Soul

SOUL. - «The a. is the principle by which we primarily live, feel, and understand» (Aristotle, De anima, II, 2, 414a, 12-13).

I. DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL.

1. THE KNOWABILITY OF THE SOUL

The earliest beliefs concerning the a. are religious and obscure in nature and merge with the earliest origins of the various civilizations and religions. The documents of primitive cultures (v. below, no. III), from which Western philosophy and civilization took their impulse and development, attest to the predominance of the problem of the a. and its function as a key for orientation regarding the other problems of nature and of God. It is difficult to decide whether in the development of these three problems there was at the beginning a strict relationship of derivation among them, as the logical progression of ideas would have it, or whether instead they were co-present in a relationship of mutual equilibrium and support: the latter hypothesis seems the more plausible, at least as regards the a. and God. Hence the curious phenomenon that a good part of those conclusions about the a. and about God, over which human thought will struggle without respite, are professed at the outset as truths that admit of no contestation; and the advent of philosophical inquiry represents almost nothing more than a "defensive" function to which man applied himself when those first beliefs began to weaken and become corrupted. An observation of this kind, while doing justice in point of fact to evolutionist theories and eliminating them from the field they themselves had chosen, cannot by itself resolve any of the grave problems that presented themselves to philosophical reflection when the time came to give those persuasions a proper structure of intrinsic evidence on the plane of being.

The reality is that in philosophy the problem of the a. always revealed itself as among the most contested and complicated. In a fragment of Heraclitus (fr. 45, ed. R. Walzer, Florence 1939, p. 82), also recalled by Tertullian (De A., 2: PL 2, 691), it is affirmed that "the boundaries of the a. cannot be reached by any journey, by whatever road one takes, so deep a reason does it have." Philo, at the full flowering of Hellenism, takes pleasure in pointing out the paradox: "The mind that is in each of us can comprehend everything, but has no possibility of knowing itself" (Legum Allegor., I, § 91, ed. Cohn, I, p. 85). And elsewhere: "The mind that is in each person is unknowable to us: who can know the nature of the a.?" (De Mutatione Nominum, § 10, ed. Wendland, III, p. 158). These confessions of impotence pass over to Christian thinkers, even to those in whom the maturity of synthesis and speculative equilibrium had by then given all that could be expected in the matter, as is the case with St. Thomas Aquinas: the knowledge of the a. presents a "maximum difficulty" (In I Sent., d. 3, 9.1, a. 2, ad 3); to it "...vix magno studio pervenitur" (ibid., d. 3, 9.3, a. 5: "requiritur diligens et subtilis inquisitio" (Summ. Theol., 1ª, q. 87, a. 1); "cognoscere quid sit a. difficillimum est" (De Veritate, X, 8 ad 8). Confessions as frank as could be, but which have not hindered tireless research, because for man every knowledge is little or nothing and every wealth is negligible until he knows who he is and what he contains within himself.

The difficulties of knowing the a. have continually diverted research into an interminable variety of opinions, which offered the occasion to a profound connoisseur of the weaknesses of the human spirit, such as Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, to reproach philosophers for having raved here with greater incongruity than elsewhere (De vanitate scientiarum, ch. 52, in Opera omnia, II, Lyon 1600, p. 85 ff.). But in this very fact a meaning lies hidden: the ever-living and resurgent interest of research, which cannot be explained without some initial and ever-present evidence, to which one wishes to attain in order to attempt the research itself anew. St. Thomas, with a precise formula, placed the initial evidence in the certainty of existence, and saw the difficulties on the side of the ontological determination of the essence of the a. A formula that seems to open no way out, given the heterogeneity and inderivability that St. Thomas expressly affirms between the two orders of essence and existence. Were it not that the a. attests to its existence in the concrete and actual exercise of life, and this can constitute a solid starting point also for the investigation of the nature of the a. That is to say, the vital manifestations — of conscious life, that is — have a two-faced character: a) insofar as they are "acts" they attest to the principle that actually produces them; b) insofar as they show in themselves a "content," they can be taken as "signs" and properties that point back to a corresponding nature. The following treatment adheres to this schema.

2. ETYMOLOGY

The origin of the word a. is connected to that category of vital manifestations that to spontaneous thought seemed the most evident and common. In the ancient languages, classical and Semitic, it has an intimate kinship with "breath," breath, wind. In Hebrew (v. below, no. II), and similarly in Arabic, the terms breath, wind, spirit occur. For Greek, Plato derives ψυχή from ἀναπνεῖν "to breathe" and ἀναψυγόν "refreshing"; and he too believes the etymology of ψυχή = φάσιν ἔχει σά ἔχει "that which holds, bears the nature" to be more persuasive (Cratylus, 399-400). Likewise the Sanskrit "Atman," by which the a. is indicated in many passages of the Rgveda, means breath, whence the German atmen "to breathe" (v. Max Müller, The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, London 1928, pp. 71-72). Aristotle, along with breath and movement, indicates "cooling" κατάψυξις = ψύγειν (De Anima, II, 2, 403 b, 29), which Mondolfo traces back to Philolaus and not to Hippo as Diels with Philoponus would have it (E. Zeller-R. Mondolfo, La filosofia dei Greci nel suo sviluppo storico, part 1ᵃ, II, p. 561). The etymology of the a. as cooling is accepted by Origen, who turns it in a spiritual sense. The "a." is said to be the spirit which, having fallen through its own fault from its primitive fervor, had as its penalty and purification union with the body: "... inde quod ex illo calore naturali et divino refixisse videatur, et ideo in hoc quo nunc est statu et vocabulo sita est" (De Principiis, II, 8; PG 11, 222 D, 223 A); an etymology vigorously rejected by pseudo-Athanasius (v. De corpore et anima: PG 28, 1432-33), and expressly condemned, on the proposal of the emperor Justinian, by the Second Council of Constantinople held by the patriarch Menas (can. IV). The etymology "a." = cooling was certainly occasioned by the observation of the effect, so easy to observe, that agitated air produces upon hot bodies, and it seems to have enjoyed the preference of the Stoics, who nevertheless are not its authors, as H. Karpp seems to suggest (Soraus vier Bücher Περὶ Ψυχῆς und Tertullians Schrift "De Anima", in Zeitschr. f. neutest. Wissenschaft, 1934, pp. 43-44). For the modern languages, which do not derive from the classical ones, note the German Seele: the term would derive from the ancient Germanic zaitvolō, which probably would have the same origin as the Greek κίλλος "mobile," an etymology that reaches one of the earliest and most fortunate meanings of the a., a self-moving principle, as will be said in the historical part (cf. L. Klages, Vom Wesen des Bewusstsein, Italian trans. in the vol. Anima e spirito, Milan 1940, pp. 258-59).

Latin has anima and animus, to be connected with the Greek ἄνεμος "wind." Curious is the etymology of Cassiodorus, taken in contrast to the ancient belief that the soul had its seat in the blood: "... Quoniam immortalis est anima recte appellatur quasi ἄνεμος id est a sanguine longe discreta." On the other hand, "animus dicitur ἀπὸ τοῦ ἄνεμου id est a vento, eo quod velocissime coustatio eius ad similitudinem motu celer per vagatur" (De Anima, 1: PL 70, 1282). The distinction between anima and animus, of which there is almost no trace in the Latin of the Scholastics, had a fairly precise meaning in classical Latin, where animus was reserved for the vital principle of man, indeed for his more mobile part, as Macrobius attests: "Animus enim proprie mens est, quam divisiorem anima nemo dubitavit. Sed nonnumquam sic et animam usurpantes vocamus" (In Somnium Scipionis, I, 14). Anima, on the other hand, stands for the vital principle of animals, or for that of the lower functions of man. It is in this sense that Hugh of St. Victor speaks of it in the early Middle Ages (Tract. sup. Magnificat: PL 175, 418 ff.), following almost to the letter St. Augustine (De Fide et Symbolo, X, 23: PL 40, 193-94). The relationship between anima and animus-spiritus underwent, in the development of philosophical and scientific thought, a radical transformation, in which the position taken by Hugh of St. Victor belongs to the terminal phase. The researches carried out by Fr. Rüsche and by G. Verbeke, extended to the whole of Greek philosophy and to the Alexandrian school, have shown the gradual passage undergone by the term animus-spiritus, through various stages.

In the Homeric poems, together with the soul (ψυχή) is placed the animus (θυμός), which is our animo, understood as courage, daring, impulse to act. The soul seems to have, in the exercise of vital activities, a secondary place; it is presented there almost inert, and after death it wanders like an empty and unsubstantial shadow in the regions of Hades. Predominant, on the other hand, is the function of the θυμός, which is the impulsive principle of the vital forces, from which originate not only feelings and passions, but thought and will themselves. While the soul does not occupy a special place in the body, but is almost a tenuous reproduction of the whole, animus is said to be located in the chest and especially in the praecordia, above all in the heart, into which it is introduced with respiration and emitted with the last expiration. Hippocrates and the ancient Sicilian medical school derive the θυμός, which is called "spirit" (πνεῦμα), no longer from respiration but from the last exhalation of the blood, and the air breathed in has the sole task of tempering the ardor of the blood's vitality. Plato and Aristotle welcomed these ideas, bending them, however, to new meanings. In Plato the internal heat becomes a lower function of the irascible part (θυμικόν) situated in the chest. In Aristotle it loses the function of soul and is reduced to a physiological agent: "intrinsic heat" (σύμψυτον, ἔμψυτον θερμὸν) as the vehicle (ὄχημα) of the vital heat with which the soul moves the body and operates in it; neither soul nor power, but a physical "instrument" at the soul's disposal (De Iuv. et Sen., De Vita et Morte, 4, 469 b, 6 ff., with reference to its cooling function; cf. ch. 5. Complete documentation in Fr. Rüsche, Blut, Leben und Seele, p. 118 ff.).

After Aristotle, the Stoic Posidonius distinguishes a twofold spirit, corporeal and incorporeal, and conceives the latter as the fifth corporeal nature, "the ether, divine body and God himself," from which human souls have derived as sparks. Philo, who still represents spirituality as corporeal subtlety, assimilates the "spirit" to light, brought to the highest degree of subtlety. A more decisive progress is observed in Origen, who understands the πνεῦμα as "invisible and incorporeal substance," and, perhaps the first to identify πνεῦμα with νόος, indicates its reason in the fact that it is capable of knowledge. A notion by then acquired, which is clarified in Neoplatonism through the merit of Plotinus (Enn., IV, 7, 2-11) against the Stoics, and which passed into Christian literature through the merit of St. Augustine ("Quidquid enim corpus non est et tamen aliquid est, iam recte spiritus dicitur": De Genesi ad litteram, XII, 7, 16: PL 34, 439). Nevertheless, as will be said, the genuine concept of spirituality would still suffer a halt in that Scholasticism which appeals to Augustine (universal hylomorphism), and it will be above all the merit of St. Thomas to have freed a notion so important from every possibility of equivocation.

3. EXISTENCE

The soul is a natural "form" and is the principle of life in living beings. For Aristotle "it is ridiculous to attempt to demonstrate the existence of nature" (Phys., I, 1, 193 a, 3 ff.): manifest things are shown, not demonstrated, and it is self-evident "sensui" and "secundum sensum," as St. Thomas comments, that there are in reality many things that have within themselves the principle of movement, such as animals, plants, and natural bodies, as distinct from artificial things. The difference imposes itself on immediate perception itself through the characters of primary evidence of the one and the other, on the appraisal of which the normal course of individual life itself is founded.

The soul too, and more distinctly than inanimate natures, participates in this evidence of existence: this means that living beings present certain unmistakable "characters" by which they are immediately distinguished, not only from artifacts, but from inanimate natures themselves. Of these the most conspicuous is the capacity that the animal has to "move itself" to action: "Vivere manifeste animalibus convenit... Dicitur enim animal vivere, quando incipit ex se motum habere, et tamdiu iudicatur animal vivere, quandiu talis motus in eo apparet; quando vero iam ex se non habet aliquem motum, sed movetur tantum ab alio, tunc dicitur animal mortuum per defectum vitae" (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 18, a. 1). It is the immediate evidence of this character that generates the immediate evidence of life and of the existence of the soul in living beings.

Alongside and prior to the evidence of lower life and of the soul of others, there is the evidence that each one possesses of the existence of his own soul, an evidence also not bare, but lived in acts: "In hoc enim aliquis percipit se animam habere, et vivere et esse, quod percipit se sentire et intelligere et alia huiusmodi opera vitae exercere" (De Veritate, X, 8). In the perception of the object and of the act there is a co-perception of the existence of the soul: "...perceptis actibus animae, percipitur inesse principium talium actuum" (ibid., X, 9). Nothing is more certain than this knowledge: "Secundum hoc scientia de anima est certissima, quod unusquisque in scipox experitur se animam habere et actus animae sibi inesse" (ibid., X, 8 ad 8). Objects and acts, acts and soul, are not "membra disiecta" but form a dynamic totality that makes itself present only in solidarity, where the components hold one another. The moderns speak rather of the experience of the I, which is evidently the experience of the existence of the soul, by which the I keeps itself united in itself and affirms itself as an operative center.

However, the soul has been denied: mechanism has asserted that the vital functions do not require any new principle different from the forces of the inorganic world; materialism has found the existence of a spiritual soul in man inconceivable. It is therefore necessary to give a "demonstration" of the existence of life and of the soul that satisfies the demands presented. An "ostensive" demonstration, and not a deductive one, which would have no meaning whatsoever; it consists in showing that the exercise of experience, both spontaneous and reflective, obliges us to recognize characteristic "signs" in which the existence of life and of the soul is made manifest. Our spontaneous certainty is strengthened and becomes critical and firm in reflection, in which we can gather the following results: 1) Absolute certainty — which it is impossible to renounce without renouncing thought and without denying oneself — of the existence of one's own soul: there is no consciousness of thought, of tendency, of feeling or passion except insofar as an I is perceived that thinks, tends, feels and is moved by passion...; and the I, as has been said, belongs first of all to the soul. 2) A very solid certainty, though less intimate than the preceding one, of the existence of the souls of other men: too evident is the resemblance, indeed the identity, in behavior and in bodily form for one to doubt the presence of principles and forces identical to those that we "live" within ourselves. 3) Lesser, but still well founded, is the persuasion regarding the existence of the soul in animals, by the same argument of analogy in behavior and in bodily structure; except that the criterion is so far limited to the manifestations of sensitive life. Vegetative life presents a particular difficulty.

Mechanism has taken strength from the obscurity in which the functions of vegetative life are carried out and from the presence in it of energies and substances that act in the inorganic world. To the difficulty, which is real, no sufficient answer is given when one limits oneself, as is the tendency of contemporary vitalism, to attributing to the living being the characters of spontaneity, form, individuality and totality (F. De Sarlo, Vita e Psiche. Saggio di Filosofia della Biologia, Florence 1935). Such characters are common to all of "nature," in a form more or less pronounced according to the perfection of nature itself. Except that in living beings they are realized in an "other" way, in a more perfect "way," than that of inorganic nature. Those characters in the living being belong to life, because in it they are generated, maintained and unfolded in an "immanent" way, that is to say in such a way that the operations of the living being redound to the principal advantage of the living being itself (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 54, a. 2). While the actions and reactions of the inorganic world redound to the advantage of something else and form an operative cycle that is always open, those of living beings form a cycle that is closed within the living being, and all the more intimately so the higher the form of life (cf. C. Gent., IV, 11). Now immanence is an immediate datum of consciousness for the higher functions such as understanding, willing, feeling, being moved by passion: they form the most manifestive nucleus of the I and of its specific nature, and we follow with the inner gaze the increase of perfection that comes to us with every act. Immanent in its sphere, vegetative life too must be recognized as being, because we ascertain, and can see and experience, that its effects redound first of all to the advantage of the living being. In the embryo it is the living substance that organizes itself and develops; in the formed organism it is the individual that preserves itself, repairs itself, defends itself, grows and then multiplies into subjects of the same nature that perpetuate its species. Nothing of all this in the inorganic world, and the descriptive and causal study undertaken by modern biology has made evident in a tangible and visible way the immanence even in the hitherto unexplored depths of purely physiological life. A demonstration, however, of integrative value and not absolutely necessary, since the characters of life impose themselves of themselves upon the most ordinary observation, before the scientific one, and would not be discernible in the latter if they were not first and more clearly so in the former. Therefore, in the manner indicated, the immediate perception of the existence of the soul has been defended.

4. DEFINITION

Those bodies are called "animated" in which the operations of life (immanent) appear to be carried out in one of its degrees (vegetative, sensitive, intellective). The bodies then are called "animated" and living by reason of the soul, and not insofar as they are bodies: otherwise every body would be living, which is not the case. The soul is therefore that which gives to the living being the nature of being such and of operating in such a way: it is the first principle that specifies the body and moves it to the vital functions. From the point of view of the functions and of perceptual evidence, Aristotle defines the soul as: "that by which we primarily live, feel and think" (De Anima, II, 2, 414 a, 12-13). Insofar as it is the soul that determines the being of the living being as such, the soul is the "first perfection" of the living being itself. However, the soul cannot be the first principle of the vital functions in any body whatsoever, but in a body capable of carrying out the works of life, of a body therefore "furnished with organs." Aristotle called the first perfection "act" and form, and the proportionate subject that receives it potency: "Wishing therefore to give the most general definition of the soul as such, one must say that it is the first perfection (act) of a natural organic body" (De Anima, II, 1, 412 b, 5-6).

From the functional and essential definition of the soul it follows that a threefold causality belongs to it with respect to the body (De Anima, II, 4, 415 b, 7-17). It is first of all the "substantial form" of the living being, because life is communicated to the body by the soul. It is also the "end" or τέλος of the living being; bodies, in fact, have organs and structures not for themselves, but in view of the soul that they receive and of the functions that the soul has to unfold, which they serve as "instruments." Consequently the soul is also the first "moving" principle, not only for local processive movement (an actualization limited to the more highly organized animals), but for all the works of life, from the lowest to the highest: all have their root in the soul and from it receive impulse and direction of development. The soul stands to the body "as the cutting of the axe stands to the iron of the axe, as the act of vision stands to the eye" (De Anima, I, 1, 412 b, 11 ff.). Hence the mechanist objection is resolved, which claims that the presence of the soul is superfluous, on the ground that the physico-chemical forces also take part in the works of life. The reality is that these forces obtain in the living being "new" effects that they do not obtain in the inorganic world, and operate in a more perfect way: this means that such forces are not left to the impetus of natural tendency, but are moved to obtain effects of a whole and of a higher value by a higher cause. "Natural heat," to use the ancient terminology, insofar as it is heat burns and consumes without limit: in the living being, on the other hand, it builds flesh, humors and tissues, and not to infinity but according to the plan of structure, the size and the figure proper to each species of animal. The mechanist demand is saved: natural heat intervenes as a cause of the vital functions; not, however, as the principal cause and the one responsible for the effect, but as a secondary and instrumental one (for Aristotle and St. Thomas see: De Anima, II, 4, 416 b, 25-28; De Part. Animal., II, 652 b, 9; De Generat. Animal., II, 4, 470 b, 26 ff.; In Lib. I De Anima, lect. XIV, n. 200; ibid., Lib. II, lect. IX, n. 348; In Lib. De Sensu et Sensato, lect. X, n. 139 and n. 149; Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ, q. 78, a. 2 and ad 2; Q. De Anima, 13, ad 14 and art. 2; Q. De Spirit. Creaturis, a. 2).

By positing the relationship between the soul and the body as a relationship of act and potency, and precisely as one of form and matter, Aristotle set in motion the metaphysical consideration of the soul, in which, even if he did not attain full clarity on every point, he nonetheless outlined its first results with the lucid intuition of an innovator. 1) First of all, the soul is not coextensive with being, nor even with life: there are forms of being below the soul, namely the entire inorganic world; and likewise the life of spiritual substances is above the soul, which is the principle of life in bodies. 2) The soul is a substance, no longer in the Platonic sense of a self-sufficient and self-moving subsistence, but in the new sense introduced by the Aristotelian conception of natural essences as a synthesis, a "synolon" of matter and form. The substance is the "synolon" itself, the whole living being; since the "synolon" entails the union of the constitutive principles, these would not constitute it in the dignity and consistency of substance if they too did not belong to the substantial order. Substances therefore in their own way, that is, as "principles," are the body and the soul, and the soul more than the body, to the extent that act surpasses its potency. 3) The soul is a simple substance: a qualification that belongs to every substantial form that is the "first act" of the body: if it were composite in itself, it would be the first act of a matter antecedent to the body, and the substantial unity of the living being would be endangered, as we shall say. 4) Consequently the soul is an incorporeal substance: the complete substance should be called corporeal, not the principle that gives the body its species, its being and its unity. The soul may be called material when in its operation it is inseparably bound to matter, but not corporeal. Incorporeal, the soul is of itself unextended, since extension too is an attribute of the composite alone.

