Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

One is that, with the invention of the afterlife (which not all religions have embraced), and without which any entity such as the soul would have far less meaning, the way was open for organised religions the better to control men’s minds. During late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the technology of the soul, its relation with the afterlife, with the Deity, and most importantly with the clergy, enabled the religious authorities to exercise an extraordinary authority. It is surely the idea of the soul which, though it enriched men’s minds immeasurably over many centuries, nevertheless kept thought and freedom back during those same centuries, hindering and delaying progress, keeping the (largely) ignorant laity in thrall to an educated clerisy. Think of Friar Tetzel’s assurance that one could buy indulgences for souls in purgatory, that they would fly to heaven as soon as the coin dropped in the plate. The abuses of what we might call ‘soul technology’ were one of the main factors leading to the Reformation which, despite John Calvin in Geneva, took faith overall away from the control of the clergy, and hastened doubt and non-belief (as was discussed in Chapter 22). The various transformations of the soul (from being contained in semen, in Aristotle’s Greece, the tripartite soul of the Timaeus, the medieval and Renaissance conception of Homo duplex, the soul as a woman, a form of bird, Marvell’s dialogue between the soul and the body, Leibniz’s ‘monads’) may strike us as quaint now, but they were serious issues at the time and important stages on the way to the modern idea of the self. The seventeenth-century transformation – from the humours, to the belly and bowels, to the brain as the locus of the essential self – together with Hobbes’ argument that no ‘spirit’ or soul existed, were other important steps, as was Descartes’ reconfiguration of the soul as a philosophical as opposed to a religious notion.¹² The transition from the world of the soul (including the afterlife) to the world of the experiment (here and now), which occurred first and most thoroughly in Europe, describes the fundamental difference between the ancient world and the modern world, and still represents the most important change in intellectual authority in history.

But there is another – quite different – reason why, in the West at least, the soul is important, and arguably more important and more fertile than the idea of God. To put it plainly, the idea of the soul has outlived the idea of God; one might even say it has evolved beyond God, beyond religion, in that even people without faith – perhaps especially people without faith – are concerned with the inner life.

We can see the enduring power of the soul, and at the same time its evolving nature, at various critical junctures throughout history. It has revealed this power through one particular pattern that has repeated itself every so often, albeit each time in a somewhat different form. This may be characterised as a repeated ‘turning inwards’ on the part of mankind, a continual and recurrent effort to seek the truth by looking ‘deep’ within oneself, what Dror Wahrman calls our ‘interiority complex’. The first time this ‘turning in’ took place (that we know about) was in the so-called Axial Age (see Chapter 5), very roughly speaking around the seventh to fourth centuries BC. At that time, more or less simultaneously in Palestine, in India, in China, in Greece and very possibly in Persia, something similar was occurring. In each case, established religion had become showy and highly ritualistic. In particular a priesthood had everywhere arisen and had arrogated to itself a highly privileged position: the clerisy had become an inherited caste which governed access to God or the gods, and which profited – in both a material and sacred sense – from its exalted position. In all of the above countries, however, prophets (in Israel) or wise men (the Buddha and the writers of the Upanishads in India, Confucius in China) arose, denounced the priesthood and advocated a turning inward, arguing that the way to genuine holiness was by some form of self-denial and private study. Plato famously thought that mind was superior to matter.¹³