In our Time  Programme 106
The Soul

Melvyn Bragg : Hello, in "Sailing to Byzantium" WB Yeats wrote, "an aged man is but paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing. For every tatter in its mortal dress. " This week on In Our Time we'll be discussing the soul.  For Plato it was the immortal seat of reason.  For Aristotle it couldbe found in plants and animals,  and was the essence of every being,  but it died when the body died.  For some it's the font of creativity, for some the spark of God in man, for others it's a chimera.  What is the soul made of and where does it live?Is it the key to our individuality as humans and when we die will our souls find paradise or purgatory, rebirth, resurrection or simply annihilation?

With me to discuss the soul are Richard Surabjee, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. Ruth Padell, poet and author of  In and out of the mind: tragic images of self and body , and Martin Palmer theologian and director of the international consultancy on religion, education and culture. 

Martin Palmer, before we unravel them, can you describe what you see as  as the three major and distinct ideas of the soul?

Martin Palmer : Mmmm.  I think there are three, that's slightly simplifying it, to put it mildly, but three core ones.  One is what we call the Vadic view, that comes out of the Rig Vader  and the traditions of India, and that is a reincarnational view that the soul, that the soul essentially is migrating through a series of bodies, gaining experience as it goes, sometimes it slides backwards, sometimes it goes forwards, hence snakes and ladders was actually originally a Hindu game of reincarnation , an interesting thought when you're playing it next with your children, but it was the idea that you were progressing your way slowly, so for example, even a figure such as the Buddha, probably the best known figure in the West in terms of reincarnation, went through countless lives in order to become the Buddha, and so the soul  was something completely separate from the physical.  It simply used the physical to improve or backslide depending on how good a life you were having at the time. 

The second approach is really what we would term the Abrahamic approach, that's the faiths that looked at Abraham as their founder, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and that essentially takes the view that this world is where you're tested. It's rather like sort of school examination day, if you do well then you pass on into paradise or heaven or wherever it is that the tradition says.  And if you fail, then you do- you fail- you are out, and you're down into purgatory or into hell.  Though some of those ideas were not there in original Judaism for instance.  Originally Judaism had no idea what happened to the soul - it kind of wandered off into a rather sort of vague waiting room, and that was...that's the Abrahamic perspective of one life, see how you do here. 

But then, as usual, the Chinese completely mess up any attempt to have a systematic and tidy relationship because they have all those views, but on top of that the concept of immortality in Daoism, whereby the soul is immortal or has the potential to be immortal, but only if you can make the body immortal as well . 
So whereas in both the Vadic and the Abrahamic traditions, the body essentially is something which is inhabited by the soul and the soul then moves on.. In Daoism the tradition is that unless you can make your body immortal, you're soul doesn't survive, which led to some very worrying experiments of trying to transform you body into indestructible elements such as drinking mercury and eating gold and jade which in the pursuit of long life often led to some rather short lives! 
 
Melvyn Bragg : Well that was a wonderful brief panorama, thank you very much.  People who regularly listen to this programme will be amazed that we are this far in and we haven't mentioned the word "Greeks" yet.  (laughter) But looking back to the 8th century BC, before the ideas which you've been discussing were developed.  Before then, what kind of people were thought to have a soul? And looking at Greece as an example of thinking about it?

Martin Palmer :  Well for instance if one reads Homer, the individual was really little more than a plaything of the gods, that dramas were enacted, using human beings as chess pieces to a certain degree. And so fate and freewill were entirely in the hands of the divine.  It was rather like a sort of divine soap opera in which  you were part players . 

Melvyn Bragg : Ruth, Ruth Padell would you agree with that - about Homer?

Ruth Padell : Not entirely, with Homer you've got a  wonderful insight into the disunity of the person, and every person is presented as a sort of chaos of lots of different impulses and the gods do have input into them, so that a god might throw a thought into your soul or into your mind, and you'd do it, but there are other feelings...there are feelings seething away in their as well. 

Melvyn Bragg : But can we look at Homer, can we look at the 8th century BC, can we say there is an idea of soul somewhere in that, there's something which we  can carry on and talk about now?