With this robust doctrine Aristotle left behind not only the Presocratics, who made the soul a certain special kind of body and did not attain the genuine notion of the spiritual, but also Plato himself, who at one and the same time made the soul composite and, under the influence of Orphic and Pythagorean conceptions, regarded the union of the soul with the body as almost occasional and not natural. Yet the Aristotelian conception itself had its difficulties. For the development of Christian doctrine on the soul, one must also bear in mind the fact that while the patristic tradition is averse to Aristotle and sides with Plato, the Middle Ages drew close to Aristotle and, thanks to St. Thomas, incorporated Aristotelian terminology into the official doctrine of the Church. The Fathers reproach the Stagirite for having made the soul mortal, once he had reduced it to the act and form of a body. In the two most prominent Peripatetic schools, Alexander of Aphrodisias expressly makes the soul mortal, and Averroes (v.) holds only the separate intellect as an impersonal unity to be immortal. Yet St. Thomas believed he could withstand both the one and the others. This suggests that the bare text was not sufficient to shed light on the greatest problems of human existence and to impose one or the other interpretation; and at the same time that beneath the harsh course of that arduous style there lay hidden, perhaps only implicitly but effectively, the principles that could lead to the definitive Christian solution.

5. SPIRITUALITY

The Aristotelian definition of the soul as the form of the body will incline one to think that the soul as such is bound in its being and its acting to matter. This logical exigency of the definition is contrasted by the exercise of human life in what is most characteristic of it. Man lives not so much on earthly things and sensible representations as on the pursuit of intelligible and otherworldly values, of the arts, of the sciences; he organizes his life according to particular familial and social bonds; he obeys a morality and seeks a religion. His existence is kept in continual agitation by the concern to secure for himself a duration and a happiness without limits, with the conviction, on the other hand, of being able to dispose of the ultimate resolution of his own life for a destiny chosen and willed. Against this background, perpetually mobile and yet so significant and distinct in its real purposes, there arose the conviction that man's soul is of a nature other than corporeal forms and similar to God. No one, moreover, can claim to have an intuitive evidence of the spirituality of the soul as substance, so that the question cannot be immediately resolved on the phenomenological plane. On this plane, indeed, a tension arises between conflicting exigencies: on the one hand, the materiality of the soul demanded by the lower functions, and on the other, the spirituality of which the higher functions would be an indication. It is more urgent to see, first of all, whether such higher functions in fact suffice to secure the spirituality on which its destiny depends: how to resolve, if possible, that contrast will be considered later. Moreover, the experience of the spiritual life is, as has already been said, immediately lived by us in an intimacy and immediacy of belonging to which the fabric of our life and the originality of the person are bound.

We can attest that of spiritual activity we have an idea incomparably more adequate than of any other activity of the lower life or of nature. If therefore the spirituality of the soul needs to be demonstrated, it is a demonstration that continues directly into a fabric of lived contents, of which nothing is more our own and more clear to us. The demonstration of the spirituality of the soul can be set in motion either from the intellect or from the will: this is attested by the development that the so-called "sciences of the spirit" (Geisteswissenschaft) have taken in modern times, also under the impulse of idealism. To many, among all the proofs, that from voluntary activity and freedom may appear more persuasive and shorter: in it, in fact, the independence of the life of the spirit and the physiognomy of the human person are affirmed. However, if instead of seeking the most conspicuous path we wish to adhere to the safest, it is undoubtedly to be taken from the experience of intellectual life, given that freedom is founded on reason and that voluntary activity presupposes and follows the direction impressed by the intellect.

The Thomist demonstration has in substance the following schema: immediate apprehension of the spirituality of the acts of intellectual consciousness, insofar as the spirituality of the objects that they bear is directly grasped (perceived); passage by argumentation to the spirituality of the principles from which the acts spring, namely the soul and the faculties (at this point one may set aside the controversy concerning the identity or diversity of the faculties with the soul, which can be and must be resolved — as we shall do — later). If here a bit of technicality is inevitable, it nonetheless has the advantage of making the path shorter and safer. Operative principles are revealed in the nature of the acts they produce; acts in turn are known from the objects they make present to consciousness and from the manner of making them present. Acts and objects are co-present and therefore co-perceived; absolutely, however, it must be recognized that the mind grasps objects for itself and, conditionally upon them, also the acts that make them present. The intellect is a potency and an operative principle; every potency is known not in itself but through the acts it produces, the nature of which in cognitive potencies is revealed by objects: "prius est intelligere aliquid, quam intelligere se intelligere" (De Veritate, X, 8). The object of the intellect is universal essences, "absolute natures." Sense assimilates only exterior and individual qualities; the intellect, by contrast, proceeds to conceive the absolute nature that subordinates individual realizations to itself; this means that the object, as it is in the intellect, is free from every material conditionality because it is universal. Once I have grasped the real content of a nature, of man, of animal...

it holds, and I can apply it, for every individual of that nature and for every species of that genus, for every man and for every dog, even if never seen, even if they do not yet exist and will be born when I am no longer there to see them. Of this I am certain and I pronounce with absolute assurance; on the other hand I can say nothing certain about the color, the stature, practical abilities, race or temperament of such natures... The absolute nature, which the soul receives in itself in understanding, shows that the soul itself is an absolute form, that is, freed from the bonds of matter (cf. Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ, q. 75, a. 5; De Spiritualibus Creaturis, a. 1; Q. De Anima, a. 6, ad 6).

The demonstration, although it may perhaps seem arduous and formal, not only makes room also for "intellectual perception," but this latter even fulfills in it a task of the first order. St. Thomas assures us that the soul, in the apprehension of universals, perceives (percipit) that the intelligible form is spiritual; moreover that we are conscious of the very becoming of the universal in the soul, and even — in connection precisely with the process of abstraction — that the very light of the intellect becomes present to us through itself. This is equivalent to explicitly affirming a "perception proper to the spiritual," of positive content that cannot be derived: a "merely negative" and privative notion of the spiritual would be nonsense, as well as a cruel mockery for man. "Et hoc experimento cognoscimus, dum percipimus nos abstrahere formas universales a conditionibus particularibus quod est facere actu intelligibilia" (Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ, q. 79, a. 4; furthermore cf. De Veritate, X, 8; ibid., ad 2, ad 9).

To the knowledge of the soul St. Thomas attributes a precision that he does not acknowledge for the knowledge of material things, although the latter is achieved by immediate abstraction and that of the soul by a process of rigorous demonstration and therefore mediately ("in alio", that is, in the intelligible species). Of the soul alone, in fact, can we say that we know the ultimate and proper difference that gives the perfect measure of its nature and capacity: "Anima humana intelligit seipsam per suum intelligere, quod est actus proprius eius, perfecte demonstrare virtutem eius et naturam" (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 88, a. 2, ad 3). On the basis of these principles it does not seem impossible to us to carry to completion within the ambit of Thomism what has been called the "phenomenology of spiritual life" (Brentano, Dilthey, Linke, Pfänder, Scheler), of which, moreover, the analysis that St. Thomas himself makes in the Sum. Theol. (1ª-2ªe) of the moral life can be an eminent example. Mention should also be made of the results of "Denkpsychologie" (Külpe, Bühler, De Sanctis), which, through the practice of the introspective method, was able to demonstrate not only the irreducibility of thought to the image-type, but claimed to have also found a thought entirely pure of images (vorstellungsloses Denken), which St. Thomas does not admit (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 84, a. 7). The Augustinian tendency is to affirm that the soul "semetipsam per seipsam novit", a tendency recently taken up again by B. Romeyer, who wished to draw over to his side even the Dominican P. Gardeil, who, however, energetically opposed it (Revue Thomiste, 12 [1920], pp. 520-33). The argument was the object of a careful experimental investigation at the Catholic Institute of Paris by G. Dwelshauvers, whose results were very sober and in full agreement with the Thomist position just outlined (see Dwelshauvers, L'étude de la pensée, Paris 1934, lect. XVII, pp. 175-76).

6. THE INTELLECTIVE SOUL AS SUBSTANTIAL FORM OF THE BODY

The spirituality of the soul entails its independence from the body in being and in operating: but if it is by nature independent of the body, one does not see how it can be its act and first perfection as the Aristotelian definition requires; a difficulty that fueled the opposition of the Neoplatonists to Aristotle and that provoked Arab-Latin Averroism (v.). If it were not that both the Platonic position of the soul as a complete substance and the Averroist one of the single separate intellect proved one-sided for at least two reasons: because, in the complex of the data of experience and consciousness, they were concerned with accounting only for a particular group of phenomena, neglecting the others and the unity of the whole, and because they bent the requirements of principles to a univocal meaning that was in no way justified. St. Thomas, on the other hand, first of all secures both the spirituality and the necessity that the intellective principle itself be the substantial form of the human body; in a third step he concerns himself with showing the "mode" according to which the compatibility of the two conclusions can be thought: it is clear that the difficulty of understanding the "mode of union" cannot undermine the evidence that can be attained concerning the fact of the union itself. For St. Thomas this must be placed beyond all doubt. His procedure reduces in essence to the accentuation of a fact and a principle, both of them inescapable: from them there follows directly the consequence that "the intellective principle must be in man the single substantial form of the body."

a) The fact: hic homo singularis intelligit. Each person has clear and unshakable certainty that it is he, as a singular historical and integral subject, who thinks, loves, becomes passionate... when he thinks, loves, becomes passionate about something. He is persuaded that such states of consciousness are in him and not in others or of others; that not rarely they are in contrast with those of others; that often they are incommunicable to others, and that to this incommunicability is bound the very character of one's own personality, responsibility and individual morality. Thought, moreover, is the specific activity of man as such, by which he raises himself above animality and can organize, unlike brute beasts, his own life according to ends of universal value. The act of thinking is therefore at one and the same time what best belongs to man insofar as he is man, and together is perceived as the activity that is most intimate to the individual and without which the exercise of his human life is impossible (De Spiritualibus Creaturis, a. 2).

b) The principle: illud quo primo aliquid operatur, est forma eius. Operations are secondary and derived actualities, which require as their foundation a substantial act, that is, the soul: it is in living beings the first principle of the works of life. Now, among the vital operations that man perceives in himself, understanding is among all of them the one that he feels to be most intimate and his own: therefore he must have the first principle of understanding in himself and as his own and incommunicable form. The Thomist discussion is very complex; above, its central nucleus has been reported, to which the conclusion refers back: "Relinquitur ergo solus modus quem Aristoteles ponit quod hic homo intelligit, quia principium intellectivum est forma ipsius. Sic ergo ex ipsa operatione intellectu apparet quod intellectivum principium unitur corpori ut forma" (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 76, a. 1). All this Thomist doctrine, which will later show itself so close and one may say identical to the official formulas of the Church, rests on the comprehension and integral acceptance of the Aristotelian notions of act and potency: just as, by contrast, the opposing theories, condemned or tolerated by the Church, came from the reluctance to accept the original metaphysical meaning of the Aristotelian doctrine.

From this position of principle St. Thomas passes to other conclusions of notable importance for the metaphysical structure of man, which his adversaries attempted in every way to oppose and which they could no longer understand.

1) The intellective soul, insofar as it is form, is united to its body "without intermediaries." According to Aristotle it is idle "to inquire whether the soul and the body constitute a unity"; they are in fact act and potency, matter and form: if something else were to be placed between them, the unity would be broken and the process then opened to infinity (De Anima, 1, 1, 412 b, 6 ff.; cf. De Spiritualibus Creaturis, a. 3). The search for intermediaries is a pseudo-problem that arises from the Platonic conception of the soul as a substance complete in itself that is united to the body only as a motor principle (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 76, a. 6).

2) Insofar as it is form, the soul cannot be localized, as both materialism and exaggerated spiritualism claim, from Plato to Descartes, in a determinate part of the body. In the living being it is the first perfection both of the whole and of the individual parts, and therefore it must be said to be "tota in toto et tota in qualibet parte eius" (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 76, a. 8). This concerns, however, presence according to the "totalitas essentiae", because according to the "totalitas virtutis" the soul is present differently in the various parts of the organism according to the different functions that it performs there (De Spiritualibus Creaturis, a. 4). The higher operations of understanding and willing, which do not directly need a bodily organ, have no localization whatsoever and are carried out in the respective spiritual faculties that adhere immediately to the soul.

3) The intellective soul is the only soul and the only substantial form of man; this is against the Platonic trichotomy, the plurality of forms of the Avicebronizing Augustinians, and the "forma corporeitatis" of Scotus. The thesis that cost him great bitterness in life and, after death, the condemnations of Paris and Oxford, expressed for St. Thomas the only way of understanding and of saving the unity of the person. This is founded on the unity of being, and being is given and measured by the form: the multiplicity of forms multiplies being and splits the structure of the living being. In fact, among the forms admitted to precede the rational soul, only the first could strictly be called substantial, so that the following ones, including the rational, would have to be called accidental. From the "single" form, which is the spiritual soul, there derives for man therefore not only being "man," but also "sensitive, living, and a natural organic body" (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 76, a. 3). To the most conspicuous argument adduced by his opponents, according to which, on the hypothesis of the unity of the substantial form, the body of Christ "in triduo mortis," in the absence of the soul in limbo, could not be called "idem numero" with that which had agonized on the cross, St. Thomas was able to reply that the principal and constitutive identity is that which is had according to union in the identical supposit or person, which in Christ remained intact, even when, through the onset of death, the union of essence between the soul and the body assumed in the humanity was temporarily broken. Both the soul and the body of Christ preserved at that time their own union with the person of the Word, and such a union is sufficient to preserve the numerical identity of the body of Christ in awaiting the resurrection (Sum. Theol., 3a, q. 50, a. 5; Quodlib., IV, a. 8).

4) The human soul, insofar as it is ordered by its own nature to be the substantial form of a body, in such a way that it is truly the act of a matter, is multiplied and individuated by the body in which it is received: the many bodies bring it about that there are many souls, and the many souls multiply the intelligences so that there is one for each individual (De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas, ch. 5, § 103, ed. Keeler, p. 67). Separated from the body by death, souls still preserve this individuation, insofar as they preserve their own unity as the form of a given body (ibid., § 104).

5) There remained, however, the initial difficulty, which had provoked the dualist solutions, namely that of uniting a spiritual principle to a material body: "how can realities that belong to opposite genera of being stand together?" In his affirmative response, St. Thomas has recourse to the Neoplatonic principle of the "continuity of the degrees of being," which he could read in a source of recognized value, the works of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Faithful to his Neoplatonic sources, he had affirmed the "affinity" or contact of beings at the inverse extremes of their natures: "Divina sapientia coniungit fines primorum principiis secundorum" (De Divinis Nominibus, ch. 7; PG 3, 873), which St. Thomas turns into the formula: "supremum infimi attingit infimum supermi." Granted that the human soul is the lowest among the spiritual forms and that the human body is the noblest and most perfect of living bodies, one does not see why they cannot be united as form and matter: "Et ideo anima humana, quae est infima in ordine substantiarum spiritualium, esse suum communicare potest corpori humano, quod est dignissimum, ut fiat ex anima et corpore unum sicut ex materia et forma" (De Spiritualibus Creaturis, a. 2, fin.).

6) There remained still one difficulty. The spiritual soul, once it is the only form of man, must be the root and principle of all the operations that are carried out in man, therefore also of the sensitive and vegetative ones: how can a spiritual soul have in itself such diverse energies? St. Thomas responds with the principle: "Quanto aliqua virtus est altior, tanto in se plura comprehendit, non composite sed unite... Unde perfectior forma facit per unum omnia quae inferiora faciunt per diversa et adhuc amplius" (De Spiritualibus Creaturis, a. 3). In this way, just as the form of inorganic bodies gives the body being and being-a-body; and the form of the plant, being-a-body and in addition living; and the sensitive soul, beyond life, gives sensibility: similarly, the rational soul confers on man all these things and in addition rational being. In support of his position St. Thomas cites two Aristotelian principles: a) "Species rerum sunt sicut numeri" (Metaph., IX, 3, 1043 b, 33), and therefore they differ according to degrees of perfection; b) "Sicut trigonum est in tetragono et tetragonum in pentagono, ita nutritivum est in sensitivo (et sensitivum in intellectivo)" (De Anima, II, 3, 414 b, 31). It has been observed that the last inclusion, of the sensitive in the intellective, is missing in the Aristotelian text and that it is therefore an addition made by St. Thomas in order to get the better of the Averroist position. It should be noted, however, that the Stagirite announces the principle in its most general form: "Sempre infatti in ciò che vien dopo è contenuto in potenza ciò che vien prima" (De Anima, II, 3, 414 b, 29-30), and this of itself suggested that extension (St. Thomas discusses the question thoroughly in the De Unitate intellectus, ch. 1, §§ 48-49, ed. Keeler, p. 32).

SOUL AND POWERS

The consequences of the substantial union of the soul with the body are shown with greater evidence in the dynamic organization of the soul considered in its powers. The soul is only the first and remote principle of operation: in order to produce its operations, which are accidental actualizations, it needs proximate principles which are accidental activities (Sum. Theol., I, q. 54, a. 1-3 and q. 77, a. 1). Every operative sector, which cannot be coordinated within the ambit of a single formal object, stands on its own and demands a particular power, which must not be hypostatized and severed from the soul and from the affinities that link it to the whole organism of the living being's action. Since it has been recognized that the soul, in its quality as the most perfect form, contains "eminently" the lower perfections, it unfolds them in the body by means of the activity of the powers. One can thus distinguish a twofold order of powers in man: a) Order of nature, according to the emanation they have from the soul, according to which the intellective powers precede and condition the derivation of the sensitive powers, and these the derivation of the vegetative; b) Order of operation or functionality, according to which it is the lower powers that precede and condition the coming into act of the higher (Sum. Theol., I, q. 77 in its entirety).

The human soul, which is spiritual in the order of substance, is not entirely so and cannot be so in the order of action: it both thinks and wills, it is true, but before thinking and willing it must sense; and before sensing, and in order to sense, it must be able to construct the organs of sense and maintain them in conditions of efficiency. Now one understands even better why the spiritual soul can be the substantial form of the body and why it must be the sole form of man. The human soul shows, in the most ordinary exercise of a mature consciousness, that it has a sector of operations that wholly exceeds ("omnino excedentem") the conditions of matter: for this reason it is called a spiritual substance and a form "subsisting through itself." But man has furthermore sensitive and vegetative operations, which, even if they appear less intimately bound to the ego or even unfold below consciousness, nevertheless impose themselves as indispensable to the exercise of the former and as certainly belonging to the whole of the person. The body does not contain the soul, but the soul the body because it keeps it in life; and it is the soul that needs the body in order to form the complete man and to unfold the virtuality of its powers. Although it is spirit, it is a "part" of a corporeal nature; and if it is true that in the union the human body rises to a higher dignity, it is nonetheless more true that the union redounds to the direct advantage of the soul itself. Properly: "Unio corporis et animae non est propter corpus, ut corpus scilicet nobilitetur, sed propter animam quae indiget corpore ad sui perfectionem" (De Spiritualibus Creaturis, a. 6). The soul needs it precisely for its specific operation, which is understanding: "Anima unitur corpori et propter bonum quod est perfectio substantialis, ut scilicet compleatur species humana; et propter bonum quod est perfectio accidentalis, ut scilicet perficiatur in cognitione intellectiva, quam anima ex sensibus acquirit" (De Anima, a. 1, ad 7; De Spirit. Creat., a. 7, tertia ratio). If the body were of no benefit to the soul for the act of understanding, the union of the soul to the body would be useless and would therefore remain inexplicable (Sum. Theol., I, q. 84, a. 4). Epistemology and metaphysics have here their longed-for point of meeting; St. Thomas shows this by appealing with evident satisfaction to St. Augustine: "Anima cum sit pars humanae naturae non habet perfectionem suae naturae nisi in unione ad corpus. Quod patet ex hoc, quod in virtute ipsius animae est quod fluant ab ea quaedam potentiae, quae non sunt actus organorum corporalium, secundum quod excedit corporis proportionem; et iterum quod fluant ab ea potentiae, quae sunt actus organorum, in quantum potest contingit a materia corporali. (Nec) est aliquid perfectum in sua natura, nisi acti explicari possit quod in eo virtute continetur. Unde anima, licet possit esse et intelligere a corpore separata, tamen non habet perfectionem suae naturae cum est a corpore separata, ut Augustinus dicit, XII de Gen. ad litt. (XXXV, 68)." (De Spirit. Creat., a. 2, ad 5, ed. Keeler, p. 22).

