Man’s “true self”: my reply to critics

Last December, I asked Bill Vallicella, my philosophical interlocuter of almost two decades, why in a Substack essay he referred to the soul as one’s “true self.” I noticed only recently, however, that I hadn’t commented on his reply (or the comments it received), and the window for that combox closed some time ago; thus this belated post.

Bill had written on the atheist Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011):

Those of us who champion free speech [Bill writes] miss him and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul.

On Bill’s blog, I asked:

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one’s “true self”? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., “the man.” The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a “less-than-true” or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man’s self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year [i.e., in 2022]. 

Bill replied:

What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person’s self. But why true self? Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then “my” soul, or rather me qua soul is “my” true self.

I invite my reader to consider Bill’s 634-word post. Here I can only reply to points of contention, not work out a biblical anthropology.

Bill presciently surmises that what exercises me, as he put it, is the biblical view of the matter, which he rightly suspects I find represented by neither Platonism nor Aristotelianism.

The effort to think God’s thoughts after Him requires me to see first what He said about man and then to try to understand it, not to excogitate a philosophical psychology and then see if there are materials in Scripture to support it. “Person” is not a biblical category.

I therefore don’t need to weigh in on the Platonism/Aristotelianism dialectic in order to explain what I mean by “soul.” Here are some of my points of departure:

So God created (וַיִּבְרָ֨א, way-yi-bra) the man (הָֽאָדָ֗ם, haadam) in his own image, in the image of God created (בָּרָ֣א, bara; the root of וַיִּבְרָ֨א, way-yi-bra) he him; male and female created he them. Genesis 1:27

And the Lord God formed (וַיִּיצֶר֩, wayitzer) the man (הָֽאָדָ֗ם, haadam) of the dust (עָפָר֙, apar; dry, loose earth) of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath (נִשְׁמַ֣ת, nishmat) of life (חַיִּ֑ים, hayyim); and the man (הָֽאָדָ֗ם, haadam) became a living (חַיָּֽה, hayyah) soul (לְנֶ֥פֶשׁ, nephesh). Genesis 2:7

In the case of man, the dust (that is, the dry, loose earth) was the “matter” that was formed; presumably it was also so in the case of the beasts that were formed (Genesis 2:19). They were not created ex nihilo.

Genesis neither explicitly affirms nor denies that each nonhuman creature was first formed and then divinely inspirated to become living souls, but living souls is what they became.

In Genesis 2:7, the verb for “to create” is not בָּרָ֣א (bara) as in Genesis 1:1, but יָצַר (yatzar), which means “to form or fashion,” as, for example, to form a vessel out of clay, where the result of the forming is the vessel, not a “component” thereof.

God formed man, not a component of man. A living being (חַיָּֽה לְנֶ֥פֶשׁ, hayyah le-nephesh) is what he became upon God’s inspiring into him the breath (נִשְׁמַ֣ת, nishmat) of life (חַיִּ֑ים, chaiyim).

That is, God breathed the breath that is life (not “life’s breath”) into the man, who was formed so that what was latent and inactive in man, including all his higher mental operations, became patent and active.

There’s no evidence either (a) that God inserted, installed, implanted, or infused a spirit being into man—man’s body is not a habitation for the man to move into—or (b) that the living being (hayyah le-nephesh) further formed what God had already formed (that is, the living being is not the “form” of the body).

The ruach returns to God upon death, that is, when God, natural events, or other men undermine the conditions of continued living. But not only men:

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one (אֶחָ֖ד, ehad) breath (וְר֥וּחַ, ruach); so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust (עָפָר֙, apar), and all turn (שָׁ֥ב, shab; i.e., return) to dust again. Ecclesiastes 3:19-20

Then shall the dust (עָפָר֙, apar) return to the earth as it was: and the spirit (וְר֥וּחַ, ruach) shall return unto God who gave it. Ecclesiastes 12:7

The God Who gives the breath of life (ר֣וּחַ חַיִּ֔ים, ruach hayyim) destroyed all flesh (בָּשָׂ֗ר, bashar) that had it—except Noah, his family, and the two of every kind of living thing (Genesis 6:17) that God commanded Noah to preserve.

There’s no reason to think that this return involves “archiving” (as it were) individual “breaths” or “winds” (רוּח֗וֹת, ruhowt) for possible future use. Again, “they all have one (אֶחָ֖ד, ehad) breath (וְר֥וּחַ, ruach). God can recreate any of them from the dust of the ground, just as He could have raised up children with Abrahamic DNA from the stones (λίθων, lithōn) that lay before John the Baptist and his Israelite audience (Matthew 3:9). This must suffice (for now) as an answer to Bill’s question:

Don’t we need Platonic souls during the time between hora mortis nostrae [the hour of our death] and general resurrection?

If God doesn’t need them, I fail to see why we do.

The mental operations that distinguish man from other species vary in quality depending on age and health: for example, neither an infant nor an adult with severe neuro-developmental disorder can compose music.

