Soul Of A Nation

This past week the Senate debated whether to redefine torture as something other than the gentle practices of waterboarding and inducing hypothermia. The fact that we’re having a political debate about torture, that such actions are just not universally condemned by everyone, right and left, is truly astonishing. Something has shifted in this country over a generation or so, a shift that goes far deeper than electoral politics, a shift of spirit and soul.

Spirit and soul. The archetypal psychologist James Hillman distinguishes between these two notions in a way I think is illuminating:

Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury—to use an image from St. Augustine—a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior…Spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negativa...The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.

– James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, 1975.

We retreat to little things. Sketching. Gardening. But these are things that create soul, as the Romantics well understood.