Untangling Cliché: "Spirit" / "Soul"

From the Mailbag:

Hebrews 4:12: For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. What do you think the distinction is between soul and spirit?

In the first place, we're talking about words, here, and it's always good idea to remember the truth that words mean what we agree they'll mean. So if you want them to mean something like "the part of the self that lives after death," or "the part of the self that relates to God," or "the part of yourself that is sustained by fairy giraffes with butterfly wings," then you can do that.

But it's helpful to dig into the meanings of the words as they were commonly used at the time that they were written. (In the case of Hebrews, this means somewhere between 50 C.E. and 100 C.E.)

If the writers were using the word in some special sense (like some evangelical Christians use the word "flesh" in a special sense to mean "sin nature" or something), there might be clues in the text. If there are no such clues, the writer was depending on contexts that are lost to us, and we're pretty much screwed as far as getting at what he meant.  In that case, the fields of meaning that they were playing in are lost to us.

The word "soul" is, in the Greek, psuche or psyche, which means "mind." From this perspective, you would be right to say that the soul represents to the Greek-thinking world (including St. Paul) one's consciousness.

The word "spirit" is, in most ancient languages that I know or dabble in, the same word that is given as "life, breath, animation." Often it is related to the word "wind," which is why life or creative energy is habitually symbolized in the Hebrew Bible as a "wind from God": see for example the first few verses of Genesis, the story of Noah, and the story of the Exodus, in all of which creative forces drive back the chaos of water or flood. The "spirit," therefore, as it's used in the Hebrew Bible, refers simply the eternal breath of God that animates us all. Until we die.

It is combined in the imagination of the Christians with their experience of the Holy Spirit, the pentecostal experience: in that event they see the purely biological life (the breath of God animating us) as no longer derivative from God, but actually tangling itself up with the very life of God.

With all of that in mind, I think it's useful to remember just what distinctions ancient writers were making. Their languages can be very elegant, but they're awfully pragmatic, rooted in physical realities that are presented very often in metaphors. Their richly poetic in that sense, but at the same time capable of almost scientific exactitude: they simply express their knowledge in words that engage the imagination, a region of the mind a little different from the one you and I habitually use as we lay "spirit" and "soul" on the table and demand a declaration of their taxons.

Update on Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 8:14AM by Otter

Email Response:

The "spirit," however, is simply the eternal breath of God that animates us all. Until we die. It is combined in the imagination of the Christians with their experience of the Holy Spirit, the pentecostal experience: in that event they see the purely biological life (the breath of God animating us) as no longer derivative from God, but actually tangling itself up with the very life of God.

Not sure how to read you on this. Are you skeptical of the idea? I don't think it is confined to the pentecostal experience. Isn't it implied in the incarnation, and made explicit in the idea of "Christ in you, the hope of glory"?

No, I'm not skeptical of it... Well, no more than I'm skeptical of all God-talk.  As far as God-talk goes, though, in fact I'm very, very close to saying it's the only genuinely Christian experience by New Testament standards.

But it is an imaginative construction: what you actually SEE and FEEL is something much different... you don't typically "see" the Spirit, but that's the metaphor or image that they (and we) give to this experience: the breath of God descends and animates us.

What that truly consists in, in real world terms, might be a little surprising.