Ruth Padell :  We can identify with a lot of the ways the person is presented and the centre of the person, and the word sucait(??) which should be probably be put on the table here, which means...which we take to mean "soul", which might come from from the word for "blowing"- so possibly it's the idea a sort of breath,  the breath of life. 

And Homer uses the word sucait(??) partly to mean life, you struggle about your life, meaning you're engaged in mortal combat or that you breathe your sucait(??) out, meaning when you die. So that's one sense Homer's use of sucait(??) and the other one is for the departed souls when you die, these souls like shade - like little images of you as your body, go squeaking off down to Hades and flit around in Hades. So I suppose that is the beginning of the Homer's...the Greek view of soul, after death. 

Melvyn Bragg : Well coming up....we're not on Plato yet, but before him, around the time of Pythagoras, what did they think the soul was made of, and where did it live?

Ruth Padell : Right well, the pre-Socratics were a multiplicity, and they had lots of different ideas.  I mean Heraclitus  for instance thought that soul had...or was made of fire and water or was fire, or the best sort of soul was a fiery soul and if your soul got moist you were sort of rather drunk and childish.  Pythagoras was possibly the first who thought of the soul as something that was purifiable and stainable - I don't know if Richard would agree with that - and you could live....you lived your life...your soul went on through different bodies, and if you purified your soul, then you'd have a better life in the next. 

Melvyn Bragg : We're still talking about something that is very..that has been around for a much longer time, I mean look at Egyptian civilisation, they're burying people with food, they're going on journeys -in the Bronze age, people are in foetal positions with food, there's tubes coming out, they're on their way to somewhere, so something is going on to somewhere. It's sort of gathering force isn't it, there's an idea that people are beginning to think about?

Ruth Padell : Yes, somewhere around 500BC a new concept comes in, in which the soul is suddenly allied to the moral , and also then in certain people like Heraclitus, understanding the knowledge of the soul is related to knowledge of the cosmos  

so that the structure of the world outside is paralleled by the structure of whatever is in you, and you use the metaphors.  Metaphors is something that you have to keep using and thinking about and talking about, so..of understanding the outside in order to understand the inside. 

Melvyn Bragg : Richard Surabjee, would you say...can we settle on Plato now and say what he brought to the table to this? How does he see the soul? Because he begins to put forward a structure and an idea which it seems to me -especially to what Martin said at the beginning -developed into the Abrahamic ideas, and so on.  Can we talk about Plato's notion of he soul?

Richard Surabjee : Yes, yes, Plato came to think that the soul had three parts, not just reason, but also two emotional  parts.  There's the domineering part of the soul, and there's the part of the soul which has lower desires and appetites.  So he thought it was very important to understand all three parts of the soul because all three have to be looked after. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Does he find a location for the soul? Does he find a purpose for it? Does he find a future for it?

Richard Surabjee :  Yes indeed.  He does think that at least some parts of the soul are immortal, at..in one work he says it's only the reason part that's immortal, although the reason part isn't just a calculating computer, it's ..it has the desires and pleasures of learning, and understanding. 

Melvyn Bragg :   What does he mean by immortal, does he mean it comes back, or it goes on or it passes onto to somebody else - what does he mean by immortal?

Richard Surabjee :   He thinks it can live separated from anybody  but he also thinks like Pythagoras - who Ruth mentioned - that it will come back and be reincarnated in different bodies, and he thinks that animals are evolved out of humans because animals are reincarnations of humans who haven't used their reason well In some dialogues, at any rate, he thinks that animals still have reason but it's atrophied, and not being used properly.  He also thinks that plants have souls, but because he connects soul with consciousness, he only justifies this by saying that plants can feel. 

Melvyn Bragg :  How did Aristotle's idea of a soul differ from Plato's?

Richard Surabjee :    Well, I'd like to draw a contrast between Plato and Aristotle, because I think these are two very different traditions that Europe's had to decide between, or try to harmonise somehow.  Aristotle was very different from Plato because he had - as you said - a biological concept of the soul, so that even plants had soul, but not for Plato's reason, not because plants were conscious but because, for Aristotle soul was the set of capacities that manifest life. 

