Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

the author writes “the soul is but a manner of being — not a constant state — that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations.”

Alas, this is a writer’s conceit, a stand-in for personality, which of course is extremely mutable. A writer can “put on” the “souls” or personalities of her characters — in a manner similar to the ancient Pythagorean notion that “any chance soul may enter any chance body” (Aristotle, De Anima 1.407b) — in order to crank out the story-line she is creating. But we know that anything from slow experience to a quick bump on the head can change someone’s personality. Personality, “the self” in contemporary Western parlance is but an ephemeral, weak construct not to be confused with the much more robust anima of the early, patristic and medieval Christian thinkers.

In truth, we have but one human soul, “the form of the body,” which is not ephemeral, but tough and lasting. Personality has only a minor role in the soul’s development, but acting morally has a major one. Think of the effect of personality on someone’s physique: sometimes it can be a major factor and other times it’s not. There is no necessary relation between the two. But as exercise has a direct effect on physique, acting morally has a direct effect on the soul. The health of the soul and the functioning of the personality (given its happenstance nature) have only a highly fluid linkage.

A recession in the soul would be when the acting person loses her or his way and finds no moral compass for her or his life. As when both Scripture and Tradition slip away in the slickness of popular thought like soap in the tub. Adrift in the world, we may end up like poor Sebastian Knight, empty and desperate, seeking a “self”-ish solution to the soul’s deprivation. What we need are genuine “moral sources outside of the subject [found] through languages which resonate within him or her, the grasping of an order which is inseperably indexed to a personal vision” (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 510). These are neither simply subjective nor social, but personally powerful and convicting because they open up the eternal value of everything and everybody to us, giving us a true place to act.

As Charles Taylor again writes, “As our public traditions of family, ecology, even polis are undermined or swept away, we need new languages of personal resonance to make crucial human goods alive for us once again” (Sources of the Self, 513).