Care of the Soul

 

Care of the Soul was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and spent almost a year on that list. It is rare for a self-help title to have also received critical acclaim. This is a popular self-help book, but not like any you may have read. Steeped in a sense of the sacred and the profound, Moore’s thesis is that modern lives lack mystery, and the success of the book would seem to indicate that most of us agree.

You should also find it a peaceful experience, almost like a letter from a forgiving friend; while knowing everything about you, they are unfazed in their belief in your godliness. This effect may derive from a combination of Moore’s experience as a psychotherapist, his years as a monk, and his wide learning. Inspired by myth, history, and art, the book exudes the richness of human experience. Moore’s chief influences are Freud (delvings into the psychic underworld),Jung (the belief that psychology and religion are indistinguishable),James Hillman (see The Soul’s Code),and the Renaissance men Ficino and Paracelsus.

 

Care of the soul is “an application of poetics to everyday life,” bringing imagination back into those areas of our lives that are devoid of it, and re-imagining the things that we believe we already understand. Rewarding relationships, fulfilling work, personal power, and peace of mind are all gifts of the soul. They are so difficult to achieve because the idea of soul does not exist for most of us, instead making itself known through physical symptoms and complaints, anguish, emptiness, or a general unease.

Soulwork can be deceptively simple. Often you feel better just by accepting and going more deeply into what you apparently hate, for example a job, a marriage, a place. The book contains a quote by the poet Wallace Stevens: “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake.” Instead of trying to remove any bad feeling or experience surgically from our mind, it is more human and honest to look squarely at the “bad thing” and see what it says to us. We will not receive the soul’s messages if it is moved out of sight. An intent to heal, either on the part of the sufferer or the helper, may obscure insight into what is actually going on.

Conventional self-help and psychotherapy are problem solving. The literature on the soul, exemplified by Moore, is “problem-noticing and wondering.” The soul has to do with turns of fate, which are often counter to expectations and against the desires of the ego and the will. This is a frightening idea, yet the only way it becomes less frightening is when we start to make space for its movements and respect its power. As Victor Hugo put it in Les Misérables:

 

 

Moore asks us to re-examine the myth of Narcissus, the beautiful young man in love with an image of himself in a pond. His soulless and loveless self-absorption results in tragedy, but its intensity eventually pushes him into a new life of reflection and love for his deeper self and nature around him. “The narcissistic person simply does not know how profound and interesting his nature is,” Moore suggests. Narcissus is like ivory: beautiful, but cold and hard. What he could become is a flower, with roots and part of a whole world of beauty. However, killing the Narcissus in us is not the way to go; instead of moving to the other extreme of false humility, it is best to keep our high ideals and dreams and find more effective ways to express them.

With the analysis of myths such as these, Moore counsels that we should avoid the simplistic single-mindedness of some self-help writing. There are many aspects to the self, and by accommodating its competing demands (for example solitariness vs. social life) life expands into something fuller. We can sometimes entertain our ego, at other times be the detached sage. Both are valid, and we don’t always have to be making sure that life makes sense.

 

“The uniqueness of a person is made up of the insane and the twisted as much as it is of the rational and normal,” Moore notes. This is attested to by the biographies of just about everyone you have ever admired—even Abraham Lincoln is getting the revisionist treatment. Why should you be any different? Care of the Soul warns us to be particularly careful that our efforts to “iron out the bumps” may only be a drive toward conformity and a sad loss of ourselves.

Most therapists now focus on specific problems that can be tackled in a short timeframe, that can restore you to “normality.” Through drugs, cognitive therapy, and sciences like neuro-linguistic programming, there is no need for introspection. Care of the soul never ends, however, as the soul itself is outside of time. Only such things as mythology, nature, the fine arts, and dreams—which all defy time—can give us proper insight into our mystery.

The book has four parts and thirteen chapters, covering the gamut of the human condition. The following themes are from the first half.

 

We should try not to see love in terms of “making relationships work.” Rather, love is an “event of the soul” that may have surprisingly little to do with who you are with. Love is relief from the mundane, sanitized nature of modern life, a door into mystery, which is why we seize it with such force.

 

Moore had a young client who had whipped himself into a frenzy about his girlfriend’s suspected affairs. Yet the man also believed that romantic attachment was not modern or acceptable. This purity of ideals had shunted out the possibility of real attachment, and the result was an ugly externalization of jealousy.

Nevertheless, jealousy is not all bad, serving the soul through the creation of limits and rootedness. Flying in the face of modern ideas about “co-dependency,” Moore says that it is OK to find one’s identity in relation to another.

 

The soul’s power is quite different to the ego’s. With the ego we plan, direct, and work toward an end. The soul’s power is more like a current of water: Though we may never understand its source, we still have to accommodate it and let it guide our existence. With the soul we have to abandon the “consumer logic” of cause and effect and the efficient use of time.

 

The soul loves power, but violence breaks out when the dark imagination is given no outlet. When a community or a whole culture lacks soulfulness, the soul is fetishized into objects, for example guns. As Oscar Wilde suggested, virtue cannot be genuine when it sets itself apart from evil.

 

Moore says that any culture that tries to protect itself against the tragic side of life will make depression the enemy, but that in any type of society “devoted to light” depression will be unusually strong in order to compensate for its unnatural covering up. Moore describes depression as a gift: It unwraps our neat little values and aims, giving us a chance to get to know the soul.

 

Late in the book, Moore tells of the summer he spent working in a laboratory, having left the monastic life where he had been cloistered for 12 years. Enjoying his new-found freedom, he was shocked when a workmate said to him with conviction, “You will always do the work of a priest.” The success of Care of the Soul is a perfect example of how self-help literature has taken the place of traditional carers-of-thesoul, to whose rituals and religious instruction we once would have turned automatically.

In place of the “salvation fantasy” that he believes characterizes contemporary self-help, Moore tries to return us to a self-knowledge quest that can encompass our shadows and complexities. His book is modeled on the less ambitious self-help manuals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which offered philosophical comfort for the trials of life. Care of the Soul may stand out from today’s self-help writing, but in fact continues an old and venerable tradition.

Renaissance doctors, Moore tells us, believed that each individual soul originated as a star in the night sky. The modern idea, he notes, is that a person is “what he makes himself to be.” We have to value the self-creating freedom that is enjoyed in our time, but Moore’s book gives us something altogether different: the encouragement to wonder what is eternal in us.

 

As well as the 12 years he spent as a monk in a Catholic religious order, Moore obtained four degrees: a PhD in religious studies from Syracuse University, an MA in theology from the University of Windsor, an MA in musicology from the University of Michigan, and a BA in music and philosophy from DePaul University.

A writer and psychotherapist, he has been a leading exponent of the archetypal school of psychology, which seeks to reintroduce a mythic dimension to the discipline. Other books include The Planets Within, Rituals of the Imagination, Dark Eros, Café of the Soul, Soul Mates, and The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life. He also edited A Blue Fire, an anthology of the writings of James Hillman. More recent works include The Book of Job (1998),Original Self: Living with Paradox and Uncertainty (2000),meditations accompanied by woodblock prints, and The Soul’s Religion (2002). Moore lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two children.