I never thought of it this way before. I think liberalism comes from (or properly exploits) the confusion between morality and fairness. It is a form of not thinking that insists that there is nothing better than anything else, thus success is proof of cheating and failure is proof of victimization. Furthermore, there is a big difference between schooling and education. See this great article: Against School, by John Taylor Gatto: http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

Seraphim Slobodskoy: “God gave us intelligence, free will and an immortal soul, so that knowing God and becoming like Him, we would all become better, perfect ourselves, and inherit eternal blessed life with God.” “Belief in God is the fundamental essence of a person’s soul. The soul is given to man from God. It is a spark in man and a reflection of God in man. Originating in God, having a kindred being in Him, the soul by itself, according to its own will, turns to God, seeks Him.”

· From this we learn that the soul is distinct from intelligence and free will. The soul is fundamentally or essentially “Belief in God.” Does this mean that the soul equals faith?
· What is an essence? In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity.
· Fr Seraphim continues to write that the soul originates in God and has it’s own will. Is this soul-will distinct from the free will already distinguished from soul at first?

Blessed Augustine: The soul is “a special substance, endowed with reason, adapted to rule the body”.

· What is a substance? Entymologicaly, “substance” means what stands beneath.
· Substance is a philosophical abstraction referring to an invisible reality more-real-than-just-this that manifests the just-this-world and thus stands behind it or under it. Or it refers to an all-purpose quality-less stuff-ness to which certain qualities are attached and called accidents. The substance is the One and thus essential. The particularities of the Many are simply accidental.
· Locke theorized that when all sensible properties where abstracted away from an object, such as its color, weight, density or taste, there would still be something left that the properties had adhered to—something which allowed the object to exist independently of the sensible properties that it manifested in the beholder. Locke saw this ontological ingredient as necessary if we are to be able to consider objects as existing independently of our own minds.
· In both cases, substance denies the world of mere appearances in favor of an invisible prototype in the sky worldview which is antithetical to Orthodox Christianity.
· If the soul is a substance, then what just-this or mere-appearance is it standing beneath?

Orthodox Apologist Richard Swinburne: “It is a frequent criticism of substance dualism that dualists cannot say what souls are…. Souls are immaterial subjects of mental properties. They have sensations and thoughts, desires and beliefs, and perform intentional actions. Souls are essential parts of human beings…”

· Substance dualism is the view that the universe contains two fundamental types of entity: mental and physical. Those who view themselves as immaterial minds housed in physical bodies are thus substance dualists. This kind of dualism holds that each of us has an immaterial mind or soul that exists in a non-physical realm and that the mental is thus irreducible, that it cannot be fully explained in terms of purely material phenomenon such as memory and brain states. Is Mr Swinburne urging us to adopt this philosophy?
· To say that the soul is a subject seems as though the soul is the real person. But I feel the more hebraic idea is that a “living soul” is dust plus breath. God formed man from the dust and breathed into him and the man became a “living soul.” Souls are not embodied. They dust that breaths with the breath of God. Likewise Orthodox theology says that neither the soul alone nor the body alone is the person. I think you have done an amazing job of explicating the person but I still don’t know what a soul is.
· Something that is “immaterial” is what philosophers call an abstract entity. It is something such as the cosine function or the law of non-contradiction. These entities are abstract because it makes no sense to ask “where in the universe is the cosine function?” In other words, they are immaterial and do not occupy a volume or determinate position in space. Yet they can be clearly demonstrated to exist by arguing from the impossibility of the contrary. For instance, the law of non-contradiction is not simply a social convention but rather a universal and invariable (unchanging) abstract entity because there never has been and never will be a culture that finds it acceptable for a person to say, “It is true that my car is in the parking lot and it is also not true that my car is in the parking lot in the same way and at the same time.” Are we meant to understand from this that Mr Swinburne believes that the soul is an abstract entity such as the cosine function?
· If, like other abstract entities, the soul is not extended in space and thus does not occupy a determinate position in space or time does that mean that the cosine function, the law of non-contradiction, and the soul are uncircumscribed and therefore omnipresent? Furthermore, in what way can we describe objective reality to something that cannot be measured or observed in any meaningful way?
· In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity. This is based on the philosophical idea of Objectivity. Objectivity is the idea that the mind, as subject, can arrive at knowledge about objects from an isolated non-dependent fixed frame of reference that does not interfere or effect what is being observed and likewise protects the observer from what is being observed. It is a zero sum game, nothing ends up changed. This means that the world is separated into subjects, independent knowing minds un-effected by the world, and objects or things capable of being known but unaffected by the person doing the knowing. Could either thing, subject or object, really be true if it was so alien and removed from our ordinary immediate sense experience. It only makes sense if one abstracts the world of our experience into intellectual categories and then absolutized these categories as a kind of “reality more real than just this.” This profound separation of subject (independent knowing mind) and object (things capable of being known) causes a dis-integration of life as a whole integrated multiplicity of undivided and interpenetrating processes that the person is also apart of.
· Saying the soul is a subject of mental properties seems to imply that the soul is simply an emerging intelligence arising out of purely physical or material phenomenon such as memory and brain states. Mental properties = memory and brain states.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church: The soul is “the innermost aspect of humans, that which is of greatest value in them, that by which they are most especially in God’s image: ’soul’ signifies the spiritual principle in humans.”