The definitive formula, according to which, then, the union of the soul to the body is to be conceived, is the one that affirms: Quod in hoc homine non est alia forma substantialis quam anima rationalis, et quod per eam homo non volum est homo, sed animal et vivum et corpus et substantia et eos (De Spirit. Creat., a. 3). The human soul contains "virtute" the sensitive and vegetative forms: those which were taken as distinct souls and forms in the opposing theories take on the nature and task of powers in the service of the one form, which is the spiritual soul. The spiritual soul is the immediate subject only of the spiritual powers; the others are found properly in the animated organs that they move. The soul therefore, because it is spiritual, must also be called sensitive and vegetative "eminenter."

7. ORIGIN AND DESTINY

Different in nature, the origin and destiny of the lower souls (of plants and animals) and of the human soul are consequently different. Of the former one can say briefly that they have a cycle of existence entirely similar to that of the other natural forms: initially they are found "in potentia materiae," from which they are brought into existence by the action of a proportionate agent — by one or another of the various modes of reproduction — only to return, when the cycle closes or its development is impeded, into the same "potentia materiae."

It is otherwise for the human soul (Sum. Theol., I, q. 118 in its entirety). Its spiritual nature prevents us from thinking it produced by the forces present in the germinal elements, which are material: nor can one think of a transmission from soul to soul (spiritual traducianism, which left St. Augustine uncertain) by means of a certain splitting of the souls of children from that of the parents, which would in the end subject the spirit to the conditions of becoming proper to material things. The origin of the human soul is therefore solely by way of creation (v. CREAZIONISMO) and directly from God, the sole creative cause. Since the soul is the substantial form of the individual body, God creates one soul for each individual, so that the causality of the generative act in the human species stops at the formation of the body. This does not prevent the parents from being truly father and mother of the entire person who is born, because if the term of generation is properly the nature, the subject is the person itself, analogously to what is held regarding the divine maternity of the Virgin Mary (Sum. Theol., III, q. 35, n. 1). It was discussed in all times by spiritualist creationists concerning the time and manner of the infusion of the soul into the body, or animation: whether in the first instant of conception, or later, and, in this second case, how the succession and ascent from life to life is to be conceived. St. Thomas defended delayed animation, basing himself on the reason that, since the soul is the form of an organic body, it cannot be united to the body except when it has at least the principal organs delineated. In this second hypothesis, St. Thomas, having rejected two opinions that he judges insufficient (formation of the fetus by the sole virtue of the seed until the infusion of the rational soul; continuous development of all three souls succeeding one another from the same virtue of the fetus), admits the succession in the embryo of various generations and corruptions until the infusion of the rational soul (De Anima, a. 11, ad 1; cf. Quodlib., I, 9; IV, 6).

Of spiritual nature, the human soul does not follow the destiny of the lower souls. The subsistent form is the one that has the act of being "for itself" and holds it necessarily united to itself. It therefore receives the act of being in itself first and then communicates it to the body, which "trahitur ad esse animae" (De Spiritual. Creat., a. 2, ad 8); when the body is no longer able to serve it as subject and power, it retains the act of being that it had communicated to it and continues in being, assuming another form of life.

It is by analogy with the nature and the inner dynamism of the soul that we think of the nature of the angels and of God himself: the Catholic doctrine on the Trinity, on the incarnate Word, on angelology can present itself to our mind with a precise meaning on the basis of the experience that the soul has of its functions and of the knowledge that it can form of its nature. If our knowledge stopped at material essences and we had of the soul and of its life only a negative knowledge, we would have no key to penetrate at least into the atrium of the higher world and to foresee the excellence of what will be the definitive homeland and beatitude of man (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 88, a. 1, ad 1; cf. ibid., q. 27, a. 1; C. Gentiles, III, 46; De Veritate, X, 8, ad 8). The Catholic truth of the soul created in the "image of God" met with the attribution of spirituality that pagan philosophy had made to the faint light of reason, and thus the foundation of Christian philosophy came to be established.

8. CATHOLIC DOCTRINE

The supernatural mission of the Church is not concerned with affirming and defending a given philosophical conception of nature and of the soul in general. What the Church has been directly concerned with is right belief regarding the nature, origin and destiny of the "human" soul and person. Founding itself on the sources of Revelation, it has proposed to the faithful certain precise truths of faith, without which the elevation of man to the supernatural order, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the immortality and resurrection of bodies, and the diversity of destiny that awaits after death according to merits, would be impossible. Occasioned by the swarming of erroneous theories that were being put into circulation, the official interventions of the supreme authority of the Church aimed, beyond any systematic concern, at defending the faithful from profane novelties and from the vanity of pagan philosophy. The brief remarks that follow are intended to indicate the most salient moments of the Church's maternal solicitude for the defense of the sacred deposit of revealed truth, in order to secure for her children the right path of eternal life.

A first group of heresies on the soul is indicated in Gnosticism. Many Gnostic sects taught the Platonic trichotomy (caro, anima et spiritus), the mediated creation of the soul (by some Aeon), and panspychism associated not infrequently with Manichaean dualism. Among the most prominent supporters are remembered Marcion, Cerdo, Valentinus. A form of Gnostic emanatism is defended by the Priscillianists, against whom the symbol attributed to the First Council of Toledo is directed, but which is held to be a private compilation of some bishop of Galicia (5th century), as well as by the De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus of Gennadius: "... Anima autem hominis non divinam esse substantiam, vel Dei partem, sed creaturam dicimus divina voluntate creatam" (Denz-U., n. 20; see the condemnation at can. 11, n. 31).

According to what Philastrius reports (De Haeresibus liber, ed. P. Oehler), Manichaeans and Gnostics attributed rationality to animals (cap. 100), placed the body as created before the soul, and held that it, and not the soul, was created in the image of God (cap. 97). To the Manichaeans is attributed, as a consequence of dualism, the admission of two souls in man, one from the principle of good, the other from that of evil; or also that they derived the soul from the principle of good and the body from that of evil, and that they conceived the soul as a luminous fluid. The Manichaean polemic occupied St. Augustine long and intensely, from whose work are taken the canons against the Manichaeans and Priscillianists of the Council of Braga (Denz-U., nn. 235, 239, 240). But the one who certainly caused the greatest confusion in the ranks of orthodoxy was Origen. The Canones adversus Origenem, established by the Second Council of Constantinople, convened by the patriarch Menna at the request of the emperor Justinian, who had composed a detailed exposition (Liber adversus

Origenem) of the Origenist errors contained in the De Principiis, they attribute to him the following errors: the pre-existence of souls; the identity of nature of the soul and of the angels; transmutation of nature among the angels, the souls of men and of animals; the belief that the sun, the moon and the stars are fallen spiritual substances; the assertion that those spiritual substances, originally identical in nature, had been bound to bodies as a result of cooling in the contemplation of the Word, and that in proportion to their guilt they had been enclosed in gross bodies such as ours and in the cold and dark bodies of the lower nature (Canones, I-IV, XIV-XV, in Acta Conciliarum, ed. Harduin, III, coll. 286-87; see also: Denz-U., nos. 203-204, 208).

The trichotomic doctrine of man, proposed by Plato, taken up by the Gnostics and spread by the Neoplatonists, attempts in the first three centuries, under the protection of a terminology that easily lent itself to equivocation, to win over even some Christian writers. It is agreed in attributing to the direct influence of Plotinus and Plutarch the heresy of Apollinaris of Laodicea (d. c. 392), repeatedly condemned by the ecumenical councils and summarized by the Council of Florence (year 1441) in the following terms: «... Apollinare quoque (anathematizat), qui intelligens si anima corpus informans negetur in Christo, humanitatem veram ibidem non fuisse, solam posuit animam sensitivam, sed deitatem Verbi vicem rationalis animae tenuisse» (Denz-U., n. 710). A vestige of trichotomy is certainly to be seen in the admission of two souls in man. From Gennadius (De eccl. dogm., ch. 15) we know that it was upheld by a certain «Iscob et alii Syrorum». St. Thomas often cites the chapter of Gennadius in defense of his own conception of the soul (see C. Gentiles, II, 58 fin.; Sum. Theol., 1st, q. 76, a. 3 sed contra; Q. De Anima, a. 11: De Spiritual. Creat., a. 3; Quodlib., I, a. 6). In the Canones contra Plotium of the Fourth Council of Constantinople (ecum. VIII, year 869-70) there also appears the condemnation of the duality of the soul, as expressly contrary to Holy Scripture, to tradition and to the ecclesiastical magisterium: «Veteri et Novo Testamento unam animam rationabilem et intellectualem habere hominem docente et omnibus deiloquis Patribus et magistris Ecclesiae eandem opinionem asseverantibus: in tantum impietatis quidam, malorum inventionibus dantes operam, devenant, ut duas cum habere animas impudenter dogmatizare et quibusdam irrationalibus conatibus per sapientiam quae stulta facta est, propriam haeresim confirmare pertinent» (can. 11; Denz-U., n. 338).

In the Middle Ages the most notable transgression is attributed to the leader of the Spirituals, the Franciscan P. G. Olivi (v.), who in the anti-Thomist polemic concerning the plurality of forms in man had denied that the intellective soul could be called, as such, the substantial form of the body, the informing of which had to be left to the lower souls and forms. The Council of Vienne in the Dauphiné (ecum. XV, year 1311), held under Clement V, condemned as heretical the doctrine of Olivi and defined it to be a truth of faith «that the rational or intellective soul was 'per se' et essentialiter» the form of the human body. The Viennese definition thus identifies, whereas Olivi distinguished, the rational and intellective soul, and by using the terms «forma per se et essentialiter», it marks a milestone in the development of the formulas of Catholic doctrine and has a capital importance no less in the field of faith than in that of theology. «Porro doctrinam omnem seu positionem temere asserentem, aut verentem in dubium, quod substantia animae rationalis seu intellectivae vere ac per se humani corporis non sit forma, velut erroneam ac veritatis catholicae inimicam fidei, praedicto sacro approbante concilio, reprobamus; definientes, ut cunctis nota sit fidei sincerae veritas ac praeccludatur universis erroribus aditus, ne subintrent, quod quisquis deinceps asserere, defendere seu tenere pertinaciter praesumpserit, quod anima rationalis seu intellectiva non sit forma corporis humani per se et essentialiter tanquam haereticus sit censendus» (Denz-U., 481).

A further step forward is taken in the Fifth Lateran Council (ecum. XVIII, session VIII, year 1513). Wishing to put an end to the plague of the renewed philosophical sects of the Alexandrists and Averroists, the Council summarizes at length the Viennese definition of 1311, to which it adds the Catholic truth to be opposed to the two condemned sects: «... verum et immortalitas, pro corporum, quibus infunditur, multitudine singulariter multiplicabilis, et multiplicata, et multiplicanda sit». At the same time it condemned the theory of the «double truth» to which those philosophers (especially the Averroists) had recourse, who protested that they held to divine truth even though on their part they were certain that human reason demonstrated the contrary (Denz-U., n. 738). The same Viennese definition recurs in the condemnation made by Pius IX of the anthropological errors of A. Günther and his followers (Denz-U., n. 1655 and note), where it is reaffirmed that the intellective soul is in man the sole vital principle.

Of the 40 propositions of A. Rosmini (v.), condemned by decree of the Holy Office on 14 Dec. 1887, no fewer than five concern errors on the origin of the soul and on the nature of its union with the body (nos. 20-24; Denz-U., nos. 1910-14), in which are reflected the consequences of his philosophical system. And in 1865 the Sacred Congregation of the Index had made the priest Agostino Bonnetty, founder and director of the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, subscribe among other things also the following proposition: «Ratiocinatio Dei existentiam, animae spiritualitatem, hominis libertatem cum certitudine probare potest» (Denz-U., 1650).

On the development of the concepts of «soul» and «spirit»: F. Rüsche, Blut, Leben und Seele. Ihr Verhältnis nach Auflassung der griechischen und hellenistischen Antike, der Bibel und der alten alexandrinischen Theologie. Eine Vorarbeit zur Religionsgeschichte des Opfers (Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Altertums, 5, suppl.). Paderborn 1930; id., Das Seelenpneuma. Seine Entwicklung von der Hauchseele. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der antiken Pneumatologie (Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Altertums, 18, fasc. 3). Paderborn 1933. On the development of the classical-Christian concept of pneuma see now: G. Verbeke, L'évolution de la doctrine du pneuma du Stoïisme à s. Augustin, Louvain 1943.

On St. Thomas and Christian thought: A. Dupont, La spiritualité de l'âme, Lyon 1887; M. J. Gardair, Corps et âme, Paris 1892; G. T. Driscoll, Christian Philosophy: A Treatise of Human Soul, New York 1898; A. Farges, Le cerveau, l'âme et les facultés, Italian trans., Siena 1900; A. Gemelli, L'enigma della vita, 2nd ed., Florence 1914; G. Mattiussi, Le XXIV Tesi della filosofia di s. Tommaso d'Aquino, Rome 1917; A. Vonier, The Human Soul, London 1920; A. Zacchi, L'uomo, 1st part, Rome 1921; J. Gruender, Psychology without a Soul, 3rd ed., St. Louis 1922; id., The Meaning of the Human Soul, in Catholic Medical Guardian, 1927; C. Gutberlet, Der Mensch, sein Ursprung und seine Entwicklung, Italian trans., Florence 1927; A. Willwell, Seele und Geist. Ein Aufbau der Psychologie, in Mensch, Gott, Welt, IV, Freiburg im Br. 1938; B. Nardi, Anima e corpo nel pensiero di s. Tommaso, in Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 23 (1942), p. 50 ff. — On the knowledge of the spirituality of the soul: M. Liberatore, Del composto umano, 3rd ed., Naples 1880; C. Fabro, Percezione e pensiero, ch. VIII: La percezione dello spirituale, Milan 1941, p. 331 ff. — One should also consult the numerous commentaries, both literal and in the form of "quaestio", made by the Scholastics on the De Anima for medieval thought: for modern thought and questions, the psychology manuals of the Neo-Scholastics (esp.: Mercier, Remer, Froebes, Maher, De La Vaissière). — On the origin of the soul: M. Th. Coconnier, L'âme humaine, existence et nature, Paris 1890 (complete exposition and defense of the Thomist doctrine on the soul); W. Reany, The Creation of Human Soul. A Clear and Concise Exposition from Psychological, Theological and Historical Aspects, London 1920. — On animation: A. Lanza, La questione del momento in cui l'a. razionale è infusa nel corpo, Rome 1939 (v. ANIMAZIONE). — On the elementary definition: T. M. Zigliara, De mente Concilio Virenmisti in definendo dogmate unionee in unionee humanae cum corpore, Rome 1879. — Among the moderns: W. Mc Dougall, Body and Mind: A History and Defense of Animism, 4th ed., London n.d.; A. Bain, Mind and Body. The Theories and their Relations, ibid. 1900; A. Binet, L'âme et le Corps, Paris 1910; E. Becher, Gehirn und Seele, in Die Psychologie in Einzeldarstellungen, V. Heidelberg 1911; J. Geyser, Die Seele. Ihr Verhältnis z. Bewusstsein und z. Liebe, Leipzig 1914; D. Feuling, Das Leben der Seele. Einführung in psychologische Schau, Salzburg 1940; it is the first attempt at an overall phenomenology of the life of the soul against the background of Catholic doctrine.

Cornelio Fabro

II. THE SOUL IN SACRED SCRIPTURE.

1. IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

1. As with other truths, so too with the doctrine on the soul (existence and nature) the Old Testament does not give a systematic philosophical exposition, but speaks the language of its time and of the Israelite people. To establish the doctrine really expressed or presupposed, one must therefore analyze this popular language. The Old Testament distinguishes in man two quasi-constitutive elements: one material, the other superior (spiritual); thus e.g. Gen. 2, 7; Job 10, 9-12; Eccles. 12, 7. The material element is called 'āphār (dust, earth) or bāšār (flesh); to designate the superior element there are several names, particularly rūah (generally translated "spirit") and néphēš (generally translated "soul"); less frequent are nēšāmāh (breath, respiration: Gen. 2, 7; I Kings 17, 17; Is. 2, 22) and lēbh or lēbhābh ("heart"; cf. Ps. 73 [72], 26). The different names express the same psychic reality considered under different points of view; they do not indicate in the first place the substance of the soul, but the different aspects or the different vital activities of it; the usual translations "spirit", "soul" are therefore not exact and in no way equivalent to the technical terms of our Scholastic philosophy.

2. When the Old Testament speaks of rūah, it thinks of the life participated to man by a divine breath (Zach. 12, 1; Job 12, 10; cf. Ez. 37, 6 where the vivification of the people is described with terms taken from the life of individuals), residing in him as the principle of vital activities, in the first place of animal (sensitive) life, secondarily of intellectual, ethical, religious life. The communication of life by means of the divine breath is common to man and beast (cf. Ps. 104 [103], 29 f.); therefore one also speaks of the rūah of beasts (Gen. 6, 17; 7, 15); thus Eccles. 3, 19: "there is but one breath — rūah — for all". The Ecclesiast confesses that he does not know what becomes of this rūah when it leaves man's body (3, 21). That the rūah is a spiritual substance in the Scholastic sense is not clearly stated in the Old Testament, but it is hinted at by ascribing to it the higher psychic activities, intellectual, moral, religious, especially from the time of Ezekiel onward. It is said, for example, that the Lord will give, in messianic times, a "new rūah" (Ez. 11, 19; 18, 31; 36, 29; Ps. 51 [50], 12); in the rūah thoughts ascend (Ez. 11, 5); the rūah seeks, desires the Lord (Is. 26, 9), is cast down (Is. 66, 2; Prov. 15, 13), humble (Prov. 16, 19; 29, 23), magnanimous (Ps. 51 [50], 14).

3. Another aspect of the psychic part of man is expressed by the word néphēš which originally perhaps meant the throat, then the breath, the respiration that passes through the throat distinguishing the living body from the non-living one; therefore néphēš also means life, but rather insofar as it is more closely bound to the body, indeed to the blood of the living being (Lev. 17, 11-14). The néphēš is considered principally, though not exclusively, as the subject of the lower vital activities (vegetative, sensitive). It is often used almost as a synonym of life (to take away the néphēš "to kill"); to save the néphēš "to liberate"), indeed the use of néphēš instead of the personal or reflexive pronoun is very common (my néphēš dies "I die", Num. 23, 10; Jonathan loves David as his néphēš, "as himself"). It also designates man as an individual, a person (70 néphēš, Ex. 1, 5), especially in the legal formula néphēš hī ("if anyone").

Rūah and néphēš, although they signify life according to different points of view, are often confused in their application to psychic phenomena; not rarely in poetic parallelism they are used together to designate the "whole man". In the last period of the Old Testament a new terminology is found, using πνεῦμα (rūah) to designate the life-giving spirit of God, while ψυχή (néphēš) is the superior principle internal to man; thus II Mach. 6, 30; 7, 37; 14, 38; Wisd. 4, 14; 7, 27; 8, 19 f.; 9, 15; 10, 16.

4. Since néphēš and rūah do not signify two substances, but rather two aspects of the activity of a single principle, in the Old Testament one cannot speak of trichotomy, as e.g. in the system of Plato (σῶμα ψυχή νοῦς). The Old Testament attests clearly (cf. Gen. 27; 6, 3; 7, 22; Lev. 17, 11; Ps. 104 [103], 29 f.; Job 27, 3; 33, 3-4; Ez. 37, 8) that the constitutive parts of man are only those two which in philosophical-Scholastic terminology are called "body" and "soul". The pre-existence of the soul is not found in the Old Testament; in Wisd. 8, 19, 20, the context excludes such an interpretation.

