The historical trajectory

Any contemporary discussion of the soul must reckon with a formidable background in the history of thought. Modern studies often describe this history in terms of a trajectory through key thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition, beginning at Plato and Aristotle, proceeding quickly through Augustine and Aquinas, and then pausing at Descartes as the most important forebear of contemporary substance dualism.Footnote ² This trajectory construes the soul debate in terms of evolving views on substance and form, not least because the Cartesian question (of whether the reality of the thinking world is to be seen as wholly distinct from the reality of the material world) tends to revolve on whether the soul should be seen as a separate substance from the material world, or as a form within (or tied to) that world (hylomorphism). Thus, more dualistic approaches are contrasted with more monistic, Plato with Aristotle, and Augustine with Aquinas.

The biblical world, knowing little or nothing of Greek philosophical categories, represents something of an outlier in this trajectory, but the Bible can be incorporated as a representative of the hard monistic end of the spectrum,Footnote ³ since the ancient Semitic view of the human person maintained an essential physical unity.Footnote ⁴ Thus, talk of the ‘soul’ in the biblical context is a way of summing up this unity as imbued with God-breathed life (Gen 2:7). Likewise, whatever Paul meant by his term ‘spiritual body’ when discussing the afterlife (1 Cor 15:44), he was almost certainly thinking in terms of the resurrection of a material body rather than the post-mortem existence of a disembodied soul.

Significantly, the idea that the soul is detachable – an intangible entity in its own right which contains a person's true identity beyond their bodily death – appears clearly in early Christianity in the thought of theologians such as Origen and Augustine, who were heavily influenced by their Hellenistic context.Footnote ⁵ This importation of the immortal and dualistic soul into Christianity is of dubious merit, according to some. Pannenberg, for instance, is particularly negative, explaining how, despite the best efforts of early theologians to maintain a holistic view, the Hellenistic body–soul duality ‘invaded Christian anthropology’ in the second century.Footnote ⁶ The implication is that much could be gained by rediscovering the earlier Christian view, and Nancey Murphy wonders wistfully what might have happened if the importation of dualism had been resisted, averring that Christianity would almost certainly have retained a ‘broader, richer’ emphasis on the this-worldly teachings of Jesus rather than on metaphysical speculations.Footnote ⁷

I myself would tend to agree: there is something to be said for the contemporary reassertion of monistic anthropologies over the long-prevalent dualistic views, if the former allow for a renewed appreciation of biblical texts, and for a constructive engagement of theology with modern neuroscience, which is, after all, resolutely monistic in its view of human mental processes.Footnote ⁸ However, insofar as this contemporary theological reassertion of anthropological monism is served by an historical trajectory which sees the varying views on substance and form as the only issues of note, it has meant that other theological questions concerning the soul have received little or no attention. That there are indeed such other questions becomes clear when the ‘invasion’ of the Hellenistic soul in the early church is examined, especially around the controversial teachings of Apollinarius, who became bishop of Laodicea around 360. Not only does this controversy demonstrate that belief in the soul was complex and varied in the early church, but it also suggests that issues of substance and form are of rather secondary theological importance.

The Apollinarian Christ

Apollinarius formulated his infamous Christology as an attempt to underscore the full divinity of the Son of God against the Arians,Footnote ⁹ and to clinch the argument by explaining how the divine Son could coexist with the human Jesus to make the one Christ.Footnote ¹⁰ Crucially, Apollinarius achieved this holistic anthropology by denying the soul – rather as in the contemporary reassertion of anthropological monism. As Apollinarius saw it, the incarnation is literally the enfleshment of the divine Logos.Footnote ¹¹ Since Stoic thought connected the Logos with the universal animating wisdom, and biblical texts (John 1:1–18) identified the Logos with the divine itself, it is easy to see the logic by which Apollinarius identified the Logos with the mind of Christ, empowering the human body of Jesus in place of the usual rational human soul.

