Article Outline
Soul, in many religions and philosophies, the immaterial element that, together with the material body, constitutes the human individual. In general, the soul is conceived as an inner, vital, and spiritual principle, the source of all bodily functions and particularly of mental activities. Belief in some kind of soul that can exist apart from the body is found in all known cultures. In many contemporary nonliterate societies, human beings are said to have several souls—sometimes as many as seven—localized in different parts of the body and having diverse functions. Disease is frequently explained as “soul-loss,” which can occur, for example, when witches steal the soul or evil spirits capture it.
In the East, belief in a human soul is central to several philosophical and religious systems. Thus, for instance, in early Hinduism the soul or self (atman) was considered the principle that controls all activities and defines one's self-identity and consciousness. The philosophical Hindu writings, the Upanishads, identify the atman with the divine (Brahman), adding an eternal dimension to the soul. Bound up with matter, the human soul is caught in the cycle of reincarnation until it achieves purification and knowledge and merges once again with ultimate reality (see Transmigration). Buddhism is unique in the history of religions because it teaches that the individual soul is an illusion produced by various psychological and physiological influences. Thus, it has no conception of a soul or self that can survive death.
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Judaism and Christianity
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Early Judaism considered the human personality as a whole, without making a sharp distinction between body and soul. By the Middle Ages, however, the soul was defined in Judaism as the principle of life and was considered capable of surviving bodily decay. The Christian doctrine of the soul has been strongly influenced by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle (see Christianity). Most Christians believe that each individual has an immortal soul and that the human personality as a whole, composed of soul and resurrected body, may, through faith, be granted God's presence in the afterlife (see Resurrection). The Neoplatonic theory of the soul as prisoner in a material body (see Neoplatonism) prevailed in Christian thought until the advent of the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, who accepted Aristotle's analysis of the soul and body as two conceptually distinguishable elements of a single substance.
The teachings of Islam on the soul resemble those of Judaism and Christianity. According to the Qur'an (Koran), God breathed the soul into the first human beings, and at death the souls of the faithful are brought near to God.
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