the doctor, social worker, psychologist, community education officer or psychiatrist have had a go . . . Spirituality means godliness, whether in material concerns, social relations or fellowship with God."35 He points out, however, that sometimes bi-partite and sometimes tri-partite models of a person are used in the Bible, although the unity of humans is the uppermost model.36

To: Biblical psychology

Alan J. Gijsbers MBBS FRACP DTM&H PGDip Epi, is Specialist Physician at Turning Point Drug and Alcohol Centre and at the Department of Drug and Alcohol Studies St Vincent's Hospital. He is a Visiting Physician at the Epworth Hospital, a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Medicine at the Department of Psychological Medicine Monash University and Senior Fellow at St Vincent's Hospital Clinical School, University of Melbourne. He also contributes to a Dual Diagnosis Clinic at the St John of God and St Vincent's Collaborating Centre consulting on people with both Drug and Alcohol and Psychiatric Disorders. He is a fellow ISCAST and editor of their national bulletin. He also somehow manages to be a husband to his wife, Lois, and a father to three children.