Sensuous Spirituality: Body, Soul, and Spirit

 

The Sufi mystic Rumi distributes sweetmeats.

             I've discussed the ancient division of human experience into body, soul and spirit as systematized by Max Scheler. This isn't about metaphysical or unconscious entities, but, in keeping with Scheler's phenomenological bias, describes lived experience. Concepts with a history millennia old are expressed in Scheler's Leib 'lived body,' Seele 'soul' or 'life-force,' and Geist 'spirit.' Equivalents with pedigrees dating back to Plato are belly, heart, and head.

       The lived body is experienced as autonomous, private, impersonal fact. Though it is ours, its pains, pleasures, and hungers are, like the weather, impervious to our will. We can't will not to be hungry if we are. Lived body is private but not personal, not part of personal identity. Hunger felt or satisfied does not make us any more or less ourselves. And finally, lived body is about goalless background moods and needs, felt but not yet directed toward any particular object or image.

Soul is the autonomous, impersonal faculty that creates goals to maximize life. Body-hunger is an objectless ache until food appears (either as object or mental image) and soul automatically hungers for it. We yearn. We salivate. Soul is social, not private, involuntarily giving itself away to an observer. But soul is also impersonal, more-or-less universal to the species. Desiring food after fasting is not a personal trait. Soul is the intelligence we share with other animals--object-directed to benefit the the species but amoral, autonomous, and impulsive. Soul channels desire and sympathy as well as hate and fear.

Spirit teams up with soul to establish relationships with objects, but, in contrast, it is voluntary, private, and personal. Spirit is about ideas, soul about images. Spirit constructs a conscious personality and moral rules. It is the ego's willful center. Its morals, defenses, and tastes, and can act in contradiction of soul. It may bury soul-impulses in a dark side in what Carl Jung calls the Shadow. Soul aims (not always accurately) to maximize life, but spirit may oppose this: fasting as self-discipline, for example, or dying for a cause. We aren't responsible for the impulses of the soul, but for how spirit uses with them. As Martin Luther wrote, "You cannot keep birds from flying over your head. but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair."

Scheler's soul mediates between lived body and spirit. Dualistic religious systems conflate soul with one of the functions next to it, treating it as a function either of the body or of the spirit. Some religious disciplines often see soul as contaminated with flesh and thus to be suppressed, an animal nature we should free ourselves from. When Jesus says that "the spirit (pneuma) is willing but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41), he lumps everything but spirit with sarx, literally 'meat'. Other dualistic schemes take the opposite approach: everything absent from a dead human body, all sentient life, is soul-spirit with no distinction. Classical Christian theology often takes this view, but it is not shared by Paul, who blesses with these words: "may your spirit and soul and body [pneuma, psyche, and soma] be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

Plotinus (204-270) systematized Plato's philosophy in a form that influenced Augustine and other Christian theologians. He saw the world as a series of emanations from central, indivisible, sun-like pure being. This One generates the world of perfect intellectual forms. This world generates the world of immortal souls, and then an imperfect phenomenological world in which our personal souls, fragments of the world-soul, have somehow become trapped. Our souls (secretly or not) desire to escape matter and rise into the level of intellectual forms--even all the way up to pure being. For Plotinus, all energy emanates from the One. The material world is remote from its Source. 

        The Neoplatonic system may inform theology, but it inverts human experience. Our rational faculties function poorly if we are drunk, starving, sleepy, hurting, terrified, angry, depressed, exhausted, or sexually excited. An impaired body-soul impairs the spirit. Activities of the spirit such as objective reasoning, sustained creativity, and meditation need a stable platform in the soul and lived body. Whatever is believed to be the case in an ideal world, in this world we experience body as prior to soul, which is prior to spirit. The Buddha gave up ascetic practices for this reason, accepting rice pudding from a village girl. For spirit to function well, it must placate matter, its phenomenological mater, and sublimate energy from the animal soul to its use.

Some traditions, including the asceticism that the Buddha tried and rejected, aim to purify spirit by quashing impulses of the soul rather than channelizing them. Like St. Anthony in the desert, ascetics see the soul's natural inclination away from pain and towards pleasure, even towards water and sleep, as temptation. Rhineland mystic Henry Suso (1295-1366) practiced disciplines "to keep nature at all times bridled" (p. 235) that read more like masochism than piety. Guilty for the pleasure he felt at touching the hands of two girls in public, he whipped himself "till the blood ran down his back" (p. 141). In addition to the obligatory hair shirt, Suso devised instruments of self-torture: a lower undergarment imbedded with brass nails pointed inward, in which he slept. He fitted leather gloves with tacks so that "if he sought to help himself with his hands in sleep, he drove the sharp tacks into his breast and tore himself, making horrible rents, as if a bear had torn him with his sharp claws" (pp. 139-140). More "cutter" than saint in today's pathology, Suso wore on his back a cross embedded with needles that dug into his skin, slapping it whenever he needed more discipline. Suso ate one meal per day, kept himself thirsty, and slept on a stone bench too short to stretch out on.

