Introduction to Abbot Vonier's "The Human Soul" | by Ralph McInerny

This is one of the last pieces written by the great Dr. McInerny before his death last year:



Introduction to Abbot Vonier's The Human Soul | by Ralph McInerny

"What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?"

We understood that easily the first time we heard it, just as we understood that it applied to both male and female. In one sense, of course, no one can lose his soul; it's not like an extra ten pounds or a suntan in winter. It's pretty close to being what we are, who we are. Close, but not quite.

At death, body and soul are separated; we are human persons in the full sense when they are together. That is why it is one of the great consolations of the faith that there will be a resurrection of the body. In the end, we will be body and soul again and for all eternity. The condition of the departed before that time has been much discussed by theologians, but it remains obscure. A human soul without a body is an anomaly. Anima mea non sum ego, Saint Thomas Aquinas said. I am not my soul. Jesus rose into heaven, body and soul, and His Mother was assumed into heaven, body and soul. That is why we can say that she is His Mother, and not merely that she was. She could scarcely be a mother without a body and Her Motherhood has never ceased. She is a full-fledged human person right now, body and soul.

We did not need a lot of help, if any, when we first read the Sermon on the Mount. The Good News comes in on all frequencies. We have a lifetime to ponder it and as we do we turn to such authors as Abbot Vonier in order to understand it better. At first they might not seem to help. Things we had no problem with become hazy, and the lingo does not have the straightforward intelligibility of the gospels. If you were told that the verse I quoted at the outset involves the subjunctive in the if clause— as does this sentence in which I am saying so — your blank look would be pardoned. Even applauded. What difference does it make? None, really. But when an Abbot Vonier turns over in his mind the great truths of the faith and lets us in on his thinking, we are well advised to listen. At first it may put us into a subjunctive mood — would that I were reading a murder mystery — but following closely has enormous rewards.

The opposite of losing one's soul is saving it. Abbot Vonier's chief interest is to help us to save our souls.

The Fathers of the Church, when they reflected on the content of the faith, tended to ask what light philosophers might contribute. Of course they did not think that philosophy could just as such arrive at the faith, any more than they thought pure reason stood in judgment of the faith. "Beware lest you be led astray by philosophy," Paul warned the Colossians. He meant philosophers who thought they should judge the faith rather than vice versa. For all that, what philosophers had to say before the coming of Christ turned out to be helpful in understanding the faith. This is especially true in the case of the soul.

Everyone finds Plato the most delightful of philosophers, particularly when he is talking about his teacher Socrates. Back from the wars, Socrates decided to figure out what men are. You might say that he turned from the sciences to the humanities, but don't. That makes it sound like a career move, and it went a lot deeper than that for Socrates. He wanted to live in such a way that he would be ready to die.

Plato was an artist as well as a thinker and it is not easy to tell whether what

he attributes to Socrates belongs to his teacher or to himself. That is a scholarly question; meaning, uninteresting. Like who wrote Shakespeare. In the Republic Plato tells an unforgettable story about the human condition. Imagine a cave in which from birth men have been imprisoned, chained so as to look at the back wall. Behind them figures, statues, are held up before a fire and they cast shadows on the wall. Those shadows are real for the prisoners; they have nothing to contrast them with. So unchain them, turn them around. When their eyes become accustomed to the firelight they think that the images they now see are the real thing, not their shadows on the wall. But images are images of something, so they are led outside and see the originals of the images that cast the shadows. How unreal to them seem those shadows and images now.

Plato is talking about the liberation of the soul from ignorance. Ignorance began, he says, when the soul was put into the body. All the knowledge it had as a pure spirit is forgotten, and it must grope through life among the shadows and images and pick up intimations of the really real things it knew before birth.

Plato's view, in short, is that the soul is what we are and that our earthly condition is anomalous. Death, the release of soul from the prison of the body, restores soul to its normal condition.

Aristotle, by contrast, likened the union of soul and body to an impression in wax. You cannot lift the impression from the wax. And yet Aristotle went on to argue that the human soul is immortal; that is, survived death. What for Plato was paradise regained was for Aristotle self-hood lost. He doesn't have much to say of the condition of souls after death. St. Thomas commends him for this. Such information as we have on the matter comes from the faith.

I suppose you could divide theologians into those who are more Platonic and those who are more Aristotelian. Abbot Vonier begins with a discussion of spiritual substance. That is what the soul is, he writes, just like God and the angels. Now that works because it is in the context of the faith that we think about the soul, and of course God and the angels are familiar to us — from the faith. Like Aristotle, though in reverse, Abbot Vonier has set a great difficulty for himself, quite deliberately, I think, and The Human Soul can be read as the gradual and finally triumphant overcoming of that difficulty. Abbot Vonier moves from what might seem to be an unabashedly Platonic view of soul to the Aristotelian, the process being guided by the faith. The soul as he first discusses it seems to have no more need of a body than do the angels. Everything he says in that chapter can be found in Thomas Aquinas. The difference is that Thomas would not have begun in that way. One might imagine that, after seemingly cutting himself off from it, Abbot Vonier proceeds to the great truth of the resurrection of the body

Our lives begin in time but we are destined for eternity. Our soul is what makes us what we are. It animates the body, enables us to sense and imagine, and most importantly to think and will. Life is a drama in which we are readying ourselves to die, that is, to save our souls. The deeds we do, with the grace of God, make us what we ought to be for all eternity. It is a sobering thought that we can fail at this. That is the message of this book.

It is a learned book, but Abbot Vonier is a gifted teacher who brings the whole weight of the tradition and teaching of the Church to bear on his subject, the human soul. It is easy for us to swerve from the way and the truth and the life and become what T. S. Eliot called hollow men. Men who have forgotten their eternal destiny and try to muddle through with only those shadows on the wall. Christianity is the only adequate answer to the question, How can we be happy? Hence the Beatitudes. This book shows us where true happiness lies, and how to gain it. It is an important book, a powerful book. Tolle et lege. Read on.

Ralph McInerny
University of Notre Dame

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Book Excerpts:

• Abbot Vonier and the Christian Sacrifice | Introduction to Abbot Vonier's A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist | Aidan Nichols, O.P.
• Pope John Paul II and the Christ-centered Anthropology of Gaudium et Spes | Douglas Bushman
• The Dignity of the Human Person: Pope John Paul II's Teaching on Divinization in the Trinitarian Encyclicals | Carl E. Olson

Dr. Ralph McInerny (1929-2010), was a longtime professor of philosophy and director of the Jacques Maritain Center at Notre Dame. He began teaching at the University of Notre Dame in 1955; he was the author of two dozen scholarly books and many more scholarly essays, as well as numerous general interest works. He was an expert in the work of Thomas Aquinas, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jacques Maritain, and wrote and lectured extensively on ethics, philosophy of religion, and medieval philosophy. He also wrote over fifty novels, including the well-known Father Dowling mystery series and The Red Hat.