Does Souls Have Gender?

[bookofjohn]

What do you think and what does official Church teaching say?

[jasJis]

It depends upon what you define as 'Gender'. Souls do not have gender in the sense that gender determines procreative sexual activity. Souls do reflect our identity and personality traits, some of which we associate as being male or female, (for example, sensitivity and emotional maternalness that we most associate with women).

[Paphnutius]

I am not sure what the Church teaching is, but I am with jas on this one.

The soul is an important part of who we are, and we were created both male and female.

[Aloysius]

WORDS have gender

PEOPLE have sex

linguistically speaking, of course

and human beings are the union of a body and a soul, and on the last day we will rise with both our soul and our glorified body, so yes we maintain our sex in heaven. but spirits, like the angels, are gender neutral.

that is why to represent them Christian art has generally refrained by putting any distinguishing sexual charecteristics on them, giving them youthful and radiant faces, long hair, just the basic human form, and long white robes. that is also why they have chosen to appear in the masculine always, from biblical times all the way through Fatima, because the clothed feminine has more obvious sexual-defining traits.

so too, God as pure Spirit (except in the Incarnated Second Person of the Blessed Trinity) deals with mankind with masculine charecteristics and in the masculine role of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

[jasJis]

Al,
So you would say souls have gender, but are asexual?

[Aloysius]

in the English language, the word "soul" will be assigned the gender neutral pronoun "it"... gender refers to the gender of a word linguistically. I believe in french the gender is feminine, in spanish I think it's masculine

a human soul is intimately connected with a human body, you can't seperate the soul and ask if the soul has a sex. the body is an embodyment of the soul, what the body is so too the soul is. Aloysius's soul is not a seperate being than Aloysius's body.

anyway, they do not procreate, they do not join the two sexes (from secare, the complements) in procreation... but they still are two sexes, male and female they are created.

[Proud2BCatholic139]

No, I don't think so.

[Aloysius]

doesn't that kind of go against the resurection of the body?

I think anything that says our souls do not have a sex necessitates some dualism of philosophy, denying the unity and goodness of our material beings. obviously our bodies have a sex, our souls are intricately connected.

male and female He created them. He did not mask them with male and female vessels, He created them male and female. the human race is divided up (secare) into to sexes, two complements, each extremely different in body and soul yet equal in human dignity.

[Socrates]

According to Thomistic philosophy, the soul is the form of the body. The soul is the active principle which gives life and form to the matter of the body (which without a soul, disintegrates into seperate, non-living substances).

Thus soul and body and intimately connected things, part of the same being. The soul is not some seperate ghostly thing that controls the body like it's a robot.

[Aloysius]

precisely, though I think that basically carries over every Christian philosophy of the soul from east to west (not counting protestants or heretics who could have any number of views of the body and the soul)

[Guest JeffCR07]

[quote name='Aloysius' date='Nov 24 2005, 12:19 AM']precisely, though I think that basically carries over every Christian philosophy of the soul from east to west (not counting protestants or heretics who could have any number of views of the body and the soul)
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Al, I have to disagree. For the majority of the first millenium christian philosophy was dominated by Plato, not Aristotle. As such, there really has been a dualistic trend in Christian thought, which is not entirely heterodox. The point at which it becomes heretical is when you move into Gnosticism and Manecheanism.

Thomas' christianized Aristotle is great, but it isnt the only option that exists from east to west.

[Cam42]

[quote name='Socrates' date='Nov 23 2005, 06:19 PM']According to  Thomistic philosophy, the soul is the form of the body.  The soul is the active principle which gives life and form to the matter of the body (which without a soul, disintegrates into seperate, non-living substances).

Thus soul and body and intimately connected things, part of the same being.  The soul is not some seperate ghostly thing that controls the body like it's a robot.
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Your defintion is close, however, I would say this is a more accurate definition: The ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies are animated.

I don't deny in any way that the soul is the form of the body, but rather I think that this is a more complete understanding of that thought.

The term "mind" usually denotes this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while "soul" denotes the source of our vegetative activities as well. That our vital activities proceed from a principle capable of subsisting in itself, is the thesis of the substantiality of the soul: that this principle is not itself composite, extended, corporeal, or essentially and intrinsically dependent on the body, is the doctrine of spirituality.

I would say this. The soul takes on the gender of the person which it inhabits. My soul is a male soul. My sister's soul is a female soul. Why? Because the soul denotes our vegetative activities.

