This past Friday, November 29, marked the anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s birth in 1898. The sixty-first anniversary of his death was one week before that, November 22.
Recurrently appearing on the Internet and social media is a pithy saying attributed to Lewis: “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
As one helpful article shows, Lewis never said this, but the sentiment’s appeal nonetheless remains, as Google searches will reveal. (Etsy sells one version of this declaration as wall art, under Lewis’s name, intended perhaps for Christians, perhaps for trans advocates.) The saying captures a surprising convergence of certain Christian and trans worldviews, both of which prioritize “the soul” even to the point of identifying it with the person. In defense of Lewis, then, and to show the distinctively Catholic vision of the person, we should look carefully at what “soul” and “body” mean in the first place.
Pop culture tends to see “soul” as the place of one’s deepest feelings and truest perceptions. Regardless of what happens to the body as it ages, the soul in this sense does not necessarily change. In loving other people, we should attend more to their feelings and perceptions than to their sheer bodiliness; otherwise, we objectify persons. Losing a limb, likewise, does not mean losing a piece of one’s soul. I remain who I am in my desires, consciousness, and dignity, no matter how my body might get injured. Maybe I really am “my soul.”
Christianity’s texts and traditions can seem to harmonize with such a view. Jesus tells us not to fear the one who can destroy the body. We as Catholics are concerned with the salvation “of souls.” St. Paul laments the war of the flesh against the spirit—and decidedly on behalf of the spirit. In this light, we might conclude that we Christians really ought to identify ourselves with the soul rather than the body. Maybe trans advocates go wrong in flouting the God-given character of the body and its sex, but they are right in seeing the body as distinct from our true self. Maybe we really “are” a soul that “has” a body.
It’s important to realize that the biblical notion of “soul” (nephesh in Hebrew, psyche in Greek) denotes not a center of conscious feeling, but something much more substantial: a living being. It is when God breathes into the dust that the first human comes to be and is nephesh. Even some of the non-human animals in Genesis are referred to as nephesh, or living creatures (though their life is not so immediately tied to God as Adam’s is). The Greek philosopher Aristotle argues that soul (psyche) means much the same thing: it is the life-principle that makes certain bodily things to exist and to be alive. Plants, animals, and humans all possess psyche, or soul, simply because they are alive, though their souls are certainly of distinct kinds.
Thinking of soul as nephesh or psyche leads to two further points. First, we can refer to the whole person as “soul,” just as we could refer to the whole person as a life, a living thing. We use this sort of language: the hero saves many lives. And just as “life” does not exclude, but includes the body, so does “soul” in this view of things. We could say that to speak of soul is to name the human person from the standpoint of its being alive—a standpoint that is difficult to conceive apart from bodiliness.
The second point, closely related, is that soul and body are not distinct things. They are distinct principles of one thing, which is the human person. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (362-368, especially 365) has even adopted Aristotle’s conclusion, refined by Thomas Aquinas, that “soul” is the form of matter: it is that which actualizes matter and structures it into a distinct kind of organism. In non-human animals and plants, the entire organism, form-with-matter, comes from the parents and over time develops through the soul’s agency and the matter’s capacity. In humans, by contrast, form-and-matter are no less united, but whereas the material disposition comes from parents, the soul comes directly from God at the moment of conception.
Either way, soul and body come into existence as one. You cannot have human bodiliness without a human soul, and the human soul is the body’s principle of existence and living. The soul does not come to the body and make it do living things. Rather, the soul, from the initial moment of its creation, makes the body to exist in the first place, forming it over time into a more mature organism.
One piece of evidence of this soul-matter unity is what happens at the end of life. Death is not simply the departure of the soul from the body; it is the destruction of the body. After death, there is no human body in the strict sense, but rather a corpse on its way to complete dissolution. This means that what the soul brought to matter was not just movement or consciousness, but the body’s unity and existence to begin with.
The Catholic view of soul, in other words, goes much deeper than being a source of consciousness or feeling. It is responsible for the body’s existence and therefore, with the body, responsible for the whole person. Only soul-and-body can be the kind of thing that is the human being; only soul-and-body can be conscious, or feel, or perceive at all. To claim that my soul is a separate thing from my body, or that my soul is in the wrong body, is not just wrong, but incoherent in the Catholic vision of humanness.
Further, the human soul is unique among the souls of animals in that it is a spiritual reality, created directly by God as actualizing matter. Because of this spiritual existence, the human soul with its matter structures the person as an image of God, capable of exercising thought and free will. Being spiritual, the soul is incorruptible and will persist even when the body dies, though it does so in an unnatural state and longs for reunion with its matter. Such a view of soul and its relation to bodiliness makes the doctrine of the resurrection of the body so much more meaningful!
It is with this view in mind that we should understand the emphasis placed on the soul in Christ’s words and the Catholic tradition.
We can see now how the words “soul” and “body” are often used problematically, even by Christians. For when we typically think of “the body,” we are thinking of something already living and formed—i.e., something already ensouled. So to speak of “soul and body” is to posit the soul as something gratuitous and separate from the body we know and experience. Our knowing and experiencing thus become “the soul,” which is the precisely what various forms of dualism, Gnosticism, pop psychology, and trans ideology maintain.
It is important that we as Christians do not fall into the same ways of thinking. C.S. Lewis was aware of the danger, as works like The Abolition of Man and Screwtape Letters reveal. In Screwtape Letter VIII, he refers to us as “metaphysical amphibians”: we are one being, but our lives involve two dimensions, the spiritual and the physical.
Let us pray for Lewis’s soul, in thanksgiving for what he did in this life and with hope for his eternal life to come.