Mother Siluana: What is the soul?
The soul contains the body; it is not what we think, that the soul is in the body, but the soul contains the body, organizes it, sustains it, leads it.
Interviewer:
What is the soul?
Mother Siluana:
I have learned many things about the soul from books and from the Holy Fathers, but also from my own experience.
The soul is a part of me. The human being is a creature consisting of two parts, two pieces, two realities: body and soul. First of all, we need to look at a human being as a “who.” I am someone, you are someone, he is someone else, a human person. This is the “who” of human beings, and apart from the “who,” I also have a “what,” a nature. This “what” of mine, this “something” of mine, has a double nature, a double way of being: body and soul. And they were created by God at the same time. He made the body from the earth, and He breathed the breath of life into it. There wasn’t a time when the body made from the earth sat like a figurine on God’s nightstand, and God only breathed into it after some time. They [body and soul] happened at the same time. The body is a human body only if it is animated, and the soul is a human soul only if it is embodied. They are connected. They happen at the same time.
And so the soul is this energetic, spiritual, simple, invisible, unchanging part. The soul doesn’t change; it works. And it works through our body. What is changeable is the knowledge that gets manifested. The soul doesn’t need time to know something. But to exist in the body, the soul needs time and needs to acquire the knowledge inscribed in the body, in our brain, in our neurological network.
Interviewer:
Science admits that beyond feelings, reason, and all other psychic processes studied by psychology, there is a divine spark, a breath of life which is immutable and unchangeable.
Mother Siluana:
It’s true - today, God helps us become humble through science. The discoveries of science humble the obstinate person who wants to explain everything according to his own mind and have power and control over everything that happens. People of good faith, scientists of good faith, reach a state of soul called astonishment - which is the most wonderful and creative condition. And this faculty of astonishment is the most knowledgeable faculty of the soul. And so they say: “Lord, how wonderful are Your works! Thank you for allowing me to be a witness, to have a part in them!”
And this is how true knowledge begins, which is the knowledge obtained with God’s help - when God gives Himself to us so we can understand Him through the created world. Everything God created has a reason, a logic - its foundation is God’s thought. And we, in turn, have a mind capable of grasping this logic, penetrating it, naming it, operating with it, acting through it.
And even more than this, we have the capacity to work in our minds with thoughts that we discerned from everything that exists, from God’s creation. And we can create with these thoughts - for example, we can perform computations with numbers and discover a star that exists somewhere. And this is again that wonderful astonishment that allows us to see that God played with us when He created the world. He put in our minds the capacity to know what exists in reality, and He put in reality the capacity to let itself be known by the human mind, by someone’s mind. He allowed reality to be broken apart and rebuilt differently. He allowed us to cut wood and then make a fire, or tables, or spoons, or crosses, or paper - and everything else we make out of wood. And if we are believers, then it is astonishing! When we discover something, we are like children who make a toy or a drawing and wait for their parents to be happy and tell them, “Bravo!”
The soul is precisely this capacity we have to receive the uncreated divine energies and make them visible. The energy of the soul is a created energy. It is unseen, as any energy. And this energy can be known today by psychologists who say that it has units of measurement called “psi.” This is something that can be measured and discerned today - we are doing well from this point of view. Scientists can take photos of auras; they conduct all kinds of experiments with this energy, which is the soul. And I was saying that this energy is unchangeable.
If we consider electrical energy, electrical current is the same everywhere. When it acts in a bulb, it produces light; in a radiator, it produces heat; in a refrigerator, it produces cold. So, it does the job it needs to do, depending on the receiving device.
The soul is an energy that acts, an energy created by God to act in the existence of human beings in the world. And the existence of human beings can be seen; it happens in the body. Human nature is the same; all human beings have the same nature. We all have a soul and a body, which are the same - it is only that they are distributed individually.
From the totality of possible bodily characteristics, each of us has a unique formula, just as we have unique fingerprints or a unique eye color - even though there are only four main categories of eye colors, we each have a personal and individual hue.
It is the same with the soul. It is the same; everyone has the same powers of the soul: intellectual, emotional, volitional, and biological. But they are distributed in a unique way. They act in each of us in a unique formula. We each have a different temperament, a different degree of vitality - but they are all from the same treasure, from the same human nature, which is composed of body and soul.
And the soul is created by God when He breathes the breath of life in Adam, who was made from the earth; then it is preserved and transmitted from generation to generation, from parents to children, through its biological part, the part that is born - and here is where heredity comes in.
But the soul has in itself the capacity to be a subject. The breath of life, which becomes a “who,” is breathed at the moment of procreation, at the moment of insemination. At that moment, a new person is created, and a seal is applied - the seal of God, the image of God - on this new “earth” that gets created from the seeds of the man and the woman and that has both body and soul.
And God’s breath comes and applies the seal, and this is “you” - in this variant, with this genetic heritage, this cultural heritage, and so on. And God says: you are called to receive Me, receive My Holy Spirit, My uncreated information, My grace - and to become like Me in whatever condition you might find yourself. And so, let’s not forget: this is what differentiates the human soul from the soul of a goat. Yes, a goat has a soul too.
