James Hillman: In Search of Soul
An excerpt from the essay Peaks & Vales
In this excerpt, Hillman lays the ground for differentiating between soul and spirit, which will be the subject of next week’s post. Here, he suggests that we are all “moderns in search of soul” as Jung put it, because of the conflation of soul with spirit in Christian dogma. He argues that the denigration of soul has led to a psychological disorientation in the Western psyche, leading us to look to the Orient for vital images of soul. (Note the clever wordplay between “disorientation” and “Orient,” a Hillman trademark and one of the reasons why I love his writing so much.) — BJ
In Search of Soul
Long ago and far away from California and its action, its concern, its engagement, there took place in Byzantium, in the city of Constantinople, in the year 869, a Council of the Principals of the Holy Catholic Church, and because of their session then and another one of their sessions a hundred years prior (Nicaea, 787), we are all in this room tonight.
Because at that Council in Constantinople the soul lost its dominion. Our anthropology, our idea of human nature, devolved from a tripartite cosmos of spirit, soul, and body (or matter), to a dualism of spirit (or mind) and body (or matter). And this because at that other Council, the one in Nicaea in 787, images were deprived of their inherent authenticity.
We are in this room this evening because we are moderns in search of a soul, as Jung once put it. We are still in search of reconstituting that third place, that intermediate realm of psyche – which is also the realm of images and the power of imagination – from which we were exiled by theological, spiritual men more than a thousand years ago: long before Descartes and the dichotomies attributed to him, long before the Enlightenment and modern positivism and scientism. These ancient historical events are responsible for the malnourished root of our Western psychological culture and of the culture of each of our souls.
What the Constantinople Council did to soul only culminated a long process beginning with Paul (the saint) of substituting and disguising and forever after confusing, soul with spirit. Paul uses psyche only four times in his Epistles. Psyche appears in the entire New Testament only fifty-seven times compared with two hundred seventy-four occurrences of pneuma [spirit]. Quite a score! Of these fifty-seven occurrences of the word psyche, more than half are in the Gospels and Acts. The Epistles, the presentation of doctrine, the teachings of the school, could expose its theology and psychology without too much need for the word soul. For Paul four times was enough.
Much the same is true in regard to dreams and myths. The word to dream does not appear in the New Testament; dream (onar) occurs only in three chapters of Matthew (1, 2, and 27). Mythos occurs only five times, pejoratively. Instead, there is stress on spirit phenomena: miracles, speaking in tongues, visions, revelations, ecstasy, prophecy, truth, faith.
Because our tradition has systematically turned against soul, we are each unaware of the distinctions between soul and spirit – therefore confusing psychotherapy with spiritual disciplines, obfuscating where they conflate and where they differ. This traditional denial of soul continues within the attitudes of each of us whether Christian or not, for we are each unconsciously affected by our culture’s tradition, the unconscious aspect of our collective life.
Ever since Tertullian declared that the soul (anima) is naturally Christian, there has been a latent Christianity, an anti-soul spirituality, in our Western soul. This has led eventually to a psychological disorientation, and we have had to turn to the Orient. We place, displace, or project into the Orient our Occidental disorientation. And my task in this lecture is to do what I can for soul.
Part of this task, because it is ritualistically appropriate, is to point out C. G. Jung’s part in prying loose the dead fingers of those dignitaries in old Turkey, both by restoring the soul as a primary experience and field of work and by showing us ways – particularly through images – of realizing that soul.
Excerpt from the essay “Peaks & Vales” from Senex & Puer (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman Book 3), James Hillman, Spring Publications, 2021