Bipartite and Tripartite Anthropology, Appolinaris, and the Soul

This will be a  bit of an odd post because it is first going to be just a primer on the "tripartite" versus "bipartite" anthropology debate in Christian theology and then a description of the complication of the thought of Apollinaris. I am largely going to stay away from a heavy debate on the matter though, although I will side with one position. In the end, the thing I am going to be most critical of is over-emphasis on the language of “parts,” and I will rely on Church conciliar history to support my ability to have an aversion to it. To wrap it all off, I am last going to give three things or images that I think get to understanding some quality of the “soul” (and that is partly to work in these other things that I have had thoughts on over the years but wanted to be able to contextualize them within larger issues).

Soul is really the central element, the central discrepancy in this debate.

To quote Bruce Cockburn:

Won’t somebody tell me

Answer if you can

Won’t somebody tell me

Tell me what is the soul of a man?

Outlining Bip and Trip

So, that is my nickname for them, “Bip and Trip”: Biparite and tripartite anthropology in the Christian theological tradition. In the context of this debate, “anthropology” means what the objective make up of a human person is. The bipartite position says that there are only two “parts” (or substances): body and spirit. The tripartite position says that there are three: body, spirit, and soul.

My personal position is that, if I have to go with one of them, if I have to discuss the human person using “part” language, I go with the bipartite and believe that the “soul” under consideration is a spirit existing in a bodily dimension. How’s that for some “zen,” “mystical” doubletalk? But it’s the best I can do, and I think that the difficulty in formulating such a position is simply evidence of what a mysterious and wonderful thing the soul is … to a certain degree, I think the “tripartite” solution is simply too easy. But, as I said, I’m not going to go into great detail on arguments

Apollinaris's Complication

So, along comes Apollinaris of Laodicea, who died in 390. Although he did help in the fight against Arianism, one of his particular thoughts was later classed as heretical (this is not the same as saying that he himself was a heretic: a heretic is one who defiantly defends their position against the authority of the Church—but if the thought is deemed heresy only after their death, the person very may well have worked very hard to adapt their position to make it obediently orthodox if they had known at the time that it would be problematic). That thought was that there was no human soul in Christ, that the Logos took the place of the human soul.

(This gets complicated because what Apollinaris officially denied was a human “nous,” which is the word for “mind,” and not necessarily a human “psuche,” “soul,” which means the animating life force common to living things … in terms of medieval distinctions between vegetative, sensate, and rational souls, distinctions that are obviously much later than Apollinaris, but I do think analogical enough to be productive here, I understand the situation to be that, as near as we can pin it down when “soul” is such a mysterious thing, the “nous” is the rational “psuche” particular to humans).

The way this complicates the issue is that, in order to say he was wrong, it seems that you have to say that there was a human soul in Christ and that the Logos was not replacing that soul and doing its function of animating the body. It gets very complex.

Basically I think there is a problem with speaking of the soul as a “part” or “substance” in a sense  univocal to that in which we speak of body and spirit as “substance,” which I think Apollinaris wound up doing in trying to say that the Logos, who is pure spirit, could fill in for the human soul. The way this all complicates my thinking is that I have to ask whether the fact that it is error to say that the Logos did not simply replace the human soul preclude my own formulation of the human as a spirit existing in a bodily dimension and whether my position would mean that Christ having a human soul would mean that Christ had two spirits.

I suppose that one answer could be that Apollinarus negated specifically the human rational (and thus any development in knowledge as a human), keeping only the divine rational and having it magically perform the function of the vegetative and sensate soul (and I’m not even sure about the latter), rather than them being performed by the distinctively human rational soul. This would be a bit like Descartes’ “ghost in the machine,” and he was definitely faulted for dualism, but this would take a lot more working out.

I say that IF I have to go with “part” language, I go with bipartite. For one, if the soul is a substance in a sense univocal to that in which body and spirit are, where does it go when you die? It is no longer doing the thing that defines “soul” versus “spirit,” which is to animate a body, and all of the discussions of interim states like purgatory and the blessed in heaven before the eschaton (the final age after the parousia, the second coming) seem to require that it be the spirit that is there, that which has made the moral choices that require purgation before further contact with God or result in joy at further contact. So, on the tripartite position, do both go? And if it was the spirit that made the choices, then it is the spirit that needs to be changed by cleansing, not the soul. I suppose that one could say that while the spirit needs cleansing because of its choices, the soul was still impacted by those choices in such a way that it needs cleansing too, although not as the result of its own choices.

