Mankind

The Angels blind us by their splendor. Everything about them seems so superb as to test our capacity for absorbing truth. It is so easy to be incredulous because it is all nearly too good to be true. Men blind us by their very ordinariness. We ourselves are men, and surrounded by our kind; human things, under our eyes all the time, are easily dismissed as prosaic. We miss the splendor of men through that same blindness to the obvious that allows us to take grass and trees, sun and rain, even love and life, for granted, while we stand in open-mouthed wonder before a machine that coughs out cigarettes.

Our human splendor is a living splendor. By that fact, we are set apart from stones and dirt, clouds and mountains. By it we join ranks with all the living, from the least plant through the highest angel, to Life unlimited from Whom is all life. A dead plant, a dead animal, a dead man are all things whose inner spark of life has been extinguished, the splendor is gone, and only memory gives some dignity to the burnt out ashes of death.

We know this can happen, for we have seen it; the vital principles by which things live are lost and death takes over the kingdom that once belonged to life. Each living creature has a vital principle, it's soul, by which it is alive; a thing not to be weighed or measured, yet not to be doubted in the face of the graphic facts of life. Here we touch on a mystery, a profound mystery for a world that sees only bodies as non-mysterious; these souls are not composite things to be taken apart; they are not bodies but the principles by which bodies come alive.

Souls are not peculiar to us, but the common characteristic of all living creatures; the living possess a vital principle by which they live. We begin to enter the realm of distinctively human splendor when we notice that we can know all bodies; a feat as impossible to a soul with anything of the corporeal in it as it would be for a man with a bitter taste in his mouth to detect sweetness or a colored eyeglass to show us the variety of the rainbow. There is an independence here that marks out the beginnings of a startling truth: that our souls are not only not bodies, they are fundamentally independent of the corporeal world which they dominate.

We begin to appreciate this when we notice that the souls of the animals are so tied up with the corporal that they cannot work without it; they produce no vital actions without a decided, sometimes a disastrous, physical change to the body. Notice the contrast, for example, between too much of light for the eye or too much of sound for the ear as against a truth too great for the mind or a goodness too great for the heart. Too great a perfection of light blinds the eye, too loud a sound deafens the ear; the very things that make possible sight and hearing, if they be too perfect, destroy vision and hearing. On the other hand, the greater the truth, the greater the perfection of the intellect contacting it; the greater the goodness, the more ennobled the heart that reaches out to embrace it. The faculties of our souls are not destroyed by the perfection of their goals but rather challenged and improved. These things, truth and goodness, do not demand a physical bodily change, they carry no threats of destruction to the seeing mind and the loving heart.

Of course we do get tired. Yet it is not our mind, but the ministering body that is the subject of fatigue. Our eyes and ears, our memory and imagination must haul the rough material of our knowing; and they are physical things that can and do need rest and refreshment from the burden of labor. As far as our soul is concerned, such fatigue is as accidental as the termination of a painter's inspiration by fading light or the architect's failure to finish a building because of lack of material. The fact is that we do things beyond the physical: we bypass time to plan for the future and to recall the past, we bind men together by bonds that are purely political, we discover the living beauty of divinity in the dead things of the world and imprison it in poetry, we trace relationships that leave no physical trails, and uncover universal truths in a world of singular things.

It is this note of independence that is the startling wonder of man's soul. The souls of plants and of animals are not made up of parts, not to be located in the roots or leaves, head or tail; for by the soul the whole creature lives, roots as well as leaves, head as well as tail. The principle of that living is the soul. That is wonder enough and mystery enough for our time. The added wonder in man is that not only has his soul no parts, vitalizing as it does the whole man, but neither is there any substantial dependence in it. An animal can not be killed by taking it's soul apart as a fresco is destroyed by scraping it off a wall inch by inch; but just as the fresco can effectively be destroyed by demolishing the wall on which it is painted, the soul of the animal can be eliminated by destroying the body on which it depends.

No such thing is possible in man. His soul can not be taken apart, for it has no parts, but neither can it be destroyed by destroying the body of a man. The death of the body is not the end of the soul, for the soul has it's own independence, it's own actions transcending the physical and corporal, it has it's own life which it gives to the body but which is not surrendered with the death of the body. The soul of a man can be separated from the body, (and we call this separation death) but not destroyed.

The soul of man, in other words, stands alone in the physical universe, for it is spiritual, bodiless, independent, living by it's own life. Once brought into existence, that soul is as immortal as the angels; it can not be destroyed by disintegration nor by any attacks on the body which it vitalizes. The soul of every man who has been born into the world lives forever; there is no end to a man's knowledge, no wall that marks the end of his life, no escape from a responsibility that stretches the length of eternity.

- My Way of Life
Confraternity of the Precious Blood