The soul in the Bible and in religion in general is a controversial topic. “The body walks, runs, chews. The soul thinks, dreams, believes, loves,” Deacon Andrei Kuraev writes about this, explaining the situation.
But if everything were so simple... It is no coincidence that one can apparently come across the following expression: religion is a disease of the soul. And it is certainly impossible to imagine the opposite statement, such as: the soul is a disease of religion. For the soul, nevertheless, in this and in all other cases, is primary. And we will talk about different interpretations associated with this concept.
According to the Bible, every human soul is a Christian
However, during the first three centuries this statement could be considered controversial. For unambiguous answers to hidden questions related to the origin of the human soul were not yet formulated by Christian theologians, which gave rise to a lot of different opinions and interpretations.
However, the moment came when the concept of the soul acquired religious content, and this happened as a result of research, including by famous religious figures: Blessed Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Nemesius of Emesa, Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus and St. Anastasius of Sinaite .
And since it was Greek philosophers who first began to think about this topic, their philosophical treatises served, in this case, as a kind of source of information for spiritual fathers when it was impossible to unambiguously interpret one or another fragment of the text of the Holy Scriptures.
No. 16 (865) / April 26 '16
Orthodoxy lessons
In this topic:
Orthodoxy lessons
Archpriest Artemy Vladimirov: Christ rests only in simple and kind hearts
Continuation. Start at No. 11 (860) – No. 15 (864)
We continue to get acquainted with the “Sermon on Death” by St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov). In previous lessons, we talked about the fact that death is incomprehensible to man and is revealed to him by God, about the fate of the body after death.
In the Church there is a certain attitude towards death, burial of the dead, and their commemoration. The dead are greeted with prayers, a funeral service is performed over them, and they are buried in a specially consecrated place - in a cemetery.
Deceased Christians remain members of the Church. She offers her prayers for them as if they were her living members. Commemoration is performed at Divine liturgies and memorial services, at which the departed are prayerfully remembered in hope of God’s mercy, forgiveness of sins and blessed eternal life are asked.
The church year knows special days on which deliberate commemoration of the dead is carried out: Radonitsa, Demetrius Saturday, Meat Saturday and others.
From church life itself, we learn about the posthumous fate of the body, when we see how the deceased, according to church tradition, are escorted on their journey to sow the earth.
A person is a spiritual-physical being, and it is important to understand what happens to his soul after the body is buried. St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) answers this question in one of the sections of “Tales on Death.” In today's lesson we will get acquainted with it in detail in order to reliably learn about the fate of the soul after death.
Let us remind you: in the last lesson we learned that the souls of people are like angels. Saint Ignatius writes: “They by nature constitute one class of beings. The souls of those Christians who lived piously and cleansed themselves from sins by repentance will inherit eternal bliss along with the bright angels, and those who do not believe in Christ and unrepentant sinners will inherit eternal torment along with the fallen angels.” And, confirming this with numerous references to the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers, St. Ignatius concludes: “Since human souls are destined for the same place of residence, the same pleasure or the same execution with the angels, this serves as an indication that souls are creatures therefore similar to angels.” .
Archpriest Andrei Kanev, rector of the church in honor of the Vladimir Icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Ekaterinburg), candidate of philosophical sciences : - Let's talk about what the soul looks like. Saint Ignatius speaks a lot about this issue. In our time, this topic has not lost its relevance, because many people come to the Church with occult experience behind them. Occultism, magic and various forms of paganism give a lot of false information about the invisible world, in contrast to Christianity, which is very chaste about this topic: what the Lord revealed in the Holy Scriptures and what was verified in the patristic experience approved by the Church, we know.
Occultism is a form of Satanism that practices interaction with fallen spirits who allegedly reveal some secrets. This is done so that a person, carried away by this pseudoscience and pseudo-religion, pseudo-search for strength, power and authority, will perish spiritually.
At the announcement, such a simple question for a church-going Christian is asked: “What does a person’s soul look like?” Christinin’s answer is very simple: “The soul looks the same as a person.” A person with a half-pagan, half-occult worldview begins to fantasize, takes knowledge from murky sources: “the soul is a kind of square, a luminous circle that flies somewhere in the sky.”
