“OOOoooooOOOhhh … coooooome toooo meee, ooohh Androgyni, god/dess of sexual confusion … Cooome and caaassst ooouut my eeenemeeeey, Bumuuurrga, the goddess of menstrual cramps (the fat old witch), so that I, Bishtar, eternal Son of a bish that I Am, can bid loooong farewell to Owhooooya, angry god of couch-sleepers, and can create My Own Reality of Pleeeaaasure with beautiful Guuuishtar [Bumuuurrga’s other manifestation], divine daughter of Swishtar, athletic goddess of tennis shoes, That our geologically brief Embrace may laaaast Eteeerrnally, or at least until that other one, you know … What’s-her-name? … (oh yeah)—Aaaaphrodiaper, goddess of eternal youth and beauty, should join us and mud-wrestle with Guuuishtar & rip off her skimpy linen things, thereby giving meee even mooooore Pleeeaasure … (how did I miss those?) … … Ooooohhh cooooome ooooohhh … um … (oh yeah)—Aaandrooooogyneee, and through your Inspiraaaaation I will create my ooooown Reality, and all Pleeeeaaasure will be Miiiiiiine (and maybe I’ll let you have a little on the side) … And maaaayybeee togeeether we can get Fishtar, ancient god of sea chanteys to take a Baaath … restoring heavenly fresh air to the Astral Spheres and the Great Celeeeeestial Reeeaaalms for aaaall the Ascended Masters of the Universe …
“By the Power of My Own God Within, this is my Commaaaand to yooouu, O Andooogyneei, … do you HEAR me? … I Commaaaand you to do myyyy bidding … as I create my ooowwn reality of Pleeeaasure with all those goddess Babes … because there’s no jealousy among all us gods, right? And it’s OK if I Am the center of aaaall pleeeaaasure!!! (Suffering is for all those foolish, sick-o, superstitious Christians, right?) If only they would puuuurifyyy themselves and become gods like uuusss, then aaaall suffering would just goooo awaaaayyy & I wouldn’t be sleeping here on the couch with Owhooooya, god of angry couch-sleepers, after being kicked out by Bumuuurrga, angry goddess of menstrual cramps … Ooohh coooome Aaandrooogyneei … Giiiive meeee a siiiiign … (?)” …
… *Thump* … *Thump* …*Thump* …
“Oh Androgyni … is that You? …”
… *Thump-thump-thump-thump* …
“… Oh, it’s you, Fido, dog—I mean god of eternal tail-waggers. Get outta here, I wasn’t calling you … (stupid mutt!) …
“Aww, come on, Androgyni … I’ve got my sacred crystal—just play along, will ya? …
“… Well how about your eternal half-brother, Mephistopheles?—is he around? …”
(… Oooooooo … mmmm … Hey, now that’s more like it! I’m starting to feel the effects already …
(I don’t need that fat old witch anyway … I’m outta here!)
“Hey Fido! Let’s go have a pizza! I’m buying … after all, it’s MY reality! (Maybe we can pick up a few Temple Prostitutes while we’re at it…)”
Fido: “Mrowrr” *pant-pant-pant*
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Body, Soul and Spirit
(and a little bit about heaven and hell)
[This is an excerpt (p. 128-133) from Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing by Peter Kreeft (available from: Ignatius Press, San Francisco).] (Note: the parts set off below with square brackets appear as footnotes in the book.)
The life of the body and soul together is the “life” the New Testament calls bios, natural life. The life of the spirit is more than natural life, or zoë. If we choose it, it is our spirit’s participation in God’s own life as Father, the source of life. Our spirit’s consciousness is then a participation in the Word of God, the divine consciousness, the “light that enlightens every man who comes into the world” [John 1:9], the cosmic Christ. And our spirit’s joy is a participation in God’s own eternal inner joy of love between the Father and the Son: the Holy Spirit.
The body is our relation to what is less than ourselves (the material world); the soul is our relation to ourselves, or self-consciousness; and the spirit is our relation to what is more than ourselves (God). That is why we usually discover the real, living God and the reality of our own spirit at the same time and why we can’t find our own deepest identity until we find God.
