More thoughts on Soul Love

So occassionally my blog gets a little random, I think I posted that I was thinking about soul love some time ago. I have read scripture and talked to some people about it and prayed, and this is my current conclussion. I think in the 1st century they understood it. I think prior to the first century they understood it. I think there was a disconnect at some point.

If you read Plato, if you read Dante, if you read many of the 13th century writings, if you read Augustine, you get a sense that these writers understood what it means to love with all your soul. Somewhere between the 16th and 18th century, we became "enlightened". During the enlightenment, spirituality was marginalized and intellectuality became king. This shift in western thought permiated the church. This western modality of intellectualism of course moved to America. The university became standard, education became king. We ceised to speak to one anther spiritually, and communicated intellectually.

In the late part of the 18th Century, we had the Romantic movement, which stemmed from the artists and poets of the time. They rebelled against the intellectualism of the enlightenment and turned to passions and felt emotions. The Romantics championed Surrealism and focused on experience.

The Englightenment, according to Nitche, killed God. Nitche gets sort of a bad rap for this, his implications is that people no longer turn to God, but instead to their own intellect. Medicine, psychiarty, technology all began to emerge, along with scientific theories like evolution. These all moved mankind away from a depenance or often a belief in God. The Romantics then taught us to do what feels good. The combination brought self fulfillement apart from boundries and restrain. We see where that has led us.

In the modern Church, we have tried to redeem intellectualism, we call it Apologetics. We have moved to redeem emotionalism, we call it lots of names. We are learning to love with all our minds and all our hearts.

Soul-love has seemed to drop away. It's like a dead language that no one speaks anymore. What does it mean to love with your soul? How do you do it? I know emotions, and I know thought, but I don't have that sort of soul language. I have felt my soul stirred and quickened, but it always seems to be an invounletary. I am commanded to love God with my soul, which is a voluntary action.

Now I have heard all the modern American ideals of soul love. Most of them are forms of intellectual based emotion. I really don't think that combinding heart and mind = soul. I'll continue to look and pray and seek, and I hope you do the same. Don't settle for some second rate definition that requires heart and mind. If God gives us three parts in which to love Him, they must be distint, right?