Now some of those capacities are the capacities for consciousness, for thought, perception, desire, but plants only have the capacity to use food to maintain a certain structure and to pass onto their offspring, that same structure, which doesn't involve consciousness at all, and so he has a concept of the soul which doesn't involve consciousness.  He extends it to plants, but not in order to make plants conscious, and that is a huge difference, and another huge difference is that the soul is so connected with the body, that it perishes when we die. 

And I think the last thing to say about Aristotle is that he thinks that animals have souls alright, no Greeks denied that, but they don't have the rational soul in his view, and that's the big difference between humans and animals. So now there's an enormous contrast with Plato, and forever afterwards, Western thought has to decide how it's going to accommodate two such very different views. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Martin Palmer, you said that around the turn of the millennium, a few hundred years around the dawn of the first millennium, a big shift took place in the understanding of the soul in many parts of the world, and you associate that very much with social upheavals, particularly to do with savage massacres and so on. 

Martin Palmer : Very much so, I mean what you have both in the Middle East and in China, and to a certain degree also in India, with the experience of Ashoka - the emperor there, is that an existing system, whereby your place within the cosmos - and I think Ruth's point about the emerging idea of a "self" is intimately linked into a thoroughgoing cosmology -because then you have to work out where you are within this entire space - it's going back to Jung's Freud, that we have to have a series of beliefs, otherwise we'd be crushed by the sheer awful-ness of the universe, and once you begin to explore the universe as a cosmological reality and spiritual reality, you have to have a structure that keeps you sane basically. And essentially the old covenants - the old traditions, whereby the king or the emperor or the pharaoh or the leader of the war band was your representative to the gods and deal had been struck whereby basically the harvests would come in and the young would be okay and wars would go moderately well, breaks down dramatically with a series of cataclysmic events.  

In China it's the coming of the first Emperor around 221 BC, who seeks to wipe out all books, all knowledge of everything that had existed before, with two exceptions, one book on agriculture and one book on divination, all history books, all philosophy books are burnt and destroyed.  Scholars are buried alive, and he just breaks the whole country.  A similar experience happens for Judaism in that they rise up round about 165 BC against the Greeks...Greek empire, and terrible massacres take place, when the Greeks having done good comparative religion decide to strike on the Sabbath, and massacre the Jews on Sabbath when they cannot raise a sword to defend themselves and the question comes up "What on Earth is going on?", you know "if we're observing the laws, but we're being killed because we're observe the laws then what's happening?".  And in India, you have Ashoka with this terrible experience, a great war leader and he wins a battle at such costs, and he walks over the battle field and sees the thousands of dead and his basic understanding of a covenant if you like between him and the gods breaks down, this happens time and time again, so what emerges from that is a sense that we can no longer rely on our leader, emperor, king whatever it is, to be our mediator with the divine. 

We now have to establish our own system of mediation.  So in China after the experience of the first emperor, you get the rise of a huge number of divination books, that offer the possibility of some kind of discourse with the divine, and in Judaism you begin to get the idea that if you die righteously here, you will actually live afterwards in a better place, which is a new idea for Judaism at that time. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Ruth Padell, does Greek tragedy come on this, does that demonstrate the individuality that Martin was talking about....moving towards?

Ruth Padell : I think there's a bit too much historical causality around here for me, and I think that the things happening in the Greek world, when Greek tragedy started which is about in the 470s BC and Athenian tragedy, because it was at Athens that tragedy was developed, is exploring inherited ideas of divinity, some of the sort of scepticism that people were voicing, about whether our ideas of the gods were right or even pious. Or maybe all ideas of the gods were projections of how we saw ourselves.  

But they're also exploring their ideas of the person, and of society, and you can also talk about it as the soul sort of looking out with eyes, the soul perceiving something, the soul is the thing that is within you which can be illumined, whether by a revelation or a glimpse of the divine or glimpse of something happening in the world. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Before we move away from the Greeks, because there's quite a long way to go, but we're never going there, never mind, it's good along the way! Richard Surabjee, Socrates friends were concerned to what would happen to his "individuality" after his death, how did Plotinus and other followers of Plato approach the question of whether individuality would survive?

