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Great Spiritual Books: Reviewing the best and most fascinating spiritual books.

One of the great things about the Internet is that we now have the opportunity to share thoughts and ideas with people from all over the world, with all kinds of backgrounds. This is also a great opportunity for dialog between the various religions.

I could say a lot about this, but I won’t right now. I’ll limit myself to noting that the words spirit and soul have generally been used roughly as Michael Mirdad uses them. Spirit has more often been associated with the divine, while soul has more often been interpreted as the psyche – or that which has a psychology.

See for instance Thomas Aquinas and James Hillman in this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul

Thomas Aquinas

Following Aristotle and Avicenna, St. Thomas Aquinas understood the soul to be the first principle, or act, of the body. However, his epistemological theory required that, since the intellectual soul is capable of knowing all material things, and since in order to know a material thing there must be no material thing within it, the soul was definitely not corporeal. Therefore, the soul had an operation separate from the body and therefore could subsist without the body. Furthermore, since the rational soul of human beings was subsistent and was not made up of matter and form, it could not be destroyed in any natural process. The full argument for the immortality of the soul and Thomas’s elaboration of Aristotelian theory is found in Question 75 of the Summa Theologica.

James Hillman

Although the words soul and spirit are often viewed as synonyms, psychologist James Hillman argues that they can refer to antagonistic components of a person. Summarizing Hillman’s views, author and psychotherapist Thomas Moore associates spirit with “afterlife, cosmic issues, idealistic values and hopes, and universal truths,” while placing soul “in the thick of things: in the repressed, in the shadow, in the messes of life, in illness, and in the pain and confusion of love.”[10] Hillman believes that religion—especially monotheism and monastic faiths—and humanistic psychology have tended to the spirit, often at the unfortunate expense of soul.[3] For, again to quote Moore, to transcend the “lowly conditions of the soul…is to lose touch with the soul, and a split-off spirituality, with no influence from the soul, readily falls into extremes of literalism and destructive fanaticism.”[11]

Hillman’s archetypal psychology is in many ways an attempt to tend to the oft-neglected soul, which Hillman views as the “self-sustaining and imagining substrate” upon which consciousness rests, and “which makes meaning possible, [deepens] events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern” as well as “a special relation with death.”[12] Departing from the Cartesian dualism “between outer tangible reality and inner states of mind,” Hillman takes the Neoplatonic stance[13] that there is a “third, middle position” in which soul resides.[14] Archetypal psychology acknowledges this third position by attuning to, and often accepting, the archetypes, dreams, myths, and even psychopathologies through which soul, in Hillman’s view, expresses itself.

Oh and thank you to growwear who also thought this lens worth reviewing

More about Theosophy and the Theosophical Society.

If you want your daily reminders of your faith in your date book. If you want your kids to grow up with bible verses literally on the kitchen wall. If you want your year lined with inspiring paintings and photographs to remind you of the greatness of God’s Creation…