· What is an “innermost aspect” and does this imply and inner / outer dualism?

I hope that helps to explain my hang ups and please do not judge all Orthodox Christians by my own impertinence and foolishness. I am an exception. I got your book from the library and after discovering it was the best book I had read in five years I bought it right away! I will take me years to absorb its encyclopedic breadth. My other favorite Christian writer is Margaret Barker. Have you read any of her books?

As an Orthodox Christian, my experience of salvation is both personal and sacramental. Our liturgy speaks very infrequently about souls so in the Divine Services and the Holy Eucharist I seldom, and probably never, think about the “attitude” or “health” of my soul. I try to be conscious of, or brought into deeper awareness through the words of prayers, of the liturgical / sacramental action that we are together entering into and saying. Even our private prayers before communion are not legalistic or magical, but serve to bring to consciousness the awesomeness of what the Eucharist is, recapitulation of the Edenic Priestly Vocation of mankind to unite the whole cosmos in a single hymn of Great Thanksgiving through being united to Christ and his once for all sacrifice on the Life Giving Cross and thus to become one with God as he enters into our bodies.

That said these are the two places I remember reference to the soul. At the beginning of the Litany the priest says, “Let us say with our whole soul and with all our mind, let us say.” and the people say, “Lord, have mercy.” During the privet prayers before communion we often ask the Lord to come under the roof of our soul even though our house is broken down and defiled. What the mind, heart, soul, spirit, and nous are is very unclear to me. Though I believe that these prayers teach me the the soul is something with which I pray and where God come to dwell in the act of Holy Communion.

So I was reading a catechetical book with my wife and the question of the difference between the soul and spirit came up with reference to the fact that the words are used interchangeably by spiritual writers. I stayed up for three more hours reading many books on the subject. The best description I found was in Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church under the word “nous” in the index. I was dismayed that your book did not mention it and that is how I came across this article.

But I understand why, and the reason it is not addressed is exactly why I love your book. You are destroying the Cartisian substance dualism with a more Scriptural Hebraic Worldview. And I have a hard time imagining what the soul is because I so dramatically refuse gnosticism, or invisible-prototype-in-the-sky worldview. I just find descriptions of what the soul is so unhelpful.

I found a passage of your book about substance and movement, about how the western view is that first there are objects or substances and then these are acted upon by forces and go into motion. But an older way of thinking could argue there are movements that bring about substances. I feel that the soul is a kind of movement.

I was wondering if you can comment on this.

Sincerely,

Ryan

If you were talking only about the theological academy you could be more precisely: almost all theological discourse aimed at truth is eliminated today in favour of (a) social-scientific descriptions of belief- and praxis-structures; (b) historical enquiries which are interested only in summarising previous scholarship and offering reconstructions of previous thought in ways which makes them appear incredible; and (c) individualistic ‘philosophical theology’ (sometimes masquerading as proper theology) which is ordered only towards the articulation of personal beliefs and assessments. Such modes of pseudo-theologizing sit as epiphenomena upon a secular-communitarian ontology which is not allowed to be foregrounded in straightforward discussion and debate, and which is thereby rendered with de facto infallibility.

We need a Fox News special report on British theology! Imagine what Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity would do to David Ford or John Milbank… :-)