I will get back to the comments you’ve offered on previous James posts; my online time comes in intervals, but I’ll be back online freely next week. I appreciate the fact that people are bothering to read and think about these entries, and I’ll try to make it more of a dialogue as soon as I can.
So last time, I mentioned that I might take up the psuche/pneuma problem in Jacobean anthropology. It’s a problem not different in kind from the comparable problem in Pauline anthropology, and both are complicated by the ambiguity of contemporary English discourses of non-material anthropology.
Here’s a rough sketch of the problem. Our ancient forebears seem to have believed that human beings subsist not simply as material beings, but also with various degrees of other-than-flesh vitality and depth. In the New Testament, this plays out in a distinction between psuche and pneuma, both of which can be rendered in English as either “soul” and “spirit,” depending on the work they’re doing.
James and Paul, among others (and here I won’t go over the ancient background) discuss humanity as involving not simply (as colloquial anthropology generally assumes) one body plus one soul, but as a body plus a pneuma plus a psuche, a “spirit” and a “soul,” if we rely on conventional superficial translations.
The problem emerges when we try to communicate this in English. For instance, English-speakers generally hold the “soul” in high esteem; but in both James and Paul we find psuchikos used as an adjective for a certain not-so-great dimension of human existence. In 1 Corinthians 2:14, for the clearest possible example, Paul says that people who are psuchikos do not receive God’s gifts, because such gifts are properly discerned pneumatikos. In other words, psuchikos existence — which we might lazily translate as “soulful” — is only for people who are prepared to do without the gifts of God (reserved for pneumatikos, “spiritual” people). Likewise James, who in 3:15 categorizes “bitter envy and selfish ambition” as typifying “earthly, psuchikos, devilish” attitudes. While he doesn’t say much about pneuma (its absence leaves the body lifeless in 2:26, and in a difficult 4:5 a pneuma inhabits us), clearly the psuche comes out second best.
The NRSV translates psuchikos as “unspiritual,” to bring out this contrast. But that couches the term only in a negative context, where general usage shows psuchikos as “having to do with the ‘natural’ vital capacities,” “mental,” “animal,” all positive terms whose force is defined not as a negative contrast with “spiritual.” If one adopts one of these as the opposite number from pneumatikos, though, one risks understating the intended contrast between the lesser psuchikos and greater pneumatikos capacities.
How to render psuche and psuchikos, then, in English? (Here I show the influence of James, who shows a marked propensity for elliptical constructions.) In 1:21 and 5:20, it’s pretty easy to stick with “soul” or “life ” for psuche. At I don’t want to use “unspiritual,” for the adjectival form psuchikos at 3:15, as it ascribes no color to psuchikos save anti-pneumatism (as it were). “Animal” is interesting, as it provides a comprehensible contrast to “spiritual,” but I’m a little too sensitive to the Latin connection of “animal” to anima, which gets us back into the anthropological terminology carousel again. “Mental” or “vital” won’t sound “unspiritual” to readers, I don’t think. Maybe “ordinary”? I’m still pondering this.
Posted by AKMA at August 26, 2004 01:07 PM | TrackBackI wonder if you (and everyone else pretty much thinking about translation issues) try to make translated words do more work than they are capable of. As you point out, the issue here is that we are dealing with an ancient worldview. No word or two or three will allow a modern reader to understand that worldview. Let's face it, some form of commentary (written or oral) is a necessity for us to understand these texts well.
I've read a lot (too much?) of the work of the Context Group guys now and am increasingly aware of how we need to mentally jump into a time machine (and one programmed correctly) whenever we want to understand the Bible.
Maybe a translation just needs some critical markings for "you'll need more context for this word/phrase". Not saying anything radical here, but I think worrying too hard about the sort of choices you have to make in an instance like you describe here would be pointless.