But, as I said, these discussions can get into deep, murky waters very quickly and my goal is not to get too bogged down in a long drawn out debate (any more than I already have). I believe the soul is some“thing” distinct that angelic beings do not have, and even the spirit in a human could not have evolved from animal soul. But I also believe that in some mystical way, the spirit does do the function of the soul in some way unique to humans. And that is about as far as I am willing to go in a post like this.

The Problem of "Parts" Language for the Person:

Scripture and Tradition in Trent and Vatican II

While I don’t want to get bogged down in trying to settle the debate, I do want to give some of the reason, or maybe justification, I find for picking at the “part” language as not sufficient to discuss the human person. And that justification is that the Catholic Church has twice in conciliar history specifically rejected “part” language for discussing the relationship between Scripture and Tradition, which live together in the Church, the body of Christ. It happened at the Council of Trent and at the Second Vatican Council, in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum. The source for that language both times, meaning the place from which it was taken by those suggesting it for Scripture and Tradition at those councils, was a Latin translation of St Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, and from what I have been able to gather, it has been considered a mistranslation at that. The Latin phrase proposed (from the particular translation of Basil’s work) was partem et partem, “into part and into part,” and the proposal was to say that the deposit of faith was materially split and part went into Scripture and part into Tradition.

(Language aside: in partem et partem, the accusatives, marked by the final “m”s, are the “accusative of motion,” for instance, ambulo in via, which uses the ablative case, means “I walk in the road,” like walking down the middle of the street, but ambulo in viam, which uses the accusative case, means “I walk into the road,” meaning I had not been on the roadway before.)

The language was ultimately rejected by both councils for talking about the mystical connection between Scripture and Tradition within the mystical body of Christ, the Church. I take this not necessarily as “evidence” in our crude legalistic mode of arguing in our times, but more as a hint, although I do think that it indicates more solidly (than a hint) that “part” language does not have some sort of intrinsic authority as normative for any and all discussion.

Fire and Soul

So, this is the first of my things that I want to use as an image for soul. And by  soul, here, I mean the animating life force common to all living things. There is a danger of conflating human with subhuman life when doing this, but I also think that, when we don’t examine the commonality, we forget what it means to be incarnate, or even embodied, and we edge towards Gnosticism.

The point on fire involves why I think fire has so captivated the human imagination. Fire is the closest thing that we can see to a soul in that is the most visible thing that acts like a soul. You feed it fuel, and that material is turned into ash, but does not become part of what we visually call the “fire,” which is not changed into a thing that stays around after like the ashes do. The fire seems to do the burning to the fuel, not take the fuel into itself (of course, all of this gets more complicated with the whole discovery of the relation between matter and energy and the fact that we feel the heat energy generated … but I am talking about why the visual image captures our imagination)

An animated body is like this. You feed it fuel and the soul turns the fuel into either part of the body or waste, but not into “soul” itself. The soul does this to the fuel and the body, but not to itself. In itself, it just seems to exist, and almost just by implication as long as the body is animated (when an animal dies, we can’t cut it open and find the soul the way we can find the heart etc … even the Hebrews, who believed that the soul, the nepesh, was in the blood, the dam, would probably not have claimed to be able to perceive it as a separate thing from the blood the way you can see blood mixing into water).

The key place you can notice is in the difference with electricity (and I think this is the reason why many who write in fantasy dealing with magic in a modern context always have there be a conflict between magic and electricity, too much magic around messes up electronics … magic is a very much more “soul-based” idea). You can plug a machine in and it is “animated” when it is on, but the you can unplug it and it is not, but then you can plug it in again and it is on as the same machine it was before. This is obviously not the case with bodies animated by a soul … once you turn them off … they stay off. In a machine you feed the animating force into the machine from an external source like a battery or wall socket, but with a fire and soul, you don’t feed the actual force in, you just feed it fuel (and with electricity, you feed it no actual fuel, just the “animating” force).

