Soul and Spirit

[Charlie Zeaiter]

My understanding is as follows...
* the soul is the life principle in a body
* a spirit is a partless being that knows and loves
* plants have a soul... but not a spirit
* for human beings, the soul is the spirit

What about animals; Do they have soul and/or a spirit? Or, like us, is their souls also their spirit?

[1ke]

plants and animals have material souls.

people have spiritual souls.

[Aelred Minor]

Originally Posted by 1ke

plants and animals have material souls.

people have spiritual souls.

Here's another way to put it. Plants and non-human animals have souls that are not spirits. Humans have souls that are spirits. Angels are spirits that are not souls.

Edit: To put it yet another way, the forms of plants or non-human animals do not have existence beyond the physical matter of those bodies. The forms of human bodies do have existence beyond the physical matter of those bodies. Angels are forms that have existence, but they are not forms of physical bodies.

[po18guy]

I have heard Catholic apologists describe the three types of souls as:

1. Vegetative, i.e. plants (and possibly couch potatoes )
2. Sensitive, i.e. animals
3. Rational, i.e. mankind.

However, the Catechism does not see a "duality" between sprit and soul - note CCC367:

362 The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that "then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.

363 In Sacred Scripture the term "soul" often refers to human life or the entire human person. But "soul" also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God's image: "soul" signifies the spiritual principle in man.

364 The human body shares in the dignity of "the image of God": it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit:

Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.

365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.

366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.

367 Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people "wholly", with "spirit and soul and body" kept sound and blameless at the Lord's coming. The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul. "Spirit" signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God.

[purplesunshine]

I have heard

1)spiritual-requiring no body eg. Angles
2)rational-requiring a body for ensoulment but able to make decisions eg. Human
3)material- requiring a body and reacting to sensitory input but dies with the body eg. Animal
4)animated-the acting agent of cellular plant and bacterial growth. Eg. Its alive but not animal. The viability of this spirit is most facinating in its reproduction and longevity.

[empther]

St. Thomas Aquinas said the soul has intellect and will. Both of these facullties are immortal in that nothing can destroy them, except God, but God has said through Biblical Revelation that he won't.

To some extent the will leads the intellect, because the will does in part guide the intellect to what it will learn. In another aspect, the intellect leads the will in that we cannot will what we don't know. The interaction of the intellect and will leads to the development, or destruction, of conscience.
Conscience is knowledge of what is good to do, and either approval, or denial of it. Through following a 'good' conscience man is saved. But man can also develop a 'bad' conscience, he denies what is the right thing to do. Such a man does not follow his conscience.

Plato said the soul has three faculties:
animal appetites, the need for food etc
passionate will, desire for this that and the other thing not all of which are necessary for life
reason, knowledge of what things really are.

Plato's formula doesn't agree with out modern idea of the soul. The animal appetites are material, not spiritual, We share them with the dumb animals.
The passionate will more or less agrees with our idea of will except it seems Plato's will is mindless.
Plato's "reason" seems to include will, for the good or the bad, because he emphasized the importantance of having the reason control out lives. Plato seemed to think that if we were only educated enough we would be good people. This ignores the fact some highly intelligent men can 'will' to do evil. and the bad angels who were far more intelligent than Einstein chose evil out of pride.

Plato's 'reason' and our idea of the interaction of intellect and will point to the soul as having a spiritual substance.
Animals have their nervous systems hard-wired to behave in specific ways appropriate to their lifestyles. This hard-wiring was developed through milllions of years of evolution.
But man is not 'hard-wired' to a set number of behaviors. He seems able to understand an infinite number of concepts, most of which have nothing to do with survival, and this cannot be the result of evolution. Nor could thought that depended only on a brain be capable of all these thoughts. Nor could a biological materialistic memory instantly record every detail of a movie so that after seeing one we can recognize every scene and the relationship to all other scenes.
The soul is spiritual.

[po18guy]

Originally Posted by empther

St. Thomas Aquinas said the soul has intellect and will. Both of these facullties are immortal in that nothing can destroy them, except God, but God has said through Biblical Revelation that he won't.

This agrees entirely with revelation regarding the spirits (i.e. angels as a type of spirit) - those in heaven, here on earth, as well as in hell. They have both intellect and will, but lack bodies. Our human souls are no different, save that we consist of body and soul forming a single human nature. There is much argument over any distinction between soul and spirit, stemming from the written distinction between the two in scripture.

[Doxiemom]

While in the English language we speak of the soul and spirit as an interchangable term I think that it is eady to look at the human body as triune( funny how God loves to repeat patterns)

#1 the body: our physical being, wrought with needs and lusts, capable of giving new life

#2 the soul: read the word "concience" here..........the battle ground where Satan tries to lure you to sin, where and why you decide to do what you do, or, why you don't ( the things i have done and the things I have failed to do sound familair...........take care of concience for it effects your body and where your eternity is spent

#3the spirit: our eternal being. There was a time when each of us was not, but there will never be a time when we will not be

your spirit departs from the body upon death. It is reunited with the body at some point. Now the 'soul",whether you call it purgatory or the Judgement Seat of Christ, it will be purged, for it contains the acts of the body. The unworthy things are burned away( thankfully) and the worthy things are made all the more pure.

[thistle]

Originally Posted by purplesunshine

I have heard

1)spiritual-requiring no body eg. Angles
2)rational-requiring a body for ensoulment but able to make decisions eg. Human
3)material- requiring a body and reacting to sensitory input but dies with the body eg. Animal
4)animated-the acting agent of cellular plant and bacterial growth. Eg. Its alive but not animal. The viability of this spirit is most facinating in its reproduction and longevity.

Are they acute or right angles??

[Aelred Minor]

Originally Posted by thistle

Are they acute or right angles??

The good ones are right, the bad ones are obtuse.