We have become so prismatic and material that we perceive ourselves as our body, but we need to perceive ourselves as a soul. Our personality, our memory, feelings, sensations, various experiences, emotions - these are all properties of the soul. Only when we are here on earth in our state do we manifest all this through the body. It is our soul that perceives through the body.
“The life of the body,” teaches St. Ignatius, “comes from the presence of the soul in the body, and the life of the soul comes from the presence of the Holy Spirit in it.”
Archpriest Andrei Kanev : - A man is dying. This does not happen by chance, but happens according to the will of God, not at the behest of some magicians, stars or some other nonsense that modern people come up with, following ancient Yachic beliefs. The soul is separated from the body and the person continues to feel himself as he is, as himself, to understand what is happening to him, but he feels and sees much more than during life.
The Holy Scriptures tell us that when Adam and Eve sinned, betrayed God and died spiritually, the Lord sewed leather garments for them. Leather vestments, according to St. Ignatius, are our inability to feel and see the spiritual world. It would seem, why was such a rich spiritual world hidden from us? Everything is explained very simply. After the Fall, man became like demons, and therefore we are now in the stage of punishment, expulsion. If a person saw the reality in which he finds himself, death from fear would occur. Because we are surrounded not by bright angels, but by a fallen spiritual world, and so that we would not die of fear, the Lord gave us this barrier. Freeing a person from the bodily barrier leads to the fact that he begins to see the spiritual world: fallen spirits, angels, the Lord, hell and heaven. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is proof of this. Today the rich man feasted, and tomorrow he sees the Bosom of Abraham, sees his condition, other sinners, righteous people, that world that in our state we do not see, do not know, do not understand, do not feel. (To be continued)
You can view or listen to the full version of the conversation on the website of the Soyuz TV channel.
In other rooms:
What is the soul and where is it located?
We can distinguish two theories on the creation (or appearance) of human souls that are consistent with biblical teaching:
- Traducianism: the soul arises with the birth of the physical body and is created, accordingly, by its parents;
- Creationism: A new human soul is created by God at the moment of creation of the human body.
There is, however, a third view on this, the essence of which is that God is the creator of all human souls, and he created them in advance at the same time, and the soul appears at the moment of the birth of the human embryo in the fetus, as if inhabiting this new bodily shell.
And the soul flies in from some heavenly warehouse, where all the divine souls are kept until that moment... These are the versions and statements that exist.
What is death in Christianity?
There are two sides to this.
First.
We are mortal because of the original sin we committed. Death is his punishment. We are already born in sin .
Second side.
Death is simply a continuation of the life of the soul, but without a body. By dying, we gain immortality, because the soul is eternal. Death is a cure, a cure for sin.
What follows from this? There is no death. This is just a separation of body and soul. There, beyond the threshold of death, the soul is alive, there the Lord is waiting for us. There is no death thanks to the atonement of sin by Jesus Christ for the entire human race.
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What is the human soul in Orthodoxy
The Orthodox teaching about man also, naturally, does not shy away from this topic, closing in its main idioms with the main biblical teaching. And, accordingly, the Orthodox teaching about the soul even believes that it has a gender, and in general the soul is the image of God in man.
And God said: Let us make man in Our image [and] after Our likeness (Genesis 1:26)… And the Lord God created man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life , and man became a living soul (Genesis 2:7) .
Thus, the image of God is supposed to be present in each of us. The human personality is holistic and includes, according to Orthodox teaching, three main components.
Soul, spirit and body: how they relate in Orthodoxy
People do not particularly deeply consider the essence of spiritual nature,” St. Ignatius Brenchaninov once reasoned about this. “They, as a rule, are content with knowledge of a superficial nature, indifferently calling the invisible part of our being, which lives in the body and constitutes its essence, both spirit and soul.
Although spirit, soul and body in the Bible are, in fact, three different principles. And the most understandable thing in this trinity, naturally, is our physical body. You can't confuse it with anything. But how the soul differs from the spirit in Orthodoxy - and what, in fact, is the difference between them - is not a simple question.
Spirit and soul: what is the difference?