And I think fire has captivated us so much because it is visually like this. Even when you strike the match or make the spark with the flint, you can’t pin that actual spark thing down.

I always loved a short story I had to read in college called “The Death of a Travelling Salesman” (not the Arthur Miller play, which is just “Death of a Salesman”), in which the slow, sort of unwitted son who works at the big farm always has to bring fire home with him from the farm to his little shack with his wife. They never start their fire on their own; it has to be transmitted, like life.

Music: Melody, Narrative, and Soul

One of the most mystical things I ever heard about music was said by my father, but not in my hearing. It was related to me later by the two friends to whom he had been talking when he said it. He said, “rhythm appeals to the body, harmony appeals to the mind, and melody appeals to the soul.” What is melody other than the combination of rhythm and harmony, metered movement between consonant notes in a scale? You can have pure rhythm by beating a stick on the ground, and you can have pure harmony in playing a simple chord on a piano. But can you have pure melody? I don’t think you can, but melody is the most distinctive: each melody, each combination, is unique, like souls.

I think that there is an analogical relationship between the human person and music: rhythm is like the body to which it appeals, harmony is like the mind/spirit to which it appeals, and melody is like the soul to which it appeals. And this means that, just as melody is that more precious thing but the one that you cannot find without the other two, so the soul is not locatable without at least body. I don’t think that soul is the combination of body and spirit as melody is the combination of rhythm and harmony, but I do think that it is somehow their meeting place.

I think narrative is the same way as soul and melody. I think the narrative is the soul of literature and is defined by movement, like melody (I have to admit to coming to this last idea somewhat in connection with a discussion with a former grad school prof who, when I said some of what I have been saying above, said that that was actually what he was trying to work on for a book idea, using either melody or narrative, I forget which but I don’t think it was both, as an analogy for the soul rather than relying on metaphysical categories such as “substance” or “part” … I’m not 100%, but I think it was narrative).

Harry Potter and the Invisibility Cloak

There is a lot of stuff about soul in the Harry Potter series (what dementors do, what horcruxes are, etc). In fact, part of my interest in and thoughts on (maybe preoccupation with) this whole debate between bipartite and tripartite anthropology began with, or at least was heightened by, debating whether Harry Potter was bipartite or tripartite anthropology in the days of the Muggle Matters blog. My take on that matter, now as then, is very similar to my take on the larger debate: I think the material transcends those categories, but that does not mean that is has nothing to do with them at all. I think that the Potter material reflects a bip anthropology sometimes and a trip one other times, depending on which suits the literary aims being sought in the passage, literary aims that are not materialist in nature and, so, are not bound to logical consistency according to a material category like “substance.”

But one of the images I always liked in Harry Potter that I think not only is a nice analogy for the soul but also depicts some of the elusiveness of “soul” is the invisibility cloak. It’s clearly cloth, but it flows kind of like liquid. I also think its kind of funky that you can see it when it is not making a living body invisible but not when it is (at least that is the experience we usually get of it in the books … for example, Snape sees it on a dark night laying on the ground before he goes into the tunnel that leads to the shrieking shack near the end of the third book).

Flotsam and Brettsam

(Warning: This kitchen sink is even more messy than those in other posts. This is a complicated issue, and so the fodder stuff is me trying to figure it out, and so it can be kind of jumbled when I am trying to figure out if one formulation makes sense)

Something about Appolinarius actually logically being tripartite? have to have a 3rd category in order to deny it? Orthodox position would only say that if you have a 3rd category of substance called soul, you cannot deny it of Christ,  but still might not require saying its a 3rd category of SUBSTANCE?

Can I do better and show that tripartite's 3rd category actually fits better with Appolinarius?

I take this all to be related to the problem with Descartes’ “ghost in the machine.” The problem there is that Descartes’ “mind” controls the body without any real connection to it. For Apollinaris’s position, I think that issue is that the Logos would be doing something similar. He wanted to talk of Christ’s body as already spiritualized, which would be necessary if the Logos was doing what a soul does.