Souls in Space
The phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty once said that “the world and I are within one another”.
Thinkers since Plato have looked at the soul as not just immaterial and purely interior entities. Rather, the human soul is something that fans out into space and works itself out in every nook and cranny of the cosmos.
At one level, this should not surprise the Christian, since as human person has long been regarded as a unity of soul and body. As material things, bodies will have to work their way through actual space.
What should also be noted, however, is the way the psalms highlight the intimacy between soul and space. Psalm 63, for instance, speaks of the soul, pining for God, and the former exclaims that without the latter, the the soul is a “dry weary land without water”.
This biblical theme is explicitly drawn upon and given a cinematic parallel in the reflections of Peter Leithart in his Shining Glory, which serve as a theological reflection on Terence Malick’s cinematic masterpiece, The Tree of Life.
According to Leithart, Malick seems to be acutely aware of this relationship in his portrayal of Jack O’Brien (played by Sean Penn) and the spiritual emptiness that he experiences in the film. O’Brien, according to Leithart, is a person whose material successes hide a soul that is long dead.
This deadness of soul, however, is not left in the interior confines of Sean Penn’s person. In the movie, the soul is mapped out into space, but in the form of a desert. Moreover, it is a desert in which Jack finds himself lost. The soul is portrayed as a vast expanse which the soul’s “owner” does not know how to navigate alone.
In a strangely similar vein, the marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, like Malick, drew on Martin Heidegger to roll the soul out into space. One tantalising little example can be found in an essay in his Key Writings, in which Lefebvre made a reference to houses. In pretty much the same way Jack speaks of his own house when he taps back into his memory, Lefebvre spoke about houses as deposits of memories and symbols. These are not just metaphors for an operation of the mind. For Lefebvre, houses are a spatial sign of the unity of the soul.
What these two different yet similar perspectives suggest is that, as we work through our urban lives, we cannot ignore the impact that the urban space has on the soul. It is no accident that we often see drab cities as “soul-destroying”, because in a way, they are. The city is in a way a form of soulcraft, and thus no wonder that the products that are peddled within its space, are now increasingly focusing not so much at the material benefits, but on the ability of these products to work on the soul, whether it is cars, crystals, teas or cheese.
For the Christian, the link between soul and space also suggests that our discipleship has real contours stretching into space and time. It is not just an attention to an interior spirit, but also, in the words of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, a task of “comprehend[ing] with all the saints, the breath and the length and the height and the depth” (Eph 3:18).
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