Two particular concerns appear to stand behind Apollinarius’ denial of a human soul for Jesus. First, there is the need to understand Christ in unified terms: to be able to affirm unambiguously that Christ the Saviour, God and human, is one, and is therefore able to unite humans with God.Footnote ¹² Second, there is the problem of sin: Apollinarius was certain that Christ cannot save humankind if Christ is in possession of a human mind or soul, because he (Christ) would then be influenced by sin. Only a Christ who does not possess a fallible human soul or mind has the power to save. As Apollinarius writes, ‘The Word did not become flesh by taking on a human mind, a mind that is changeable and subject to filthy thoughts, but by being a divine unchangeable heavenly mind.’Footnote ¹³ Similarly, he notes in one of the fragments of his Apodeixis: ‘If together with God, who is intellect (νοῦς), there was also a human intellect (ἀνθρώπινος νοῦς) in Christ, then the work of the incarnation is not accomplished in him.’Footnote ¹⁴ According to Apollinarius then, Christ needs the divine mind in order to be the Saviour because otherwise he would not be immune from sin.

It is difficult to pin down Apollinarius’ argument with confidence though, not least because of the fragmentary form in which his texts have come down to us. In some of his fragments he seems to operate with a basic dichotomist anthropology: the human person is flesh (σάρξ) and spirit (πνεῦμα), with the Logos taking the place of spirit in Christ (i.e. ‘spirit’ is all that is non-material in the human and thus includes soul, mind and spirit); while in other writings Apollinarius works with a trichotomist anthropology: body (σῶμα), animal soul (ψυχή) and rational mind (νοῦς), where the Logos takes the place of νοῦς in Christ.Footnote ¹⁵ It is unclear why Apollinarius’ anthropology is inconsistent in this way: it might be context dependent,Footnote ¹⁶ or it is possible that his anthropology evolved over time,Footnote ¹⁷ as he sought to nuance it more carefully in soteriological terms.Footnote ¹⁸ But throughout, Apollinarius’ main point seems to be that in Christ it is the divine mind (the Logos) that is dominant, providing supernatural life and motivation to the human flesh.Footnote ¹⁹ This allows Apollinarius to develop an ethical/subjective soteriology in the trichotomist fragments, whereby ordinary humans are saved by making their own intellectual ‘self-assimilation’ (οἰκείοω) of Christ's divine–human union.Footnote ²⁰ The human mind is usually subject not only to sin, but also to the sinful flesh, which tends to dominate; the human mind literally cannot help itself of itself.Footnote ²¹ But if ordinary Christians submit to Christ intellectually, with his all-powerful divine mind ruling the flesh, then they can appropriate/assimilate his divine mind for themselves, argues Apollinarius.Footnote ²² This appropriation takes place through a kind of self-willed and subjective imitation of Christ,Footnote ²³ where the power of the mind is exerted over the flesh in order to attain Christ's virtue.Footnote ²⁴ Like Apollinarius' christology, therefore, his soteriology places a heavy emphasis on mind and cognition.

The Cappadocian response

There are those today who warm to Apollinarius’ innovations,Footnote ²⁵ but the church of the time judged them to be dangerous failures.Footnote ²⁶ In this, two of the Cappadocian theologians, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, played crucial roles. Both were insistent that Christ must have a human soul/mind like us in order to save us. Gregory of Nazianzus’ famous maxim says it all: ‘That which is not assumed is not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.’Footnote ²⁷ Gregory of Nyssa made a similar point: ‘That which he [Christ] united he assumed into his divinity.’Footnote ²⁸ In other words, if the Logos had not assumed a human soul as well as a human body at the incarnation, then our human souls (minds) could not be said to be healed as well as our human bodies: Christ must assume the human condition entirely in order for it to be healed entirely. The Apollinarian Christ is therefore lacking in more than just a human soul: he is lacking in the ability to save humankind, according to the Cappadocian way of thinking.

Although a rhetorically effective critique, it is arguable whether this truly engages with the force of Apollinarius’ position.Footnote ²⁹ Still, the Cappadocian position does allow for the development of a more sophisticated soteriology. As Brian Daley puts it:

Therefore, according to the Gregorys, the work of salvation is through our humble and lowly humanity, in all its particularities and messiness, not around it or in spite of it, as Apollinarius had proposed. This Cappadocian emphasis leads to a powerfully holistic view of salvation, including the soul, although each Gregory developed this view differently, as I shall explain shortly.