5. The problem of the immortality of the soul does not arise

formally in the books of the Old Testament before the book of Wisdom, since the term that signifies exclusively the higher part of man as substance is lacking; rather, one speaks of the immortality of the "nomo," which even after bodily death has a certain life, though diminished and almost shadowy, no longer here on earth, but in še'ôl, where man "is gathered to his fathers" (e.g., Gen. 25:8). The inhabitants of še'ôl are never called népheš, nephášôth, and much less rûah, rûhôth, but néphá'îm (the "languid ones"). The obvious conclusion that, once the body is dead and decomposed, it can only be the soul that survives in še'ôl, is not explicitly found before the book of Wisdom (3:1-3).

6. Man's superiority over the animals in the Old Testament is not derived from the possession of a spiritual and immortal soul, but is expressed through the idea of likeness to God (Gen. 1:26; 5:1-3; 9:6; Ps. 8:6 ff.; Eccli. 17:3; Wis. 2:23). Nevertheless, since this likeness consists in man's being endowed with intelligence and free will, implicitly resembling God coincides with having a spiritual soul, essentially superior to the soul of brute animals.

Agostino Bea

II. IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

The authors of the New Testament no more than those of the Old offer a systematic philosophical exposition of the nature of the soul. Their conception of man is first of all that of the Old Testament, and their psychological language is that in use in the Septuagint version. To designate the higher element of man in opposition to the lower, corporeal element (body or flesh), the terms employed here and there are almost the same (heart, soul, spirit) and often indicate, like their Hebrew equivalents, only the different aspects of one and the same psychic reality.

1. In particular the heart (καρδία) is the center of every sensitive, intellectual and moral life: man believes, doubts, speaks, argues with or in the heart (for example Mk. 2, 6-8; 6, 52; 8, 17; Lk. 24, 25; Rom. 10, 8-16).

2. Like népheš, the soul (ψυχή), although it is opposed to the material body (Mt. 10, 28; 26, 38), is sometimes the subject of activities of a purely sensitive order (Lk. 12, 19-23; cf. Mt. 6, 25; Apoc. 18, 14), and always maintains a close relationship with the body or the flesh. Thus it often indicates life itself, sometimes the living being (Mk. 3, 4; Rom. 2, 9; etc.) and even seems simply to replace the reflexive pronoun (Mt. 10, 39; cf. Lk. 9, 24-25; etc.).

3. Alongside ψυχή, the New Testament likewise uses πνεῦμα, as the Old Testament used rûah alongside népheš; but it attributes to the "spirit" only properly spiritual activities. Indeed, πνεῦμα is less the subject of these than their principle, with rare exceptions, generally justified by the context (Lk. 1, 47; Act. 17, 16; I Cor. 14, 14; elsewhere it is a matter of the Holy Spirit). The Fourth Gospel says, for example, that the soul of Jesus Christ is troubled (Io. 12, 27), but that He is troubled in his spirit (13, 21). Thus, far from replacing the soul, the one can be named close to the other (I Thess. 5, 23; Phil. 1, 27; Hebr. 4, 12). Wrongly did the Gnostics and later Apollinaris base on these texts their trichotomic conception of the human composite, undoubtedly widespread in the milieu under the form of νόος, ψυχή, σῶμα, but unknown to the New as to the Old Testament. In St. Paul it is not a matter of two parts of the soul in the manner of two substances, but rather of two aspects: whether one understands by ψυχή "the soul in the whole of its functions, especially vital and sensitive" and by πνεῦμα "the same soul in its higher intellectual functions," or whether one prefers to see in πνεῦμα the human soul living the supernatural life, according to a usage dear to St. Paul.

4. In fact, when St. Paul (the usage is almost exclusively his) wishes to underline the properly natural character of the human intelligence, he has recourse by preference to another term, taken from the current usage of the time, νόος; whether he joins the two terms νόος and πνεῦμα (Eph. 4, 23), or sets them against each other (I Cor. 14, 14-19), or finally whether only νόος appears to designate, for example, the falsified intelligence of the pagan (Rom. 1, 28; Eph. 4, 17; etc.) or that of the sinful man in struggle against the flesh, but not yet renewed by the divine Spirit (Rom. 7, 23-25). Not even in this case could one speak of trichotomy.

5. Like the Old Testament, the New looks at the problem of immortality rather from the point of view of man than from that of the soul, and attention is concentrated more on the resurrection of bodies than on the life of the separated soul. Nevertheless, even stripped of the body, the soul is not supposed to live in the sleep of še'ôl, but to dwell near the Lord (II Cor. 5, 8; Phil. 1, 23). And the fact that this separated soul is no longer only called ψυχή (Apoc. 6, 9; 20, 4), but also πνεῦμα (I Pt. 3, 19; Hebr. 12, 23), provides at least a precious indication in favor of its spiritual nature.

Stanislao Lyonnet

III. THE SOUL AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES.

On the soul among primitives, two groups of problems had to present themselves in the past. In the first place, whether a soul could be recognized in natural man, and in what sense; in the second place, what concept of it the primitives had.

1. Evolutionism, in its time monistically extended also to the study of cultures, denied to primitives, along with rational intelligence, the soul. Modern ethnology, however, has had to reach quite different conclusions on the basis of the facts, since it was easy to establish how even the peoples most culturally primitive from the ergological and social standpoint possess clear, deeply rooted and felt notions of religion and morality, a well-established family, parental and social organization, a language grammatically and lexically not inferior to any other, singular knowledge of nature, demonstrating even marked inventive capacities, as revealed by tools, wheels, carts, agriculture, etc. Today, therefore, it is universally recognized that, for all this, the primitive is essentially distinguished from the animal, and that, consequently, a true and proper human psyche must be recognized in him. Moreover, currents arose within ethnology that in such a psyche did not intend to see a true and proper human soul. Some maintained that it was nothing other than the result of animal instincts, and that, therefore, only these guided the primitive in thinking and acting. Others affirmed that, in the supposed scale of ascent, natural man had not yet reached the full development of his personality and individuality, lying at a step of thinking and acting that they called collectivistic. Some held that his way of thinking still lacked logicality, that is, that he was at a prelogical state. Still others, while recognizing logical faculties in him, did not fail to proclaim his intelligence inferior, holding such inferiority to be caused by an essential difference of his psyche. All these a priori opinions have sought in vain for confirmation in the facts. Thus, as regards animal instinct, appeal was made to cruelty, cannibalism, slavery, infanticide, the harshness proper to certain initiations of youth. But, conversely, it has also been seen that the most ancient peoples, who theoretically should have excelled in brutality, are far from manifestations of that kind, for, on the contrary, they follow habits demonstrating an opposite mentality (for example conjugal fidelity, love toward offspring, assistance to the needy, etc.) and consciously practice them and carefully hand them down. Under the influence, moreover, of pansexualism it was maintained that the primitive was completely a slave of the sexual sphere, and that this alone governed his thinking and acting. But, even on this point, objective research has brought to light countless facts and actions that it is absolutely impossible to reduce to that sphere, and we have proof of this, beyond everything else, in reflective thinking in relation to the soul (v. also FAMIGLIA; MONOGAMIA; PREGHIERA; SACRIFICIO, etc.).

With regard to religious acts, modern psychology too, and especially that directed to religious phenomena, has been able experimentally to clarify how those acts represent a characteristic activity of the spirit, essentially distinct therefore from the sexual sphere. That the primitive was, in his thinking and acting, driven solely by collectivistic ideas found no confirmation, because even among the most ancient peoples facts emerged revealing a decided sense of individuality.

Closely connected, as we said, was the theory of prelogism, which traced the formation of ideas in primitive man back to a priori and simplistic magical influences, rather than to the natural and spontaneous logical processes provoked by experience (Lévy-Bruhl). But then agriculture, hunting, pastoralism, as well as the economic systems organically derived from them, and even more so weapons, tools, simple and complex traps, knowledge of the habits of animals and the related exploitation of them, knowledge of the curative properties of certain plants and the related applications, to say nothing else, soon arose to shake that complicated edifice to its foundations, definitively demonstrating that primitive man too possesses and follows a certain logic.

As regards, finally, the alleged essential gap between civilized man and natural man, who was supposed to be arrested at a lower step of the cultural series, that is, devoid of aptitudes for further development, it is clear today that the phenomenon depends not on internal causes but on external influences, such as long isolation, climatic adversity, etc.; and we have proof of this in the fact that individual primitive peoples show no different, nor lesser, sensitivity and responsiveness to the work of acculturation, both outside and within their own environment, thus placing themselves, without further ado, on the same level as the great amorphous mass of the civilized.

Thus ethnology, on the basis of thorough knowledge of all cultures, has come to conclude that primitive peoples, even the most ancient, possess a truly and integrally human soul and are therefore endowed with human feelings and will, with fully active reasoning, such as to lead them to give an account of the world, to organize themselves socially, and to trace back by way of causes to the origins of creation.

2. As for the concept of the soul among primitive peoples, we now know that there exists no people or stock that believes man to be made of body alone. All recognize, instead, alongside and above the body, the existence of an independent element, different from it, capable under given circumstances of existing even by itself, in some way influencing vegetative life itself and constituting the center of the individual's spiritual powers and qualities. All likewise possess the plain and simple conviction that this element will continue to exist even after the death and decomposition of the body. Up to this point the agreement is unanimous. Opinions differ as regards the essence and number of souls, the origin of the individual soul, and the mode of existence of the soul in the afterlife. We are not equally informed on this point about all primitive peoples. We can, however, for now identify two large groups: more ancient peoples; and matriarchal agriculturalists with a cult of ancestors or at least of the dead.

Pygmies, ancient Americans, southeastern Australians, etc., with very few exceptions, hold that man consists of body and soul, and they say that this is like the wind (Maidu of California), like the air (Fuegians), like the height (Wiradjuri in Australia): all attributes that certainly designate immateriality. Scholars customarily call such a concept of the soul, breath-soul. It is this soul that vivifies the body and is the center of self-awareness and personality. The individual soul is created and sent by the creator, either at the moment of birth (Fuegians) or before it (Semang of Malacca). In myths it is told that the creator awakened the first man to life by breathing his breath into the body already formed but without life (Kulin of Australia). If the creator calls the individual soul to himself, man dies and the soul, generally through the Milky Way, returns to the creator. The fate of the soul in the afterlife generally depends on the moral conduct of man. The peoples of this group, as a rule, do not hold that souls return among the living after death.

The matriarchal peoples, and in this respect those of Africa and of southeastern Asia with its islands are better known, believe that man is composed not of two but of three elements: body, the vivifying principle of the body, and soul. Precisely for this reason one sometimes speaks of two souls: soul-life and soul-image or shadow. The soul-life (vital fluid, vital force) seems to be conceived in a panentheistic sense. After death, it passes into another living being (man or animal), or returns to the earth and can be subject to the influence and will of magicians and sorcerers. The soul-image or shadow, which stands beside the other and also above it, is considered the center of the individual's qualities, powers, and spiritual functions. Some peoples seem to see in it a kind of protective spirit, belonging more to an ancestor than to the individual himself. Others, conversely, discern in it something proper to the individual, which constitutes the deepest basis of his whole life. On the presence or existence of this soul depends the whole fate of life: health, illness, death. As the center of self-awareness it is that which feels, thinks and wills; it can temporarily exist outside the body even in this life, but even more so and definitively after death. We know little about the origin of the individual soul; certainly some of these peoples regard it as the reincarnation of the souls of ancestors. It survives death, and there are those who hold that for some time it lingers near the house or the corpse of the deceased, to be then directed, by means of rites, toward a definitive dwelling place. This is no longer, as for the first group, heaven and the seat of the Supreme Being, but the land of shadows, a kind of Hades, often situated in the West, now under the earth, now above it; on islands, mountains, distant valleys, etc. From there the souls, quite unlike the beliefs of the first group, can return among the living, sometimes only through reincarnation, at other times for the purpose of doing good or harm.

With this, all the opinions of primitive peoples on the soul are not exhausted. There exist tribes that believe every individual has more than two and up to seven souls; but the current state of research does not allow us to judge whether this is a true and proper belief in different souls, or a way of rendering different aspects and attributes of the soul, while the relevant particulars are not yet numerous enough to authorize the formulation of other groupings.

For the origin of the concept of the soul in primitive man, v. ANIMISMO.

Michele Schulien

#### IV. THE SOUL IN EXTRABIBLICAL RELIGIONS

The belief in the survival of the soul that has been found in the beliefs of primitive peoples (v. ANIMISM) is also found in the religions of culturally evolved peoples, whether these are the religions proper to the national groupings of the ancient world (Egypt, Babylonia, Syria, etc.) and the modern world (China, Japan, India, etc.), or supranational or universal religions (Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Islam).

1. CHINA

The Chinese have two different terms to express the idea of the soul: po'h, which corresponds to the "sensitive" soul of Aristotelian philosophy, the one that presides over the vital functions, manifests itself in the breath and vanishes from the body at death; and hun, which is the rational soul, the one that presides over the functions of the spirit and, in morbid phenomena and in dreams, seems to depart temporarily from the body. The Li ki, or "Memorial of Rites," one of the five classical Chinese books, states that, once death has occurred, one of the relatives of the deceased climbs onto the roof of the house and, turning to the north, which is the region of the dead, invites the soul of the deceased to re-enter the body: "after which the mouth of the dead man was filled with rice and a piece of raw meat was placed beside him. Then they looked toward the sky and buried the body in the earth. The body and the animal soul go below, the intelligent spirit goes above" (Li ki, 7, 1, 7).

Further proof of this belief is found in the cult of the ancestors, which obliges the filial piety of descendants to venerate their parents and forebears as though they were still living: an obligation that falls upon everyone, from the head of state, who venerates them in specially appointed shrines, to the humblest private individual, who honors them as present in the tablets placed in a special corner of his house. This practice is so deeply rooted that - provided the tablet is stripped of the idolatrous meaning of "support of the soul" - it has been authorized even for Chinese Catholics by a special decree (Dec. 8, 1939) of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda.

2. JAPAN

Shinto Japan too believes in the survival of the soul without investigating its nature or the manner of its survival. This is due to the fact that Shintoism is a frankly animistic and naturalistic paganism (as its mythology shows), upon which Chinese civil and religious culture and Buddhist preaching soon came to be superimposed.

Closely dependent on Chinese influence is the cult of the ancestors, which Japan also practices, venerating them within every house, in special shrines (mitama-ya) where the tablet is kept, which is at once a support and a memorial of the deceased. The ancestors of the imperial family, moreover, enter directly into the category of the Kami, or higher and divine spirits, protectors of the country.

3. EGYPT

In ancient Egypt too there are two names to signify the twofold aspect of the soul. The ka (ko, ko') is the vital breath, conceived as equal to the man, which departs when the individual dies, but remains near the tomb, to which it is almost bound, and feeds on the offerings brought to the corpse. The ba (bai), on the other hand, is only the spiritual part of the soul, not bound to the tomb and capable of moving freely either toward the sky or toward the kingdom of the afterlife; for this reason it takes the form of a bird and loves to visit the mummy from time to time and to alight upon its heart. One reads in the pyramid texts: "(The dead man) goes toward the sky like the falcons, with feathers like those of the goose, he darts toward the sky like the crane and kisses the sky like the falcon, he leaps toward the sky like a locust. Thus the man flies far from you, O men, he is no longer on earth but in heaven, with the gods his brothers...". An affirmation not only of survival, but also of the happy fate of the soul.

4. BABYLONIA

According to the Babylonians, what survives the corpse is the edimmu, that is, its soul conceived as a spirit being, furnished with wings, like a bird, which departs into the land of shadows (arallu) situated beneath the earth. In order that this shade may be at peace and not torment the living, it must lack neither burial nor assistance. On the tomb, therefore, the relatives must provide it on the appointed day with the funerary meal (hispu): "Have you seen - Gilgamesh asks Eabani - the fate of the edimmu of him whose corpse has no one to care for it?". And Eabani answers: "I have seen him eating the scraps of the pot, the remnants of food thrown into the street". But this gloomy vision left open a chink onto a happier one, almost a hope of a renewal of life, because it is precisely in the darkness of arallu that the fountain of life flows which the goddess Ishtar goes seeking for Tammuz; and Gilgamesh is moved to his journey by the desire for immortality, which is redoubled in him by the death of his friend Eabani. The myth of Adapa too, who, on the advice of Ea, refuses the immortality that the god Anu offers him by proffering to that end the food and water of life, demonstrates in its own way the yearning of the Babylonian soul for the privilege of immortality.

5. SYRIA

Among the other Semitic peoples as well, the soul is the vital breath (nèpheś) which after death descends into a dark region from which there is no return. But its fate can be alleviated by the funerary rites performed by the living upon the tomb, the inviolability of which was a most severe law among all the Semites. For the otherworldly fate of the soul, the Aramaic inscription of King Panammu dedicated to the god Hadad (excavations of Zengirli, 8th century B.C.) is important, in which explicit allusion is made to the dwelling of the souls of the Syrians with the divinity. Panammu indeed commands that this prayer be addressed to Hadad at the moment of sacrifice: "May the soul of Panammu eat and drink with you!", that is, may it too partake of the sacrifice offered to the god.

6. INDO-EUROPEANS

The funerary furnishings of the primitive Indo-European peoples, collected, for northern Europe, in the museums of Germany, Scandinavia and the Slavic countries, demonstrate among the various peoples of this family the belief in the survival of the soul. This is conceived as the breath, or exhalation (Sanskrit ātman, German Atem) which at the instant of death abandons the body and goes to join in their region the "fathers," the "ancestors," the "good." It must not, however, be abandoned, which would make it wrathful and therefore harmful, but must be assisted, by furnishing the corpse in which it dwelt with the utensils, weapons and ornaments used in life and by bringing offerings of food and drink to the tomb. These offerings are made on the third, ninth, thirtieth (or fortieth) day after death, and are renewed on a day of the year that is commemorative for all the dead, which among the ancient Greeks was that of the Anthesteria, among the Romans that of the Lemuria and the Feralia. The souls are invited to feed, to offer in return to the living prosperity of the land and of the livestock, and finally are prayed to depart (Manes evite paterni! θύραζε σήρας).

7. INDIA

Vedism. — The Indian of Vedic times recognized in the body the presence of an element of airy, shadow-like consistency, which could leave its seat either temporarily (and then the body loses consciousness of itself, as in cases of illness or sleep), or definitively at the moment of death (and then the body decomposes, while that shadow-like essence acquires an independent life and can assume various forms). To this airy element the Vedas give two names: asu "breath, puff," something material, therefore, which man has in common with the animal and which ceases at the expiration of life; and manas, that is, spirit as the seat of intelligence and will, which has its dwelling in the heart; popular imagination pictures it as a little man the height of a thumb. The two names, however, are often used interchangeably. At death the manas departs into the world beyond, where the ancestors (pitaras) already are, over whom Yama reigns, the first of men who knew death. Naturally here too the state of the soul in the other life depends on the piety of the living, whence the complex funerary ritual and the cult of tombs, with the related funerary offerings (śraddhā), without which the deceased would suffer and torment the living. Of metempsychosis there is no clear trace in the Vedic era.

Brahmanism. — In Brahmanism the Vedic notion of the soul, so primitive yet fundamentally so adherent to reality, volatilizes into a pantheistic vision of the entire cosmic organism, in which there is no longer room for the affirmation of a personal and permanent I through the changing flux of things. The name that serves to designate the I, the soul, is ātman "breath, wind," that is, the inner principle that keeps the individual alive. But this name also serves to express the I that gives life to the entire universe: individual ātman and universal ātman (Brahman) are fundamentally identical; individual souls issue from the universal soul like myriads of sparks from a fire, and therefore participate in its nature (Mandaka Upan, 1, 7; 1, 1); indeed, salvation (moksa) consists precisely in this identification, which is an immersion in the universal Being, like a river that loses itself in the sea.

Buddhism. — From this pantheistic volatilization of the individual soul in the universal soul, Buddhism arrives at nothing less than the negation of the soul, inasmuch as it rejects as rationally unthinkable the idea of ātman, whether universal or individual. It admits, like Brahmanism, that the personal I and the sensible world are a fabric of appearances in continuous transformation, but it denies that the absolute (Brahman) is the only reality and that in it is to be recognized the substance of the soul (ātman). The soul is not an individual, permanent spiritual substance, the subject of the phenomena of knowledge and consciousness; it is the apparent result of a succession of states of consciousness detached from one another but associated in series; just as a field set alight at one end and made to rotate about the other end traces a circle of fire, which in reality does not exist. The personal I does not exist — says the monk Nagasena to King Milinda — but only the five elements that form human existence: name and body, sensation, idea, concept, knowledge; just as the chariot does not exist but only the pole, the wheels, the yoke, etc., to the union of which the name chariot is given. The negation of the soul as an individual permanent substance appears in contradiction with the doctrine of metempsychosis, admitted by Buddhism, which makes the new existence depend on the "law" (karma), that is, on the chain of actions committed in the previous existence; but Buddhism has resolved the contradiction by maintaining the idea of a "non-permanent continuity" in the process from one existence to another; "continuity" because the new existence in fact continues the preceding one, "non-permanent" because, the substantial I having been denied, the new personality has nothing to do with the preceding one; just as when one lamp is lit from another lamp one cannot say that the first is made to transmigrate into the second, although in fact there is the birth of a new lamp. It is a question, therefore, according to Buddhism, not of transmigration properly so called, but of rebirth.

