How To Be An Agnostic
the urn and the portrayal of this timelessness Keats can equate
beauty with truth, truth with beauty. Its eternal history trans-
ports him from his own temporality: ‘Thou, silent form, dost
tease us out of thought/ As doth eternity’.
History on the TV and in books is clearly not always so
intensely felt as the romantics would have it. But in its tales
of tragedy and triumph, of humdrum and high-powered lives,
it conjures up the same ambivalent feelings of familiarity
and distance. Inasmuch as it exists on the borders of what is
known and unknown, history is an excellent provocation of the
mystery of things.
I – is for me (my soul, personhood and
resurrection?)
When, in the seventeenth century, Descartes suggested that
there might be a distinction between mind and body, part of
the reason his presumed dualism appealed, had to do with reli-
gious convictions. It is clear that one day all living bodies die.
However, if it could be shown that the mind was separate from
the body, then that would support the belief that the human
individual can survive bodily death. In the Christian dispensa-
tion, the soul might rise to immortality. In Eastern systems of
religious thought, the spirit might be reincarnated.
Today, the very existence of the soul has become deeply prob-
lematic, not least because such dualism is so powerfully resisted.
Then there are further questions, such as if the soul did exist,
would it be the same or different from mind or consciousness?
A short history of the soul is perhaps illuminating, at least in
terms of unravelling what is at stake.
The notion that the soul is a crucial part of human nature,
perhaps the most important part – the centre of consciousness
and mind – emerges from the twilight of prehistory. Ancient
Greek Orphic and Pythagorean mystery-teachings held that the
soul is immortal. Conversely, in early Judaism, there is no real
notion of the immortal soul. Rather, there is nephesh, or breath,