www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Tripartite nature of Man

There is no way I'll be able to "hang in here" with an Eastern Orthodox debate (BTW, we have the same debate on out own boards :-)) but I will enter my own view.

I would consider myself leaning toward being a tri-chotimist. I do think there is a difference in soul and spirit. Let me just say why, and leave it, because we will differ on this reason.

All men have an active, thriving soul. This is what God breated into Adam.

Man's spirit is dead apart from a relationship with Christ. Paul tells us in Romans and Ephesians that before regeneration a man is spiritually dead. Therefore the soul/spirit cannot be both alive and dead. After salvation the spirit is made alive (Ephesians 2).

Please don't let this derail your thread, that is not my purpose - just wanted to give some input from another viwepoint.

Roger

Dear Father Deacon Lance,

My only question is whether the tri-partite view is, in any way, heretical or could be considered so.

Alex

Alex,

I don't think the concept is heretical but certainly it could be used by heretics and I believe it was used by the Apollinarians who believed Christ had no human spirit but did have a human soul and body.

Fr. Deacon Lance

The answers to Ghazar's underlying questions depend upon the definitions of the words. If we look to the Word of God (i.e. scripture) to define the body, spirit, and soul, we find the following:

body = soma (Grk.)

[sarx = flesh; and is used specifically for other reasons, usually with the negative concept of the supersensual or self-pampering of the body.]

spirit = pneuma (Grk.) or ru'ah (Heb.)

soul/life = psixi (grk.)

They are three distinct words each with its own distinct meaning and usage in scripture.

If one looks to Proverbs, for just one example, one finds a clear usage of "spirit" and and "word" as the two hands of the Lord. What he wills, they complete. In virtually every case where one finds the "spirit" acting, one also finds his "word" acting.

[Keep in mind that "spirit" is simply "breath" or "wind," (see first verses of Genesis where the same word, "ru'ah," is translated as both "spirit" and "wind" according to inferred intent) but in numerous scriptural contexts, we understand this to be the breath or wind of God. Actually the point is moot in the end since there are not any "breaths" or "winds" that are not God's. He made them all!]

So pneuma/ru'ah = spirit, breath, or wind. Put another way, it equals "living air."


Clearly and empahatically it should be clear that "soul" and "life" are the same word.

(While all of this scriptural searching should be done in Hebrew and/or Greek, thankfully, scriptural English never had the problem of using the same word for "soul/life" and "spirit" as do the liturgical usages in Slavonic, Russian, Albanian and possibly some others. This mistake throws the believers off the track from understanding body, spirit, and soul.)

Go through scripture (even in English) and find that soul and life are interchangeable.

Look at James 19-20: "My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this: whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins."

(However, don't go to the NIV wherein they drop the word "psixi" and mistranslate it as " will save HIM from death and cover a multitude of sins.")

How can we understand "save a soul from death?" Soul MUST mean "life." We can accept that a life dies, but then am I also proposing that the soul dies? Yep! But don't take my word for it, go to scripture and see it for yourself!

[Folks sometimes get off of the excursion here since they can't bear to think that their loved ones are "no more." I remind us that Rachel's children and many others in scripture are described as "not" or "no more." Does this mean that they cannot be retrieved? Of course not. We believe in the Resurrection and that all who are alive in Christ are with Him in a mystical way that we, in the East, have not had the need to define further. Fear of this very stark and dreadful state of "not" caused all manner of speculation into the "afterlife" and the subsequent abuse of the word "soul" to mean a fluttery thing with wings. More recently, everyone is trying to become "like the angels," not realizing that it was Lucifer/Satan's jealousy of man's creation in God's image and likeness that triggered the rebellion, his subsequent judgement, and being cast out of the heavens.]

Doesn't it say repeatedly in the psalms that "my soul/life (psixi) goes down to Sheol?" And what is Sheol but "the grave." Again, go to revisionist translations and one finds "life" substituted for "soul" because the modern English ear is uncomfortable hearing that the "soul" dies.

Interestingly, to confirm the point, we should go to older versions of colloquial English. Even 50 years ago when a ship went down the news report would read: "Passenger liner sinks in heavy seas: 126 souls perish!"

Are they trying to tell us that 126 peolple went to hell? (That is how the English ear of 2004 may tend understand it.) Of course not, the news report is merely informing us that they died.

But if all of this is too much, to think that the soul dies, stay with this trend of thought and take it to its logical conclusion. This is the part that people have trouble with:

body + spirit/breath = soul/life

Or to quote a very Orthodox dogmatics professor who, as I recall, was quoting his very Orthodox predecessor:

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul."

Go back to colloquial English, "that poor soul, he doesn't have a friend in the world." The pronoun "he" is substituted for the individual, the "soul" in the preceeding clause.

A soul is not a part of a person, it is the person. Remove the spirit/breath and the soul dies and we are left with a body. Add the breath/spirit to the body and we have life or a soul. (See Ezekiel and the Valley of the Bones.)

So that's my contribution, "the equation" one that I've offered previously. Please try it out in scripture, preferably with a Greek Septuagint and New Testament close by. I have found it to be most the most helpful and correct understanding and to be in accordance with the earliest Eastern teachings.