Later Buddhism, called that of the Great Vehicle (as opposed to the original one called that of the Small Vehicle), has not substantially varied on this fundamental point the doctrine of the master, although it has constructed a whole speculative and practical Buddhology that has transformed the concepts of the Buddha and of nirvana, diverting the goal of the monastic vocation and organizing a veritable cult of the Buddha.

8. PERSIA

The beliefs concerning the survival of the soul in pre-Zoroastrian Persia must not have been different from those of the other Indo-European peoples, of which a brief mention has been given above. A residue of these beliefs, accepted by later Mazdeism, must be recognized in the Fravadi, which are to be understood as the spirits of the ancestors, something similar to the Lar and the Genius of the Romans that protects the descendants of one's own family. But precisely because of this too evidently animistic meaning of theirs, the Fravadi are not named in the more ancient parts of the Avesta (which go back to the preaching of Zarathustra) and are found instead in the more recent Avesta (a hymn is dedicated to them), where they appear as the souls of the just in the function of guardian angels who place themselves from birth at man's side and protect him against the demons. In place of the Fravadi, Zarathustra introduced the daena, that is, the consciousness of the I, which determines the good or bad destiny of each one. In Mazdean eschatology the daena assumes the aspect of the conscience of the just man, which appears to him in the figure of a beautiful maiden who accompanies him to the judgment, toward which he moves under the guidance of Sraosha, directing himself to the Cinvat bridge that arches between earth and heaven. Once the weighing of actions has been done, if the soul is deficient it plunges from the bridge into the abyss that opens up below; if it is justified it passes through the bridge and enters paradise full of spiritual delights.

9. GREECE AND ROME

From that important vestibule of Greek religion which is constituted by the Minoan-Mycenaean era, the faith in the survival of the soul is clearly documented: abundant funerary furnishings, terracotta or marble figurines, vases, obsidian or bronze blades, seals, gold masks that preserve the features of the deceased, in short all that equipment which presupposes the reality of a further life of the deceased and the use that he can still make of the things he used and loved on earth. But the most eloquent monument of all is the painted sarcophagus of Haghia Triada, of whose funerary meaning (despite the exegesis of E. Petersen and E. J. Harrison, who see in it rather scenes alluding to the spring awakening of nature) it is impossible to doubt. The two long sides of the sarcophagus, in fact, represent, the one the deceased standing before the tomb receiving the offering of a boat and of animals, and the other the solemn sacrifice of a bull. Of the two shorter sides, one has painted on it a chariot drawn by horses with two women inside, perhaps a scene of real life, the other a chariot drawn by griffins (symbolic animals, often, in Minoan monuments, connected with death) with two men inside, one of whom, certainly the deceased, portrayed in a darker tint and entirely enclosed in a garment that imprisons even his arms; above, a bird flies in the direction opposite to that of the chariot and represents the soul of the dead man. This sarcophagus demonstrates that the Minoan people believed in the survival of the soul, in its otherworldly journey (boat and chariot) and in the usefulness of funerary ceremonies.

In Homer too the belief in the survival of the soul is clearly affirmed. When the warrior dies, his soul (ἐνὴλ, vital breath) issues from his mouth and from the gash of the wound and descends into the invisible underworld (Hades). It preserves the figure (εὐθαίον) of the deceased, who is in fact recognizable (Achilles in Hades recognizes Patroclus), but it is tenuous as a shadow, so much so that it cannot be clasped in one's arms. This psyche lacks consciousness, because psychic activity depends on the viscera of the body from which it is now separated: only blood can restore it, and for this reason Odysseus, before descending into Hades, slaughters the victim whose tasted blood gives back to the souls the sense and memory of life.

The funerary ritual of classical Greece likewise presupposes the belief in the survival of the soul. After the eyes and arms had been closed, the corpse was washed, clothed, crowned and laid out with the feet toward the door. In later times it was also customary to place an obol in his mouth for Charon, nor was a prayer to Hermes psychopompos, that is, guide of souls, omitted, so that he might lend his office benevolently. Once the body had been cremated or mummified, the things dear to the deceased in life were deposited in the tomb. On the return from the funeral the funeral banquet (περίδεσπον) took place, and on the third, ninth and thirtieth day and on the anniversary, offerings of legumes, especially of beans, were prepared upon the tomb.

For the Romans, the soul after death lives a shadowy life in a subterranean region called Orcus. Its condition there depends on the way the corpse is treated. It is the family's duty to provide for burial and to appease the Manes of the dead with funerary offerings upon the tomb. The tomb is the necessary meeting point for the soul, and to be deprived of it is the most anguishing of punishments: for this reason, for the unburied dead and for the shipwrecked, an empty mound (cenotaph) was built, three times loudly inviting the wandering soul to come and dwell there. The call was also performed at the moment of death, after the dying person's last breath had been gathered. In Rome too there was the funeral banquet (silicernium) on the very day of the burial, a banquet on the ninth day (coena nocendialis) and the parentatio, or anniversary commemoration of the dead.

The spirits of the dead were called Lares and Manes if placable or favorable to the living, Larrae and Lemures if malignant and tormenting. Their conduct toward the living depended on the kind of treatment given to the corpse. Three times a year the souls enclosed in Orcus came to visit the living, passing through a crevice made in the mundus, or ritual pit, which put the world of the living in communication with that of the dead.

10. THE MYSTERIES

The evolution from the concept of survival to that of the immortality of the soul came about in Greece thanks to the spiritual development of the mystery religions. These were originally agrarian rites directed at bringing about the rhythm of the seasons, thus ensuring, after the death of vegetation in winter, its rising again to new spring. From this original sacred-magical meaning the passage to the mystical one is spontaneous, inasmuch as the divinity in whom the spirit of vegetation is personified (to which the initiates assimilate themselves through the initiatory ceremonies) guarantees to them its own same lot, and almost makes them experience it in the transport of the ecstasy provoked by the rite, which raises their souls into a higher region. This particular experience was alive especially in the Dionysian mysteries, where the intoxication reached its climax when, after the unbridled running, the maenads bit into the kid or the fawn, the incorporation of the god.

From this rather crude mode of union with the divinity, which gave the soul the experience of a life higher than the ordinary and more desirable, one passed to the discipline of the Orphics, who, elaborating the myth of Dionysus and rendering his ritual more composed, reduced to a fixed rule of ascesis what had been the orgiastic transport of an hour.

Orphism believes that man results from two elements: one divine, the soul, and the other earthly, the body, joined together (like the prisoner and his prison) from the day when from the ashes of the Titans, struck by Zeus because they had dismembered and devoured Dionysus-Zagreus, the human race was born. The Orphic discipline teaches how to liberate the divine, Dionysian element, that is, the soul, from the earthly, Titanic element, that is, the body, in order to make it return into the bosom of the divinity; all the more so since the imprisonment is long, because the soul is condemned to pass into other bodies (v. METEMPSYCHOSIS) until complete purification. The Orphic tablets, found in tombs of southern Italy and in Crete, make the certainty of the divine origin of the soul and its desire for liberation felt most vividly, a liberation for which it yearns as a thirsty man yearns for a spring of fresh water. « Celestial is my race - says the soul to the guardians of Hades in the tablet of Petelia - and this you too know; thirst burns and consumes me: now give me at once the fresh water flowing from the lake of Mnemosyne ». « I flew away from the mournful and hard circle - says the soul in one of the tablets of Thurii - and with swift foot I reached the longed-for crown... Happy and most blessed you who from man became god! ».

The Orphic faith in the divine origin of the soul and in its immortal destiny exercised a great influence on the Hellenic world. Pythagoras owes to the Orphics his doctrine on the soul, Plato his psychology and the vision of immortality that shines in the Phaedo, Cicero the consoling certainty that gladdens his Dream of Scipio, the Neopythagoreans their firm belief that the soul, a new Sappho released from human allurements, tends, to the sound of the mystic lyre, toward the regions above; Neoplatonism, grown in the furrow of Orphic thought, owes to it its doctrine of the soul and of its return into the One illustrated by Plotinus; Gnosticism finally - a disordered and unbalanced ferment of ideas that at the dawn of Christianity developed in the East, availing itself at once of the Neoplatonic current, of the Christian faith, of Iranian dualism, of Chaldean astralism - was also tributary to Orphic ideas, inasmuch as it maintains that the soul is a ray of divine light enclosed in the darkness of corporeal matter and that its supreme duty is to gain gnosis, that is, the true doctrine that opens for it the way of salvation.

11. ISLAM

Muhammad, opposing the paganism of the Arab tribes with his preaching in which Hebrew and Christian elements learned from the Israelite and Nestorian communities with which he had come into contact surfaced, affirmed not only the survival of the soul, already comprised in the animistic beliefs of the Bedouins, but its immortality. This, however, is not explicitly affirmed in the Quran but is implicit in the solemn and repeatedly stated affirmation that Muhammad makes of the final judgment of Allah and of the consequent sanction for the good and for the reprobate. He does not have a clear idea of the spiritual nature of the soul, and conceives it as incapable of thought and action without the support of the body. After death it remains immersed in a state of unconsciousness (like the Seven Sleepers in their cave, Qur. 18, 8 ff.) until Allah awakens it either temporarily in the tomb or definitively on the day of the final judgment. After Israfil, the angel of death, has carried out the separation of the soul from the body and the corpse has been laid in the tomb, Allah revives it again so that it may undergo the particular judgment by two special angels (Qur. 7, 35; 50, 16). If the sentence is favorable, it will enjoy in advance the joys of paradise, but if it is unfavorable, the deceased will undergo there the so-called « punishment of the tomb » made of anguish, stench and remorse. « Even in the tomb - says the catechism of Islam - the soul returns to the body, and the Most High creates a kind of vitality for the dead, by which they can feel pain and pleasure. On the day of the universal judgment, then, Allah will judge men by means of a great balance that will weigh their actions justly (Koran 21:48); the good Muslim will pass over the bridge of Sirah stretched over the abyss and will enter paradise; the infidel and the wicked Muslim will fall from the bridge into hell, the infidel forever, the Muslim for a limited period of time.

The philosophical-theological development of the concept of the soul took place in Muslim theology along two different lines: the Aristotelian one represented by Avicenna (v.), who from the spirituality of the soul deduces its immortality, and the mystical one illustrated by al-Ghazali (v.), who places the living experience of Quranic faith above rational demonstration.

V. THE SOUL IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.

1. ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

The opinions of the Presocratics on the soul have been preserved for us by Aristotle (De Anima, 1), by the doxographers and by the fragments that modern historiography has so far been able to identify from their lost works. The scarcity of sources and the controversies still ongoing regarding the interpretation of this dense and varied period of thought make any attempt at rigorous classification arduous and uncertain. On the other hand, the fact remains that the problem of the soul is present in all thinkers and often indeed occupies the center of the conception they form of the world, and this greatly facilitates the attempt at some classification and at a substantial understanding of those first solutions.

Aetius distinguishes two classes of opinions: those that attribute to the soul a corporeal nature, and those that make it incorporeal. Among the latter he names Anaxagoras and "his followers," of whom Stobaeus (Ecl., I, 49) records, together with Anaximenes, also Archelaus, Diogenes of Apollonia and Anaximander. For them the soul is of an air-like nature, since for them air is the moving principle of nature; to this contributed the observation of the close connection between the act of breathing and the preservation of life. "Men and the other animals," declares Diogenes, "live by the respiration of air. And this is for them the soul and the intelligence, as becomes clear from the fact that when it separates, they die and the intelligence departs" (fr. 4). The soul, however, is a special air, as Diogenes himself declares, one that is warmer than that which is outside, but nevertheless much colder than that which is in the vicinity of the sun (fr. 5). According to Aristotle, some Pythagoreans were of the same opinion because "they said... that the soul is the dust that moves in the air," others that it is the moving principle of that (De Anima, I, 2, 404a, 17-19). Isolated opinions are those that make the soul of a watery nature (Hippo, De Anima, I, 2, 405b, 1b, 24), or that, like Homer and Critias, place it in the blood (ibid., 403 a, 31; 405 b, 4-7). Hippasus, Democritus and Leucippus brought it close to the nature of "fire": indeed for the atomists it results from atoms of fire because they are more mobile and operative. Heraclitus held that the soul was the "hot evaporation" (ἀναθυμίασις: De Anima, I, 2, 405a, 26), while Empedocles would have conceived it as a mixture of "ethereal and air-like substance" according to Theodoretus, or even of all four elements and of their reason or "proportion" (λόγος) as Aristotle hints (De Anima, I, 5, 410a, 1 ff.). Thales, on the other hand, is placed by Aetius at the head of those who conceived the soul as of an "incorporeal" nature, having been the first to call it "a self-moving nature and eternally in motion" (αὐτοκίνητος καὶ ἀεικίνητος), followed by Alcmaeon, who further called it "immortal and akin to the gods." Yet from Aristotle we know that the notion of "incorporeal" is no less present to the other Ionians, despite the apparent contrast of the terms. "Incorporeal" (ἀσώματος) has for them the meaning of "subtle" (ἐππομερές: De Anima, I, 2, 405a, 6), penetrating and therefore particularly mobile and fit to move the body, as is fitting for the soul (De Anima, I, 2, 404b, 31; 405a, 7, 27; 405b, 12).

These and other indications have led to a complete revision of the interpretation, dominant before Zeller, that attributed to the first philosophy an exclusively cosmological and physical meaning in the strict sense. Zeller, on the other hand, qualified it as "hylozoism" because it was entirely centered on the presence of the soul in the cosmos. More recently K. Joël observed, following the suggestion of Aristotle himself, that for the first philosophers, as for every man who begins to move in the world, the beginning of thinking is taken from what precedes "quoad nos," starting therefore from ourselves, and not "quoad se," starting from an absolute reality that is foreign to us. The character therefore of Ionian philosophy, as well as physical and cosmological, is essentially anthropological and mystical: "The problem of the soul, that is, of life, is the fundamental problem for the ancient naturalist philosophers, and not merely an addition to the physical problem. There is not even one of the so-called Φωτινίδι who, even in the paltry fragments..., neglects to speak of the soul.... Nor do they explain the soul by means of the physical world, comments Mondolfo, but vice versa: which constitutes (third point, together with the feeling of self and the value of the soul and of life) that anthropomorphism of the mystical and lyrical foundation of natural philosophy that elevates man to symbol and key of the world (La filosofia dei Greci, I, 11, p. 32). The analogy is explicit in fr. 1 of Anaximenes, which seems the only genuine one: "As our soul, being air, holds us together (συγκρατεί), so also air and spirit surround (περιέχει) the whole world.... To sustain, to surround, to activate, to move, to govern are the attributes given to the soul, which remain meaningless in a purely 'physical' interpretation." There is thereby attenuated that "monism" that even Aristotle himself attributes to the first philosophers, and for a good part of them also materialism, when one adheres to the mentality they had, and not to ours or to another more evolved one such as that of Greek thought posterior to the systems of Aristotle and Plato.

The passage from the concept of "incorporeal" as a subtle and penetrating reality to that of "spiritual" seems to be due to the Pythagorean sects, from which Plato took it, and probably the primitive and common source is to be seen in the doctrines of the Orphics, to which the Neoplatonists will expressly appeal. For them too the souls wandered in the atmospheric "dust" and entered man with respiration. Wishing, however, to explain their intimate nature, the Pythagoreans placed as the principle of things the "numbers," that is, contents of an intelligible nature, whence the clear separation - at least glimpsed - of material and spiritual. Some of them called the soul "harmony," which is an effect of the consonance of numbers, like Dicaearchus; but Pythagoras, Xenocrates and the majority of the school called it outright "a self-moving number" (De Anima, I, 4, 407b, 30; 409a, 6). Another point of the Pythagorean conception of the soul, and one that will likewise be valued by the Neoplatonists, is to explain the soul as a synthesis or resultant of "finite" and "infinite," which for them had first of all an ethico-religious meaning. But the cosmological aspect was not neglected. Already the Ionians, who attributed life to respiration, had conceived the stars as animated. In the same way and more clearly the Pythagoreans, as is evident from a fragment of Alcmaeon (fr. A12), by virtue of circular and therefore eternal motion, attributed to each star an immortal soul.

Dualism, which the Pythagoreans arrived at with the introduction of the intelligible, that is, of the spiritual, alongside corporeal substance, had had some vague precedents. Heraclitus considered the soul as a "reason" (λόγος) that increases itself (fr. 115, ed. Walzer, Florence 1934, p. 146). The same term, as has been said, is read in Empedocles, for whom — even if the idealization attempted by Rosmini is not to be accepted in every respect — if one wishes to take account of his theories concerning the "sphere" or "intelligible cosmos," of the admission found in the poem Καθαρμοί of superior agents or δαίμονες, and of the very contact he could have had with the Pythagorean schools of Magna Graecia, one must admit that he arrived at conceiving forces superior to matter, and such were Love and Strife. Certainly, moreover, the Nous of Anaxagoras explicitly posits a substantial heterogeneity with the corporeal, and it is the starting point of the concept of absolute spirituality that will later be affirmed by Aristotle. The heterogeneity, however, of the soul from the body is still lacking.

Of primary importance for the formation of Greek doctrines on the soul are the aforementioned Orphic traditions, which in time came to form a single body with the Pythagorean ones. Aristotle cites the Orphic poems that attribute to the soul an extrinsic origin and explain its entry into the body by respiration, a conception common to all early Greek thought and perhaps to all primitive human thought (De Anima, I, 5, 410 b, 26-29). Proclus names the theory of the cycle of time, of births and misery, of the wheel of fate and of generation (In Tim., 330 ab, ed. Diels, III, Leipzig 1906, pp. 296-97); a doctrine that would enthuse the neo-pagan Nietzsche. Clement of Alexandria recalls the theory or tradition of original sin: "The ancient theologians and seers also attest that for some punishment the soul is joined to the body and as in a tomb is buried in it" (Stromata, III, 433, trans. Mondolfo; the doctrine is reported at length by Plato: Cratyl., 400 bc, where there is a curious play of etymologies; the accent on sin is also in Aristotle: fr. 60 Rose, Berlin 1870, 10 b; in the ed. Walzer, p. 44). This doctrine is followed by that of the transmigration of souls reported by Proclus; a transmigration that can be double, because "the same spirits become in turn both fathers and sons, and well-ordered wives and mothers and daughters; according to the cycles the soul of men passes into other animals..." (In Remp., ed. Kroll, II, Leipzig 1901, pp. 338-39). All these doctrines recur verbatim and are attributed to Pythagoras by Dicaearchus in the citation made of him by Porphyry (Vita Pythagor., § 19, ed. Nauck, Leipzig 1886, pp. 26-27). Pythagoras therefore went so far as to say that the souls of animals are of the same nature (ἀνεσθέντος) as ours (Porphyry, De Abstinentia, I, § 19, ed. Nauck, pp. 99, 13). Empedocles too is no less explicit, and this confirms the supposition made above about the inspiration and character of his doctrines: "There is an oracle of fate, an ancient decree of the gods sealed by broad oaths: if ever any one of the demons (among whom are certainly human souls), who obtained a long life as their lot, stains his limbs with guilty blood, or following Strife swears an impious false oath, he shall wander among the vaults ten thousand years far from the blessed, being born in the course of time under all mortal forms, exchanging the painful paths of life..." (fr. 115). "For I was once a boy and a girl, and a shrub and a bird and a mute fish of the sea" (fr. 117, trans. Mondolfo; see in frs. 136-37, the condemnation of bloody sacrifices).

