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GRAMMAR OF SOUL
LAVON STAVELAND ELLS
IMAGINATIONS OF SOUL
"The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream–he awoke and found it truth.' -John Keats
A definition of soul begins with imagination. Not imitation or recollection. Not wild fantasy or reverie . . . but an effort of mind that works within imaginal space to create an image of a mystery or to limn an imageless idea of what it means to be. A magical effort that paints a new picture or freshens disused ones. Soul defined to probe a connection with grammar includes some timeless imaginations, adds observations from recent research and thought, and shifts the emphasis from general metaphysics to a particularized purpose. The effort acknowledges that soul has an unimaginable mystery to its purpose, however, by offering its definition as a pilgrimage through many imaginations rather than a direct path of reasoning.
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Soul has been defined by many throughout the centuries, each definition carefully constructed and internally consistent, but each reflective of a historical era. Early Greek philosophers imagined soul as a principle of movement in nature that causes change and as an elemental substance traceable to the originating principles of nature. Their views varied concerning the make-up of elemental substances and the origin of first principles, but they were consistent in viewing soul as “the breath of life that is the animating principle of nature.”
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Socrates is said to be the first to establish soul “as the seat of the individual waking consciousness and of the moral and intellectual character.” Plato and Aristotle added the imagination of ‘form’ to those characteristics: soul as “the form of perfection to which we aspire.” Plato’s form is an invisible model of creation endowed by the Creator (Intellect) with reason, harmony, and other ‘good’. The visible world that we know is fashioned, fitted, and set in motion within this invisible model: therefore, our world is imbued with soul. Aristotle’s form is not transcendent but inherent: “...soul is the form of a natural body having life potentially within it.... soul is inseparable from body.” That soul is moral and intellectual consciousness was not in question, but whether soul is immanent or transcendent was then a disagreement that continues to this day.
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Six centuries later the mystical philosopher Plotinus freshened Plato’s imagination by defining soul as subtle gradations of form, angelic through human, that flow as images from the Divine Mind of the Creator. This definition influenced Christian imaginations well into the Middle Ages until Thomas Aquinas reintroduced Aristotelian thought and melded the two. In his imagination, soul is still separate from body (a form that transcends matter). Yet body and soul are intrinsically tied, for it is through body that divine form becomes intelligible.? This Aquinist definition remains strongly influential.
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During this past century psychologists have been re-imagining soul, adding the rich and diverse experiences of living in the world to those of animation, form, consciousness, character, and change. William James defined soul as our center of personal energy: “the hot place in a man’s consciousness, the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works....”? Others have defined it within a more collective context, shifting the emphasis from form to forming: Carl Jung held soul to be our psychic nature, which includes both conscious and unconscious activity “of unimaginable complexity and diversity.... [a] non-spatial universe....” Robert Sardello expands that definition to include the inner nature of the whole world, shifting the emphasis from personal psychic activity to that of interactivity: “...consciousness that ‘sees through’events, both inner and outer, finding a circulation going on between them in which a constant recreation of both the human being and the world takes place.” This definition is more in keeping with the early philosophers, and it implies human responsibility for soul formation.
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Down through the ages in Western cultures, certain imaginations of soul have held constant. All historical and current imaginations encompass the intuition that soul is not the creative principle, itself, but an energy of creation ‘breathed’ into body—an animating principle. The imagination of soul as form has also held, although as different iconic systems such as transcendent images or functioning essences. Whether soul pervades the collective world or resides in particulars, whether it is a dynamic that manifests only in humankind or just differently in humankind, and whether it is a timeless animation or a characteristic of space-time have long been debatable. They remain so. That the term soul has had such moment throughout the ages is a testament to how real it is in our imaginations and how essential it is to our understanding of being. . . .
