What dreams may come

Since I’m the one who brought up the whole discussion of souls and soul-talk, Helena’s question in comments seems fair and excellent and necessary: “Is it too much to ask that Fred whether he thinks the soul survives death, and if so, what happens to it?”

Ay, there’s the rub. It’s a version of a very old question that persists because it remains unanswered for anyone we can hear asking it. It’s a question that tends to reduce me to babbling about Flatland — which makes me sound too much like Matthew McConaughey on True Detective — or to quoting Whitman:

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

But the question here wasn’t about what Rust Cohle thinks, or Edwin Abbott, or Walt Whitman. And it was more specific: “whether … the soul survives death, and if so, what happens to it?”

This is where I think untangling all of the Plato stuff from the non- and anti-Plato stuff in our soul talk is important. If we consider that question through the lens of Plato — or the Neoplatonic lens of Augustine — then it becomes a question about what happens to our immortal, immaterial “soul” after it has shuffled off its mortal coil of the fleshy body it has been inhabiting. That dualistic construct is so pervasively infectious that it colors and changes all of that other, very different, “soul” talk we humans have also attempted for just as long as we’ve contended with and against Plato’s framework.

I want to counter that framework, to inoculate against it, by reasserting what we Christians believe (or try to believe) about the resurrection of the body. Here I think of a surprisingly “Old Testament” biblical passage, Job 19:25-26. I usually cite the careful, modern English translation of the NRSV, but thanks to Handel (and to the soprano I dated in college) I can’t help but quote these verses in the King James Version:

I know that my redeemer liveth, and he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.
And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.

We believe in the resurrection of the body. “This body”? What do we even mean by such a thing? Is “my” body this 47-year-old version of it that is typing these words? This body has, at this moment, the itchy lump of a mosquito-bite just inside its/my right knee and the invisible but large-seeming remains of a pallet-splinter at the base of its/my right index finger. It has/I have coffee stains on the “temporary” caps of the canines a crafty orthodontist repurposed into incisors. (“They could last up to 20 years,” he said, 30-some years ago.) Is all of that part of what we mean by this body? Or are we talking, somehow, of some ideal form of “this body” — and thus reinviting Plato back into the discussion by another door.

And what of the colonies of microbiota that, I am told, my body — this body — hosts as cooperative little subcontractors? They are not part of the substance of this body, but this body could not function without them.

Dozens of other such questions arise, all casting suspicion on Job’s audacious claim. But all of those questions and doubts are secondary to the one certain fact — the answered question that seems to make his claim impossible nonsense.

Here is something we know, with certainty: This body will rot or burn. It will be decomposed and recomposed as food for worms and then food for plants. We can observe and measure and document this. We know what becomes of these bodies — of our bodies, the bodies of the dead young men and women, of old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. This is not a matter of controversy or dispute, but a matter of fact.

And “yet,” Job says, “though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” His affirmation is more concrete and particular than the messy abstraction of Whitman’s “all goes onward and outward.” He is not claiming that, broadly, in some general sense, life will endure. He is saying that he, personally, Job, will survive and endure.

This is where, inevitably, I fall back into that other kind of soul talk. What is it about Job that is Job? We can consider a host of possible terms — mind, consciousness, personality, flesh, spirit, essence, memory, selfhood — but none of those quite works or satisfies. So we leap for or retreat to that word again. His soul.

This is why I would answer Helena’s question affirmatively. Yes. I believe that the soul survives death. I don’t mean that in the Platonic sense of transmigration. I mean, rather, that I think that the soul survives death because I think that the word soul means that ineffable thing that survives death. It is the you-ness of you and the me-ness of me, that essential thing that I believe death does not end.

As for the second part of Helena’s question — “what happens to it?” or, more pointedly, “what happens to us?” — well, that’s where I’m afraid I can offer you little beyond more babble about Flatland and flat circles and other timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly speculation that gets away from me, a bit, yeah.

But the bottom line is that I still believe, or think, or hope, what I said at the conclusion of the post there: The universe is governed by love. You and me and Job and Whitman and McConaughey are loved by a love that does not end with our death. That love will survive, forever. And so too, I believe, must the object of that love — us. Our, for want of a better word, souls.