Sufi mystics use an opposite strategy, one more compatible with Buddhism and modern psychotherapy. Strange as Suso's "disciplines" of soul may seem to us, a poem written by the Ayatollah Khumani and published posthumously by his son may be equally puzzling. The stern old cleric and hero of Islam seems to glorify lust, irreligion, and drunkenness:

O Friend, I have become captivated

by the mole over your lip.

I have seen your languid eyes

and I have become sick.

I have departed from myself,

      . . . . .

Grieving for the sweetheart

Has cast fire in my soul,

Angry enough to die from,

and in the bazaar I am known.

Open the door of the tavern before me night and day,

for I have become weary of the mosque and seminary.

       This from an imam who taught seminary, attended mosque regularly, and presumably avoided alcohol? What's going on? Khumani writes in a centuries-old tradition practiced by the Sufi master Rumi (1207-1273). In this tradition, conventional images from classic love poems "are repeated again and again, of the quest of the lover for the beloved, intoxication with mystical experience, the dissolution of the self through union" (Legenhausen). Like the anatomically graphic descriptions in the Biblical Song of Songs, these images are read as allegories of divine love. The beloved is God or God's beloved, Muhammad. Descriptions of the beloved's beauty represent God's indescribable beauty. The seminary and mosque represent ordinary religious devotion and understanding. The tavern, mediated by the traditional cup-bearer (saqi) or spiritual guide, is a metaphor for the "place" where the mystic finds the intoxicating presence of God.

The Sufi tradition aims for mystical union with God: "annihilation in Allah and absorption in Allah, where all is blindness and there is no longer any vision" (ElSenoss). This is the experience of pure spirit, with body and soul left in the dust. Recall that the language of the soul is not words but imagery and that its movements are toward or away from sensations, real or imagined, so the Sufi aim of blind absorption is an ironic yearning of the soul in its own terms for its own annihilation. Purified head-consciousness is expressed in terms of the heart and belly (sugar is one of Rumi's favorite spiritual metaphors). 

       Unlike Henry Suso, who serves the spirit by crushing the sensuality of the soul, Sufi poetry has its feet planted in soul as it reaches toward a spiritual heaven with formal but sensuous imagery only an outsider would confuse with sensuality. Islam discourages representative imagery, especially pictorial representation of God or the Prophet, so how is a Muslim to express passionate devotion? One answer, not far removed from the sensuous Paradise of the Quran, is the mystical love poetry of Rumi and Khumani.

This eroticized passion for the divine reminds me of the invitational hymn, "Come Ye Sinners," that I sang often growing up Baptist in Alabama. It exploits the soul's yearning for physical comfort and petting, mammalian drives I share with my lap dog Rumi. It glorifies the spiritual in terms of autonomous attraction to safety and, with the odd word charms, sexuality.

I will arise and go to Jesus;
He will embrace me in his arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior,
O there are ten thousand charms.

Imagine how provocative this sounded to a teenager beginning to read Freud and make out with girls, even if the idea of finding ten thousand charms in the arms of  a male was disconcerting.

Sources

AlSenoss, Murdhid. "The Language of the Future: Sufi Terminology." Almiraj Sufi Centre. http://www.almirajsuficentre.org.au/qamus/app/single/1350. Accessed may 24. 2020.

Khomeini, Ruhullah Musawi. "Wine of Love, Mystical a Poetry of Imam Khomeini." Translated by Muhammad G. Legenhausen. https://www.al-islam.org/wine-love-mystical-poetry-imam-khomeini. Accessed May 24, 2020.

Legenhausen, Muhammad G. "Translator's Introduction," in Khomeini, "Wine of Love."

Suso, Henry. Collection: Two Books. Aeterna Press, 2016.

White, John R. "Max Scheler's Tripartite Anthropology," in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 75:255-266, 2001. White explains concepts in Scheler's Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics (1913-1916), translated by M. Frings and R. Funk, 1973.