In these Orphic-Pythagorean theories there are by now, as Proclus himself testifies (In Tim., 124 c, ed. Diels, I, Leipzig 1903, p. 407), all the elements of the Platonic doctrine of the soul, which give a little unity to the not a little conflicting expositions of the various dialogues. Of the Pythagoreans, however, Plato criticizes the notion of the soul as harmony (Phaed., 93 b); the criticism was taken up by Aristotle in the De Anima (I, 4, 407 b, 32-408 a, 9), and even earlier in the lost Eudemus, from which W. Jaeger derives the more explicit criticism made by Plotinus of the same theory (Enn., IV, 7, 8, ed. Bréhier, IV, Paris 1927, pp. 202-203; see: W. Jaeger, Aristoteles, Italian trans., Florence 1935, p. 57, note). The sense of the criticism lay in the reply that the soul is substance, whereas harmony is instead a modification and combination; moreover, harmony is always a good, whereas the soul can become bad.

The aspiration to make of the soul a substance standing by itself, self-moving and immortal, which already appears in Thales and in Alcmaeon according to Aetius (Dox. gr., p. 386), finds in Plato its awaited fulfillment, down to the most minute particulars. But it is an arduous task, and interpreters still declare that they have not succeeded in offering an exposition coherent with the different perspectives of the different dialogues: in this, as in the other doctrines, even the most important, Plato never came to a fixed point amid the continual agitation of his thought. There is added, moreover, the complication deriving from the use of myth, which with regard to the soul is continuous and becomes one with the doctrine. Holding with A. E. Taylor (Plato, the Man and his Work, New York 1936, p. 306) that the Leges develop the hints of the Phaedrus (244 c ff.), we can establish the following principles: 1) The soul is a substance standing by itself, because it must set other things in motion; to it belongs that motion which comes tenth in the natural order, but which is logically first by birth and by power, namely that of "moving itself and other objects," which "never fails... and is not only for itself, but is the source and principle of motion for all other things" (Leges, 894 c ff.; Phaed., 244 cd). 2) Consequently, the soul must be called not only independent of the body and immortal, but pre-existent to the body of which it is the moving principle (Leges, 896 c ff.), and the perfections of the soul existed before the perfections of bodies. 3) As many as there are motions, so many are there souls: there is therefore before all a "anima mundi" and the sun has a soul and each star has its own (Leges, 898 d ff.): the cosmic character that Plato attributes to the soul is attested by his attribution of a soul to the gods themselves; indeed even Jupiter is said to have a "royal soul" and a "royal intelligence" so that he may be a cause (Phileb., 30 d). 4) Threefold in man is the principle of motion ("soul"): the one, the more noble soul, is found in the head and is the principle of knowledge and of beautiful and virtuous actions; the second, the irascible soul, impels to acts of courage, and resides in the breast: the third, the ignoble soul, is placed in the lower part of the body and is the principle of sensual appetites. It seems that Plato wished by the doctrine of the three "parts" of the soul to establish an analogy with the "parts" of a well-ordered city: the philosopher-kings as rulers, the warriors as defenders, and the common herd of slaves (Rep., IV, 441 c ff.). 5) As to its origin, the soul is said to be the work of the Demiurge who forms it by turning his gaze to the Ideas, since the soul must be the intermediary between these and the inert corporeal world: from it the other souls derive (Tim., 30 b ff.; to reconcile the narrative of the Timaeus, where the soul turns out to be composed and molded from its constituents, with the doctrine of the absolute simplicity and spirituality of the Phaedrus, the Neoplatonists understood that composition in a purely intelligible sense). 6) Enclosed in the body, the soul is there as the charioteer on a chariot drawn by two steeds, the one generous (the irascible soul) which tends toward excellent things, the other slothful and pleasure-loving (the concupiscible soul) which seeks pleasures. The souls that succeed in mastering the second and making the first prevail pass after death to definitive immortality, to contemplate the "pure intelligibles" (the Ideas): the others will instead pass again from body to body.

The transition observable in Aristotle from the enthusiastic adherence given to Platonism in his youth, as appears from the fragments that remain to us of the dialogues he then wrote, can be identified and characterized — as regards the doctrine of the soul — in the two terms he uses, which differ only by a slight change of consonant. In the Platonic period of the dialogues the soul is called ἐνθελέχεια or "continuous and perpetual motion" as Cicero translates it, who has preserved it for us (Tusc. Disput., I, 10, 22); in the autonomous period the Stagirite coins the original term ἐντελέχεια which means act and form of a body to which it is united in being (De Anima, II, 1, 412 a, 10). The change is due to the new concept of "nature" that Aristotle reached through a more intimate contact with experience, suggested by research on living animals: nature is a synolon of matter and form and, in living beings, of a duly proportioned body and its soul. Thus he reproaches most of the doctrines on the soul advanced by his predecessors and especially by the Pythagoreans and therefore also by Plato, for "uniting and placing the soul in the body without taking care to define for what reason and in what manner the body contains it...: they aim only to show what the soul is ("substance subsisting by itself") and meanwhile take no trouble at all to define the body that must receive it, as if what is said in the Pythagorean myths were possible, that any soul whatever enters the first body it encounters; whereas on the contrary it is seen that each body has its own proper form and figure" (De Anima, I, 3, 407 b, 13-26).

With this there fell the other theories connected with the soul as "substance" (pre-existence, metempsychosis, trichotomy, etc.) in favor of a linear theory according to which the soul acquired being and carried out its operation through its natural commerce with the body, as has already been set forth in the doctrinal part. The Pythagorean-Platonic transcendence was replaced by the immanence of being and of forms: this led to an overturning of perspective in all fields of theoretical inquiry: in the theory of knowledge, in ethics, in metaphysics, in politics, and this Aristotle was for the most part able to carry through. In the new conception the notion of the "incorporeal" made a notable step forward, since the soul was defined no longer in terms of the physical subtlety of some nature (Presocratics), nor as composed of contrary natures (Plato), but as act and form of a body that is potency to it in being and instrument in operating. Moreover, in man, the higher part which is the intellective principle is "something divine and comes from outside" (De gener. et corr., II, 3, 736 b, 27 ff.). Unfortunately Aristotle did not sufficiently specify the nature of this intellective soul nor clarify its relations with the body and with the lower activities; this allowed an easy retaliation on the part of the Neoplatonists and was the cause of grave divisions within the Peripatetic school itself, such as Alexandrinism and Averroism.

The subsequent Stoic and Epicurean philosophies take up again the primitive orientation of Greek philosophy, which saw in the soul a particular corporeal nature, capable of generating movement in gross and heavy bodies. The materialism that was implicit in the Presocratics, and in some of them coexisted with flashes and hints of spiritualism, now becomes an explicit affirmation in the open polemic against Plato. The Stoics substantially accept the Aristotelian distinction between nature and soul: nature is an intrinsic principle of motion, but devoid of impulse and of knowledge; the soul, on the other hand, is "a nature endowed with imagination and tendency" (Philo, Leg. Alleg., II, § 22; Stoic. vet. fragm., ed. Arnim, II, 149, 39 ff.). Insofar as the soul acts upon physical bodies, it cannot be an ἐντελέχεια, an act and form that are incomprehensible, but must be a certain corporeal nature. The soul is ἐντέξις, "spirit," that is, a vapor formed of air and fire, and is a spark of the "universal Spirit," God, mingled with the body. Hence the definition reported by Galen: "a subtle body that moves itself according to the seminal reasons" (Defin. Medicar, 29, ed. Arnim, II, 780, p. 218) and the other attributed to Chrysippus: "The soul is a spirit implanted in us and diffused continuously throughout the whole body" (De Hipp. et Plat., Proc., III, 1, ed. Arnim, II, 885, p. 238). Many Stoics admitted the survival of the soul, at least for the better souls; for others the spark of the soul, once freed from the envelope of the body, was reunited, being reabsorbed into the eternal substance of Zeus, the immortal fire and universal cause which is also identified, as in the Presocratics, with the celestial ether. It is in this sense that the funerary inscription to the fallen of Potidaea (431 B.C.) is to be taken: "The ether received their souls, the earth instead their bodies" (Corp. Inscr. Antiq., 442, in Fr. Rusche, Das Stelenparama, Paderborn 1933, p. 13, note). In this way, of the eight parts that the Stoics attributed to the soul, only the ὁ ἄγειωνεῖον or directive principle residing in the heart was saved, but this did not succeed in exonerating them from materialism. Hence the reproach of the Neoplatonist Calcidius: "Ergo spiritum animam esse dicentes, corpus esse animam plane fatentur. Quod si ita est, corpus corpori sociatum est" (In Plut. Timaeum., cap. 221, ed. Wrobel, Leipzig 1876, p. 257. For Plotinus's polemic against the Stoics, v. Eun., IV, 7, 7, ed. Bréhier, Paris 1927, IV, 197 ff.).

More pronounced is the materialism of the Epicureans, who draw close to the atomists. The soul is called a "temperament" (ἐκβασις, κρῆμα) of four natures: air-like, fiery, spiritual, and a fourth "nameless" (ἀκατονόμαστου) one which is the principle of feeling (Dov. Gr., p. 389), and also of judging, loving, hating, and in general of prudence and reason; a nature left without a name because it is not better known (Plutarch, Adv. Coloten, 20, H. Usener, Epicurea, Leipzig 1887, p. 218). To the other three natures the following functions are attributed: to spirit, (local) movement; to air, rest; to heat, apparent warmth: none of them participates in the act of feeling, which belongs to the unnamed nature (Stobaeus, Ed., I, 49). The emphasis on a fourth unnamed nature has suggested to modern scholars of Epicureanism (C. Giussani, E. Bignone) the hypothesis that Epicurus takes up the theory of the soul of the early Aristotle in this particular of terminology, in order to remedy the weakness of the old Democritean materialism (E. Bignone, L'Aristotele perduto e la formazione filosofica di Epicuro, Florence 1936, part 1, p. 249 ff.). As regards the relation in which the four natures of the soul stand, from the examination of an important text of Lucretius (III, 238-87) the following conclusions have been put forward: 1) The four natures form a single one; 2) the first three natures form a group apart with respect to the fourth; 3) the fourth nature is the one that truly originates motion and is in the soul what the soul is in the body; 4) the first three natures receive motion from the fourth and transmit it to the body, and moreover have thermal qualities upon it, with which are explained the phenomena of excitation or depression inherent in the passions (C. Diano, La psicologia di Epicuro e la teoria delle passioni, in Giornale critico della Filosofia italiana, 20 [1939], p. 109 f.).

Among the Neoplatonists the doctrine of the soul presents two moments, one critical and the other constructive; both directed to the affirmation of the Platonic solution which, because of its Orphic-Pythagorean derivation, represented for every elevated spirit the best that Greek civilization had produced. The criticisms are aimed by preference against Aristotle. To the conception of the soul as "entelechy of the body," Plotinus opposes no fewer than seven arguments: the soul would be like the form of the statue with respect to the bronze (that is, something "accidental"); it would be divided with the division of the body, and by breaking a part of the body a part of the soul would be broken; sleep would not be possible; nor would there be any contradiction between reason and appetite; there would be only sensations, and thoughts would become impossible. Therefore the adversaries themselves, concludes Plotinus, introduce another soul which they affirm to be immortal (Eun., IV, 7, 8, ed. Bréhier, IV, p. 203 ff.). This criticism is taken up in late Neoplatonism by Proclus (In Parmeniden, 998, 19 ff.; 2nd ed. Cousin, Paris 1864). In the constructive part, the Neoplatonists abandon the myths and elaborate that complex metaphysical organism that goes under the term "theory of emanations." In Plotinus it unfolds as the "causal circle of the three hypostases" (the One, Intelligence, Soul) according as one considers absolute sufficiency in unity, or multiplicity in rest, or finally multiplicity in motion. To the soul, then, it falls to move bodies insofar as it is "life in itself" (ἐντῶς), having life from itself (παρ' ἑαυτῆς ἔχουσα τὸ ζῆν) and is therefore a universal cosmic principle that "connects" (συνεχτικὴ) all the beings of the cosmos, gods, demons, men and irrational beings (Proclus, In Tim., 205 ed. Diels, II, p. 213). Hence the complicated genealogies of divine and supracosmic souls, cosmic souls, intracosmic souls; of souls participating according to the triadic schema of emanation. Olympiodorus simplifies into supracosmic souls, human souls akin to them, cosmic souls of various nature according to the diversity of bodies (In Alcibiadea prior., ed. Creuzer, Frankfurt am Main 1821, p. 19. A graphic schema of the complicated hierarchy, in E. R. Dodds, Proclus. The Elements of Theology, Oxford 1932, p. 282). Proclus, who gathers with every care the heritage of the school, does not fail to point out the divergences that arose within it on not a few points concerning the classification and derivation of souls, of which the most extremist appears to have been the position of Theodore of Asine, who derived souls according to the schemas offered by the letters of the alphabet, by characters and by numbers (Proclus, In Tim., 225a, ed. Diels, II, p. 274).

Throughout all this rather disorderly elaboration, however, there was an evident purpose: to demonstrate, in the face of the penetration of the Christian idea, the sufficiency of the pagan conception of being and of life, in which everything is life and everywhere in some form the soul is present and with it the divinity. Nevertheless, certain elements of this conception were freed from the system and soon assimilated by Christian thought itself. Let us recall: 1) A more precise notion, founded on causal dependence, of the hierarchy of beings, according to which "the lower touch the higher in their highest part" (principle of degrees). 2) The position of the soul "on the horizon" between eternity and time, touching Intelligence above and allowing itself to be touched by the body below (v. Proclus, Elementatio Theologica, prop. 190; the principle is already in the Timaeus, 35 a). 3) The affirmation of a spiritual presence of the soul in the whole world that it moves and in the body that it animates ("secundum essentiam, tota in toto et tota in singulis partibus"). 4) The theory of the emanation of the faculties from the essence of the soul and of the consequent immanence of operations in the soul, as a counterpart to emanation and immanence in the ontological-cosmic order.

2. PATRISTIC AND MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

Christians had in the sacred books and received from oral teaching a well-defined doctrine on the nature of the soul as well as on its origin and its destiny. They could therefore reproach with St. Paul (I Cor. 1:20) that God had made foolish the wisdom of this world (Hermias, Irris. gentilium, 2, in H. Diels, Dox. gr., 2nd ed., Berlin 1929, p. 651, 14-16). Also Arnobius: "Quid sit (fit in Migne) sensus, quid anima : advolaritne ad nos sponte, an cum ipsis sata sit et procreata visceribus; mortis particeps degat, an immortalitatis perpetuitate donata sit. Qui status nos maneat, cum dissoluti abierimus a membris ..."; "we must wait to learn it from Christ the teacher and not from vain opinions" (Adversus Gentes, I, 38: PL 5, 765-66).

If only pagan philosophy had not begun to attack, in the name of the rights of reason, even the truths of the new faith concerning the soul. Together, the union made in Christ of the two natures, human and divine, in the single person of the Word, came to present not a few new problems on which the adversaries brought pressure in order to achieve their purpose. It was therefore urgent, both for the external consolidation of the faith and for a more intimate assimilation of the content of revelation, to make contact with the mentality of the adversaries and not to reject the means they employed. The work of rapprochement began quite early, but it must be acknowledged that it was long and uncertain and at times subject even to dangerous slippages for the integrity of orthodoxy itself. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few positions evidently too extreme and which moreover were officially condemned (Tertullian, Origen, Apollinaris of Laodicea), those which seem to us deviations were not so for their authors, for two reasons: a) that they often had to limit themselves to using one philosophy or another, without having the possibility of a choice — of doctrines and terminology — that was entirely adequate to the truths they wished to express; b) that such dissonances therefore remained external and left the deposit of the faith intact. This is also shown by the fact that not infrequently affirmations that seem to us mutually exclusive — materiality, spirituality, immortality — are often juxtaposed and not rigorously organized. Many authors, moreover, take care to distinguish clearly, when they speak of the soul, the vain opinions of the philosophers from the authentic doctrines of the sacred doctors, with two separate lists (v. Tertullian, De Anima, 1-7: PL 2, 693; and later: Cassiodorus, De Anima, 2: PL 70, 83; Claudianus Mamertus, De statu animae, II, 7-10: PL 53, 747 ff. In the Middle Ages, William of St. Thierry, De natura corporis et animae: PL 180, 1707 ff.; Albert the Great, Summa de creaturis, II, qq. 2-3, ed. Borgnet, Paris 1890-99, XXXV, p. 9 ff.; and many others).

The materiality of the soul maintained by some Fathers offers an example of the use of the criterion stated. It is in fact affirmed as a consequence of the following arguments: a) in order to maintain the reality of the torments of sense in the soul of the damned, of which the parable of the rich man feasting speaks (Lk. 18, 19); b) by the fact that the soul is contained in the body: «quia carne clauditur» (Tertullian, De Anima). But Tertullian, as Karpp has shown, fell into materialism, so as to conceive even the divine nature itself as material, for having accepted wholesale the theories of the Stoic physician Soranus. Therefore those same expressions, when they do not refer to an explicit source such as this, can lend themselves to a more benign interpretation, as seems to be the case with St. Irenaeus (Adv. Haereses, V, 55, ed. W. W. Harvey, Canterbury 1857, p. 381) and with Gennadius (De eccl. dogmatibus, 11-12: PL 58, 894; only God is spirit, all creatures are corporeal). On Gennadius depends literally Alcher of Clairvaux in his De Spiritu et Anima, long believed, as was also the De eccl. dogm., to be a work of St. Augustine and which had a leading influence in the controversies (PL 40, 793-94). An affirmation of the absolute spirituality of the soul is found, however, by now in Claudianus Mamertus, who resolves those two arguments (De statu animae, III, 2, 8, 10: PL 53, 767, 771-72). The uncertainties about the spirituality of the soul had a repercussion on the manner of explaining its origin. A complex state of mind, which surfaces also in some council and which was expressed lucidly by St. Gregory the Great: «Hac de re dulcissima tua charitas sciat, quia de origine animae inter sanctos patres requisitio non parva versata est: sed utrum ipsa ab Adam descenderit, an certe singulis detur, incertum remansit, eamque in hac vita insolubilem fassi sunt esse quaestionem. Gravis enim est quaestio, nec valet ab homine comprehendi; quia si de Adam substantia anima cum carne nascitur, cur non etiam cum carne moritur? Si vero cum carne non nascitur, cur in ea carne quae de Adam prolata est, obligata peccatis tenetur? Sed cum hoc sit incertum, illud incertum non est: quia nisi sacri baptismatis gratia fuerit renatus homo, omnis anima originalis peccati vinculis est obstricta... Cur in Adam omnis homo moritur, si originalis peccati vinculis non tenetur?» (Ep. ad Secundinum inclusum: PL 77, 989-90).

These and other uncertainties, both about the soul and about the other problems, are to be attributed to the conditions of culture in the patristic age, and not to an insufficient understanding of the content of the faith as such, as though this in the course of the centuries had been transformed into something other than the initial one: the instrument of expression and presentation was perfected within a more advanced cultural environment, that is all. The observation, which holds for the development of Catholic doctrine in general, is pertinent to the inversion of direction that has been observed, between the patristic era and the scholastic era, in the study of the soul, inasmuch as the one is judged predominantly Platonic in inspiration, the other instead Aristotelian, so that to some it has seemed that the doctrine of the Church would have radically changed. The inversion, which is a historical fact, to which St. Thomas also often alludes when he touches on the nature of the philosophy of St. Augustine (De Spiritualibus Creaturis, a. 10, ad 8; Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 84, a. 5), does not entail the conclusion mentioned. The Fathers believed they were inspired by Plato because of the undeniable resemblance, as regards the expression of some of his doctrines, to those of the faith (subsistence of the soul and immortality), a resemblance that is not found, at least at first sight, so clearly in Aristotle: St. Thomas himself acknowledges this with regard to the criticism of St. Gregory of Nyssa (v.: De Anima, VI: PL 45, 200), who saw in the Aristotelian definition of the soul as form of the body a derogation from its subsistence and therefore the negation of immortality (De Spiritualibus Creaturis, a. 3, beginning).

