“We wouldn’t treat people the way we do if they had souls”…

In an interview recently https://youtu.be/C-mJnYmdVmQ?t=2379 the psychologist Gabor Mate said: “For this society to function it has to separate the soul from the body – because we wouldn’t treat people the way we do if [we believed] they had souls. Post-enlightenment rationalism means cutting people off from the heart – so western science starts from the neck up – and it can do a lot of great things; with the intellect, with hyper rationality, with research and so on, but it also leaves us short of our humanity. And that integration is not taking place because it threatens the social structure.”
In his view the rational enlightenment divided the rational self from the mystical or religious understanding of life. And this meant that we ceased to attend to the human reality of the soul. He was talking about the treatment of victims of our contemporary economic system, but I thought about the transatlantic slave trade and the way colonialism brutalised black people ‘as if they didn’t have a soul’.

Sometimes theology can appear to be remote and even irrelevant but here is an issue with an external, real world referent and a clear moral outcome; if we concede the naturalistic claim of science that all life derives from a process of random but meaningless fluctuations of atoms and sub-atomic structures, if we accept that the soul is an unscientific and archaic idea which derives from an incomplete understanding of reality, then we may also denigrate and downgrade the dignity and scope of the individual human, just as the slave trade did, as the holocaust did, as the soviet system did – and as our modern economic system still does.

Gabor Mate was right in my view to pinpoint the rational enlightenment as the moment when this ‘dislocation of the human soul’ occurred. And we as the religious tradition of the enlightenment must be vigilant that we nurture and encourage the mystical and spiritual side of our tradition and protect it from being overwhelmed by the rationalistic and reasonable side. We must affirm and commit to the present reality of the soul. Because while we continue to evade any real commitment to the reality of the spiritual realm we are like the character “The Virtuoso” in Thomas Shadwell’s play, written in 1676 a few years before our chapel was first built, who in a famous scene, attempts to learn to swim without getting in to the water.
Last week we acknowledged the value (and disfficulty) of holding ‘no position’ and of allowing mystery to occupy a central role in our religious life, but on All Souls day, on the last service before another period of lockdown, I want to urge you to go further: despite our ‘unknowing’ I urge you to commit to the soul, to commit to prayer and to holding a space of possibility, at least the possibility of the Over-Soul of All Souls.
Sometimes we must get into the water to be able to swim; I understand the brilliance of that metaphor now, aimed as a broadside at an early scientific rationalist Shadwell points out that in order to swim you have to get into the water; we must act as if the soul is a present reality whether or not we can falsify or verify its existence. We must get in to the water of ‘an ocean heavily coloured with God’s presence and God’s being’ if we are to experience God’s presence and God’s being…

This is an extract from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay The Over Soul from which I borrow my title (amended to reflect gender inclusive language)

Within [one person] is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

From within … a light shines through us … and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

Ineffable is the union of [humanity] and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in their integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment

God will not be manifest to cowards…”