The Soul

Here begins what I hope will be a successful endeavour into the blogging field. 

What are the aspects of man?  We are enfleshed skeletons, containing guts and organs between.  We have a brain in our head which runs by electrical impulse.  We have a network of nerves which extends through our entire being; we have senses, which we number five, and (if everything works properly) we are mobile, independently able to move about, observe and interact with the world at large.

Man also has emotions, however.  Happiness, sadness, anger, and the entire palette in between.  Through his interactions with the environment, man’s emotions change.  He may become attached to some thing or person, and mourn its loss.  He may place his hopes on the acheivement of some goal, and become euphoric or griefstricken depending upon its outcome. 

Different men, moreover, react differently to the same situation.  All men behave in a different way in the absence of any stimuli.  No one thing seems to make all men happy – utopianists know this from experience.  Some men - most men - are made glad by food, drink, sex and other bodily pleasures.  Others despise these for the more cerebral, being extremely introverse.  An appreciable few, however, derive satisfaction and contentment from the removal of all pleasures, bodily and cerebral, and the willful adoption of a life of simplicity. 

These few are evidence of man’s soul.  They nourish neither mind nor body, but rather, they nourish their souls to find contentment.  To many, they appear as madmen – how appearing as a madman in this day is yet possible is quite beyond me – but internally they are among the happiest people who walk this Earth and, I daresay, should probably be among the happiest who no longer walk it.

These are men who see shadows move about them and are not intimidated by them.  They see the shapless forms of buildings rise and fall, the meaningless patterns of costume change a thousand times in a decade; they see the rise and fall of great men, the name of Caesar fall from divinity to pizza parlors, and they are not disturbed.  They see, instead, behind these forms.  They perceive the eternal; they nourish that fragment of the eternal which is within them – their soul.

All men long for the eternal.  For eternal glory seeks the conquerer.  For eternal life seeks the chuchgoer.  For knowledge of the eternal seeks the scientist.  All men strive to conquer the eternal, but most seek to do so by means of the temporal.  The temporal cannot last – the ascetics have seen this.  Their discarding of the things of this world allows them to achieve a happiness far deeper and far more lasting, even in the face of worldy adversity, than any mere mental or bodily happiness.  Theirs is a happiness of the soul.

“In order for a person to be immortal he must, at the very core of his sense of self, feel himself immortal. For him to be eternal, in his center of consciousness of self he must know himself eternal. Without doing this, for him both immortality and eternity alike will be conditions imposed from the outside.”

-Fr. Justin Popovich