Richard Surabjee : Well Plato created something of a problem because although Socrates assures his friends that as he  puts it "I" will survive, when Plato says - as he does in many places -that "the true self is reason" -he makes the true self sound a bit impersonal.  This was a  problem for the neo-Platonists.  The neo-Platonists started  600 years after Plato, and 250AD and Plotinus really wrestles with this.  He feels in one way it would be better if we - after death - became disembodied, pure reason, all thinking the same thoughts, but then how would we be distinct from each other, how would we have individuality?And the best compromise he can hit on is the analogy of a theorem in a mathematical system.  Each theorem is  a distinct individual theorem, and yet no theorem can be understood except as part of the whole mathematical system. That's the analogy he keeps coming back to .  So it's a sort of very unstable compromise.  

And what happened, was that, after him, different interpreters who'd read Plotinus, and other neo-Platonists texts went one way or the other.  So that there's one, not so well known but very important late neo-Platonist whose name is Thermistious  in the 4th century AD who plumps for "No-humans have individual intellects"and then very famously there's a great Arabic philosopher round 1200AD Averrois in the Latin version of his name, who says "No-human being's don't have individual intellects, there's just this one human intellect"and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, had to see whether Aristotle could be accommodated to Christianity, and so he was thoroughly cheered up by reading Thermistious, and he said "There you are you see, the Aristotelian tradition allows us to think that human beings have individual intellects, which can be disembodied, can be immortal, so Aristotle is compatible with Christianity on this, we can look forward to our intellectual parts of ourselves at any rate, having individual immortality". 

Melvyn Bragg :   Well you did a hell of a hop, skip and a jump there Richard, you went over - a quick a calculation - about 1700 years, very, very eloquently....

Richard Surabjee : It's true!

Melvyn Bragg :  No, it was great! Just tug us back a little bit. 

Richard Surabjee :  Yes. 

Melvyn Bragg :   Martin you've argued that Christianity offers a particular intimate relationship with God   You call it a negotiated relationship with God. And Augustine brought in an idea that there was a moral aspect to the soul. 

Now most people, many people, most people I guess listening to this programme will think of the soul in terms of Christianity , that there is a Christian soul. Now can you tell us how the Christian soul , this moral agent, which was yet connected with the body, came into being, when it came into being, what it took from the Greeks, what it got from elsewhere if it did...sorry about this! But could you do that?

Martin Palmer : In one minute is it..now I get a minute and a half....

Melvyn Bragg :   No we can devote the rest of the programme to this, there's quite....it's three times longer than an article in the observer, you've got bags of time away you go! (laughter)

Martin Palmer :  Well I think I would go back to I think what happens with the emergence of Judaism as a missionary faith and then Christianity as a missionary faith, which is a new phenomena, and bear in mind that the Greeks never actually sent out teams of missionaries to explicitly convert other people. No more than did the druids of Britain or the priests of Jupiter of Rome.  The traditions that we've been talking about are in a sense essentially indigenous traditions that made sense of gathered wisdom over centuries. What happens with the emergence of the missionary religions which begins with Buddhism, in the 3rd century BC and gathers steam is that you begin to get world religions that say "actually what we have to say is true for everybody ". 

But in order to make that statement and move into cultures that had previous experience of being prostheletised at all, they had to find some way of finding phrases,  terms that they could latch onto.  So you have an extremely fundamental shift in the way that religion operates with the coming of the missionary faiths, because they're now saying that what we are teaching isn't just true for our tribe, our clan, our family - it is universally true, and this is where you begin to get the concept of the relationship between a soul, the divine and morality. Because you are actually arguing for the first time that our system, our beliefs, our relationship with God, is more intimate, more profound, more workable, more magical than any other. 

You've got that wonderful story that Beade tells, when the first Christian missionaries come to the kingdom of Northumbria in 627 and one of the thains is asked for his advice as to whether they should listen to this religion and he says"My lord, our life is like that of a sparrow that flies into your great hall from the Winter storm and for a brief period is warm, the smell, the sounds of your great hall is comforting and then it flies out at the other end, we don't know where it came from, we don't know where it goes, that's how deep our understanding is of the soul at the moment" so if this lot - meaning the Christians  can shed some more light on this, well why don't we listen?

