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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Soul as Observed and Shadow1/27/2006 00:43:45In my general natural monist position, there comes the problem articulated by, of all people, John Paul II in his statement on evolution: from where comes the soul, when is this implanted in the human being? If we are the sum of material things, and indeed things that were not a part of us are now and vis versa, is there anything special about what we are? It occured to me that we can take Jacques Maritain (and others') suggestion that the gaze of God, and our awareness of it, is what composes the human person, circumscribes her. But now go further: what if the soul is simply that, the effect of the gaze of God, an attribute that is external to us rather than internal, utterly dependent on God to exist. This certainly accords with the tendency for people who believe in God to also believe in souls and so on. The soul that God sees is his expectation. He looks at this bag of matter and sees a person because he is looking for a person. He has a form (nearly in the platonic sense, but epistemic rather than metaphysic) in mind when he looks at us, and this is the soul precisely - it is our divine self, perfectly good so far as God is good, for it is his expectation or his idea. The concept of sin and departure from God is therefore affected. For though he looks through the lens of this idea, our material mess is what sits on the other end, lost from its shadow, which is the soul. In this sense Peter Pan becomes an even more powerful myth - the search for one's shadow (God's image of us that perhaps one day fit us perfectly) as the salvific quest. This involves an epistemology of categories that I am working on developing, one in which predispositions (prejudices) lead to and define the processes of thought. Certainly and thankfully this is nothing outrageously original, but I am trying to get the language and formulation right in relation to problems of scale. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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