What is the soul? And how can a person understand if everything is all right with his soul? Reflects Priest Stephen Freeman - cleric of the Orthodox Church in America, rector of St. Anne's Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, creator of the Orthodox blog Glory To God For All Things, author of numerous articles and the book Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe ("Omnipresent: Christianity in a one-storey universe").
Tell me - have you recently heard that someone worried: is everything in order with his soul? On the other hand, you probably won't have to strain your memory to remember how you listened to a friend's complaints about psychological or emotional difficulties.
There is a difference, agree. We have become a “soulless” society, fixated on our psychological problems. Our usual, traditional concern for "mental health" has now been replaced by an all-consuming interest in our psychological and emotional well-being.
We have turned into a “well-oiled” society, as a kind of mechanism.
And the soul … it has always been something mysterious, not amenable to analysis. In Greek, the word "soul" (psyche - from psykhein - "to blow, breathe") meant the very life of a person. The meaning of this word is close to the meaning of the word "pneuma" ("spirit", spirit), meaning "breath", "breath".
A body that no longer breathes is dead. In Genesis, the Lord breathed life into Adam:
“And the Lord God created man from the dust of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2: 7).
The psychological term "self", "self" or, for simplicity, "I" is a very fashionable concept today. Freud's classic works were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His ideas were instantly taken up by pop culture, "popular psychology" after the First World War. In the "Roaring Twenties", in the era of returning to a peaceful life after the horrors of war, people en masse were carried away by Freud's teachings. His reasoning that moral and sexual prohibitions are "dangerous and harmful" became especially popular. This was the decade that saw the first flashes of the approaching sexual revolution.
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Modern people, studied from head to toe by psychologists, fixated on their psychological problems, people are simply fascinated by themselves. We analyze, qualify, classify, from all sides we consider the smallest components of our "I".
“Work on your“I”,“psychological self-help”,“become your own psychologist”- these are typical expressions from the arsenal of“kitchen psychology”. However, the purpose of this thoroughly "psychologized" approach to man has little to do with what is called "mental health."
Modern Christianity has taken up this worldview and adapted Scripture to modern requirements. All sorts of options for the "Welfare Gospel" (ideology, the main message of which is that God is interested in people being financially secure, having good health, happy marriages, and generally living well.
Supporters of this ideology argue that people, according to the Bible, should be rich and well-off. According to this teaching, genuine faith leads to material prosperity, and it is a sign of God's blessing - approx. ed.) - all of them are based on the "psychologized" picture of the world. Even in popular evangelical churches, it is believed that the "born again" life, the life of a church-going person should be happier than before. Christ became a means for achieving a more successful in society, a more satisfied with oneself, a more prosperous psychologically "I".
The "psychologized self" also includes how we are fixated on "success." But to say that, they say, things have become better for me is completely inappropriate in confession. "Is everything good with my soul?" Is a much more pertinent question. And the soul must be very strong so that we can cope with anger, disappointment, temptation, failure.
“Therefore, we do not lose heart; but if our outer man smolders, then the inner one is renewed from day to day. For our short-term light suffering produces eternal glory in immeasurable abundance when we look not at the visible, but at the invisible: for the visible is temporary, and the invisible is eternal”(2 Corinthians 16:18)
The saints were not at all "well balanced", "balanced" people.
The “psychologized self” is perfectly combined with our consumer culture - it would be more appropriate to call it “consumer self”. When we buy something for the sake of pleasure, for the sake of comfort, we buy it for our “I”, so that it becomes, as it is now believed, “healthier”. No one argues that mental suffering should be alleviated, but not at the cost of our souls. The modern concept of "I" is a faded substitution of the concept of "soul".
What is “soul”?
The soul is what we live with. It is immaterial, it is, as it were, dissolved in us.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa proposed the following definition: "The soul is a born essence, a living essence, mental, communicating by itself to the organic and sensual body the vital force and the ability to perceive the sensible, as long as nature is present, capable of accepting that."
Much of what we describe as "personality", "individuality" that we are so passionately interested in and about which we care so intensely - for the most part is just body work. The body can be healed, changed, it can even disappear under certain circumstances. Our memory, desires, passions, our "communication style" is not our personality, not what defines us.
Let's say my brain may be prone to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but this has nothing to do with my soul. The brain is the instrument with which the soul expresses itself (in the words of the modern Athonite elder), but the brain and its activity are not the soul.