But first it is important to expand upon the perceived failure of Apollinarius’ soteriology, since it is relevant for the contemporary debate on the soul. The connection between sin and the soul is rarely discussed in the contemporary soul debate, but from a theological perspective it is vital to preserve this connection. In short, wherever anthropologically we place the soul/mind, we must also find a place for sin. Apollinarius failed, according to the Cappadocians, because the possibility of sin was not essential to his anthropology. Apollinarius’ soul-less Christ was a being who was more-than-human but was actually less-than-human in anthropological terms: he had no means of experiencing sin, nor even of comprehending it fully in a truly ‘human’ way. Ordinary Christians might have been able to apprehend the mind of Christ intellectually in Apollinarius’ soteriology, but since the mind of Christ itself was unable to apprehend sin at first hand, it was unclear that Christ could apprehend ordinary humans, still less help them.

My own concern to clarify this soteriological point arises because the modern debate on the soul has overlooked it so comprehensively. As I believe the Apollinarian controversy demonstrates, any theological anthropology must find an effective means of incorporating the full breadth of the human condition, especially of sin. Discussions of substance and form might be philosophically satisfying but they are theologically insufficient: if the human condition needs saving, then we must be clear what it needs saving from. Sin is, of course, as elusive a concept to describe as the soul: not simply wrong-doing (however that might be defined), the idea of sin in Jewish and Christian traditions encapsulates a formidable array of created and cosmic entities and circumstances standing over and against God. If it is unclear how best to reduce the idea of the soul/mind to a physicalist description without making it vanish altogether, then it is doubly unclear how to reduce the idea of sin to a physicalist description, even though sin is still no less real as an experiential concept in the human condition. In our concern to put forward a physicalist/monist description of the human condition, we might deny the immaterial soul, but we are still left with the problem of sin. I am not, however, advocating a return to a dualist anthropology. There are greater subtleties here than the question of dualism versus monism, as a close examination of what the two Gregorys believed about the soul begins to reveal.

The soul in Gregory of Nazianzus

In a highly significant passage, Gregory of Nazianzus draws further attention to the problem of sin in the soul debate, again attacking the Apollinarian doctrine of a soul-less Christ:

The human soul/mind is by no means dispensable in Christ according to Gregory, since it forms the ‘wall of partition’ between the flesh and the Logos: it is the place where sin, conscience and what we would call consciousness are to be located in the human condition. Removing this ‘wall of partition’ (the human mind/soul) removes the possibility of both sin and conscience. Note that the Greek term translated here as ‘wall of partition’ (μεσότοιχον) is unusual, but it is particularly meaningful in this context: occurring in just one place in the New Testament, it is nevertheless prominent, and is richly suggestive for Gregory's purposes: ‘For he [Christ] is our peace; he has made both groups one and has torn down the dividing wall of partition (τὸ μεσότοιχον τοῦ φραγμοῦ), that is, the enmity (τὴν ἔχθραν), in his flesh’ (ἐν τῇ σαρκὶ αὐτοῦ); Eph 2:14.Footnote ³² Gregory's image of the removal of the μεσότοιχον is a clear allusion to this biblical passage. Note that the intriguing combination of τὸ μεσότοιχον with τοῦ φραγμοῦ in the Ephesians text is both difficult to translate and difficult to interpret, but it conjures up the sense of a permanent and impassable barrier, which is nevertheless torn down by Christ.Footnote ³³ And herein lies the real point of interest in the comparison between Gregory's letter and the Ephesians text, for in the latter it is Christ who attacks the wall of partition, while in the former it is the Apollinarian, who does not tear down the wall of partition but makes it vanish altogether. In other words, the Apollinarian is an anti-Christ, eradicating the dividing wall of partition (the soul/mind), so that Christ no longer has anything to tear down, and therefore has no capacity to deal with sin (i.e. Christ has no atoning power). Another way of looking at this is to say that the wall of partition is the ‘causal joint’ across which divine action occurs; without it there is no possibility of atonement. This is why Gregory says that Apollinarianism provides an ‘excuse’ for those who sin with the mind: such sin cannot be atoned for in this system, but becomes an inevitable and fixed ‘given’ in human nature.

