reawakens it. By the end he is a whole person again, committed, full of mission and desire.
The ultimate desire is the desire for fusion with a beloved other, for an I–Thou bond, the wholehearted surrender of the whole being, the pure union, the intimacy beyond fear. In his novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières described this last best stop on the journey of heart. An old guy is talking to his daughter about his love for his late wife. He tells her, “Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”
This is the heart fulfilled.
THE SOUL
The other more important part of the consciousness is the soul. Now, I don’t ask you to believe in God or not believe in God. I’m a writer, not a missionary. That is not my department. But I do ask you to believe that you have a soul. There is some piece of your consciousness that has no shape, size, weight, or color. This is the piece of you that is of infinite value and dignity. The dignity of this piece doesn’t increase or decrease with age; it doesn’t get bigger or smaller depending on your size and strength. Rich and successful people don’t have more or less of it than poorer or less successful people.
The soul is the piece of your consciousness that has moral worth and bears moral responsibility. A river is not morally responsible for how it flows, and a tiger is not morally responsible for what it eats. But because you have a soul, you are morally responsible for what you do or don’t do. Because you have this essence inside of you, as the philosopher Gerald K. Harrison put it, your actions are either praiseworthy or blameworthy. Because you have this moral piece in you, you are judged for being the kind of person you are, for the thoughts you think and the actions you take.
Because each person has a soul, each person is owed a degree of respect and goodwill from others. Because each person has a soul, we are rightly indignant when that dignity is insulted, ignored, or obliterated. Slavery is wrong because it insults the fundamental dignity of a human soul. Rape is not just an assault on a collection of physical molecules; it is an insult to a human soul. It is an obscenity. Obscenity, the philosopher Roger Scruton teaches, is anything that covers up another person’s soul.
The soul is the seedbed of your moral consciousness and your ethical sense. As C. S. Lewis observed, there’s never been a country where people are admired for running away in battle, or for double-crossing people who were kind to them. We seem to be oriented by these moral sentiments the way other animals are oriented by the magnetic field. They are embedded in our natures. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within,” Immanuel Kant wrote.
Mostly, what the soul does is yearn. If the heart yearns for fusion with another person or a cause, the soul yearns for righteousness, for fusion with the good. Socrates said that the purpose of life is the perfection of our souls—to realize the goodness that the soul longs for. Everyone I’ve ever met wants to lead a good and meaningful life. People feel bereft when they don’t experience purpose and meaning in their lives. Even criminals and sociopaths come up with rationalizations to explain why the bad things they did were actually good or at least excusable because nobody can live with the idea that they are thoroughly bad.
Because we all have souls, we are all involved in a moral drama, of which we might have lower or higher awareness in any given moment. When we do something good we feel elevation, and when we do something bad we start making moral justifications. John Steinbeck put it beautifully in East of Eden:
Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I