More Thoughts on the Soul

"I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?"

What separates man from beast? Qoheleth (the author of Ecclesiastes) has observed all that is done in the world (1:14) and he has seen no difference between man and beast. Man and beast are both dust and spirit and one cannot observe where the spirit of the man or the beast goes when they perish. The spirit is the life-force given to all living things by God, it is this spirit and the dust of the earth which compose both man and beast.

Qoheleth draws no physical or metaphysical distinction between man and beast. There is no soul in man that distinguishes him from the beast. What then is the difference between man and beast? Out intuition tells us that there is some kind of profound difference between man and beast but Qoheleth does not speak of it. And yet he does. Qoheleth has implicitly distinguished between man and beast in the very composition of the book.

Man is self-reflective, man has language, reason, insight, foresight, hindsight. Man is nowhere and everywhere different from the beast. Man and woman are created in the image of God, but, just like God himself, one cannot put a finger on this image. The image of God is not the soul, indeed there is no soul. The image of God is everything that a man is, that a woman is. The image of God is everything that it means to be human.