It is our spirit that thirsts for God, whether or not our conscious souls do. We have six thirsts. On the bodily level, we thirst for pleasure and sense experience (curiosity); on the soul level, for happiness and knowledge; on the spirit level, for joy and wisdom. Pleasure and sense experience come from the world; happiness and knowledge come from ourselves (though many try in vain to find them in the world); joy and wisdom come from God (though many try in vain to find them in themselves or in the world).
Pleasures and sensations are like ripples on our surface; happiness and knowledge are like undercurrents in our inner waters; joy and wisdom are sunken treasures at the very bottom.
Each step deepens the one before it. Knowledge is a kind of depth perception or X-ray of sense perception; it sees forms and structures and essences behind external appearances. In turn wisdom discovers the deepest significance or ultimate meaning and value of what knowledge turns up. Similarly, happiness is a deepening of pleasure; we can see this when we are happy even when in pain. (Yes, it happens; ask any mother in childbirth!) And joy is deeper than happiness, for our joy can remain even when our feelings are upset. There are deeper feelings than the feelings, just as there are deeper reasons than the reason: “The heart has its reasons which the reason cannot know.”
Joy can be in the spirit without happiness being in the soul, but joy usually flows out into the soul and even into the body. A joyful spirit inspires joyful feelings and even a more psychosomatically healthy body. (For example, we need less sleep when we have joy and have more resistance to all kinds of diseases from colds to cancers.) But the home of joy is the spirit. We feel joy in the conscious soul only because the spirit is the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body. Joyful feelings are not joy, but joy’s overflow, not the wave but the wave’s imprint in the sand.
Not everyone knows what the spirit is and how it is distinct from the soul. Does it really make a difference? Only the difference between life and death. The soul makes the difference between life and death to the body, and the spirit makes the difference between life and death to the soul. A body without a soul is not a living body but a corpse. The difference between a living body and a dead body is not a bodily difference. Immediately after death the body has the same weight, shape and size; but its life has departed. Life is not a thing, like the body, but the life of that thing. Similarly, a soul without a spirit is a dead soul, and the difference between a dead soul and a living soul is not a soul difference. Dead souls think (dead thoughts) and feel (dead feelings) just as living souls do, but they have no life. If you want to see dead souls, or at least dying souls, just walk through certain city streets.
Greek philosophy (or at least Socratic-Platonic philosophy) teaches the immortality of the soul. The Bible does not: The only immortal one is God. [1 Tim. 6:15-16: “the King of kings and Lord of lords who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light.”] We attain immortality not by the unfree passivity of being born but by the act of free choice to be “born again.” [John 3:3: “Unless one is born anew he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”] Without the divine miracle of raising the dead, there is no hope for immortality. [1 Cor. 15:17-19: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied.”] That immortality is bodily as well as soul and spirit immortality. [1 Cor. 15:35, 38: “But some one will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? … God gives it a body as He has chosen.”] Finally, souls are not said to be immortal but mortal, that is, able to die. [Matt. 10:28: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.”] Hell is precisely that: the death of the soul.
Spirit is unchanged by bodily death, which only clarifies its “fundamental option” for or against God. Souls are purged and perfected by bodily death (if their spirits live). Bodies are killed.
Spirit has only two choices: for or against God, for spirit confronts God, the absolute, the one and only. Here is the only area of absolute either/or: yes or no to God. (That is why conscience, which is the voice of spirit, is so absolutistic: it is the voice of God.) C. S. Lewis is thinking of the spirit when he says, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God: ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says in the end: ‘Thy will be done.’” [C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), p. 72.]
Soul has many choices, not just one, for our thoughts and feelings are multicolored, not black or white. And body is the most dispersable of all, for it is part of the world of matter, which is maximally dispersable.
Spirit is where we decide who we are—our identity, our I. It is where we are selves, where we are ones. Our Dionysian and Apollonian halves are not selves, not wholes. Where are they one? Or are we only tow halves glued together? No, we are wholes, and we find this wholeness only at the bottom of the bowl where the two sides converge. Just as “everything that rises must converge” in God [The Flannery O’Connor title is from Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)], everything that descends must also converge at the heart of the self, which is the image of God. The human I reflects the divine I Am. This is the spirit or “heart” (as Scripture calls it). It is both center and bottom.