Gregory's argument then is that the human soul/mind should not be done away with: it is the locus of both sin and salvation, the battleground on which salvation is to be either won or lost. Therefore, the soul cannot be removed without making Christ (and the reality of sin) pointless. Gregory's next piece of correspondence makes the same challenge: ‘They [the Apollinarians] who take away the Humanity and the Interior Image [the soul of Christ] cleanse by their newly invented mask only our outside, and that which is seen’ (Οἱ τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἀποσκευαζόμενοι, καὶ τὴν ἐντὸς εἰκόνα, τὸ ἐκτὸς ἡμῶν καθαρίζουςι μόνον διὰ τοῦ καινοῦ προσωπείου, καὶ τοῦ ὁρωμένου).Footnote ³⁴ This passage poses an important question for those in the contemporary soul debate (such as myself) who support a physicalist/monist thesis: by reducing the mind/soul to the status of flesh in Christian anthropology, does the physicalist approach reduce the human condition merely to ‘that which is seen’, therefore only allowing for a superficial cleansing of the human person, or is the physicalist approach capable of describing the true cleansing of the human ‘interior’, most especially the mysterious human consciousness? It would seem that, until the contemporary physicalist position develops an account of sin, this question will remain open.

Also relevant in Gregory's soteriology is his famous concept of θέωσις,Footnote ³⁵ which offers a vision of how the Christian is turned, through the saving work of Christ and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, into the likeness of Christ. This occurs by means of a dynamic movement of growth towards God, which occurs at least in part in the believer's intellectual/epistemic domain of being.Footnote ³⁶ As Christopher Beeley has pointed out, Gregory takes a very high view of doctrinal theology, seeing it as the primary means by which the Christian makes her ascent to God.Footnote ³⁷ Contemplation of the mysteries of God, of Christ, and of salvation is what enables the upward journey. And although this is not so dissimilar to Apollinarius’ suggestion that the Christian believer can assimilate herself to the mind of Christ, yet Christian tradition has judged Gregory's solution to be more successful, because Gregory's Christ, unlike Apollinarius’, has actually taken the human mind to himself and healed it, not rejected it as unfit for purpose. In other words, Gregory's θέωσις offers a positive intellectual path towards healing and holiness of the entire human.

The soul in Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa developed a related idea of salvation to Gregory of Nazianzus’ θέωσις, but known as ἐπέκτασις.Footnote ³⁸ Similarly transformative through growth, ἐπέκτασις is potentially even more promising for the modern soul debate (as I will suggest shortly). Like Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa was certain that Christ has a human soul,Footnote ³⁹ and he wrote a major (and largely non-polemical) treatise on the subject of the human soul and the afterlife, On the Soul and the Resurrection.Footnote ⁴⁰ This work is extremely useful in exploring fourth-century beliefs regarding the soul, and it demonstrates considerable sophistication in those beliefs, which are relevant to the monism/dualism question at the heart of the modern soul debate.

On the Soul and the Resurrection is constructed as a kind of Socratic dialogue between Gregory and his sister Macrina, who, through extended answers to Gregory's questions and doubts, provides much of the wisdom and direction of the piece.Footnote ⁴¹ We know that the soul exists, Gregory tells us (via Macrina), because we know that God exists.Footnote ⁴² (S)he explains that our bodily senses, like sight, are able to apprehend the ‘almighty wisdom which is visible in the universe’ and thereby to know the existence of God. Gregory/Macrina then puts an interesting spin on this otherwise familiar argument from design by extending it to the soul and the body. Since the human being is ‘a little world’ in him/herself, when we look to our ‘inner world’ by means of ‘thought and not of sight’, we find evidence of what is unknown there, i.e. the soul, which (like God) ‘eludes the grasp of sense’. This is clearly a circular argument on Gregory/Macrina's part – we may only apprehend the soul by our own rationality (i.e. through the exercise of our rational souls) – but the fact of the argument does at least demonstrate that the existence of the soul was by no means taken for granted, even in the fourth century.

