Losing sight of the soul
Carl Gustav Jung: ‘The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man.’ (University of Houston interviews, 1957)
The soul has been one of the three most influential ideas in history, the others being the idea of Europe and the experiment — that’s the assertion made by Peter Watson in his magisterial tome, Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud (2005).
One would think that, surely, the idea of God is, or has been, more powerful, more universal. But Watson, a former deputy editor of New Society, author and arts presenter, puts forward two reasons why the soul has been a more influential and ‘fecund’ idea in the Western world than the supreme deity itself.
One is that, with the notion of the afterlife, without which any concept such as the soul would have much less meaning, the way was clear for organised religions to more easily control people’s minds, and wield great authority, particularly during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. A toxic combination of faith and fear wielded by the Catholic Church held back thought and freedom in the western world for centuries.
The second reason is that the idea of the soul has outlived the idea of God: ‘one might even say it has evolved beyond God, beyond religion, in that even people without faith — perhaps especially people without faith — are concerned with the inner life,’…