If we try to formulate the vector of each of these principles, it turns out that the soul, being a human material essence, has a certain horizontal life vector. The spirit, representing a certain higher immaterial nature, is a landmark of a vertical nature, directed upward, towards the Divine, professing such concepts as faith, conscience, and the desire for higher service.
Although the difference between spirit and soul in its popularized form is interpreted quite simply:
- Spirit is the beginning in us of a high, spiritual, Divine order. He has all the brightest properties and human aspirations. And, in addition, the spirit carries within itself the nature of immortality.
- The soul is a kind of connecting bridge between our body and spirit. She is like a guide, on whose mood it depends whether a person - in all his full appearance - will submit to the highest spiritual principle, ceasing to serve only his flesh.
This explanation, it seems to me, is quite conditional. In any case, one way or another, the unity of the spirit of soul and body is an immutable law of Orthodoxy.
Where is the spirit?
With the spirit it is even more difficult. If man is two-part and created by God from a body and an immaterial soul, then where did the spirit suddenly appear in him? And what is he?
St. Ignatius Brianchaninov defined the spirit as the desire of the mind for divine reason, through which a person comprehends the wisdom of God. This is a certain property of the soul, for the development of which it uses the brain and heart. And therefore, the spirit is a property (part?) of the soul, is in it and with it leaves the body after the death of a person.
Saint John Chrysostom generally believed that soul and spirit are synonymous, like body and flesh.
Among theologians, the question of the spirit has not been resolved. It is possible that the spirit, as St. believed. Gregory Palamas is truly a kind of divine gift to the human soul, which with his help can see, sense and feel God himself.
Three powers of the soul in Orthodoxy
In general, the church views the soul as a certain substance, which also consists, in its structure, of its three fundamental abilities:
- Reasonable from rationale, as well as: verbal, mental and cognitive;
- Irritable from irascile - constitutes her feeling, emotional strength; This principle is also characterized by a state of anger and rage as a special type of zeal and energy;
- Desirable from concupiscentiale or a force that is desirable, active, allowing one to have a desire for something or an aversion from something; our will, which generates action, also applies to it.
Thus, all these mental forces - mind, will and feeling - are different, constantly interacting aspects of her integral, unified and indivisible life.
The Bible about the state of the human soul after death
Himself, Lord, give rest to the souls of Your departed servants... Those who served You... Every sin committed by them in word or deed or thought, as a good Lover of mankind, God forgives, as if there is no man who will live and will not sin. For You are the only one besides sin, Your righteousness is truth forever, and Your word is truth.
A lot has been said about death and the soul. More precisely, in relation to this amazing, immaterial nature, spiritual - if we consider the substance as a whole, it would be more correct, nevertheless, to use the word not death, but immortality. We also talked about this on the pages of our website in a detailed material called Immortality of the soul.
Here I would like to dwell on some more points that raise questions and concerns among people.
My soul hurts: what to do?
Each of us felt this oppressive, hopeless pain-heaviness, which, it would seem, had nowhere to come from: after all, the soul, as we know, has an immaterial essence. How, then, can something that doesn’t exist hurt?..
One of the explanations for this phenomenon is that in this case two essences of man seem to enter into some kind of confrontation with each other: his material part, prone to sin and, accordingly, ultimately to the fall, and his Divine or spiritual component .
It is this, the Divine and spiritual part, that especially clearly senses and understands (if these definitions can at least somehow correspond to the explanation of the intentions of non-material substances) the sinfulness or unrighteousness of certain of our actions and deeds.
It is our spiritual beginning that tries to pacify our mortal thoughts and direct them towards the search for an ideal world in ourselves and in the space around us. This, I think, is the essence of the term salvation of the soul in Christianity.
General cultural concept of the soul
In a number of religious and philosophical teachings, the soul refers to the immortal immaterial essence of a person, his vital and personal beginning. It is often contrasted with the physical material component of human nature. The soul can also mean the inner world of a person. That is, everything that mental life consists of: thoughts, feelings, dreams, fantasies. But what is the human soul in Orthodox doctrine? What is its origin and place in the hierarchy of our nature?
Soul of man