The medieval Aristotelians, those of the orthodox direction whose principal exponent is St. Thomas, tracing the questions back from a more rigorously scientific perspective, halted before the insurmountable difficulties that came from other affirmations and from the very spirit of Platonism, above all from the impossibility of explaining the substantial union between soul and body as is required for the unity of the human person, for the consistency of moral life and for the final destiny of man (death and resurrection). On the other hand, a more thorough consideration of Aristotelian principles and the recourse to auxiliary principles compatible with them showed that the difficulties that were feared were not insurmountable, and so that inversion could take place which is the fruit of a more accurate knowledge of the classical texts and of a greater speculative maturity. The definition of the Council of Vienna (1311) therefore did not canonize Aristotle, combated earlier by the Fathers, but expressed in more appropriate terms that truth which the Fathers too held essential to the Christian conception of existence: the ontological unity of human nature and person. Such a progress of formulas was possible by reason of the «transcendence» which revealed doctrine enjoys with respect to purely human systems of thought, so that it can never be entirely identified with any of them; a transcendence which does not prevent one of them from being less remote from Revelation and therefore from being preferred, provided that the requisite cautions are also used with regard to it. Thus the usual objections in the matter fall away and dispense us from entering into the examination of the particular doctrines of the Fathers.

The decline of culture in the late Middle Ages is reflected also in the doctrine of the soul. For the most part these are compilations, timid and meager, drawn either from the Timaeus or more often from the works of St. Augustine; in this regard the lament of Alcuin is symptomatic, for he confesses that he was unable to track down the works of the holy Doctor that directly treat of the soul, of which he knows only the titles (De Animae Ratione, ch. 13: PL 101, 645). Nevertheless the controversies over the nature of the soul vividly occupy the attention of the learned: thus Ratramnus of Corbie, at the request of a dignitary, wrote a short work to defend the incorporeality of the soul, published by dom A. Wilmart in Revue Bénédictine, 43 (1931), pp. 207-23, (v.: M. Cappuyns, Jean Scot Érigène, Louvain 1933, pp. 92-93). Characteristic of this period are the prolix definitions of the soul, always with a Platonic basis, of which Alcuin himself gives us a distinguished example: «Anima seu animus est spiritus intellectualis, rationalis, semper in motu, semper vivens, bonae malaeque voluntatis capax, secundum benignitatem creatoris libero arbitrio nobilitatus, sua voluntate vitiatus, Dei gratia liberatus, ad regendum carnis motus creatus, invisibilis, incorporalis, sine pondere, sine colore, circumscriptus, in singulis suae carnis membris totus, in quo est imago creatoris, spiritualiter primitiva creatione impressa... » (De Animae Ratione, 12 : ibid. 643-644).

In the direction that remains more faithful to Platonism, through the commentary of Calcidius on the Timaeus, the theory of the «world soul» undergoes notable development, which by some, perhaps in the school of Chartres, is identified even with the Holy Spirit. The indication comes to us from the

From the De Elementis Philosophiae of the pseudo-Bede: « Anima mundi secundum quosdam est Spiritus Sanctus, divina ac voluntate et bonitate, quae Spiritus Sanctus est... omnia vivunt quae in mundo vivunt. Alii dicunt animam mundi esse naturalem vigorem rebus a Deo insitum... Tertii dicunt animam mundi esse quandam incorpoream substantiam quae tota est in singulis corporibus quamvis propter quorumdam corporum tarditatem, non idem in omnibus operetur. Igitur in homine sunt duae animae... » (PL 90, 1130: similar statements in the Mundi Constitutio of William of Conches: PL 90, 902; and in the De Mundi Universitate libri duo of Bernard Silvestris, ed. C. S. Barach and Jo. Wrobel, Innsbruck 1876, p. 31). The theory of the « a. mundi » had free course in the early schools of Arabic philosophy, as the researches of Fr. Dieterici have shown, Die Lehre von der Weltseele bei den Arabern im X. Jahrhundert, Leipzig 1872.

Investigations into the penetration of the natural, metaphysical and ethical doctrines of Aristotle, unknown in the West until the beginning of the 13th century, have made it clear that this was accomplished by way of translations both directly from the Greek text and indirectly from the text of the Arabic versions. A decisive impulse came, for the doctrine of the soul, from the translation of the great commentaries that the two greatest Arabic philosophers, Avicenna (v.) and Averroes (v.), made on the Aristotelian treatise; to them is due the enormous interest taken in psychological problems, as well as a large part of the responsibility for the first condemnations and prohibitions of the Aristotelian books by the Council of Sens (1210) and shortly thereafter by the papal legate Cardinal De Courçon (1215). A no less important part must be attributed to the Arab-Jewish philosopher Avicebron, who in his Fons Vitae, translated by Dominic Gundissalvi, who also disseminated its doctrines, offered a complete metaphysical elaboration of the universality of matter, thereby assuring the defenders of the materiality of the soul and of the angels a speculative basis which they would shrewdly avail themselves of in order to resist the penetration of Aristotelianism.

It must be borne in mind at the same time that the De Anima which the Arabs offered to the West, especially Avicenna and Averroes, represents the endpoint of an intense labor of assimilation of the Stagirite's doctrine, in which Neoplatonic principles play a leading role, and at crucial moments. Neoplatonic at root are the positions of Avicenna and Averroes on the unity of the separate intellect (agent or even possible), which would unleash the most acute intellectual drama of medieval Christendom and perhaps of all time. Worthy of note, for its originality, is the Avicennian proof of the existence of the soul, which calls to mind the Cartesian « cogito »: « Dicemus igitur quod aliquis ex nobis putare debet quasi subito creatus esset et perfectus, sed velato visu suo ne videat exteriora. Et creatus esset sic quasi moveretur in aere; aut inani ita ut eum non tangeret spissitudo aeris quam ipse sentire posset; et quasi disiuncta essent membra eius, ita ut non concurrerent sibi, nec contingerent sese. Non enim dubitaret affirmare se esse; non tamen affirmaret exteriora suorum membrorum, nec occulta suorum interiorum, nec animum, nec cerebrum, nec aliquid talium, sed extrinsecus affirmabit se esse... Tu scis quod id quod affirmatur aliud est ab eo quod non affirmatur, et concessum aliud ab eo quod non conceditur. Et quoniam essentia quam affirmabat esse, est propria illi eo quod illa est ipsamet; et est praeter corpus eius et membra eius quae non affirmabat esse. Ideo experfectus habens viam evigilandi ad sciendum quod esse animae est aliud ab esse corporis: immo non eget corpore ad hoc ut sciat animam et percipiat eam. Si autem fuerit stupidus, opus habet converti ad viam » (Avicenna, De Anima qui sextus Naturalium dicitur, 1st part, ch. 1, Venice 1508, fol. 2 rb). The argument returns more fully in the 5th part, ch. 7, fol. 27 rb-va: this text is reproduced in full by E. Gilson, Les sources gréco-arabes de l'augustinisme avicennisant (Archives d'histoire doctrin. et littér. du M. Age, 4), Paris 1930, pp. 40-42, with indications of the medieval masters who make use of it. Did some echo of it reach Campanella or Descartes through one of these?

The Jewish philosopher Isaac Israeli (845-940) in his Liber de Definitionibus compares the definitions of the soul of Plato and Aristotle, showing however his preference for the former and accepting the Neoplatonic developments, as appears from his notion of the human soul: « Sublimiore animarum gradu et meliore ordine est anima racionalis, quoniam ipsa in horizonte intelligenciae et ex umbra eius generata est » (ed. J. T. Muckle, Arch. d'hist. doctr. et litt. du M. A., 9 [Paris 1938], p. 313). The Scholastics preferably recall the formula of the De Causis (prop. 2): « Anima est in horizonte aeternitatis inferius et supra tempus », which condenses what is read in the Elementatio Theologica of Proclus (prop. 191; cf. St. Thomas, Comm. in lib. De Causis, lect. II, Opera omnia, XXI, Parma 1866, pp. 720-21).

The influence of Aristotle begins to be felt at the beginning of the 13th century, and it is the definition of the soul that gives notice of it: some follow the version from the Greek and some that from the Arabic. To the first category belongs Hermann of Carinthia: « Aristoteles vero (in opposizione a Platone) in libro de Anima sic: Anima est, ait, perfectio corporis naturalis instrumentalis potentia agentis. Et, alibi: Anima est perfectio corporis agentis et viventis potentia » (in Ch. E. Haskins, History of Medieval Science, 2nd ed., New York

1927, p. 62). More precise is that of Alfred of Sareshel (De motu cordis, ch. 1, ed. Baeumker, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Theologie und Philosophie des Mittelalters, 23 [1923], pp. 3 ff., 93 ff.), who precedes it with a definition of plainly Platonic flavor but which he likewise attributes to Aristotle: «In se considerata (anima) substantia est incorporea, intellectiva, illuminationum quae a primo sunt ultima perceptiva, ut Aristoteles in Metaphysica capitulo quod K inscribitur; a qua diffinitione nec Areopagita in terarchia sua dissentit» (p. 2, lin. 7-10). This last definition is reproduced at length by Chancellor Philip (d. 1236) in the Quaestiones De Anima of his Summa de Bono (ed. L. W. Kaeler, Münster i. Westf. 1937, p. 20) and by the Franciscan John de la Rochelle (Summa de Anima, 1st part, ch. 2, ed. T. Domenichelli, Prato 1882, p. 106). To the second category belongs the group of Arabizers whose center of diffusion is Spain. In the De Anima, which is now agreed to be attributed to Gundissalvi himself, there is the definition: «Anima est prima perfecto corporis naturalis, instrumentalis, viventis potentialiter» (ed. A. Loewenthal, Berlin 1891, p. 130), where one should note the presence of «prima», which is missing in the citations of the ancient Greek version just mentioned, and which is also omitted by some followers of the same Arabic version, such as the physician Costa ben Luca (De differentia spiritus et animae, ch. 3, ed. C.S. Barach, Innsbruck 1878, p. 134). The Platonizing definitions of Calcidius, of St. Augustine, and of a certain «magister Remigius» (R. of Auxerre, probably) continue at the same time to have currency; a plainly Aristotelian theory of the soul would not be had until the second half of the 13th century, when the De Anima could enter the schoolrooms as an official teaching text (1252).

This will require an explicit dissociation, in the current theories, of the Platonic and Neoplatonic elements incompatible with the principles of Aristotelian naturalism. The architect of this doctrinal renewal without compromises, which Albert the Great was not always able to avoid, was his disciple Thomas Aquinas, according to the principles that have been indicated in the doctrinal part of this article. To psychological Aristotelianism, shared in general terms also by the Averroists and which became traditional in the Dominican Order, Augustinianism (v.) was opposed in various ways and forms by the theological tradition of the preceding generation and then by the Franciscan school, which was able to achieve some success, though of brief duration, with the condemnation of Paris (7 March 1277), immediately renewed at Oxford by the Augustinian Dominican R. Kilwardby (18 March 1277) and repeated later by his successor to the episcopal chair, the Franciscan G. Peckham (29 Oct. 1284), a contemporary opponent of St. Thomas at Paris. The points on which Augustinian psychology resisted Aristotelian positions most were apparently the following: 1) the composition of the soul (and of the angels) from matter and form; 2) the plurality of forms in man; 3) the identity, or at least consubstantiality, of soul and faculties; 4) the theory of the two faces of the soul (ratio superior et ratio inferior); 5) the assimilation of the nature of the soul to light (Lichtmetaphysik). These doctrines, under the pressure of polemics, became subject to new complications; some were abandoned or at least diluted in favor of others; but on the whole the opposition between Aristotelian and Augustinian psychology has been maintained by the two schools down to our own days. The drift to which Augustinian psychology came with P. G. Olivi (v.) was the object, as has already been indicated, of an explicit condemnation by the Ecumenical Council of Vienne (1311). The innumerable commentaries, treatises and "quaestiones" on the De Anima written in the 13th-16th centuries mostly polarize the interest of discussions around the Averroist controversy, to which in the Renaissance the Alexandrist one was added: never as in this century did the problem of the soul hold the attention of the learned so captive, when at the opening of every new professor of philosophy the whole mass of students rushed to hear him, loudly demanding "Anima, Anima!"

While at Padua the Aristotelians did battle, at Florence Platonic doctrines were brought into honor under the impulse of the Greeks who had gone there to take part in the Ecumenical Council (1439), among whom were Gemistus Pletho, his disciple Chrysoloras and Bessarion: they ardently defended the superiority of Plato over Aristotle, particularly regarding the doctrine of the soul. Pletho laments that "while the Greeks and the Romans have admired Plato more, the Westerners instead, deceived by Averroes, lose themselves in celebrating Aristotle as the greatest intellect produced by nature: even if he had been so in his other doctrines, he certainly is not in those on the soul, since he holds it mortal; is this not madness?" (George Gemistus Pletho, De Platonis et aristotelicae philosophiae differentia, Prologus: PG 160, 889; see in ch. 9, coll. 600-601 the doctrine on the soul and the critique of the soul as an immobile principle according to Aristotle). The rights of Aristotelianism were claimed by George of Trebizond (Scholarios), a sincere admirer and translator of some works of St. Thomas, who in his Comparatio Platonis et Aristotelis (Venetian ed. 1523) replied point by point vigorously to Pletho. He was answered, no less violently, by Bessarion with his In calumniatorem Platonis (II, 8; ed. L. Mohler, in Kardinal Bessarion als Theologe, Humanist und Staatsmann, II, [Quellen und Forschungen aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte, 22], Paderborn 1926, p. 139 ff. The history of the polemic is illustrated in vol. I [20 of the collection], p. 346 ff.).

With greater serenity and temperance of language, Ficino took up again the Plotinian theory of the soul. The soul stands in the middle of the scale of beings, between God and the angels on one side, and qualities and bodies on the other, and participates in the nature of both: "Dum divinis haerer, quia spiritualiter illis unitur et spiritualis unio gignit cognitionem, illa cognoscit. Dum implet corpora, intrinsecus illa movens, illa vivificat. Est igitur divinorum speculum, vita mortalium, utrorumque connexio... ut merito dici possit centrum naturae, universorum medium, mundi series, vultus omnium, modusque et copula mundi" (Theologia platonica. De immortalitate animorum, ed. III, 2, Paris 1359, fols. 43 b, 45 a). More eclectic, Pico della Mirandola, while wishing to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, in reality defends to the utmost the most intransigent Neoplatonism, to judge from the commentary on Benivieni's Canzone d'Amore (ed. Garin, Florence 1942, p. 462 ff.) and from prop. 10 of the Conclusiones Cabalisticae LXXI: "Qui negat coelum esse animatum ita ut motor eius non sit forma eius, non solum Aristoteli repugnat, sed potius philosophiae fundamenta destruit" (Opera Omnia, Venetian ed. 1537, fol. 1555b). Outside Italy, those who did not take part in the fervor of its spiritual life limited themselves to favoring one or another of the ancient theories on the soul, when indeed they did not go so far, with Agrippa of Nettesheim, as to declare the vanity of all human thoughts, asking help from divine truth (v.: De vanitate scientiarum, 52, Opera omnia, II, Lyon 1600, p. 85 ff.).

3. MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Spiritualism. - In modern philosophy the problem of the soul vanishes and gives way to that of "consciousness," placing itself in dependence on it. Not, however, immediately, for indeed in the first period there is an intensification of the substantialist conception; and never totally, so that some survival of it may be observed even in the periods of greatest phenomenalist, idealist or materialist fervor. Brief mentions of the most visible phases of this movement will suffice.

In Descartes the cornerstones of the traditional conception still appear intact, at least in appearance. That the soul exists and is a substance is a fact evident by the light of reason alone, and on this line of immediate evidence Descartes resolves all the problems of the soul. According to the Principia Philosophiae (I, 9): "Notandum est lumine naturali esse notissimum, nihil nullas esse affectiones sive qualitates, atque ideo, ubicumque aliquas deprehendimus, ibi rem sive substantiam, cuius illae sunt, necessario inveniri." Hence in the VI Meditation the evidence of the soul is presented with recourse to the principle of the clear and distinct idea of the opposition between the two attributes that we observe in ourselves, extension and thought, in which body and soul are immediately made present as two distinct substances:

« Quia ex una parte claram et distinctam habeo ideam mei ipsius quatenus sum tantum res cogitans, non extensa; et ex alia parte distinctam ideam corporis, quatenus est tantum (res) extensa non cogitans, certum est me a corpore meo revera esse distinctum et absque illo posse existere ». Here one should note the evident resemblance to Avicenna's argument of the "flying man," but Descartes takes it up with greater commitment because he identifies the whole I with that which sustains the activity of consciousness and ultimately with consciousness itself, since he admits between the two only a distinction of reason. Such a narrowing of the ontological sphere of the I does not, however, prevent Descartes from affirming a true substantial union between the soul and the body: the soul becomes persuaded of it, by a knowledge that is natural to it, in the perception of (physical) pain and of the other bodily feelings, which cannot come from it alone (cf. Principia Philosoph., II, 64). But the problem, despite Descartes' protests, remained unsolved: at most it had been shown how soul and body are distinguished, not how they are united and cooperate in the operations of a single subject. And there was born the great crisis in the progress of consciousness in Western philosophy.

Moving from the new Cartesian situation, Malebranche and Geulincx abandoned half-measures and attributed everything to God: « God does not communicate his own power to creatures, and does not unite them among themselves, except because he establishes their modalities, occasional causes of the effects that he himself produces » (N. Malebranche, Entretiens sur la métaphysique, sur la religion et sur la morale, VII). An extreme solution that struck directly at the heart of the supposed Cartesian self-evidences, but which was not to be the last. If the soul, Spinoza concludes, is made present wholly in thinking, then the soul is thought itself, it is the idea, the content of our inner life, which it no longer makes sense to think of as bound to the body: « Vita illa qua unumquodque est contentum et gaudium nihil aliud est, quam idea seu anima » (Ethices, part 2, prop. 57 Scholion, ed. Gentile, Bari 1933, p. 161). And Spinoza, more than of soul, speaks of « mens »: a term destined soon to enjoy great fortune.

The most notable effort, to which the rebirth of spiritualism in the second half of the 19th century would remain bound, is due to Leibniz's revival of the Aristotelian notion of "entelechy." Being is preserved only in effective unity, which cannot be given by material atoms because matter is purely passive: there is need therefore of "formal atoms," entelechies or forms, whose nature is held in the force they tend to unfold, and which can be called "souls" and "monads." The soul here becomes once again not so much the Aristotelian "entelechy" as the cosmic principle of Neoplatonic panpsychism. In fact the entelechies are not generated in the bosom of becoming, but have been concrete with the world and subsist always (pre-existence): the same should be said of the body to which the entelechy is united. The formation of living organisms is only apparent, and reduces to a pure phenomenon of external growth (preformationism). Equally apparent is the separation of the soul from the body in death: for Leibniz it is only a reduction in the dimensions of the apparent body, and the soul preserves a tenuous body, organized in its own way, the one that one day, in the resurrection, will take up again the dimensions of the apparent body lost in death. The soul and the body do not communicate in any way, but their operations correspond in perfect synchrony, like two clocks that the supreme Artificer has constructed by himself and then set in motion at the same instant (pre-established harmony). The inextricable entanglement in ancient and modern questions no longer subsists (cf. Considerazioni sulla dottrina d'uno spirito universale, 1702, ed. De Ruggiero, in Opere curie, Bari 1912, p. 68, and vol. IV, ed. Gerhardt; see also the Discours de Métaphysique, ed. H. Lestienne, Paris 1929, chaps. x-xii, pp. 38-42, and Monadologia, § 18 ff., ed. Boutroux, Italian trans., Florence 1934, p. 134 ff.).

The reaction to the Cartesian definition of the soul as « substantia cogitans », with an explicit recognition of the function of the organic body, finds its formula in Leibniz's spiritual heir, Chr. Wolff. Since our intellections are conditioned by sensations and these in turn by the mutations that occur in the bodies that surround us, our knowledge or « Weltanschauung » depends on the place that our body occupies in the universe: « Animam ergo definivi, quod sit substantia universi representativa pro situ corporis alicuius organici in universo » (Ratio Praelectionum, § 22, cited by M. Campo, Chr. Wolff e il razionalismo precritico, I, Milan 1939, pp. 298-99). Leibnizians remain at bottom, later, Herbart and Lotze, to whom much is owed for the revival of spiritualism in modern psychology. The latter gives three reasons in defense of the spirituality and substantiality of the soul, which are the three fundamental experiences of the spiritual life: the freedom of the will, the complete incomparability (völlige Unvergleichbarkeit) between psychic processes and the spatial situations of movement, place, figure and material energy, and the unity of consciousness (Metaphysik., III: Von dem geistigen Dasein, §§ 238-40, Leipzig 1879, p. 473 ff.). Psychology could thus rise again to new life, having rediscovered its object, which materialism had confined to the realm of nature.

