Since the dawn of man, humans have always wanted to seek out the truth. Man has pondered and explored great thoughts and concepts that have caused much confusion. Perhaps the one question that has plagued man the most is what exactly is a soul. During the Roman Era, people believed in many gods, spirits, and life after death. As time progressed, different religious beliefs arose, and new sects of faith were established. The belief in one God replaced the belief in many gods and the belief of one's soul transforming into the after life was established. God was known as a Supreme Being, who gave his creations a soul and free will. But what does this mean? The problem of what exactly one's soul is has been a battle between people throughout time. Although this struggle caused people to abandon their beliefs, great authors like Augustine and Hildegard stuck to their visions and ideas in order to put faith back into our community.
Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias offers a convincing definition for the essence of a soul. First off, when people think of Hildegard they think of her visions. Visions that she conjured, to some, might not hold as much credence as science. But were they actually visions? What more is a vision than thoughts in your mind? Her visions are intellectual, valid thoughts; parables told to relate to our everyday lives. Her visions were much more meaningful and powerful than the laws of physics. Hildegard states," The will performs each work, weather it is good or evil" (Vision Four: 20, pg 33). Not only is our will in control of our own actions but the entire body. The will is in charge of everything; it even has power over the soul. "The will is in other powers of the soul.... the will supports the heart and the so...
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...that the soul makes a person alive and states, " The soul makes a person alive, and it is glorified by the person's sense of sight..." (Vision Four: 24, pg. 36).
Hildegard and Augustine represent God in two totally different spectrums of life. Augustine looks at his own process of returning to God and wants to inspire others to actively seek this return. Augustine's Confessions takes the highly original form of a direct address to God from one being in his creation. Hildegard's Scivias addresses the role of blind faith. In her explanation of God, we come to see God's true essence; a kind, loving being and not a part of our imagination. Thanks to these great authors, people have placed their faith back into the church. We understand that the relationship between our souls and free will is one that we must learn to appreciate so we can peacefully live our lives.
Is there such a thing as a soul? And if so, how does it survive outside of a physical body?
In the reading by Richard Swinburne, he evaluates the mortality of the soul and its interaction with the human body. His position is best described as attributing the soul to a light bulb, and the brain to a functioning socket:
might reply to this by saying that the soul is so closely united to the body that it can derive the energy
spirit and the capability of it reaching the "Over Soul". The "Over Soul" is the so-called state in
A soul has always been thought of as that part of us that makes a human, a human. We believe that if we are good we will go to heaven and if we are bad we will go to hell, at least, that 's what the Christian religion is that I was raised as growing up. But I had always wondered if that was it and there was more to it than that. I was right, getting information from BuddhaSasana, and an article was written titled "Is there an Eternal soul?". The article goes on to explain that apparently we humans don 't have a soul and we are not born with one and no God has ever created one. What we call our personality and ourselves is technically our soul. A very interesting metaphor that is used in this article was
defining souls as distinct from bodies and minds that do not communicate through the channel of logic with evil but with evol. The 3rd order good of free will, I argue, is dualistic to the 3rd order evol of death. Death is an evol that the soul communicates healthy with the soul and unhealthy with the mind-body. Think about the time you lost a love one and questioned god, or your higher power, from an intellectual standpoint? You may have asked, why did god take your loved one? Logically god wont respond to you cries, for many have proclaimed that god, or your higher power, does not communicate with everyone in the same manner, and that manner does not involve immediate reciprocity.
Through the course of these last few weeks, we as a class have discussed the Soul, both in concept, and as it applies in terms of our readings of The Phaedo and as a philosophical construct. But the questions involved in that: In the ideas of good, of living a ‘good’ life and getting ‘rid of the body and of their wickedness’, as ‘there is no escape from evil’, (Phaedo, 107c), in whether or not the soul is immortal, or if our bodies themselves get in the way of some higher form of knowledge, or even of the importance of philosophy itself are rather complex, simultaneously broad and specific, and more than a little messy. While I discuss these aspects, the singular question that I feel applies to this is, in a sort of nihilistic fashion, does
Accordingly, the model would be that a human person is a multi-level being in which there is a kind of ultra-powerful transcendental unity of both apprehension and life and that body is a real but lower appearance and effect of Unity. That Unity used to be called "soul".
of life, when we die we don't have souls, were empty, that is the end,
...erstand the nature of the soul are, as Epicurus says "incomparably stronger than other men" (Letter to Herodotus 83), since they will be able to understand and set aside their fears and worries about themselves after death.
A common thread of faith and reason runs through the two different theological visions of St. Augustine in his Confessions. This can be seen by comparing the ascent, the vision, the descent, and language in the two visions. Although other parts of the text will be referred to, the central part of these visions are as follows:Vision 1: "...
Throughout the evolution of philosophic thought, there have been many different views on the relationship of mind and body. The great philosopher Plato and the Neoplatonists held the belief that man's body is merely a prison of his soul, but St. Augustine later refutes this with his idea of the disembodied soul. He distinguishes between the concept of the physical form and the spiritual soul, and he argues that humankind can be redeemed because of the God spirit contained in the intellectual soul. This intellectual soul is not an inseparable part of the body, as St. Thomas Aquinas postulates. Instead, this soul is indeed the higher part of man, the state and well-being of man depends upon its stability.
We should not focus on pleasures of the body and only fulfill those that are necessary to live. The soul’s only desire is wisdom, which can only be achieved through the intellect and not through the deceitful senses. This can be illustrated by the fact that the true form of things such as justice, beauty and goodness can never be perceived through the senses. However, we are born with some sort of sense of what these things are, therefore there must be an ideal form which the things in the emperical world are somewhat equal to. Since the mind already has a sense of these forms when its born, the soul needs to be immortal. (102-104,
The soul can be defined as a perennial enigma that one may never understand. But many people rose to the challenge of effectively explaining just what the soul is about, along with outlining its desires. Three of these people are Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. Even though all three had distinctive views, the similarities between their views are strikingly vivid. The soul indeed is an enigma to mankind and the only rational explanation of its being is yet to come and may never arrive.
What makes us human? What underlying characteristic differentiates humans from animals or Gods? Where does the essence of humanity lie?