Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
We're continuing our look today at man according to our Franciscan spirituality, according to Franciscan thinking.
Last time, a couple of weeks, we spoke about the body.
Today we'll say a word about the soul, about our souls.
We know that we're tied or connected to the material world by means of our bodies.
Of course, this is by God's design.
But it's this way because of a special mission that we have that's rooted in our nature and an impulse towards the transcendent that's in our spirit, that's essentially in our soul.
When God breathed the breath of life into the lifeless body of Adam in Genesis 2, verse 7, there was a greatness and a dignity that went with that gesture, and also a royalty that was inserted into the material world, the rational soul, essentially, rational soul penetrated into matter in order to give it life and to elevate it.
As human beings, we are incarnated spirits, and we have a value, which is really foreign to the rest of the material, corporeal world, meaning we can think, we can love, we have the values of liberty, responsibility, sociability.
These values come from our spiritual nature, which is oriented towards heaven, towards the infinite, towards God more than towards the things of the earth.
So even though we may not do what St. Paul says, even though we may do the opposite of what he says in Colossians 3, even though we may set our minds on the things of the earth more than the things of heaven, our real happiness won't be found in doing that, and many people experience that.
To paraphrase St. Bonaventure, with our bodies we stand erect, we stand upward, as it were, but it's our soul that points us to the heavens themselves.
For this reason, God made man his vassal, to use an old term.
He made man similar to him, and gave man the delegated power to have dominion over all the earth and over everything that moves on the earth.
We read that again in Genesis, Genesis 1 verse 28.
In order to better understand the mission that we have, it's good to understand the nature and the end of the human soul itself.
The human soul, the rational soul as it's called, is by nature a spiritual substance.
That as Dante says in his work on Purgatory, lives and feels and has self-consciousness.
He says that in Canto 25 of Purgatory.
Considered independently from the body, the soul is something that's determined and indivisible.
Per se, our soul could exist on its own, like the angels, but is distinguished from the angels because God created it to be united to a body, and the soul naturally tends towards the body.
That's why death is so unnatural for the human person, that's why we recoil so much from it, because we weren't created for death, we were created for life.
Our soul doesn't come into existence by generation, nor from some pre-existing material.
Being a spiritual substance, it's created immediately by God at our conception.
So the soul has a beginning, but will never have an end, and it's destined for eternal beatitude, assuming of course that we cooperate with God's plan for us, otherwise our soul will experience eternal misery, not eternal beatitude.
So we shouldn't see the soul as condemned to be united to a body, nor should we look at it as being imprisoned by the body, as the philosopher Plato envisioned it.
The soul has a natural tendency to be united to the body.
Why?
Because the two were made for each other, to put it very simply.
St. Bonaventure writes that the soul is united to the body and gives it life, isn't something that's accidental or ignoble.
It's not accidental, because the soul is a substantial form of the body.
It's not ignoble, because the soul is the most noble of all the forms, and in it the desire or the yearning of all nature is summed up, says the Seraphic doctor.
So inferior nature reaches its greatness in the human body, the human body which is created in order to be enlivened by the soul.
Even the material world is created first and foremost to glorify God, but it won't reach that goal without there being a soul infused into it, a soul which brings to matter the beauty of intelligence and the fire of love.
Man’s soul is created for this, it's created to immerse itself in the body, not for sinful purposes, not to denigrate itself, but in order to communicate to the material world a conscious and free life, a life that's capable of consciously raising itself to God and bringing the rest of creation to Him as well.
So with the soul, our body finds its voice, its expression, its ultimate fulfillment.
The soul becomes the perfective and glorifying act of the material world and of our bodies.
But the body and the material world are its place of dominion, its place of rule, and its mission territory at the same time.
We as rational human beings are called to have dominion over all creation, but first, our soul is called to have dominion over our bodies.
Reason enlightened by faith is meant to be the soul's guide in choosing to love in an ordered way, in choosing to love God above all things, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, as our Lord would put it.
In other words, if you can't exercise self-control and say no to sinful living and sinful passions, then it's best to not go around telling everyone else how they ought to live.
First, take care of yourself.
So it's in us, it's in our soul that the universe finds its spirituality and actualizes it in relationship to God, hopefully in an ordered way, which is what we were created for.
And it's the investiture, the command that we receive to preside over and to dominate all created beings on earth that indicates the greatness of our mission, which is subordinate to the entire material world, which is subordinate to it, but it's also to subordinate that world, subordinate the material world, but also bring it back to what is spiritual, and in the spirit to raise it to God at the same time.
And in order to do this, we have to recognize Christ as our King, and through Christ with Him and in Him, we must gravitate and navigate our way back to the Father.
So let's ask Our Lady then for the grace to truly live by the Spirit, as the Apostle Saint Paul encourages us to do in his New Testament letters.
May she make our spirit totally in sync with the spirit of her Son.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.