Summary: I. Doctrine of the soul — II. The soul in Holy Scripture — III. The soul among primitive peoples — IV. The soul in extra-biblical religions — V. The soul in the history of philosophy — VI. Symbolic representations of the soul — VII. The soul in popular tradition and poetry.
I. Doctrine of the soul
I. THE KNOWABILITY OF THE SOUL
The earliest beliefs concerning the soul are of a religious and obscure nature, and merge with the first origins of the various civilizations and religions. The documents of primitive cultures (v. infra, n. III), from which Western philosophy and civilization drew their impulse and development, attest to the predominance of the problem of the soul and its function as the key to the understanding of other problems concerning nature and God. It is difficult to decide whether, in the development of these three problems, there was at the outset a strict relation of derivation, as logic would suggest, or whether they were rather co-present in a relation of mutual equilibrium and support: the latter hypothesis seems the more plausible, at least with regard to the soul and God. Hence the curious phenomenon that a large part of those conclusions about the soul and God, around which human thought would tirelessly labor, were initially held as truths beyond dispute; and the advent of philosophical inquiry almost represents nothing more than a “defensive” function to which man resorted when those first beliefs began to weaken and decay. Such a finding, while it corrects in fact the evolutionary theories and removes them from the field they themselves had chosen, cannot by itself resolve any of the grave problems that arose for philosophical reflection when those persuasions were given their own structure of intrinsic evidence on the plane of being.In philosophy, the problem of the soul has always revealed itself to be one of the most complex and difficult. In a fragment of Heraclitus (fr. 45, ed. R. Walzer, Florence 1939, p. 82), also cited by Tertullian (De Anima, 2: PL 2, 691), it is affirmed that “the terms of the soul cannot be reached by any journey, by whatever road one may set out, so deep is its reason.” Philo, in the full flourishing of Hellenism, delights in pointing out the paradox: “The mind that is in each one of us can understand all things, but it has no power to know itself” (Legum Allegoriae, I, § 91, ed. Cohn, I, p. 85). And elsewhere: “The mind that is in each one is unknowable to us: who can know the nature of the soul?” (De Mutatione Nominum, § 10, ed. Wendland, III, p. 158). These confessions of impotence passed to Christian thinkers, even to those in whom the maturity of synthesis and speculative balance had already yielded all that could be expected on the subject, as in the case of St. Thomas Aquinas: the knowledge of the soul presents a “greatest difficulty” (In 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” [Summa Theologiae, I, 87, a. 1]); “cognoscere quid sit anima difficillimum est” (De Veritate, X, 8 ad 8). These are remarkably frank admissions, yet they have not prevented unceasing research, for to man every knowledge is little or nothing, and every wealth is negligible, so long as he does not know who he is and what he contains within himself.
ANICETUS, pope — Fresco by Fra’ Diamante (15th cent.).
Sistine Chapel.
The Roman Martyrology, following Ado, places the feast of Anicetus on 17 April, while the Liber Pontificalis assigns it to the 20th of the same month. He is described as a martyr.