With love in Christ,
Andrew

Dear Andrew,

Thanks for your indepth response. I will continue to consider it. I think it is important to remember that just becuase something seems to fit with Scripture, doesn't necessarily make it true. Protestants teach lots of things which "fits" with Scripture. Yet the true test is whether a teaching is the Faith passed down from our Fathers. Does it match their understanding of Scripture, passed on to them from the Apostles.

Btw, I don't think you said whether the view you presented could be considered Di- or Tripartite.

Thanks, Ghazar

Dear Friends,

Well, I finally got my answer. It came from some friends on an Orthodox forum. It seems the "Orthodox in union with Rome" crowd are slipping up a little in their theology :p (except of course for Fr. Deacon Lance).

The tripartite view of name is not at all heterodox as some have suggested. It is indeed Orthodox as Fr. John Meyendorff states in his, �Byzantine Theology:�

"We are here back to the point made at the beginning of this section: man is truly man because he is the image of God, and the divine factor in man concerns not only his spiritual aspect -as Origen and Evagrius maintained- but the whole man, soul and body. This last point is the reason why a majority of Byzantine theologians describe man in terms of a trichotomist scheme: spirit (or mind), soul, body. Their trichotomism is very directly connected with the notion of participation in God as the basis of anthropology."

Fr. Meyendorff's reference for this is the very profound (and very early) Patristic testimony of St. Irenaeos' Against the Heresies (Bk 5 Chpt 6:1) which can be viewed online at:

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103506.htm

But the best presentation and explanation of this, was sitting two feet away from me on my book shelf all along. It comes from one of the first two books I ever read on Orthodoxy: "The Orthodox Way." For those interested:

The Tripartite Nature of Man
from Bishop Kallistos Ware�s: The Orthodox Way

And what is man�s place in God�s creation?
�I pray to God that your whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ� (1 Thess. 5:23). Here St. Paul mentions the three elements or aspects that constitute the human person. While distinct, these aspects are strictly interdependent; man is an integral unity, not the sum total of separable parts.
First, there is the body, �dust from the ground� (Gen. 2:7), the physical or material aspect of man�s nature.
Secondly, there is the soul, the life-force that vivifies and animates the body, causing it to be not just a lump of matter, but something that grows and moves, that feels and perceives. Animals also posses a soul, and so perhaps do plants. But in man�s case the soul is endowed with consciousness; it is a rational soul, possessing the capacity for abstract thought, and the ability to advance by discursive argument form premises to a conclusion. These powers are present in animals, if at all, only to a very limited degree.
Thirdly, there is the spirit, the �breath� from God (see Gen. 2:7), which the animals lack. It is important to distinguish �Spirit,� with an initial capital, from �spirit� with a small s. The created spirit of man is not to be identified with the uncreated or Holy Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity; yet the two are intimately connected, for it is through his spirit that man apprehends God and enters into communion with him.
With his soul (psyche) man engages in scientific or philosophical inquiry, analyzing the data of his sense-experience by means of the discursive reason. With his spirit (pneuma), which is sometimes termed nous or spiritual intellect, he understands eternal truth about God or about the logoi or inner essences of created things, not through deductive reasoning, but by direct apprehension or spiritual perception -by a kind of intuition that St. Isaac the Syrian calls �simple cognition.� The spirit or spiritual intellect is thus distinct from man�s reasoning powers and his aesthetic emotions, and superior to both of them.
Because man has a rational soul and a spiritual intellect, he possesses the power of self-determination and of moral freedom, that is to say, the sense of good and evil, and the ability to choose between them. Where the animals act by instinct, man is capable of making a free and conscious decision.
Sometimes the Fathers adopt not a tripartite but a twofold scheme, describing man simply as a unity of body and soul; in that case they treat the spirit or intellect as the highest aspect of the soul. But the threefold scheme of body, soul and spirit is more precise and more illuminating, particularly in our own age when the soul and the spirit are often confused, and when most people are not even aware that they possess a spiritual intellect. The culture and educational system of the contemporary West are based almost exclusively upon the training of the reasoning brain and, to a lesser degree, of the aesthetic emotions. Most of us have forgotten that we are not only brain and will, senses and feelings; we are also spirit. Modern man has for the most part lost touch with the truest and highest aspect of himself; and the result of this inward alienation can be seen all too plainly in his restlessness, his lack of identity and his loss of hope.
(The Orthodox Way, pgs. 47-48)

Dear Ghazar,

However, there is no authoritative teaching on the subject within Orthodoxy and Fr. Michael Pomazansky, for example, sees the soul and the spirit as parts of the same reality with the spirit the "higher" part."

So whether the soul and the spirit are part of a tripartite understanding of our ontological being, or two parts of our one spiritual part - that has not been answered and there is no authoritative teaching by the Church on this.

Alex

Dear Alex,

I agree nothing has been "officially proclaimed" but this was not my point. My original question was, in the tripartite scheme, what is the differing roles of soul and spirit in man. Some on this thread suggested that such an idea as man being tripartite was heterodox. I knew it wasn't. So when I found proof for this, and the explanation I was originally looking for, I wanted to share these with everyone.

I never said the Dipartite view was erroneous or heretical. I only wanted background on the approach which I personally now embrace. We could start another thread about the advantages of one view over another. But this was not the point of this thread. I knew the view was historic, valid and Orthodox and just wanted more info on it.

Thanks for your anticipated understanding,
Ghazar