In Search of Soul

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second.

— Virginia Woolf

Fix every wandering thought upon that quarter where all thought is done; who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

— W. B. Yeats

Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I've written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself.

— James Joyce

THE LOSS OF SOUL IN THE MODERN AGE

As so many other ancient pieties are viewed in our times, the concepts of God and soul have increasingly become objects of suspicion, if not indifference. Where secularization has been most aggressive in the twentieth century, especially among European and American writers dubbed the "new atheists," we have seen obituaries written on behalf of both ideas, as if they are now anachronisms, relics of days of old, when wonder and magic filled the air. In many of these accounts the story of the modern world is narrated in evolutionary terms, with secularization greeted as the morning sun, dispersing the murky fog of the night, and the age of Enlightenment welcomed as the conqueror of the dark ages of the past. As a corollary of a Eurocentric bias, measuring every corner of the globe by its own presumptions of cultural superiority, this story measures and quantifies the development of world cultures by their adherence to Western norms of rationality and finds them crude when they deviate from these norms. It is a story that frequently casts religion in the role of the superstitious and primitive barbarian and reserves the civilizing and colonizing role for science. With a monopoly on truth established by scientific principles, the religious worldview is largely denied and dispossessed of any claim on the truth; this now belongs to the purview of modern rationality, a conception of knowledge stripped of archaic mysteries and primeval beliefs. In this paradigm, little, if any, tolerance is afforded a concept like the "soul." It belongs to an antiquated age whose time is done.

While this narrative of intellectual and cultural evolution has remained an influential model, it has also stirred up swarms of opposition from various artists and intellectuals who dispute its value and credibility. Around the same time that the clouds of disbelief thickened the most (roughly speaking, the nineteenth century to the present), the principles associated with the idea of soul found advocates in numerous modern movements, from romanticism and modernism to African American and Latin American thought. In their own unique ways, these developments resuscitated and breathed new life into the concept of soul, making it stronger and richer, infusing it with the magic elixirs of poetry, myth, melody, and cultural style. In these cases, the various apologists for the idea of the soul revealed a certain degree of misgiving and skepticism about some of the new dogmas that the age of reason sought to enshrine in place of the soul and God. They tended to blame modern secularism for a small and monochromatic view of reason and culture and for a Eurocentric hubris that presumed to judge all that is true, good, and beautiful by its own parochial standards. For those who continued to believe in the power of the soul to claim and raise up a person's life, the Enlightenment's pantheon of new creeds — free enterprise and consumerism, materialism and bureaucratization, science and rationality, and not least, self-assured confidence in European superiority over all other peoples in this brave new world — offered a poor and paltry substitute for the values of old, and many modern artists withheld their devotion.

One might measure the breadth of discontent in modernity by the interest in the soul, by the palpable fear that the soul, once a star, is now in danger of collapsing into a black hole. For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, advocacy on behalf of the soul — or what he called "soul force" — revealed a profound sense of discontent and disillusionment with the modern world and tended to act as a spotlight on the numerous cracks and flaws lurking in the foundations of the Western world. His grammar of soul exposed these defects and showed how crushing the forces of modernity have been to many people of color. For millions of colonized and non-European communities, in fact, Enlightenment principles of freedom, rationality, and equality were a burlesque of the facts, so many looked elsewhere for alternative forms of liberation. In spite of pronouncements of the death of God, or the death of the soul, religious traditions remained desirable and meaningful options among African American and Hispanic communities and offered them resources for spiritual and cultural resistance to Western "progress." The idiom and notion of the soul, as a precious fragment of the larger body of Christianity, became a trope of defiance, a prophetic and dangerous weapon of social justice. By tracking the fate of "soul" in this study, therefore, one might not only evaluate the transmutations of the idea at the hands of black and Spanish traditions — specifically, the antimodern and postcolonial gestures in these renditions of the idea of soul — but also assess the state of modernity as the soul increasingly finds itself in a starved and inhospitable landscape.

In this chapter I define "soul" — its sacred and profane manifestations — but at this point I want to invoke Virginia Woolf's reading of Russian literature in the 1920s, because in it she works on the same assumption that guides my study: namely, that the grammar of the soul has increasingly fallen into disuse in the Western world (she singles out the English context), yet it flourishes in other contexts, especially on the edges and margins of the modern world. In this regard, she turns to the raging spirituality of Russian literature to explore regions of the world or regions of her own self where the soul still pulsates with life. If modernity treats the soul as a museum piece, no longer an actor in the drama of modern society, Woolf directs us to places where the soul is still vibrant and alive, where the flicker is more like a furious flame, still leaping and dancing. Perhaps there is something of the exotic in this desire — like the taste of chocolate to a tongue that has only known insipid foods — but more generously, it can be seen as a measure of her discontent with modern European culture, on the one hand, and on the other her genuine willingness to explore the whole circumference of the soul, even parts of her being that her culture did not deem credible any more, parts of her that were inflamed by the...