Unlike idolatrous portraits of the self, which leave no room for the Other and crowd out the presence of wonder, the soul is an icon of the Other, a portrait that is filled with light and shade like a chiaroscuro painting of the Renaissance. In the space of a unique singular person, the soul is an aura or trace of the infinite.25
In Gregory of Nyssa’s portrait of the soul, for example, the metaphor of icon is explicitly invoked: “The icon is perfectly an icon only so long as it is missing nothing of what is known in the archetype. Now, since incomprehensibility of essence is found in what we see in the divine nature, it must necessarily be that every icon keeps in it too a likeness with its archetype.”26 Since the soul is an icon of divine incomprehensibility, the argument goes, the soul shares in this incomprehensibility and formlessness, in that which is without shape or semblance. The soul resembles “nothing”; it is denuded of all graven images, indeterminate and strange. What pertains to God—namelessness—also pertains to humankind. “Man remains unimaginable,” writes Jean-Luc Marion, “since formed in the image of He who admits none, incomprehensible because formed in the likeness of He who admits no comprehension.”27
Augustine’s consideration of the conundrum of memory only deepens this via negativa of theological anthropology. As he wanders through the hinterlands of the human psyche, his language gropes for metaphors and images that intensify, rather than eliminate, our perplexity and surprise. For Augustine, to put it plainly, the soul is an enigma, and the human person is an “immense abyss.”28 In his winding, circuitous path into the soul, Augustine never discovers an unchanging ground of identity or any essence of subjectivity in the center of the soul’s labyrinth. If anything, his discovery entails the dizzying, vertiginous realization of an infinite panorama within, one whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. As for self-knowledge, he can only concede that he knows that he is, but not what he is; his existence is not in doubt, but his essence confounds him enough for him to say that he has become a great question to himself.29 When considering the great mysteries of memory in particular, he tells us that he is suddenly lost in astonishment, and a great stupor seizes him.30 Like any poet addressing an inscrutable question, he reaches for metaphors that describe the wonder of it all: memory is a wide plain, a spacious palace, a storehouse of images, a vast cloister, a cavern and crater, a vast and infinite sanctuary: “Who can plumb its depths? And yet, it is a faculty of my soul.”31
So as a faculty of the soul, memory poses an insurmountable problem for self-consciousness and makes the search for soul an existential ordeal. “I have become to myself,” he confesses, “a land of difficulty over which I toil and sweat.”32 If the terrain of the soul in Augustine is a land of difficulty with numerous caverns and abysses along the way, travel through this territory is like spelunking in subterranean depths, advancing by touch and feel, living by faith not sight. And without a fixed essence at the core, human identity is subject to constant variations, changes, and upheavals, as is evident in so many biblical characters (the subject of the following chapters). The soul is an ever-expanding vessel, one that constantly grows and swells, contracts and stumbles, advances and retreats. For Augustine, though, the keys to the soul’s growth and not its ruin are the biblical values of dispossession over possession, caritas over the libido dominandi, self-renunciation over self-gratification.33 If the soul is to be true to its divine nature—its fathomless and shoreless being—it must embody these values with the same wanton generosity as the sun over the desert.
In spite of these apophatic moments in classical theology (the moments of unsaying in theological discourse), however, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine clearly assumed that we can in fact achieve some wisdom about God and the soul, even if that is a revelation in obscurity, seen through a mirror dimly. Augustine did believe that we encounter God in the labyrinth of the soul, that God graces us with an understanding, however partial, of who we are, who we can be, and who we ought to be. It is obvious, then, that knowledge of God is revelatory and revolutionary for the meaning and purpose of our lives. Even if our grasp of God—and the human soul—is evanescent and imperfect, like Moses’s glimpse of God as he passed by, it is enough to stun and transform us (Exod. 33:17–23). And even if the soul is as elusive as a phantom (“Few catch the phantom,” as Woolf writes; “most have to be content with a scrap of her dress, or a wisp of her hair.”), the Christian tradition dresses up the soul in radiant colors and voluptuous profiles, which makes the soul into something a lot more sensual and alluring than a bloodless ghost.34
The Aesthetic Contours of Soul: Mysticism, Music, and Festivity
To speak of the soul as an icon—in which God is simultaneously revealed and concealed, present and absent—is to inevitably invite the question of aesthetics. At least in classic Christian theology, especially in the analogical tradition, the experience of beauty is a seductive ruse of God to charm and beguile the soul and hence a confirmation of what is true and good. Nicolas of Cusa said that we can taste eternal wisdom in everything savored, feel eternal pleasure in all things pleasurable, and behold eternal beauty in all that is beautiful.35 In the myriad forms of creation, everything is saturated with grace, thus compromising the divisions of sacred and profane, spirit and flesh, the transcendent and worldly. God’s presence teems and overflows in the cosmos, bathing and penetrating everything, large and small. The human soul, as a result, is indivisible from the elegant tapestry of creation, and a microcosm of the larger pattern of the universe. In this world of grace, a “house made of dawn, house made of the dark cloud,” the soul walks surrounded and steeped in beauty (“Navajo Night Chant”).36
In David Bentley Hart’s assessment, this classic vision of the soul was eventually forsaken for the modern self:
But before modern subjectivity had fully evolved and emerged from the waters, a person was indeed conceived as a living soul swimming in the deeps, participating in the being of the world, inseparable from the element he or she inhabited and knew; and the soul, rather than the sterile abstraction of an ego was an entire and unified spiritual and corporeal reality; it was the life and form of the body, encompassing every aspect of human existence, from the nous to the animal functions, uniting reason and emotion, spirit and flesh, memory and presence, supernatural longing and natural capacity.37
In this enchanted cosmology, the soul is submerged in the being of the world and is related to the whole of creation; it is the brother of the sun, the sister of the moon, and the child of mother earth.38 And it is of course related to the verbal and musical artistry of the cosmos: When the soul is attuned to and synchronized with grace, it rises into being at the sound of creation’s sonata-like summons and moves and dances to the gravitational pull of the heavenly spheres. In fact, as the ancient Pythagoreans, Neoplatonists, and Christian theologians believed, everything is formed with the cadence and rhapsody of poetry and song. God created the universe by the artistry of language like a great orator or musician, filling the silent void of the earth with melody and sonority, producing music from the rotation of the heavenly bodies, so that all of creation became an ode to beauty: the chiming of the planets in their orbits, the splashing voices of the sea, the caroling air, whistling winds, warbling birds, buzzing cicadas, and groaning and pealing thunder.
The concept of the soul in the Middle Ages was a reaping of this Greco-Roman and Jewish-Christian vision, in which music was the food of the soul and a medium of transcendence. Many medieval theologians saw music as both edifying and elevating. They discerned in music a unique mode of perception, one that draws the soul into ethereal spheres of truth. In reference to the musical ear of Gregory of Nyssa, Hart remarks: “According to Gregory of Nyssa, creation is a wonderfully wrought hymn to the power of the Almighty: the order of the universe is a kind of musical harmony, richly and multifariously toned, guided by an inward rhythm and accord, pervaded by an essential symphony.”39 In appealing to this great symphony of creation, Gregory of Nyssa clearly resonated with the rich pedagogical culture of early Christianity, in which the sequence of the liberal arts gradually moved in an ascending pattern through grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.40