Remember that Plato viewed the soul as a three part idea:

1. the reason (mind or logos)
2. the appetite (body or passion)
3. spirit (emotion or pathos)

Aristotle had a different view:

Aristotle defined the soul as the core essence of a being, but argued against its having a separate existence. Unlike Plato and the religious traditions, Aristotle did not consider the soul as some kind of separate, ghostly occupant of the body. The soul, in Aristotle's view, is an activity of the body, it cannot be immortal.

Augustine, one of the most influential early Christian thinkers, described the soul as "a special substance, endowed with reason, adapted to rule the body".

The Church officially defines the soul as being:

[quote name='CCC #363']In Sacred Scripture the term "soul" often refers to human life or the entire human person.  [b]But "soul" also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God's image: "soul" signifies the spiritual principle in man.[/b][/quote]

It is through this idea that I have come to the understanding that my soul embodies me and I embody my soul. I do not cease to be when I die, my soul will be reunited with my glorified body; a male body. My soul is proper to me, and no one else.

This view is supported by four paragraphs of the Catechism:
[quote name='CCC #362']The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that "then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." [b]Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.[/b][/quote]

[quote name='CCC #364'][b]The human body shares in the dignity of "the image of God": it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit:

Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity.[/b] Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. [b]Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.[/b][/quote]

That pretty much sums it up. I believe that the soul is intimately united to the person, and therefore can be regarded to be of the same gender, precisely because the whole person is made of body and soul; together.

And finally:

[quote name='CCC #365'][b]The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather [u]their union forms a single nature.[/u][/b][/quote]

[quote name='CCC #366']The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.[/quote]

[son_of_angels]

First of all, in my mind, speaking of the soul's connection to the body is an outdated approach. The soul is ourselves as a purely spiritual incoporeal person. Does it have sex? Well, no, not in any specific way that we can define it, but, like God, the particulars of His revelation could give us a pretty good analogy to understand Him as a spiritual person. He taught us to call him Father, Abba, and Holy Spirit (and in Catholic theology do not we call the Blessed Virgin the "Spouse of the Holy Spirit"? How may she be spouse to one without sex?). While these are not statements of his sex, as it were of Zeus or Apollo, these things do suggest rational, unified understandings of who he is in the spiritual realm. They are not randomly chosen, but, rather, we should reflect on them as the regular character of his person. This is the same with the angels. In the same way who we are as a physical being does not define ourselves as a soul, but serves as a decent analogy to our nature as spiritual beings. As for the resurrection of the body, while "we shall not be married nor given in marriage" nonetheless the body DOES have a specific sexual gender. In that day when the body is resurrected (the same body, but with a different nature), the soul will be fully actualized in time and space (as it may exist then) by its perfect union with the body. The person and the antecedant for the person (namely, the body) will have perfect union.

It is from these opinions that I have always considered the concept of "free-will" and even "sin" to be actions of the soul, and thus relating the soul's relationship with God, more than a certain perceived freedom of the mind and body.

[John Lowell]

An interesting question and one that plays directly into the prevailing confusion of the expression "person" with that of "soul". One very unfortunate holdover from Platonism is the idea that the soul, or life principle, is the person, a conception that St. Thomas specifically rejects. This soul-as-person formulation is held very widely in modern thought, Vogelin's ghost-in-the-machine, for example. One terribly unfortunate consequence of such a view is that it offers support for the sin of abortion, permitting women to consider their "bodies" as objective to "themselves". The body is denigrated in such thought, made into a mere instrument, but such is the fashion after which much of Western culture believes it is constituted. All of that notwithstanding, given its main thrust, the soul can be abstracted for sake of discussion as it is in the case in this forum, but In such abstraction it should be seen as the body's life principle and no more. In reality, the body and soul are inseparably joined, and together are "personalized" at conception. It is correct to say, therefore, that the soul, considered in itself, is sexless, but that the person of which it is the life principle is not.

John Lowell

Edited November 25, 2005 by John Lowell

[Guest JeffCR07]

Now I think a lot of people give poor old Plato a bad rap. Sure, he thought that the body and the physical world is less real than the forms, but thats not [i]really[/i] that bad, and it certainly doesn't equal gnostic/manichean disrespect for the body. I mean come on, he [i]did[/i] save the material world from Parmenides :