Here at the bottom of the canyon the waters of life flow together and mingle; joy and wisdom are one. Deepest joy is deepest wisdom; beatitude is “the beatific vision.” Happiness is not of itself knowledge, but joy is wisdom and wisdom is joy. The reason for this unity is that the object of joy and wisdom, unlike that of knowledge and happiness, is not an abstract, partial ingredient in the whole; and it is not known with an abstract aspect or part of ourselves, the intellect. Rather, in joy and wisdom the living God lets himself be touched by the human heart, center to center, heart to heart, spirit to spirit, I to Thou, “deep calling unto deep.” [Ps. 42:7.]
Scripture invites us to “know the Lord” with the heart, not (first of all) the head. The biblical sense of “know” is “to love.” The word is even used of physical love: “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived.” [Gen. 4:1.] She did not conceive a concept but a conception, a child. On the spiritual level, there is an incredible and wondrous parallel: God wants to be our spirit’s husband. [Isa. 54:5.] Our spirit’s love and intercourse with God conceive ourselves, our new identity, our destiny. We are our own mothers (in the sense that by choosing God, we receive his grace, and we give life to our own spirit—G/F). What we are now is only our womb, our raw material, our potential self. But we cannot be our own fathers, our own gods; that is the Oedipus complex, the dream of getting rid of our father and marrying our mother, and being our own father, that is, our own god. It is our primal sin, “original sin,” the refusal of the divine marriage proposal. Its result is death, spiritual barrenness—ultimately, hell, “the outer darkness,” the only ultimate alternative to joy. [Matt. 8:12.]
[This is an excerpt (p. 128-133) from Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing by Peter Kreeft (available from: Ignatius Press, San Francisco).] (Note: the parts set off below with square brackets appear as footnotes in the book.)
The life of the body and soul together is the “life” the New Testament calls bios, natural life. The life of the spirit is more than natural life, or zoë. If we choose it, it is our spirit’s participation in God’s own life as Father, the source of life. Our spirit’s consciousness is then a participation in the Word of God, the divine consciousness, the “light that enlightens every man who comes into the world” [John 1:9], the cosmic Christ. And our spirit’s joy is a participation in God’s own eternal inner joy of love between the Father and the Son: the Holy Spirit.
The body is our relation to what is less than ourselves (the material world); the soul is our relation to ourselves, or self-consciousness; and the spirit is our relation to what is more than ourselves (God). That is why we usually discover the real, living God and the reality of our own spirit at the same time and why we can’t find our own deepest identity until we find God.
It is our spirit that thirsts for God, whether or not our conscious souls do. We have six thirsts. On the bodily level, we thirst for pleasure and sense experience (curiosity); on the soul level, for happiness and knowledge; on the spirit level, for joy and wisdom. Pleasure and sense experience come from the world; happiness and knowledge come from ourselves (though many try in vain to find them in the world); joy and wisdom come from God (though many try in vain to find them in themselves or in the world).
Pleasures and sensations are like ripples on our surface; happiness and knowledge are like undercurrents in our inner waters; joy and wisdom are sunken treasures at the very bottom.
Each step deepens the one before it. Knowledge is a kind of depth perception or X-ray of sense perception; it sees forms and structures and essences behind external appearances. In turn wisdom discovers the deepest significance or ultimate meaning and value of what knowledge turns up. Similarly, happiness is a deepening of pleasure; we can see this when we are happy even when in pain. (Yes, it happens; ask any mother in childbirth!) And joy is deeper than happiness, for our joy can remain even when our feelings are upset. There are deeper feelings than the feelings, just as there are deeper reasons than the reason: “The heart has its reasons which the reason cannot know.”
Joy can be in the spirit without happiness being in the soul, but joy usually flows out into the soul and even into the body. A joyful spirit inspires joyful feelings and even a more psychosomatically healthy body. (For example, we need less sleep when we have joy and have more resistance to all kinds of diseases from colds to cancers.) But the home of joy is the spirit. We feel joy in the conscious soul only because the spirit is the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body. Joyful feelings are not joy, but joy’s overflow, not the wave but the wave’s imprint in the sand.