I find it interesting to reflect on the experiences of those who have endured great torments for their faith - and on their observations of the nature of the soul. One such noteworthy example is the recollections of Father Roman Braga, a Romanian monk who spent 10 years in prison under the communist regime. He was subjected to torture there, the strongest psychological pressure.
He wrote: “You cannot go anywhere, you cannot even look out the window - there are no windows in the solitary cell. But you still need to move somewhere. And you go deep into yourself, deep into your heart and mind. You ask yourself - who am I? why did the Lord bring you into this world? You even doubt whether there is a Lord and what kind of relationship do I have with Him?
When we are free, we have no time to ask such questions, and our faith is superficial. After all, you can know a lot, and your mind can be like an encyclopedia, but if you do not know yourself, you cannot understand yourself - even if you know everything in the world - you slide on the surface if you do not ask yourself: “Why do I live ? "," What is the meaning of my life? "," Why did the Lord create me? "," If I believe in God, what does He want from me?"
Such questions, especially when asked by a person to himself in a situation that seems hopeless, surrounded by enemies, can be maddening. Or, as in the case of Father Roman, to give true knowledge about the soul and shed the light of true knowledge about the miracle of the life given to us.
To the question "Why do I live?" you cannot answer using the resources of only your personality. Are the possibilities of the individual in a solitary cell great?
These questions direct our attention directly to the soul. When St. Gregory wrote about the soul, he began with an apophatic approach, recognizing from the very beginning that the soul, like the Lord himself, belongs to the region of the unknowable with the help of reason alone. The question "Why do I live?" requires silence and silence.
And this silence is the best sound for the soul. The noise of reason is chatter, idle chatter.
When the Holy Fathers spoke of reason in relation to the soul, they called it "nous" (a term introduced by Plato to designate the Supreme Reason. "Nous" is the manifestation of divine consciousness in man - ed.). The fact that this word is considered synonymous with the word "intelligence" is part of the sad story of our loss of understanding of the meaning of this concept. Nous, of course, also understands and perceives, but not at all like the intellect.
And this disappoints the modern mind, because we need to see, weigh, measure and compare everything. We even doubt that the soul actually exists - they say, maybe it is so simply customary to call something else, for example, a certain function of the brain? And all that we want from the heart is a feeling of self-awareness, self-awareness. Give us a kind of soul selfie - the undeniable and most convincing confirmation of the existence of something in the modern world.
Our life is more than just a description of metabolic processes in the cells of our bodies. The soul, which is our life, embodies, carries within itself the meaning, the purpose of our being. The soul was created to know God, and all its attention is directed precisely to Him. It becomes clearer to us what nous, divine consciousness is, when we sincerely pray, when we feel the presence of the Lord. Self-consciousness in nous - it is in repentance, repentance, when we "return to ourselves."
Sincere remorse is not when you feel bad about something you did wrong, some kind of sadness that might just be our emotions. In fact, this is an awareness, a deep realization that without God, distant from Him, we are nothing. In the monastic tradition, this is called "mortal memory." This is the knowledge of the soul about its true state. And it is in this state that the soul longs to return to the Lord.
Remember the words from the Great Penitential Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, which are sung at the very beginning of Great Lent, drawing our attention to this: “My soul, my soul, rise up, why write off? The end is approaching, and Imashi will be embarrassed: rise up, may Christ God spare you, who is everywhere and fulfill everything”.
The soul is our life, it is literally the anchor of our being.
The "consumer self" is ill-suited for true being. As soon as such a “I” is faced with the impossibility of choice, as its inherent narcissism plunges the “consumer I” into despair. People in the modern world often shop in order to "muffle" depression at least a little.
But our true being is the soul. Only in the soul the pain, suffering, and ailments inevitable in our world acquire meaning. The "consumer self" cannot stand suffering and clings to any false hope that promises deliverance from suffering.
But listen again to Father Roman: “Suffering is good not only for a Christian, but for every person in general. If you do not know suffering, you do not know anything. " This is said by a man who was imprisoned by the regime, which Solzhenitsyn described as "the most terrible barbarism of the modern world."
The Lord Himself directly said that the salvation of the soul implies suffering. He said that those who follow Him will have to "accept their cross." And He spoke not about a wide road, along which one must go to self-realization, but about a narrow path where one's own will is humiliated, this notorious "I" and complete obedience to the perfect will of the Lord is achieved.
The modern world has lost its soul. Fortunately, the world is ready to provide us with all the pain and suffering at any moment and thus give us the chance to regain it.
Wake up, rise up, my soul.