Posted on 05/08/2003 9:44:29 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
For Lurkers unfamiliar with the passage, it is Jesus' prayer for us, just before he entered the Garden of Gethsemane (verses 20 and 21:)
My faith as a Christian is rooted in Judaism and I am very grateful to all Jews, including you, and pray for every blessing for all of you!
Thank you so much for sharing the wisdom! IMHO, your very close friend hit a home-run with this statement:
As you say, when we “shed these mortal coils” we’ll see. Hugs!
PDAs are great ... here's one for you: {{{{Hugs!!!}}}}
Hugs!
Indeed, the abortion issue must be exponentially more severe when one considers the soul. IMHO, it is impossible to justify abortion with that consideration, and therefore I wonder if the greatest resulting soul damage is to the abortionist or the mother?
There is a related warning in the Old Testament which is repeated three times, signifying great importance. Roughly it says never seethe a baby goat in its mother’s milk. That is one of those passages which speaks directly to my spirit in ways too strong and complex for me to explain adequately with words alone.
For one thing, I am overcome with the sanctity our loving Father decrees to the trust between an innocent baby and its mother – at the animal (nefesh) level. I cannot imagine the magnitude of His outrage when such a trust is violated at the higher spiritual level (neshamah.) It is beyond my ability to express.
1. G_d knew the abortionist before formation.
2. The Keter of Nefesh and Neshama cannot completely be severed from Ruach. Rather Ruach is contracted to the point of being ineffective.
3. The abortionist cannot truly repent until he/she ceases to perform abortions.
Then if/when that time occurs and reconciliation with G-d can actually take place then how powerful must His call be and can it be ignored? And if reconciliation actually happens, what a truly exsquisite feeling of relief must wash over the individual.
I wish any one lurking with experience in actually performing or assisting with an abortion would feel free to enlighten me at this point. I promise not to knee jerk and spew venom in your direction. I cannot speak for any other reactionaries that reside on this forum however, so if you do care to share please have your skin as tough as possible. Given the extreme feelings on both sides of this issue I'm sure you are well prepared. Thank you AG for your warmth. Return {{{hugs}}}.
This seems like a good passage to kick off a meditation on the classical speculation regarding the soul or psyche – that is, the way that Plato and Aristotle treated of the subject, as best I understand them.
A couple of background notes. Plato and Aristotle regarded divine Nous – divine Reason or Mind -- as the ordering, structuring source of all things that come into existence, including man. Man, of all the being things, alone possesses nous. Indeed, man’s nous is in some way a participation in the divine Nous; and nous, an area of the soul, is what can facilitate the divine-human encounter, the basis of the divine-human partnership in love, goodness, and justice and their resulting creative effects in the world and society.
We’ll get to the structure of the soul in a second. First another background note. Divine Nous is the source of the hierarchy of being which expresses the total cosmic Reality. That hierarchical Reality can be summed up in the following list, set out top-down, “highest” to “lowest”:
Divine Nous
Psyche – Noetic
Psyche – Passions
Animal Nature
Vegetative Nature
Inorganic Nature
Apeiron – Depth
We might call this layout the divine noetic specification of the cosmos. It is also the divine noetic specification of the microcosm -- man. For man participates in all of these, from Divine Nous down to the apeirontic Depth: As Voegelin notes, “Man… is an epitome of the hierarchy of being.” And the site and sensorium of his participation is the psyche – the soul.
Note where psyche fits into the above hierarchy. It is elaborated into two modes, the noetic and the passionate. It has a structure of its own. Rooted in the fathomless depth of the divine ground of existence (Apeiron), it is divided into the unconscious and the conscious. The unconscious is by far the “larger” part. It has content of which consciousness is not aware (but which can perhaps be retrieved by means of anamnesis, or recollection of memory. But that’s a story for another time).
Consciousness itself is a fairly “small” part of the psyche. It includes sensation, feeling, passions. It also includes Reason, mind – nous.
Reason in this sense is not the instrumental reason, such as we see employed in analytical thinking. Rather, Reason is the essence of human nature; for as Aristotle noted, “All men by their nature desire to know.” Reason is the process for exploring human existence in all its dimensions. It reaches out, questing for the truth of Reality. And given its nature as a participation in the divine Nous, it is susceptible to being drawn from that direction in its search.
That drawing is an immortalizing “pull” from the creative, divine ground, the criterion of the divine Beyond of this world, mediated by nous in the medium of the metaxy, the “in-between” of human Reality. We can perhaps define metaxy in part as the psychic field of human existential experience resonating between the two poles of Divine Nous and Apeiron, the contents of which can be made luminous to consciousness via nous, and articulated in language symbols.
Just as man can be drawn by Nous, so can he also be drawn by Apeiron. But where the pull of Divine Nous is an immortalizing action, the pull from the other is a mortalizing one, drawing him “downward” into the passions and his lower animal nature. Perhaps these lines from Timeaus will clarify the issue:
Now, when a man abandons himself to his desires and ambitions, indulging them incontinently, all his thoughts of necessity become mortal, and as a consequence he must become mortal every bit, as far as that is possible, because he has nourished his mortal part. When on the contrary he has earnestly cultivated his love of knowledge and true wisdom, when he has primarily exercised his faculty to think immortal and divine things, he will – since in that manner he is touching the truth – become immortal of necessity, as far as it is possible for human nature to participate in immortality.
Man lives in the “in-between” of Reality, in the metaxy as Plato called it. But man lives in the “in-between” in more senses than the one just given. He lives “in-between” ignorance and knowledge; “in-between” life and death; “in-between” the animal nature and the purely divine; “in-between” mortality and immortality; etc., etc. And as mentioned, noetic psyche is the site and sensorium of the searching quest (zetesis) of the truth of human existence as participation in all the realms of the hierarchy of being, as well as the site and sensorium of the divine-human encounter that sheds light on all these problems of human metaleptic (i.e., “in-between”) existence.
* * * * * *
Alamo-Girl, I’m not familiar with many of the sources you cite above, particularly the Kabbala. But looking at the five subdivisions of soul you mentioned, I am struck by certain analogies to the Greek account. This is particularly interesting to me, for I’m not aware there was much cultural contact, if any, between Hellas and Israel. Still, Nefesh seems analogous to the animal nature of man. Rauch to pneuma, “breath” or “spirit” (which the Greeks definitely underemphasize relative to nous – but then the great Greeks were probably the most “intellectual” people who ever lived). Nous and Neshama seem to be very closely related ideas. Chaya corresponds to the soul of the man who consciously submits to the divine pull that immortalizes. And Yechida corresponds to the joy of momentary sameness that rises, Nous-to-nous (so to speak) in the divine-human encounter, where the sameness and difference of the knower and the known dissolves temporarily in the act of noetic participation. It was of this sort of experience that Aristotle wrote in the Metaphysics:
Thought thinks itself through participation in the object of thought; for it becomes the object of thought through being touched and thought, so that thought and that what is thought are the same.
Thanks for posting this wonderful thread, A-G! Much excellent food for thought here….
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