The Vale of Soul-Making

The phrase comes from the poet, John Keats (1795-1821). Keats was 23 when he wrote it; two years later he had died. It first appeared in a letter to his brother and sister. The letter, amusingly, starts with an account of getting a black eye having been hit with a cricket bat… Herewith I reproduce the paragraph in which he writes the phrase and then explains it; I’ve made minor punctuation changes to make it easier to read. Now I’ve known this saying virtually all of my life, but I read what lies behind it for the first time today. I wrote a rather long thing in my diary this morning. I ended that entry with that phrase—and then got curious about its origins. I read Keats and was astonished to discover that I had written essentially the same content myself this morning—to be sure in the words of a man about to turn 76 on the last day of this month. Herewith Keats:

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears” from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven—what a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world, if you please, “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say “Soul making” Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception; they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion—or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These three materials are the Intelligence, the Human Heart (as distinguished from intelligence or mind) and the World or Elemental Space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—and yet I think I perceive it—that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that School. And I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul! A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Mind’s Bible, it is the Mind’s experience, it is the teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the Lives of Men are, so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence. This appears to me [the] faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity. I am convinced that many difficulties which Christians labour under would vanish before it—there is one which even now Strikes me—the Salvation of Children—In them the Spark or intelligence returns to God without an identity—it having had no time to learn of, and be altered by, the heart—or seat of the human Passions...

     [Part of a letter written by John Keats to his brother (George) and sister (Georgiana) February 14-May 3, 1819]

Keats mentions a hornbook in this passage. Hornbooks were single pages mounted on a board with a handle and then covered by translucent horn material to protect the printing. The image of the hornbook I show comes from Wikipedia (link). The text of the entire letter is available here.

Eudaimonia

It seems to be agreed among the wise that the aim of an individual life is the soul’s development. That consensus is obscured because we encounter concepts like happiness (Aristotle), salvation (Christianity), and, in modern times, individuation (Carl Jung and others). If we just look at these words casually, happiness and individuation have quite different connotations; they’re very different from each other; and so is salvation from either of these. Individuation strongly suggests a process of development, sometimes dramatic, whereby a personality often displaying contradictory, disorganized, behavior, unaware of being highly conditioned by society, differentiates itself and achieves a kind of noble coherence and autonomy.

The casual use of a word like “happiness” almost suggests nothing much. We all want to be happy—and it means different things to different people. Aristotle used a word that has a great deal more depth. He spoke of eudaimonia. The word contains eu, a very positive concept signifying affirmation, well-being, and beauty. A daimon is a spirit or a minor deity. If we understand this idea for what it once meant in the Greek, it is “beautiful soul” rather than “happiness,” and in Aristotle’s context, it was the consequence of a process as well, the process of a well-lived life. The word can but need not have a spiritual connotation. Indeed, in Aristotle’s hands, it had a secular taste—one more reason why it is easily translated as happiness.

Salvation in the Catholic context—not necessarily in sophisticated scholarly contexts but as taught to children and the public—has a heavily moralistic flavor. It is the consequence of ridding the self of sin, of minimally dying (even if not always living) in a state of grace. That the soul is spiritual is not in question in this community. Salvation is a form of securing for this soul eternal happiness through union with God. Here happiness recurs after a great battle against the fallen self and its natural downward pull.

In its simplest expression in the Protestant context, development is minimized into a single act of faith; and in some branches of Protestantism salvation is not even a process: it is decided by God through foreknowledge before we’re even born. To be sure, the Reformation was a reaction against the excessive mechanizations of the spiritual by a Church that, by the sixteenth century, had become grossly corrupt (on average). And if we examine that single act of faith carefully, studying the process that led up to it, the period that follows it, we discover here another case of abbreviation, simplification, and of crude labeling. Catholic and Protestant religiousness, viewed in detail, is identical; it is the same process that produces eudaimonia in ancient understanding and individuation in the modern, secular conceptualization.

We live our lives in what Keats called “the vale of Soul-making.” The experience is the same, no matter the times, the prevailing cosmologies, the strength or weakness of religion. Concepts concretely underpinned by matter (“this hammer”) are easy to sort, but the great spiritual facts of experience are stubbornly subjective. One man’s God is another’s the Great Unconscious, one’s salvation is another individuation—but all of us strive, ultimately (if the spark throws its light into our soul) to become beautiful demons. Does that sound weird? To transcend the words is to rise to the reality.