Hi Justin —
It is an all too harmless picture of death if we think that the body dies but the soul lives. Is there really an independent soul over against a body with its own independent existence? [....]
No. The Catechism states so. Christianity, like Judaism, is an holistic vision. The body/soul duality is Greek.
This is why eminent Christian theologians today can dispense with the notion of an immortal soul without jeopardizing the Good News of resurrection and eternal life. In fact, as soon as we no longer feel obliged to hold on to such intellectual abstractions as the notion of an immortal soul we are able to enter more freely and more fully into the existential approach on which Biblical statements about the resurrection are based.
It's a shame he does not give a theological context. What theologians? And if we are dismissing 'intellectual abstractions', then what is the existential approach to resurrection?
Actually the myth of purgatory comes very close to the myth of reincarnation; it tries in general to answer the same questions and it comes up with largely the same answers-that there is justice and that you have to work out your karma.
I see no problem with that. I think the idea of purgatory and reincarnation both take a form of 'judgement' as their starting point. I find purgatory a for more logical concept that karma, which no-one has ever been able to explain to my satisfaction.
When we're talking of culpability, of responsibility, we're in the moral dimension. The mechanism of cause and effect simply cannot be applied. One man cuts off another man's leg. Is that good, or bad? Depends on why he did it. Karma seems to have no 'moral consciousness', it's always presented to me as good accrues good, bad accrues bad, but there is no determination of good or bad, other than human moral values? Anyway ...
Set against that, the idea of an everlasting punishment, when the punished cannot learn, cannot repent, is horrendously unjust. Say you have a child who does something naughty. Are you sorry? you say. No! declares the little tyke. So you begin to hit the child, and you continue to hit that child, for evermore ...
Neither view, of a mechanistic karma, or eternal damnation, is satisfactory, but both have pastoral value ...
He qualifies his belief in reincarnation, but notice he doesn't reject it, merely doesn't make too much of it.
Well he says 'steered me away from it' ... not a rejection, but not a buying-into either. Karl Rahner discussed reincarnation. But then, it is my assertion that most everybody's notion of reincarnation is a misinterpretation of the teaching, 're-phrased' to suit westerners. There may well be a populist view in the East, but this is the same kind of superstition/sentimentalism that many here see as 'blind faith' or the unquestioning acceptance of dogma when it occurs within the western context.
In his long post he makes clear that true death occurs only when one loses one's individual existence and is absorbed into Christ, very much (as he says) like the Buddhist's absorption into Brahma.
Yes, the two doctrines are remarkably similar.
Again, this is straight Buddhism. I cannot find a single Christian doctrine that he actually believes to be true.
I rather think he's saying there are doctrines that find their own expressions.
A soul, in the Catholic understanding of the word, is the immaterial component of human nature, comprising intellect and will.
A la Aquinas. OK.
Soul is bound to body and acts through body...
I would rather say the body is the means by which the soul manifests itself in the world. It does not occupy a body, it projects / actualises / realises itself in the world as a body.
Furthermore wherever soul is, there body is, in much the same way that angels have no bodies, but they are an idea, or an ideation.
... and soul and body together make up a human individual, but just as we remain human even if we are missing two arms and legs and are blind and deaf, so we remain human if we miss the rest of our body.
Do we? All of it? Then we are no longer 'here', nor, perhaps, are we 'anywhere' ... and this to me is a 'death', in the sense that the disembodied soul no longer plays any part in creation. Creation is absent to it, it is absent to creation ...
I mean our individual existence is not compromised in any way.
I think it is.
"I am Thomas" remains just as true if you are soul alone or soul with body.
No, the entity that is Thomas is the product of body and soul in unison. That's how it experiences.
We are not fully human without our bodies however, since the soul is meant to work with a body, unlike angels who are pure immaterial spirits designed to function without a body.
Ah, now I'm with you. I would simply say that the angels' 'body' is different to our 'body'. I do not for a moment believe that angels have heads and limbs and eyes and ears ... but they have a 'body'.
Angels can take a material form, manipulating matter to present the appearance of a man - or a serpent, but they don't have to. Ditto for human souls.
Hmmm, not sure. Angels can walk through walls, but they can't open a door! They can witness this world, but they cannot
participate. (have you seen
Wings os Desire? Awesome!) I think the 'material form' is a manifestation in our perceptual faculty, rather than a vision of an angelic actuality.
No. There is nothing egoist about individuality.
Oh, good grief, there is everything egoistic! That's what Adam and Eve is all about!
The Christian tradition holds that a human being is an entity separate from God although created and maintained in existence by him, and remains a separate entity in the next life. There's nothing wrong with that. Egoism comes into the picture when a human being rejects God, preferring his own will, passions, ambitions, whatever, to what he knows is God's will for him.
Exactly! And who does not do that? Who is without sin?
On the soul:
The Hebrews have Nephesh, Ruach, Neshamah ... and that's just the start! They
qualify the soul, and the Christian Tradition actually follows their lead on that point. I think the idea of an immortal soul becomes real when man has attained a certain quality of soul. The New Testament talks endlessly about attaining immortality, it's not a given.
For my rather lengthy discussion on the soul,
follow this link