So  what you have in a sense - and I do go a lot for the historical causality here - I think Ruth is... you have a growth of religions that are actually trying to argue that what they are teaching is actually better than what went before. And so you get the relationship between a personal relationship with the divine with a certain guarantee of afterlife and a morality code by which you can judge whether you've actually set the target the faith sets. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Well I think you did what you said you couldn't do! (laughter) You did that very well! Can you bring that Ruth Padell,  can you bring what Martin's been saying further towards the idea of the soul claiming for itself a moral dimension and being associated with the self - with individuality, which..that was going on at the same time, can you just give us something on that?

Ruth Padell : Yes I mean it does go back to ...there are Greek...big Greek ingredients aren't there in the Christian thing....

Richard Surabjee : Oh absolutely. 

Ruth Padell :  ...particularly from Plato, the sense that you are respons...even in Pythagoras, you are responsible for your soul, it's the part of you that you can, you know that you can do something about, as we'd go the gym and workout, you have to sort of purify ..workout your soul as well, and there is a moral imperative there and that was the part that went into as it were Renaissance Christianity, so that I think somebody like Montaigne when..they were tugged to and fro between Plato's idea that the soul is immaterial and immortal and it goes on, it's the part of you that goes on after death versus the Christian idea that you have the resurrection of the body, so some Christians are sort of washed over with Platonism and begin to think that the soul is immortal apart from the body. 

Melvyn Bragg :   Martin I'm sorry to lob a big one at you again, but here it goes, you're sitting there quite able to field these.  The idea of dual...the idea of their being a soul and a body, and Descartes was credited with that concept of dualism. Where did he think the soul was and why do you think he's been the subject of so much criticism Descartes?

Martin Palmer : I think what Descartes does is he that he takes an existing tension within Christianity and particularly - and I think Ruth's point about the re-emergence of Greek philosophy at the time of the Renaissance is enormously important - because what you get at the time of the Renaissance is a shift from a sense that I am in community therefore I am, which is essentially what the Catholic church proposes, here is a priest, here is a community, if you're baptised into this community, in a sense you're on the conveyor belt to somewhere. And it's up to you as to whether it's up or down in terms of the afterlife, to a relationship in which you are...you stand before God on your own terms, which is essentially the heart of the reformation. And what is emerging there is a real grappling with the fact that yet again a covenant arrangement has broken down - the Catholic church is no longer offering you all the answers, you're having to negotiate your own way, and Descartestakes that and actually elevates the concept of the individuality of each person to such a degree that he forces apart the old covenant whereby "I'm in community therefore I am" to "I think therefore I am".  It becomes a solely - I use that word carefully - a solely personal adventure - and that is where religion begins to have problems with him, because essentially he demolishes in one fell swoop, the need for institutions of religion. 

Melvyn Bragg : Ruth Padell, do you think that DNA brings a different area of thought to bear on all this?

Ruth Padell : It should do.  I mean if you're thinking of the soul as the  kernel, as the sort of atomic centre of each person or each  individual body and soul, the you're looking for it in the sort of most hidden secret crevices. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Richard Surabjee, I understand that you've said that you think the soul is now been replaced by the idea of the "self" - what do you mean by that?

Richard Surabjee : People are a bit reluctant to speak in terms of soul these days because they're not very sure that they can identify what it actually is, especially in the light of Descartes, could I say a word about Descartes first?

Melvyn Bragg :  I don't know whether you can, actually. 

Richard Surabjee : You don't know whether I can, okay. 

Melvyn Bragg :  I'm looking at that clock....

Richard Surabjee :  No, alright. 

Melvyn Bragg :  ...and there's that remorseless red hand ticking our immortality...

Richard Surabjee :  Descartes made this very strong distinction between soul and body and if it's terribly distinct from the body and yet a subject that carries mental characteristics people are not sure that there is such a thing .  But they ought to recognise that there is such a thing as self . They don't all do so I'm afraid, but I believe that with infant psychology you see you've got to think in terms of a concept like "me".  The infants not going to survive it's first years if it doesn't see the world in terms of this is within my reach, my mother's not looking at what I'm looking at, I've go back to where I was before. You've got to see the world in terms of "me", and so these questions that have worried people "Could the soul go on after death?" can now be put in terms of "Could I go on after death?".  So it's still a very sensible question. 

Melvyn Bragg : Well, thankyou very much Martin Palmer, thankyou Ruth Padell, and thankyou Richard Surabjee and thankyou very much for listening.