Become Like the Angels

4. Higher Soul

[79] Chapter 4 Higher Soul Having examined Origen’s understanding of the “two souls” doctrine and his conviction that a “hierarchical” relationship between a higher and lower soul could make sense of moral struggle, further study must be carried out as to Origen’s conception of the “higher soul.” After an examination of the “higher soul” in Plato and the Middle Platonic schools, Origen’s own view of the soul will be presented. While Origen accepts the Platonic identification of the higher soul with “mind” or rationality, he enriches this concept by associating the mind with the divine Logos incarnated in Christ (Jn 1:18), along with the biblical concepts of the “heart” and the “image of God.” These associations allow Origen to incorporate the rational functions of the Platonic mind into the broader schema of the Christian moral and spiritual life, whereby the higher soul finds itself in an ontic and dynamic relationship with the Triune God. Plato and the Higher Soul Plato followed Socrates in identifying the higher soul with the human intellect, although he added to this certain qualities of transcendence and immortality. “The crucial step,” E.R.Dodds says of Plato’s doctrine of the soul, “lay in the identification of the detachable ‘occult’ self which is the carrier of guilt-feelings and potentially divine with the rational Socratic psychē whose virtue is a kind [80] the Two Souls of knowledge.”1 The “occult” self, according to Dodds, was derived from the magico-religious ideas of the northern shamanistic culture, which Plato transposed onto the plane of rational argument. Yet the essential pattern of the “occult” self, or daemon, remains vivid in Plato ’s imagination: innate divinity, perfect simplicity, detachment from the body through contemplation, reincarnation, and immortality.2 In the thought of Plato this “occult” self is merged with the Socratic self—the psychē, the self-sufficient principle of intellect and life—which alone is capable of virtue and happiness. The self for Plato is not bare rationality, since for Plato even the gods were more than that,3 but it is clear that the higher or inner self of Plato is first and foremost the cognitive and moral agent, seen as distinct from the body. Perception, thought, emotions, and imagination round out the Socratic intellect, which alone serves as the subject of the “care of the soul” so central to Socrates’s moral philosophy.4 To this resulting “self”—the transcendent, rational soul—a second, mortal “self” is added, together with its irrational impulses. These “selves” seem to represent “Plato’s vision of man as he might be and his estimate of man as he is.”5 But the higher, rational self that represents man’s original nature, now “buried” in the mortal part (just as the sea-god Glaucus is buried in barnacles),6 remains as an “inner man” that must now struggle to maintain governance over the whole. In the seemingly metaphoric language of the soul’s three parts, Plato attempts to underscore the extent to which the soul’s true nature must now compete with the lower appetites in the contest to define the human person. Man’s true nature, or the highest part of his soul, is defined largely by mentally subtracting from the person all that is bodily, 1. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 210. 2. Ibid., 209–14. 3. In the Timaeus God (defined as Nous, or Supreme Mind) has properly ordered desires and may even be tripartite. Cf. 29e, 39c. 4. Cf. T.M.Robinson, “The Defining Features of Mind-Body Dualism in Plato,” 37–39. 5. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 214. 6. Republic, 611e. [81] Higher Soul sensible, or passionate. This procedure leaves primarily the intellectual element, in addition to the faculties of perception, imagination , memory, and the capacity for moral decision and reasoned action . This element—the logistikon—represents the original nature of man, which remains hidden until it emerges from its entrapment in the body, when once again it may rest in the contemplation of the eternal Forms. Until then it remains in the body but not of the body: it is condemned to the task of maintaining and governing the body’s movements for a time, while it pines interiorly for freedom. The Middle Platonists and the Higher Soul In the Middle Platonic schools most of these same, familiar themes recur: the divinity of the higher soul, its...