Fenomenismo e idealismo. — In Locke soul and body are still substances: in Berkeley the body vanishes and substantiality is reserved to the soul, if one can still speak of substance for a being that identifies itself in act with the act of perceiving. The phenomenalist conception, to which empirical actualism was to lead, unfolds fully in the work of Hume with a lucidity that has no equal. The soul, which henceforth, as in Spinoza, is called « Mind », is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, held together by certain relations and supposed, though wrongly, to be endowed with simplicity and perfect identity, so that they can be separated at will one from another and each from the same mind. It is therefore nothing but a dynamic system of different perceptions, bound together by the relation of cause and effect, so that they can mutually produce, destroy and influence one another (Treatise on Human Nature, I, part 4, sec. vi: Of Personal Identity, ed. Selby-Bigge, Oxford 1928, p. 251 ff.; in the Carlini trans., Bari 1926, p. 303 ff.). Previously (ibid., sec. v) Hume had shown that questions about the immateriality and substantiality of the mind cannot have any intelligible sense: so much the better for us, because such doctrines would lead straight to atheism and would justify the extreme opinions of Spinoza. Hume's position stands enigmatically, in the development of doctrines on the soul, between idealism, which will take its start from Kant, an admirer of his new concept of "creative consciousness," and phenomenalist and materialist empiricism: the two currents, into which European thought would fragment for two centuries with movements of flux and reflux, in which at times — as in J. Stuart Mill and H. Taine — it is not always possible to discern whether some clear line of demarcation still subsists.

Kant does not accept the Cartesian equivalence "I think, therefore I exist," because in that case the property of thought would make all beings that possess it necessary beings. The proposition "I think," in the sense understood by Descartes, expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, which is quite different from the "I think" of transcendental apperception, pure problematicalness, the form of every judgment of the understanding in general that accompanies the use of all the categories. In substance, Kant reproaches the Cartesians and the Leibnizians for the continuity between psychology and metaphysics: on the basis of that subjective experience one cannot make the transition to admitting a substantial, simple, incorruptible, personal, spiritual, immortal soul. In this way we would have taken a step beyond the sensible world, and this contradicts the principle that regulates the use and value of the categories. Whoever wishes to go further falls into inextricable "paralogisms" that have a common schema of "sophisma figurae dictionis," in which the "I think" has a different meaning in the two premises, inasmuch as in the one it refers to an object as a "thing of experience," while in the other it has the meaning of the pure form of thought abstracting from every object. Thus, Kant concludes, a knowledge sought beyond the limits of possible experience and yet pertaining to the highest interest of humanity, if it is demanded of speculative philosophy, ends in an illusory hope (Critique of Pure Reason, part II, Transcendental Dialectic, II, 1). It is not surprising, therefore, that both the positivists and the criticists, from Comte to Wundt, drew on Kant in order to oppose the existence of the soul and the establishment of psychology as a science.

In the systems of transcendental idealism, the soul returns to the center of the problems, not however as a reality standing on its own but in function of the whole, essentially dynamic, that absorbs being as such: either as the absolute (Fichte), or as Nature that continually makes itself (Schelling), or as absolute Spirit (Hegel). In the ascent of the Hegelian dialectic, the soul is "subjective spirit": either it is in itself immediately, and it is the soul or natural spirit that is the object of anthropology; or it is for itself, that is, mediately, as reflection still identical in itself and in another, and it is spirit as relation to another, the consciousness that is the object of the phenomenology of spirit; or it is the spirit that determines itself in itself, as subject for itself, and it is the object of psychology (of the Leibnizian type). In short: the soul is the spirit considered in its lower stage of consciousness: to call it substance, simple, immaterial, immortal is to use terms out of place, since what is at issue is a stage that counts at most as a point of departure, and therefore involves no exclusive determination by which matter on the one hand and the soul and spirit on the other would have to be conceived as two "things." In the dialectical process there must also vanish this distinction from which there had arisen, Hegel observes, that incomprehensible problem which constituted the stumbling block of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz, namely the "communion of the soul and the body." With acumen and good reason Hegel notes that if soul and body are presupposed as absolutely independent of each other, they are mutually impenetrable as one matter is with respect to another, and each can be received into the non-being of the other, but with this the meaning and possibility of any communion disappears (Enzyklopädie der phil. Wissenschaften, §§ 387, 389, 390, 403). Of the Aristotelian notion, led astray by Leibniz and abandoned by the other moderns and which, through the relation of act and potency, admirably avoided the shoals of that aporia, Hegel makes no further account, although he had set it forth with words of admiration in the History of Philosophy (ch. III, 3; Ital. trans. Sanna-Codignola, II, Florence 1932, pp. 344 ff.).

Our Spaventa follows Hegel closely and indeed surpasses him when he affirms that the soul is only as relation to another, or as act in which form and content are distinguished, yes, but in uniting, not in separating (against the Herbartians). For Spaventa, the soul is by no means without the body, without showing and expressing itself in it, and Spinoza was right: anima est idea corporis (and therefore an adequate idea), not of the phenomenal, external body, but of the internal one, of that which the spirit posits — finds, others say — in itself, and which it embraces, contains, surpasses, and without which the spirit would neither feel, nor represent, nor imagine, nor desire, and therefore would neither think nor will (B. Spaventa, Principi di Etica, ed. Gentile, Naples 1904, pp. 57 ff.). The dialectical duality of form and content, and therefore of soul and body, which Spaventa's act still preserves, disappears in Gentile's actualism, in which the act, in itself and as such, is the sole and pure mediation of itself: to posit the other as other than itself would be to posit nothingness and absolute emptiness. Every act creates itself ex novo and posits itself as object: to stop is to close one's eyes, not to remain an inactive soul but to cease to be a soul (G. Gentile, Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, ch. 3, 4th ed., Bari 1924, p. 21). It cannot be denied that idealism in its various forms contributed, in certain moments of greater positivist bewilderment, to setting the soul and the spirit back on their feet; nevertheless the advantage was notably diminished by that monism to which it is fatally bound, and which, coherently understood and developed, is capable of vindicating and renewing materialism itself (G. Rensi, Il materialismo critico, Rome 1934, p. 137).

Materialism and return to dualism. — In the theories of the soul that circulated in the circles of secular philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries, almost even the memory of both the nature and the existence of the soul had been lost. The rise and developments of scientific psychology constituted for many a sufficient compensation for the loss of values that in their eyes had disappeared forever. Kant himself was not extraneous to this desecration of philosophy; if being is unreachable and the spiritual is reduced to the intelligible, the rest — one may even say nothingness — is but shadow and opaque background that can be neglected and, if it is inconvenient, even denied. Therefore, if the sources of materialism and its method for denying the soul were originally quite other, in modern culture they acquired strength in the excessive contrast and often in the very alliance of a priori philosophies. Lamettrie, Helvetius, Büchner, Haeckel and the positivists who deny the soul may also declare themselves opposed to such philosophies, and these to them. But Wundt, who is a Kantian, holds in substance the same doctrine on the soul (Grundriss der Psychologie, 4th ed., Leipzig 1901, § 22: Der Begriff der Seele, pp. 382 ff.); and so do W. James, Titchener, Ribot, Höffding and the schools founded by them, all partisans of psychology without a soul. — The formula was found by V. A. Lange in opposition to the rigid spiritualism of the Herbartians, devoted to the study of the essence of the soul: "What is to be done with a hypothesis on the existence of the soul, when we still know so little about isolated phenomena, to which nevertheless every exact investigation must first extend? In the small number of phenomena made accessible so far to a more exact observation, not the slightest reason was found for admitting a soul in general, whatever the more or less precise sense attributed to this word" (Geschichte des Materialismus, Ital. trans., II, Milan 1932, p. 307). Lange takes the reasons for supporting his denial expressly from Kant.

The rights of the psychology of the spiritual life were successfully defended by W. Dilthey with the distinction between "natural science" and "science of the spirit" (Naturwissenschaften, Geisteswissenschaften), which placed alongside scientific, explanatory and causal psychology a psychology of the spiritual fact as such (v. vol. V of the Sämtliche Werke, Leipzig 1892). The reaction gained greater consistency, on the one hand with H. Driesch on the basis of the new embryological investigations, and on the other with the circle of the Aristotelianizing Brentanists or phenomenologists (Meinong, Stumpf, Pfänder, Scheler, Husserl). Starting from the study of perceptual phenomena, of the contents of thought and of voluntary behavior, following the example of Külpe, a scholar of the psychology of the blind, W. Steinberg, energetically defended the rights of "Psychology as science of the soul" (Psychologie als Wissenschaft von der Seele, Leipzig 1937). To the traditional Aristotelian position there returned, in reaction also to the agnostic tendency of F. Brentano (v.), his teacher, C. Stumpf, affirming that the soul is known through concepts and not through intuitions and that its presence in us is attested immediately in its actual operation (Erkenntnislehre [posthumous], II, Leipzig 1940, § 32, 4, pp. 380-81).

Nevertheless it seems to us that the horizon of contemporary culture is still clouded by not a few clouds that prevent the opening of a view free of compromises, from which neither "Ganzheitpsychologie" nor "Gestaltpsychologie" has freed itself, though they have strenuously struggled to demolish the canons of nineteenth-century psychology: Wertheimer, for example, finds the soul to be something mystical and unnecessary (Über Gestalttheorie, "Symposion", Erlangen 1925, p. 53). More frank is the attitude of a disciple of Wertheimer, Koffka, who, analyzing the problem of memory, has shown that the unity of the I, far from being founded on memory, is rather the foundation and the center of organization of memory itself (Principles of Gestalt Psychology, London 1936, p. 332). The proponents of the "philosophy of life" have made no place for the soul, except as an energetic nucleus irradiating the instinctive impulse, the "libido" and the irrepressible vitality that makes of man a "sick animal" and of the soul the "adversary of the spirit" (Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, title of the principal work of L. Klages, in 3 vols., Leipzig 1920-32). For existentialism (v.), the soul is at one and the same time the consciousness that the individual has of his vitality and the inexhaustible reason for his subjectivity and interiority (v. K. Jaspers, Philosophie, III: Metaphysik, Berlin 1932, p. 62). More positive and consistent seem the positions of those who, denouncing at one and the same time Cartesian dualism and materialist and idealist monism, propose the consideration of the living being and of man as a "whole" resulting from the union of two realities, the soul and the body (v. E. G. Boring, Psychology for Eclectics, in Psychologies of 1930, Worcester, Mass. 1930, pp. 123-24, 127; P. Lersch, Seele und Welt. Zur Frage nach der Eigenart des Seelischen, Leipzig 1941).

Currents inspired by politics vaguely or with romantic expression, but of materialist content, claim a particular soul for each people (Volksseele), immanent in individual souls, and a motive principle of the destinies of the collectivity and of the races, which would have in the blood and in the biological characteristics of the different peoples a characteristic of its own, and therefore the foundation of a greater or lesser right for one people to dominate and for the others to be in subjection: a revival of the Kraftrecht of the barbaric mentalities that Western civilization ascribed to its honor of having surpassed even before the Christian message.

Thus the history of the problem of the soul is in the end the history of the very life of individual peoples and of different cultures: with it civilization rises, clarifies itself or lowers itself, because every individual and every people cannot move within its environment and participate in exterior life except by starting from a definite conception of the soul.

A. J. Festugière, L'Idéal religieux des Grecs et l'Évangile, 2nd ed., Paris 1932; E. Gilson, L'esprit de la philosophie médiévale, I, Paris 1934, ch. 9 and notes at the end of the volume. Bainvel in DThC, I, 1, coll. 971-78, has given an accurate list of the numerous treatises on the soul of the patristic age and of early scholasticism, Latin and Greek. What is lacking, on the other hand, is an overall work on theories of the soul in the 13th-14th centuries. Still useful for the authors touched upon is H. Siebeck, Geschichte der Psychologie (only the 1st part published in 2 fascicles, which goes from the beginnings of Greek philosophy up to scholasticism inclusive), Gotha 1880-84. On the formation of scholastic psychology, especially in Paris, see: O. Lottin, Problèmes de Psychologie (Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles), I, Louvain-Gembloux 1942; A. C. Pegis, St. Thomas and the Problem of the Soul in the Thirteenth Century, Toronto 1934. Cardinal Mercier, Les origines de la psychologie contemporaine, Italian trans., Piacenza 1920, has excellently defended the existence of the soul against phenomenalist, materialist and positivist denials. For the controversies on the soul in 1900, see: F. Fiorentino, Pietro Pomponazzi, Florence 1886.

Exposition of modern doctrines on the soul starting from Kant, in J. H. Witte, Das Wesen der Seele und die Natur der geistigen Vorgänge, Halle 1888; F. De Sarlo, Il concetto dell'anima nella filosofia contemporanea, Florence 1900. De Sarlo's reflections are taken up by G. Villa, La psicologia contemporanea, 2nd ed., Turin 1911, pp. 399-403. Still noteworthy for its hints of personal interpretation is the overall history of the problem of the soul traced by A. Rosmini (Delle sentenze dei filosofi intorno alla natura dell'anima, appendix to vol. I of the Psicologia, Naples 1858, pp. 173-240). The richest and most up-to-date list of opinions on the soul in R. Eisler, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe, III, 4th ed., Berlin 1927, pp. 1-22; H. Leisegang, Die Entwicklung der Seelenbegriffe, in Logos (German), 16 (1917), p. 311 ff. Accurate indications on contemporary theories, esp. of 'Lebensphilosophie', with a defense of Catholic doctrine, in Th. Steinbüchel, Die philosophische Grundlegung der katholischen Sittenlehre (Handbuch der kath. Sittenlehre), I, 1, Düsseldorf 1938, ch. 6, p. 258 ff. From the point of view of Phenomenology: Max Beck, Psychologie, Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Seele, Leiden 1938. - Independent: N. Hartmann, Das Problem des geistigen Seins, Berlin 1933; A. Gehlen, Der Mensch, Seine Natur und Stellung in der Welt, ibid. 1940; O. Bumke, Gedanken über die Seele, ibid. 1941; P. Häberlin, Der Mensch, Eine philosophische Anthropologie, Zurich 1941.

Cornelio Fabro

VI. SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SOUL

1. IN CHRISTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

In ancient Christian art the soul was symbolically represented in various ways: a) as a dove (v.), either isolated, or bearing an olive or palm branch; and either in the act of approaching the vase (v.) to quench its thirst, or pecking at a bunch of grapes or flying toward the tree; sometimes it is combined with the loaves or with the anchor (v.); b) as a deer (v.) quenching its thirst at the spring; c) as a fish (v.) often combined with the anchor; d) as an orant (v.), mostly female, signifying the state of the soul, in beatitude or isolated among the patron saints; e) as a lamb (v.); f) as a sheep (v.) already grazing in the heavenly garden or, more often, being led back to the fold by the Good Shepherd (v.); sometimes as a ship (v.) heading for the harbor.

In epigraphy a long series of attributes is given to the soul: ἀγαθή, καλή, beata, benedicta, benemerens, bona, casta, castissima, dulcis, dulcissima, innoca, innocens, innocentissima, melleia, merens, merentissima, pia, piissima, pollens, pura, sancta, sanctissima, sapiens, simplex. Damasus calls the saints laid to rest in the cemetery of Callistus: sublimes animas (A. Ferrua, Epigrammata Damasiana, Vatican City 1942, p. 120). In an inscription of Domitilla one reads: solus Deus animam tuam defendat Alexander (O. Marucchi, Le catacombe romane, Rome 1933, p. 177); in one from the cemetery ad duas lauros, today at the Lateran, belonging to a deceased native of Carrhae in Mesopotamia: Deo animam reddidit terrae corpus (G. B. De Rossi, Bull. arch. crist., 2nd series, 4 [1873], pl. XI, 4). Often for soul one finds spiritus (A. Ferrua, Il refrigerio dentro la tomba, in La Civ. Catt., 1941 II, pp. 373-78; 457-63).

The immortality of the soul is represented by the phoenix (v.). The soul in the blessed life can be recognized in the banquet scenes (v.); the allusion to immortality is prefigured in the miraculous feeding of the multitudes. A drawing in a Bodley manuscript in the British Museum and the ivory cover of the Psalter of Charles the Bald, in the National Library of Paris (fonds lat. 1152), represent ideographically the content of certain verses of Psalm 56. In the upper zone stands Christ the judge in glory; immediately below, an angel seated with wings spread holds on his knees a tiny figure, the soul ("in umbra alarum tuarum sperabo donec transeat iniquitas"); around it the lions and enemies rush in, exactly according to the text of verses 2, 5, 8 of that psalm. In Eastern art this personification of the soul in a small female figure often recurs, for example in the menologion of Basil II for the souls of St. Ammon and St. Alexander of Thessalonica (Menologio di Basilio II. Cod. Vat. gr. 1613, Turin 1907, pp. 26, 45) and generally in the scenes of the Dormitio Beatae Mariae (F. Grossi Gondi, La Dormitio Beatae Mariae, Rome 1910).

Enrico Josi

SOUL IN ART

In medieval art it is generally depicted as a child in swaddling clothes (or even naked); in this form it appears first of all in the numerous images of the Dormitio Virginis (εὐφύγας) where Christ, standing beside the bed, holds in his arms the soul of his dead mother. Born in the East, this type of depiction, as emerges from a comparison of the mosaics of Daphni (1100) with those of the Kahriëhgiami in Constantinople and with the frescoes of the monasteries of Mount Athos, remained unchanged throughout Byzantine art; it then passed during the Ottoman era, by way of Byzantine ivories, into the Western world, which adopted it in certain sepulchral monuments of the 11th and 12th centuries (and in the woodcuts of the various editions of the Ars moriendi).

The West too made its contribution to the representations of the soul: a group of Catalan miniatures of the 11th century belonging to the Apocalypse of St. Beatus symbolize souls as doves. The Salzburg miniatures of the Commentary of Honorius Augustodunensis, drawing inspiration from the allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs in which it appears as the Bride of Christ, represent it instead in the form of a young queen.

When already in the fourteenth century the modes of representation were bending toward naturalism, the soul is often represented in the act of leaving the body together with the last breath: in the Camposanto of Pisa or in the Crucifixion of Masolino at S. Clemente in Rome, angels or devils are ready to take it according to the merits or the faults of the dying person. In general, whenever the soul is depicted in torment or in beatitude, it is identified with the human image, by virtue of a naturalistic conception that from the thirteenth century onward had supplanted every other symbolic representation.

Kurt Rathe

VII. THE SOUL IN TRADITION AND IN POPULAR POETRY.

In the tradition of our common people certain very ancient beliefs about the soul have survived, reflecting a primitive mentality. The human soul is imagined as a material thing, placed upright in the mouth of the stomach, called for this reason mouth or little fork of the soul. If the agony drags on too long, it is believed that this is due to the fact that the soul is placed crosswise and cannot get out. Thus, of a person slow to die, it is said that he has his soul crosswise: whence the joking proverb that «women have their soul crosswise like cats». It is also believed that certain persons, especially women afflicted by hysterical phenomena, have in their body other souls as well, such as those of the father, the mother, or another relative.

According to the common people of Abruzzo, if the dying person was in life a bit of a good-for-nothing, one must keep as far away from him as possible at the moment of his passing, so as to prevent his soul from entering the body of one of those nearest to him. According to other popular beliefs, the soul of the deceased remains for some time within the room where the death occurred, or wanders about the surroundings of the house. The souls of those who died by a violent death «find no place», and therefore go wandering until the day on which, by the will of God, they should have left this world. The souls of decapitated bodies, that is, of executed criminals, are venerated by the people of southern Italy, who have recourse to them to implore graces, dedicating ex-votos to them as to the saints and to the Madonna. In Palermo a small church near the river Oreto is dedicated to them. In some villages the souls of Purgatory are identified in the will-o'-the-wisps.

From these beliefs and devotional forms some popular poetry too has drawn inspiration. To induce the people to penance, certain religious songs have been composed, and accepted by the people into oral tradition, which describe the sufferings of the soul condemned to the pains of hell. Worthy of note especially are: an ancient narrative song in hendecasyllables, widespread from Umbria to Emilia, very beautiful, a Sicilian «story» in octaves, and a Lament that the wretched soul condemned by God to hell makes, also in octaves, several times reprinted in popular booklets: all compositions that are linked, in tone and content, to other similar ones, some in dramatic form, of medieval and Renaissance moralizing literature. - See Plates CXIII-CXIV.

Paolo Toschi