Soul and Spirit, a false dichotomy?
I've been thinking, lately, about the distinction many Gnostic texts draw between the soul and the spirit and between "psychic" and "pneumatic" persons. Some of our classical Gnostic sources appear to make a distinction between soul and spirit as if they were, in effect, entirely different organs (for lack of a better term).
I'm not sure I buy that, given my own experiences. I tend to look at the soul from something of an alchemical perspective; like the quest to transform lead into gold, the Gnostic seeks to transform the soul into spirit. It's rather like mining ore. You can sell the impure ore that you've mined, or you can expose that impure ore to heat and force it to shed the dross parts so that it becomes something both more malleable and more valuable than it was in its original form.
The soul is the ore and Gnosticism is the fire, if you will. Pick an allegory, see what works, eh?
I'm not sure I buy that, given my own experiences. I tend to look at the soul from something of an alchemical perspective; like the quest to transform lead into gold, the Gnostic seeks to transform the soul into spirit. It's rather like mining ore. You can sell the impure ore that you've mined, or you can expose that impure ore to heat and force it to shed the dross parts so that it becomes something both more malleable and more valuable than it was in its original form.
The soul is the ore and Gnosticism is the fire, if you will. Pick an allegory, see what works, eh?
posted by +Sar Shimun | 15:20
4 Comments:
I think that some of the "soul" and "spirit" dichotomy comes out of the trinitarian debates, and this vision of the threefold nature of the person. There is the Material body or Hylic, the soul or Psychic, and the Spirit or Pneumatic parts of a person. The Hylic is self-evident, the psychic is the flawed mental life of the person, while the Pneumatic is the divine spark within everyone.
It might be a way to distinguish between what is noble and ignoble in a person's thoughts. The Noble stuff is Pneumatic, the ignoble is Psychic.
If you only have a body and a soul, you end up with what Gnosticism is often accused of: being Dualists. Matter bad, spirit good. I think the Gnostic Mythology is a bit more complex than that.
That's a handy way of explaining the difference between soul and spirit.
Gnostic mythology is certainly complex and almost entirely allegorical. Don't know if I'd surmise the matter/spirit debate in terms of matter being bad or evil while the spirit is pure. Certainly, some Gnostic schools held that the hylic world was wholly bad, but I've always looked at the material world as simply being flawed and imperfect rather than either good or bad.
Jung strongly identifies the "soul", or psychic part of the human, to the ego, which exists in the realm of the demiurge.
In a definitional sense, the human "soul" is the total being of hyle, psyche, and pneuma in a person. I don't know why, but at some point, "soul" started to acquire the connotation of both psyche and pneuma as if they were the same organ (they are OF the same organ, IE of the human soul, but dif parts of that).
One of the great things about Gnostic Mythology is that since it is so Complex, one can't say "This is correct, This is incorrect". Varying interpretations are the bread and butter of the Gnostic mindset.
We believe six impossible things for breakfast.
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