So we can understand this, we need to look at what the Church teaches about the soul. First of all, it teaches that the soul is created through God’s breath. It is like a vessel capable of receiving God’s grace, which it receives in its deepest or highest part, called spirit. The soul is spiritual, simple, invisible, immortal; it is changeable, but it doesn’t turn into anything else; it doesn’t become the soul of a goat; it is changeable in the sense that it does different things and is dynamic.
Interviewer:
When we try to locate the soul in the body, we think it is in the area of the chest, of the heart. Is this true?
Mother Siluana:
The soul contains the body; it is not what we think, that the soul is in the body, but the soul contains the body, organizes it, sustains it, leads it. The human soul is whole and perfect at the time of conception, and its first task is to grow its body from the two seeds, to make the body capable of being born in the world. That is why the killing of the human person in the first hours after insemination is murder, because when the two seeds unite, God breathes the breath of life into that person, and this transforms the biology of that cell into a person, into “someone” who will be born. And if you kill that cell, you kill that “someone”.
We need to know that the soul is whole - it grows and organizes the cells, reads the information it has in its biological material base, and respects its program.
Interviewer:
Can we say that the soul is everything? Since it organizes the body and our entire invisible activity?
Mother Siluana:
The soul is everything because it is the only one who receives God, the only one who can say yes or no when it receives God. On the one hand, the soul’s function is directed by God through God’s providence, just like the soul of a goat causes a goat to come out when the sperm and the egg unite. The soul of the goat works there through God’s providence. But from the beginning, the human soul has the attribute of knowing - being a witness, having seen God, knowing that it is a human soul. And from that time, the soul works on its personal development by acquiring spiritual powers and growing.
Interviewer:
This vision of the soul is unique for each of us. For example, for me, it is related to poetry, to a very elevated state, so to speak. And I am thinking of a poem by Ileana Malancioiu where she says, “I am looking into your soul.” She doesn’t say, “I am looking at your soul,” but “into your soul.”
Mother Siluana:
Well, we all have this, not only you.
Interviewer:
I only gave an example; I didn’t mean I was the only one.
Mother Siluana:
But some people work more with particular powers of the soul. In the teachings of the Holy Spirit and in the Scripture we see the soul as psyche. The psyche is a power of the soul; it is a part of the soul. Besides the psyche, the soul also has a vegetative power concerning nutrition, growing, procreation, and self-conservation. Then, it has this psychological or passionate part, which concerns sensations, perception, will, zeal, enthusiasm (the irascible part), and appetites.
All our affectivity, our imagination, our willpower - they all belong to our psyche. These powers are structured according to a unique formula that gives our personality, our type, our character.
We do have, however, a special power, a human one. Because we have the first one, the biological and vegetative, in common with all life forms - plants and animals have it, too. Animals also have the passionate part. And the power that only humans have is the thinking power - not rational, because reason is just an action of the thinking power. Besides reason, it also has nous and spirit (pneuma). The nous or the intellect or the deep part of the mind is the part that receives its orientation from God and understands what God says and wants from us. We don’t know God with our reason, but by perceiving Him in our spirit and our mind, in the deep part of our mind.
A human being is spirit and mind - these two must be united. Because if we speak well but don’t have spirit, that is nothing. If we have spirit but don’t apply our mind, it is not good either.
And so we nourish our body but also our soul. We don’t know how to nourish our souls. We can nourish our passionate part, our psyche. With what? With all that is beautiful. Beauty nourishes our soul. But we also need to nourish our spirit - that part that can be nourished only with God.
And so, when we fill our stomach with good food, we feed our body. When we fill our soul with beauty, poetry, music, we feed our soul. When we pray or go to church, we feed our spirit. But our poor spirit is dirty and starving. And we have to be careful; we are responsible for ourselves.
And, of course, we are not joyful. Because we don’t find joy in our senses. In our senses, our sensations, we find pleasure. We don’t find joy in our passionate part either; our psyche gives us satisfactions that are accompanied by pleasure and have some echoes of joy. But joy is specific to the spirit. Only our spirit can rejoice. And this joy of the spirit in contact with God enlightens our feelings.
Interviewer:
And we can really experience this. If we go somewhere by bus and we say a short prayer, we already feel that our soul is smiling. It is something simple for each of us - of course, we have to do it.
Mother Siluana:
Some people say: “I went into a church, there was nobody there, and I just sat there for a while, and I felt so peaceful when I left.”
And this should make us think: what happened there with us?
If you want to read more of Mother Siluana’s words, the following books are available on Amazon:
“God, Where is the Wound?” (ebook)
“Offering Ourselves, We Enter into His Joy - Volume 1” (paperback and ebook)
“Offering Ourselves, We Enter into His Joy - Volume 2” (paperback and ebook)
YouTube clip with English subtitles based on this translation:
Wonderful thoughts from Mother Siluana. Thank you.
Thank you !!