Likewise, the relationship of the soul to the body (monism versus dualism) was also a debatable matter, as becomes clear slightly further on in Gregory/Macrina's discussion, where (s)he contrasts the soul's peculiarity and individuality (ἐν ἐξηλλαγμένῃ τε καὶ ἰδιαζούσῃ φύσει) with the coarseness of the body which it accompanies (παρὰ τὴν σωματικὴν παχυμέρειαν).Footnote ⁴³ At first glance, such a contrast may seem like a basic statement of the dualistic soul, comprised of a ‘special thinking substance’ (ἰδιάζον νοητῆς οὐσίας).Footnote ⁴⁴ However, there are subtleties, and this is far from the Cartesian substance dualism that is so familiar in the modern soul debate. In fact, a careful reading demonstrates that Gregory's anthropology veers towards a kind of practical monism, since it is sufficiently holistic that he sees the human person – body and soul – as one psychosomatic being.Footnote ⁴⁵ The soul exists inseparably with the body, always closely associated with it:Footnote ⁴⁶ body and soul are one whole as a human is one whole; the soul comes into being when the body is born, such that the two grow and develop together;Footnote ⁴⁷ and even after death, when the body is dissolved into its constituent atoms and scattered far and wide, the soul recognises and remains with each atom, being the means by which they are reassembled at the resurrection of the dead.Footnote ⁴⁸ There is therefore no sense in which the soul might be separable from material/physical reality, although the soul is not reducible to it.Footnote ⁴⁹ The upshot is that Gregory/Macrina is not quite a physicalist (in the reductive sense), but then neither is (s)he obviously a dualist; (s)he is, at any rate, a confirmed holist in both life and death.Footnote ⁵⁰ In fact, her/his position is not unlike that of ‘non-reductive physicalism’ in today's soul debate. Significantly, (s)he uses the language of the soul in a heavily metaphorical way, to capture aspects of the spiritual life that are not reducible to the physical. For instance, in Gregory/Macrina's protracted discussion of the parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31 – a parable which is often cited as evidence today that the New Testament can conceive of a disembodied afterlife – the metaphorical nature of the parable is stressed by Gregory/Macrina, such that (s)he interprets it as an allegory of the moral life during our earthly (present) existence, and of the sins that may consequently cling to the soul after death.Footnote ⁵¹ When (s)he concludes this section by speaking of the disembodied soul ‘soaring up to the Good’ unhindered by the flesh, it is to make an allegorical point about the need to be free from the sins of the flesh in this life so as to avoid a ‘second death’ at the Judgement.Footnote ⁵² This, to my mind, is much more like a practical monism than a Cartesian dualism.

The ‘soaring up to the Good’ is reminiscent of Gregory's famous concept of ἐπέκτασις, which appears in a number of his works (especially in his Commentary on Song of Songs) and presents his view of the soul in even fuller theological perspective. Hinting at the ‘straining forward’ of Philippians 3:13,Footnote ⁵³ Gregory's ἐπέκτασις captures the idea of the dynamic transformation of the entire believer into the likeness of Christ. This can be related to Gregory's christology, where Gregory describes the transformation of Jesus’ human nature by means of the divine.Footnote ⁵⁴ Gregory's most celebrated image pictures Christ's human nature encountering the divine as like a drop of vinegar mingling with the ocean.Footnote ⁵⁵ In an important reading of this analogy, Brian Daley argues that Gregory sees the humanity of Jesus as no longer discernible in any of its own qualities – being so dominated by the divine that it is, to all intents and purposes, identical with it – yet the humanity continues to exist and to undergo further change.Footnote ⁵⁶ Human characteristics such as mortality and disease are swallowed up, while the ever-changeability of human nature remains. And since the risen Christ is the ‘first fruits’ of the transformed humanity, Daley argues that every believer can therefore be caught up into the same process of eternal transformation.Footnote ⁵⁷

Daley's reading of Gregory's christology parallels Gregory's ἐπέκτασις, especially in the sense of eternal transformation within ἐπέκτασις. For eternal it truly is: in Morwenna Ludlow's exploration of the ἐπέκτασις motif it is to be seen not as a period of change which reaches its final state of perfection at the eschaton; rather, it is humankind's eschatological state.Footnote ⁵⁸ There is no state of blessed stasis and perfection to be attained one glorious day: instead, the process of eternal change into perfection is human destiny. Since Christians hope for resurrection one day – a resurrection like that of Christ – the complete human condition will be caught up into this: flesh and body as well as mind and soul, and also our complex networks of human relationships.Footnote ⁵⁹ Gregory thus offers a holistic view of the human condition, capturing body, mind and soul in community, and all in contemplation of the divine. And significantly, ἐπέκτασις operates in this life too, through the soul/mind's cognitive trajectory of ascent into the mysteries of God.