Not everyone knows what the spirit is and how it is distinct from the soul. Does it really make a difference? Only the difference between life and death. The soul makes the difference between life and death to the body, and the spirit makes the difference between life and death to the soul. A body without a soul is not a living body but a corpse. The difference between a living body and a dead body is not a bodily difference. Immediately after death the body has the same weight, shape and size; but its life has departed. Life is not a thing, like the body, but the life of that thing. Similarly, a soul without a spirit is a dead soul, and the difference between a dead soul and a living soul is not a soul difference. Dead souls think (dead thoughts) and feel (dead feelings) just as living souls do, but they have no life. If you want to see dead souls, or at least dying souls, just walk through certain city streets.
Greek philosophy (or at least Socratic-Platonic philosophy) teaches the immortality of the soul. The Bible does not: The only immortal one is God. [1 Tim. 6:15-16: “the King of kings and Lord of lords who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light.”] We attain immortality not by the unfree passivity of being born but by the act of free choice to be “born again.” [John 3:3: “Unless one is born anew he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”] Without the divine miracle of raising the dead, there is no hope for immortality. [1 Cor. 15:17-19: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied.”] That immortality is bodily as well as soul and spirit immortality. [1 Cor. 15:35, 38: “But some one will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? … God gives it a body as He has chosen.”] Finally, souls are not said to be immortal but mortal, that is, able to die. [Matt. 10:28: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.”] Hell is precisely that: the death of the soul.
Spirit is unchanged by bodily death, which only clarifies its “fundamental option” for or against God. Souls are purged and perfected by bodily death (if their spirits live). Bodies are killed.
Spirit has only two choices: for or against God, for spirit confronts God, the absolute, the one and only. Here is the only area of absolute either/or: yes or no to God. (That is why conscience, which is the voice of spirit, is so absolutistic: it is the voice of God.) C. S. Lewis is thinking of the spirit when he says, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God: ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says in the end: ‘Thy will be done.’” [C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), p. 72.]
Soul has many choices, not just one, for our thoughts and feelings are multicolored, not black or white. And body is the most dispersable of all, for it is part of the world of matter, which is maximally dispersable.
Spirit is where we decide who we are—our identity, our I. It is where we are selves, where we are ones. Our Dionysian and Apollonian halves are not selves, not wholes. Where are they one? Or are we only tow halves glued together? No, we are wholes, and we find this wholeness only at the bottom of the bowl where the two sides converge. Just as “everything that rises must converge” in God [The Flannery O’Connor title is from Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)], everything that descends must also converge at the heart of the self, which is the image of God. The human I reflects the divine I Am. This is the spirit or “heart” (as Scripture calls it). It is both center and bottom.
Here at the bottom of the canyon the waters of life flow together and mingle; joy and wisdom are one. Deepest joy is deepest wisdom; beatitude is “the beatific vision.” Happiness is not of itself knowledge, but joy is wisdom and wisdom is joy. The reason for this unity is that the object of joy and wisdom, unlike that of knowledge and happiness, is not an abstract, partial ingredient in the whole; and it is not known with an abstract aspect or part of ourselves, the intellect. Rather, in joy and wisdom the living God lets himself be touched by the human heart, center to center, heart to heart, spirit to spirit, I to Thou, “deep calling unto deep.” [Ps. 42:7.]
Scripture invites us to “know the Lord” with the heart, not (first of all) the head. The biblical sense of “know” is “to love.” The word is even used of physical love: “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived.” [Gen. 4:1.] She did not conceive a concept but a conception, a child. On the spiritual level, there is an incredible and wondrous parallel: God wants to be our spirit’s husband. [Isa. 54:5.] Our spirit’s love and intercourse with God conceive ourselves, our new identity, our destiny. We are our own mothers (in the sense that by choosing God, we receive his grace, and we give life to our own spirit—G/F). What we are now is only our womb, our raw material, our potential self. But we cannot be our own fathers, our own gods; that is the Oedipus complex, the dream of getting rid of our father and marrying our mother, and being our own father, that is, our own god. It is our primal sin, “original sin,” the refusal of the divine marriage proposal. Its result is death, spiritual barrenness—ultimately, hell, “the outer darkness,” the only ultimate alternative to joy. [Matt. 8:12.]
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