The simplest way to describe the meaning of psyche is "life" or "life force." More literally, psyche can mean "breath." You can see the connections here. What's the difference between, say, a rock and a human being? Well, the rock is dead and it's not breathing. The rock lacks psyche, lacks life. A human, by contrast, is possessed by some force that makes it "alive," causes it to move. This "life force" seems to be attached to the breath, which is invisible, because when a human stops breathing, when the breath departs, we die and become "inanimate," devoid of the life force, becoming like a rock. Psyche, the soul, has left.
Now, here's the critical thing to notice here. The idea that an invisible "soul," associated with our invisible "breath," is "animating" our bodies is a part of the New Testament imagination. We share this imagination. So does our understanding that when the "soul" departs the body, when we take our last "breath", we die. But here's the critical thing to notice. Where we make a hard distinction between body and soul in this imagination, in the New Testament vision psyche is much more closely associated with animal life than with the spiritual. Psyche is animal life. Because a cat is also alive in a way a rock is not. So is a plant. Something is "inside" humans, cats, and plants that makes them different from rocks. That thing "inside" humans, cats, and plants is psyche, the life force. This is why Aristotle famously, and to modern sensibilities bizarrely, describes the "souls" of humans, plants and animals. Yes, plants have souls. Because they are alive. Cats also have souls.
The point here is that psyche is much more closely tied to vegetable and animal life than to spiritual life, closer therefore to the body than to pneuma. What we see emerging here is the ontological contrast between psyche and pneuma. True, psyche is "invisible" and "immaterial," like "breath," so psyche looks to the modern eye as being "spiritual." As moderns, we think invisible means spiritual. Yet it's pneuma that is ontologically "other" compared to animal life, and comes from and operates in a properly "spiritual" register. This scheme is crude and over simplified, but it'll make the point. In the modern imagination, we tend to group psyche (soul), soma (body), and pneuma (spirit) this way:
[psyche / pneuma] :: [soma]
[soul / spirit] :: [body]
[spiritual] :: [physical]
Again, as I mentioned above, there are some good reasons for these associations, linking psyche with pneuma over against the body. For example, we do see examples in the New Testament where the psyche is disembodied (e.g., Rev. 6.9, 20.4). And yet, to understand the New Testament contrast between psyche and pneuma, the associations are often closer to this:
[pneuma] :: [psyche / soma]
[spirit] :: [soul / body]
[spiritual] :: [physical]
If we start to appreciate how psyche is more closely tied to physical, animal life, rather than with the radically different spiritual realm, we can start to appreciate the New Testament contrast between soul and spirit, the qualitative distinction between psychical life (soulish, animal life) and pneumatical life (spiritual life).
Summing up, and contrary to our modern expectations, in the New Testament the "soul" is associated with animal, physical, earthly, biological, and natural life, as opposed to being "spiritual." We'll explore this in some biblical texts in the next post.