Therefore, if the modern soul debate is inclined to pigeonhole the soul into either Platonic/Cartesian (an eternal and unchangeable substance distinct from the body) or Aristotelian (the form of the body) terms, then we miss the force of Gregory's conception. The soul is on a different plane from the body, but its changeability and its inextricable links with the body are integral to the soul's identity as part of the entire process of human straining forward. For Gregory, the entire human person, including our rational soul and intellect, is subject to change and transformation, and that is precisely how humans are saved by Christ. And therefore, as Ludlow points out, Gregory's soteriology links human ontology – our state of being – with epistemology – our state of knowing.Footnote ⁶⁰ Rather like Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa believes that theology – and the doing of it – is transformative and soteriological.Footnote ⁶¹ The doing of theology may be a never-ending task (an uphill struggle perhaps), but that is a good thing, not bad, since it is fundamentally the desire of the human mind/soul to grow and to know and to love God more deeply.Footnote ⁶² Gregory's language may at times appear to envision a disembodied soul, especially when he speaks of the soul's ascent towards God, but it is an apophatic metaphor intended to capture the intellectual ascent of the soul/mind, as well as the soul/mind's ‘reaching-out to God in love’, in this life as much as the next.Footnote ⁶³ In the Hebrew Bible, the word (habitually translated ‘soul’ in English) frequently appears in contexts that refer to the whole person's drives (including for food and water, e.g. Ps 107:9; Prov 25:25), desires, and yearnings, which may be spiritual (e.g. Ps 42; 130:6), or even sexual (e.g. Song of Songs 3). ‘Soul’ is therefore an ideal term to use when speaking scripturally of the mind in its mode of contemplation and adoration: it is the whole human life in active search of God. It is no accident that some of Gregory's most intense ἐπέκτασις language concerning the soul is to be found in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, reflecting on this biblical text's deep undercurrents of eroticism and desire for full personal realisation through seeking after the other in love. To read this language in polarised terms (embodied versus disembodied, dualistic versus monistic) is to miss the theological force and beauty of Gregory's vision.

This last point is particularly valuable in light of our present tendency to overliteralise talk of the soul. In his Great Catechism Gregory suggests that we simply cannot understand the soul and how it coheres with the body: the soul is inextricably mysterious, like the union between God and human in Christ, or like the making of the original creation.Footnote ⁶⁴ The causal joints between body and mind, creation and Creator are beyond our understanding, he appears to suggest; nevertheless, those causal joints must be there.

Application to the modern soul debate

The various stances on the soul adopted by these three figures from the fourth century – Apollinarius of Laodicea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa – are subtle and complex, and I have only sketched their thinking in outline here. There are parallels with the modern discussion on the soul, but since the modern discussion is fixated on issues of substance and form, and dualism versus monism, these fourth-century thinkers offer many insights that our current debate completely overlooks. All three thinkers see the soul – the rational mind – as the soteriological bridge between ontology and epistemology. And for the Cappadocians the soul must be affirmed ontologically precisely because it is the theatre of knowing, especially the knowing of Christ, the goal of any Christian. At the same time the soul is the theatre of opposition to knowing Christ: the dividing wall, the location of sin, that theological concept which is as elusive as the soul is elusive.

By synthesising my presentation of these three thinkers, I should like to offer seven considerations for the current soul debate, considerations which (I believe) the debate has not yet reflected upon, but which emerge from the Apollinarian controversy as being of prime soteriological importance:

1. 1. The existence and nature of the human soul was a matter of debate in the fourth century, as it is in ours. Full-blown physicalism was a viable option, as the dialogue between Gregory of Nyssa and Macrina makes clear. However, there was a concern to avoid reductionism: the two Gregorys appeared to feel that the reality of the human soul as something ‘extra’ must be affirmed, because pure physicalism alone was simply too reductive in theological terms.

