In Search of the Bible’s Metaphysics of the Soul

By Alin Christoph Cucu

[T]here are myriad passages of sacred Scripture which proclaim the immortality of the soul…[1]

The Hebrew Bible (or Christian Old Testament) and the New Testament affirm what might be called a holistic or integrated view of human beings.[2]

The notion that human beings have or are souls (Hb. nephesh, Gk. psuché) is ubiquitous in Scripture. But what does this mean metaphysically? How should we think biblically about the soul in terms of its ontological nature and its relationship to the body?

With respect to this question, Christian philosophers have traditionally taken either the position of substance dualism (SD) or of Thomism. SD can be summed up with the slogan “We are souls and have bodies”. SD considers both soul and body as substances, which roughly means that they are entities which can exist independently of one another[3]. In the last decades, SD has come under fire by some Christian scholars who regard it as an extraneous insertion of Greek thought into Christianity, often because it allegedly denigrates the body. However, a denigration of the body is no essential part of SD.

Thomism (going back to Thomas Aquinas) is a variant of Aristotelian hylomorphism and has it that a human being is exactly one substance, not two substances joined together. It comes about by the infusion of matter with the human soul, which according to Aquinas is not a full-fledged substance but a subsistence, endowed with the typical capacities of an Aristotelian form. However, wanting to salvage the Christian vision of the afterlife, Aquinas held that the soul survives the death of the body, though in a rather truncated state, because its full potential is only realized when embodied.

UNITY and SEPARABILITY

Let’s test those two views against the following two criteria, which I take to reflect the main desiderata for a philosophically and theologically adequate biblical metaphysics of the soul (see also introductory quotes):

UNITY: (Embodied) human beings appear to be unified, holistic beings, not like compound entities where the soul inhabits and steers the body like a captain steers a ship. This ought to be reflected metaphysically. Human beings should be metaphysical unities, which means that there is numerically just one substance.

SEPARABILITY: Despite their unity, body and soul can come apart, with the soul surviving the death of the body.

Substance Dualism

SD obviously fulfills SEPARABILITY: soul and body are two different substances that can be joined or separated, and since the soul is a full-fledged substance, it stands to reason that it continues to exist after the demise of the body. It does not depend on the body like a property-instance of roundness depends on the ball that exemplifies it: as soon as the ball is destroyed (say, by fire), the instance of roundness is also gone. Not so with the soul.

Extra-biblical support for SEPARABILITY comes from near-death experiences (NDEs). NDEs are experiences people have in a state of total cortical inactivity, for example, as the consequence of a heart attack. Over the last decades, a vast number of NDE reports have been amassed and thoroughly analyzed by researchers. In some cases, people even report to have left their bodies and to have learned things (later verified!) they could not possibly have learned had they depended solely on their bodies[4]. According to materialist or property-dualist theories, there should not even be consciousness without a functioning brain, let alone verifiable experiences. SD, by contrast, is perfectly able to explain NDEs (in particular veridical ones): it is the person as her disembodied soul who has those experiences, since the soul continues to exist even without the body.

However, SD fails on UNITY. The reason is simple: the joining of two substances does not yield one unified substance; one plus one does not equal one. Christian substance dualist Charles Taliaferro rightly points out that an adequate SD must be “integrative”[5], yielding a unified body-soul being, but SD simply lacks the metaphysical resources for this. The problem is more than a wordplay: for instance, SD entails that when a man kisses his wife, he is strictly speaking not kissing her but only her body, because she is an immaterial soul ‘inside’ that body, unreachable by his kisses.

Thomism

From its definition, it is at once clear that Thomism meets the criterion of UNITY. After all, it is the main point of hylomorphism to explain the unity of substances. SEPARABILITY, by contrast, is another matter. On the one hand, Thomism grants the separability of body and soul. On the other hand, the Thomistic soul is not a substance, and thus does not possess the full range of an embodied soul’s capacities. However, veridical NDEs suggest that disembodied souls have an astonishing range of abilities, from thinking to remembering to sense perception to even motion. A Thomist could reply that it is God who upholds the soul’s capacities in the disembodied state. Although this is clearly a possibility, I wish to present a view which meets both criteria with less effort.

Thomistic-like Dualism

Thomistic-like Dualism (TLD) is J. P. Moreland’s ontology of the human person[6]. It takes from SD the tenet that the soul is a full substance and can thus unproblematically survive death; by the same token, TLD allows a less strained explanation of NDEs than Thomism. TLD is also Thomistic in that it ascribes to the soul a key role in forming, structuring, and maintaining the body. For Moreland, the soul contains the capacities not only for consciousness, but also for “animating, enlivening, and (…) developing teleologically its body.”[7] This means nothing less than that DNA must cede its role as the ‘blueprint’ of the body to the soul! Most importantly, though, on TLD the body is no longer a substance but becomes an integral part of the ‘bodily soul’, thus yielding only one substance.

I take it that TLD satisfies both Christian intuitions: that the soul is immortal, and that embodied human beings are holistic entities.

Notes

[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles., II.79.17

[2] Goetz, Stewart, and Charles Taliaferro. 2011. A Brief History of the Soul. 1st ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 30.

[3] Not all versions of SD affirm that the soul can exist independently of the body (see e.g., Lowe, Jonathan. 2006. “Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and the Problem of Mental Causation.” Erkenntnis 65:5–23).

[4] For an overview of especially those ‘veridical’ NDEs, see Habermas, Gary R. 2018. “Evidential Near‐Death Experiences.” The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, 226–46.

[5] Taliaferro, Charles. 1994. Consciousness and the Mind of God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[6] See Moreland, J. P. 2018. “In Defense of a Thomistic-like Dualism.” In The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, edited by Jonathan J. Loose and Angus J. L. Menuge, 102–22. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

[7] Moreland 2018, 103.

— Alin Christoph Cucu (PhD, University of Lausanne) is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is the author of a PhD thesis as well as several peer-reviewed papers on mind-body-interaction, especially its scientific aspects, and co-editor of an anthology with the title “Religious Hypotheses and the Study of Human Nature” (in Romanian, Institutul European, forthcoming). His co-authored paper “How Dualists Should (Not) Respond to the Objection From Energy Conservation” (with J. Brian Pitts) was awarded the Best Paper Prize of the Mind and Matter Society. In recent years he won three Templeton grants for research projects at the intersection of theology, philosophy and science.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

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