Aristotle and Aquinas recognized that a person’s happiness depends on his proper “functioning”—on the orientation of his acts toward the ends proper to man. In nature, function coincides with shape. We can infer function from shape, and shape from function.
So it is with the human soul. The mature soul achieves a complex “shape” that fits with other shapes—other souls. We learn manners and are shaped by customs. We acquire a common language and habits of mind that “fit” our social circumstances. These shapes, which often take the form of the standard set of virtues, drive all shared and fruitful human action: marriage, family life, and civic activity. The particular shape of a man’s soul “matches” with other particular shapes. The husband dovetails with his wife. The roles of father and mother shape adults in ways that fit with the only partially shaped lives of children. Students are trained to have dispositions that accord with those of their teachers. These matches overlap with other matches to create productive social configurations, making for a functional society. Upon such matches, and so upon complementarity, our happiness depends.
To speak of the soul’s having a “shape” may seem odd, but it should not. Shape governs a large domain of activity in nature. Atomic binding depends on shape. The DNA-protein interactions that regulate physiology depend on shape. Social science sees the human person’s objectives and choices in terms of shape.
source: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/06/origami-of-the-soul
Some thoughts:
A soul is shaped by formation, and it WILL be shaped, one way or the other. The only question is this: who or what will be forming the shape of the soul? It's an important question, because just as a great river invariably flows out to the sea, so to does a soul have to endure shaping and molding. It's not a matter of it being shaped or not, but what sort of shape it will be.
But unlike a river, which almost always flows in just one direction, there are two directions that the soul can move in: up towards heaven, or down towards hell. Our soul will be formed by one of those two great kingdoms, and often times both. Just like a battery is useless without both a positive and negative pole, so too are we also worthless unless we have the extremes of heaven and hell to choose from.
But it's not just a matter of us forming our own souls, there is a big, dangerous world out there that will form us whether we like it or not, and hence a lot of formation is beyond our ability to choose, but maybe not all of it. We must come to the realization that every single contact we have with another human being is something that will be used to form that person, it will shape their soul, whether or not we are conscious of it. Likewise, their interaction with us will also serve to form our souls, like it or not.
So much of life is just becoming conscious of those forces that are shaping us, and how, we in turn, go about shaping others. But the shaping is never, ever a neutral activity: we are either helping them to get to heaven, or casting them into the depths of hell, with every word we speak and every action we take. And the same is true for ourselves: we are the victims of our own thoughts, words and actions. To a certain extent we can accept or reject the formation being forced upon us by our circumstances and environment, even though we might be powerless to changes those external forces. But the big question is how do we stand firm when disaster strikes all around us?
Hence, formation will happen, there's no doubt about it. But perhaps we do have a bit to say in how that formation is going to take, and how we want to help form others.
Something to think about: the way information causes formation......
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