Posted by: Paul Baxter at August 26, 2004 03:10 PMTranslation -- not just Biblical translation -- *always* involves a transformation of meaning. It's not just a matter of glossing words in one language, whether that language is French, Swahili, Ancient Greek, Aramaic, or Perl, to words in another language. The task of the translator is to reach deep inside the work to be translated and deep inside his.her own cultural world and find the points of resonance. As Benjamin noted, the translated work is never just a new version of the original, but is in fact a new work in its own right.
Of course, this gets tricky when talking about holy texts -- after all, the original work is supposed to be the expression of God, the gods, or equally significant personages. But I very much doubt that those "authors" meant for their work to be incomprehensible outside of their original cultural context.
I'm not sure about the way you (AKMA) are using the term "anthropology" here, but what I'm essentially talking about is an anthropology of the original work. An anthropologist is charged with making the lives and beliefs of some group of people comprehensible to people who do not share the same background, landscape, worldviews, etc. To do this, s/he needs a deep understanding not just of the people being studied but of the people being explained to.
Of course, this doesn't solve the particular problem of translation described. It seems to me -- non-expert in Biblical, particularly Christian Biblical, exegesis that I am -- that the sense of the word you are describing has to do with our sensual natures. Not our physical sensation of the world, but perhaps our ability to derive joy and pleasure from those sensations -- our aesthetic sense if you will. Maybe I'm off-target -- I don't necessarily like to think of a division between the sensual and spiritual, but then again, I'm not an early Christian.
Posted by: Dustin at August 26, 2004 03:57 PMAt the risk of the simplicistic: why not some variation on "psychological" ("merely" psychological, as opposed to spiritual)?
Posted by: Pascale Soleil at August 27, 2004 08:06 PMI like 'earthly', alithough I'm not sure if that conveys 'unspiritual' as much as it conveys 'not heavenly/divine'.
Posted by: Nick Janus at August 28, 2004 04:56 PMhmmm, the essential antipathy of psyche and spirit... Has it occurred to you to render this as: just plain wrong?
as to whether these terms were translated "correctly" or not, the error has passed down the centuries with as little resistence as a greased pig at a county fair -- though what a simile to interject into such otherwise erudite hermeneutic exegesis. my god! anyway, speaking from unspeakably nasty personal experience from childhood on, I'd say the antipathy has been all too well preserved. if we're going to yell at Descartes, shouldn't *his* sources be taking part of the rap?
just a thought.
RB
Ha -- I can't think of a more appropriate place to spamvertise a cartoon sex site than a debate over biblical translation!
Posted by: Dustin at August 30, 2004 10:32 PMI posit that James and Paul were trying to differentiate between the conscious thinking
part of us and the compassionate empathetic side.
Brain verses Heart if you will.
With death conscious thought stops.
But the soul lives on.
I am also struck by the similar words in Greek
and Latin of pneuma & numen. Though the OED sets
numen to be singular and isolated I have more often heard of numen with the analogy of "the force" of Lucas. Joseph Campbell is a source on this.
I also suggest that one of the words used to describe psuchikos is sensuous. And an antonym to sensuous is spiritual.
So I think that it is not so much animal vs spiritual as it is rational vs emotional,
physical vs spiritual.
Modern science can represent our thoughts with
electrical activity in the brain. I don't know
of any way that has been found to represent our
soul in our heart.
Enough already. I need more coffee.
Michael
When reading Greek philosophy I always mentally translate "psuche" as "butterfly" and "pneuma" as "air". If there is any legitimacy to these (obviously metaphors) in the context of James, then of course the thing that is subjected to the air, and in fact derives its delightfulness from the action of the air, is comparatively inferior, especially if it has historically gotten all the admiration from people who didn't really understand air.
The pagans have understood soul but not its relationship to the more fundamental fountain of life, is how I would (in a charitable mood) read James.
Posted by: pierre at September 1, 2004 11:12 AMMaybe spirit/Spirit? spirit for the soul at norm non-spiritual, Spirit for when the soul is in God's grace?
Posted by: Wally Owen at September 1, 2004 05:53 PM