2. 2. As Apollinarius realised, the human mind/soul is a necessary soteriological battleground: it is the prime locus of sin in the human condition. And as the Gregorys realised, doing away with Christ's human soul means that sin can no longer be defeated: Christ must be epistemically open to sin in order to deal with it ontologically. In other words, Christ cannot save humans by losing his mind, and he cannot defeat it in the flesh alone. The point is that sin cannot be reduced to the flesh, but Christ must save our thoughts too.

3. 3. Transferring this to the modern debate, the reality of human consciousness as a theological arena in its own right distinct from the flesh needs to be affirmed in order to capture the significance of sin. As Gregory of Nazianzus reminds us, the soul is the ‘wall of partition’ between the flesh and the divine, the place where Christ does his work, and where spiritual transformation is focussed. It is, in short, the ‘causal joint’ through which the divine work of soteriology takes place. To deny the soul (in this context) is to deny the causal joint and to embrace a deistic deity who is powerless to save.

4. 4. In other words, a reductionist position that puts too much emphasis on the physicality of the human condition alone cannot capture the full significance of sin nor of Christian soteriology, both of which are theological entities not easily reducible to the physical.

5. 5. This does not necessarily mean that the only solution is to affirm a fully dualist disembodied soul. Gregory of Nyssa, for one, seems to have operated within a position somewhere between what we might call monism and dualism. It was, in any case, fully holistic in both life and death.

6. 6. In fact, none of the three thinkers was a strict dualist, and all attempted to describe a holistic anthropology of some kind. None of them conceived of the soul as a kind of detachable ‘mini me’, but as ‘me’ in the mode of rationality: changeable, finite, but striving always to grow towards the light. In all three thinkers talk of the soul was the epistemological bridge to knowing and loving (or rejecting) God.

7. 7. Therefore, our modern talk of the soul must grasp the fact that it is not only possible but necessary to speak in mystical and metaphorical terms of disembodiment while holding on to a monist-like and holistic position. This is essentially Gregory of Nyssa's vision of ἐπέκτασις. To interpret this literally as referring to a dualistic disembodied soul is to misunderstand it altogether, and to fail to recognise that there are large areas of Christian mystical and soteriological thought where our modern scientific desire for precision in material/physical terms is completely ineffective. In short, the modern soul debate must be careful not to miss the point.

In light of these seven considerations, I believe it is clear that the modern soul debate needs to move beyond its preoccupations with substance versus form, and reductionism versus emergentism. It is not that these issues are irrelevant, but that they have been allowed to control the debate to such a degree that the real value of ‘soul language’ – namely its ability to capture soteriological and mystical categories in a concise way – has been lost to sight. In short, talk of the soul has been overliteralised to the extent that the only question that is seen to matter is whether it is a ‘thing’ that exists or not. If we must speculate on the soul as a ‘thing’, then I suggest that the above seven considerations are not incompatible with an approximately physicalist position, and this would be my own preferred solution.Footnote ⁶⁵ But the overriding point of my argument is that a view of the soul must be developed which considers theological entities of primary importance (such as sin and salvation), and which engages meaningfully with mystical ideas such as deification. Ray Anderson, working within the perspective of non-reductive physicalism, has already pointed out (albeit very briefly) the holistic nature of the body/soul unity in biblical perspective, and how this picture incorporates the effects of sin, producing disorder at physical, social, psychological and spiritual levels.Footnote ⁶⁶ My response is that, while we would certainly want to acknowledge the psychosomatic (and other tangible/visible) effects of sin, this cannot be the only level at which sin is acknowledged in the human condition, or else we will fall into the deterministic trap of asking all over again, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ (John 9:2). Rather, the soul as ‘dividing wall’ and causal joint needs to be more the focus of attention than it is at present, without tying it down futilely to some modern-day equivalent of Descartes’ pineal gland.

In sum, the fourth-century Apollinarian controversy – which concerned the question of whether Jesus has a human rational soul/mind or not – emphasises theological categories that have been lost to sight in the contemporary soul debate: namely the place of sin in the human mind, the soteriological role of Christ which connects epistemic and ontological categories, and mystical talk of deification (‘the ascent of the soul’). I have proposed that it is not necessary to adopt a full-blown dualist perspective in order to explore these ideas, since the original thinkers did not do so. Rather, I have suggested ways in which these ideas need to be explored within the context of physicalism as a starting point, in order to develop the contemporary monistic paradigm further.