Intelligence, the mental capacity to discern patterns in the presentations of sense or imagination, varies from individual, and average intelligence varies from group to group. There’s nothing “materialistic” about the view that physiology sets an upper limit to intellectual capacity, or that man’s spiritual side—say, artistic symbolization, scientific inquiry, or philosophical system-building—depends on the specific arrangement of his cerebral tissue, DNA configuration, and so forth.

But that doesn’t make man a spirit being, such as God is (John 4:24) or such as were the demons that Jesus cast out (Matthew 8:16, Mark 1:34, Luke 4:41). Neither does it imply that man has in his body a discrete spirit being that goes to live elsewhere when the man dies.

Commenter Richard Norris expressed surprise that (unnamed) “Christian materialists” avoid the biblical creation’s narrative story’s “clear dualistic implications.” I can’t say I’m surprised when Christians like Norris bring their philosophical preconceptions to the text. He asserts that

[y]ou have [in Genesis] man made from two components: one is material, the dust of the earth, and the other is immaterial, the very breath of God. The latter is also surely the greater and more important component—it bestows value on what is otherwise worthless.

All I can say is: quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. That goes for his value judgement as it does for his anthropology.

Bill, however, seconds Norris’s rejection of what’s pejoratively labeled “Christian materialism,” but at least offers a reason. (Since people understandably associate materialism with atheism, “Christian materialism” connotes (if not denotes) “Christian atheism.” Do “Christian materialists” call themselves that?) Bill asserts that:

The Genesis implication is plainly dualistic.

To which I reply: only to those who bring dualism to the text.

Humans are animals and thus material beings.

Physical, yes. I find φύσις (physis) in the Greek Scriptures, but not “matter.” James uses ύλη (hyle)—the word the classical Greek philosophers used to symbolize their concept of “matter”—to refer to the forest (that is, the wood) that can catch fire as easily as the human tongue can boast (James 3:5).

But at some point, they [humans] acquired an infusion of spirit which set them apart from every animal.

No, it was life that was acquired by the perfectly formed man as it was by every beast and creeping thing. Each of them is called נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh), a word that appears 754 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. The King James translators interpreted it as “life” the first time (Genesis 1:20); the second and third times (Genesis 1:21, 24), “creature”; the fourth (Genesis 1:30), “life.” When they got to the fifth time, however (Genesis 2:7), did they decides to render נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh) “soul.” Why? Bill continues:

The breath of God is that infusion of spirit.

I see no reference to ruach (spirit) in Genesis 2:7.

“Breath of God” must be taken in a spiritual sense, not in a crass material sense. God is not an animal who physically breathes. Otherwise, he would have such-and-such lung capacity, a certain O2 uptake, etc.

The force of “must” is lost on me. God’s self-revelation in Scripture, not the metaphysics, regiments my thinking about Him.

Crass materialistic interpretations wear their disqualifications on their face, but so, in my opinion, do “spiritualizing” evasions of literal meaning when it doesn’t square with one’s preconceptions.

Must God be only a universal agent vis-à-vis His creation? Can’t He project Himself as a local agent into the concrete contexts that His created image-bearers generate?

• • Even before the creation of animals, His spirit (וְר֣וּחַ, weruach) hovered locally over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2) not over, say, the rings of Saturn or over the universe.
  • He wrestled with Jacob (Genesis 22) even though in His infinite nature the Father, Who is greater than His finite Expression (John 14:28), has no arms.
  • God, that is, אֱלֹהִ֛ים יְהוָ֧ה (Yahweh Elohim) walked (מִתְהַלֵּ֥ךְ, mithalek) in the garden with Adam, so we may infer that He had legs (Genesis 3:8). If יְהוָ֧ה (Yahweh) is the First and the Last (Isaiah 44:6), then He must be identical with Jesus. Why? Because Jesus “also” claimed to be the First and the Last (Revelation 22:13), and there can’t be two firsts and two lasts. The “I am” (אֲנִ֤י, ani) of Isaiah 44:6 is identical to the “I am” (ἐγὼ, egō) of Revelation 22:13). And Jesus had legs.
  • יְהוָ֧ה (Yahweh) said he’d go down (אֵֽרֲדָה, eradah)—that is, migrate from point A to point B, that is, from heaven to earth—to see for Himself what the ruckus from Sodom and Gomorrah was all about (Genesis 18:20).
  • So, if יְהוָ֧ה (Yahweh) had breathed life into man, then God’s self-projection did indeed “physically breathe,” as Bill put it, that is, had a certain lung capacity and O2 uptake, and so forth. What’s wrong with that?

There is more to be said about the soul, about ruach/pneuma and nephesh/psychē, but not within the limits of this already overlong post. As I said on Bill’s blog (cited above), I wrote a lot about this in 2022, a dozen posts in all, in preparation for a book on Otis Q. Sellers. Here are their links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII.

I welcome feedback, but if it’s provided immediately, I can’t promise that my reply will be that prompt. It should not, however, be as long in coming as this one was.