The Soul Grows Inwards

Peasant Times-Dispatch Issue 23

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The Soul grows inwards

- Don Colacho

Don Colacho Again

This quote has always stuck out to me, it’s significance obvious even if it’s meaning is not. This is another from Don Colacho, aka Nicolás Gómez Dávila, as introduced in the previous issue. He is a Colombian philosopher and he wrote several books, his most famous being collections of aphorisms which he called “Annotations from an implicit text”¹.

This quote is #79 on the list I found.

Reading vs. Doing

When I first became Catholic in 2018, I was on a mission to become a good Catholic. I wanted to read all the books, and if you mention an interest in Catholicism to a room full of Catholics you will be bombarded by book recommendations. I have become a little cynical about that—book recommendations can feel equal parts “I am really interested in helping you,” and also “I am winning at Catholicism,” which may or may not be helpful. For me, the bombardment of books was helpful until it wasn’t. I realized I was collecting books for my shelf but not really getting much out of them. My first year as a Catholic involved a lot of reading but I had not fully solidified the habit of going to Mass². That was the single most important thing, and I wasn’t doing it!

For all the books I could read about Catholicism, my faith didn’t begin to grow until it started to deepen. And as my faith deepened, I began to understand myself more. God has slowly revealed to me more and more about who I am, what I am about, what I am capable of. My soul has grown inwards—and revealed my own heart to me³. I think this is important to understand in the context of evangelism: that knowledge can offer breadth but true spiritual progress goes in.

Infinite Depth

How are we to understand this aphorism, then? It is deceptively simple. If we’re splitting hairs, we need to understand its three primary elements. The Soul, Growth, and “inwards”.

The Soul, quite literally, is our everlasting spiritual being. I don’t think this quote is necessarily limited to literalism. The soul is (among other things) our self understanding, it is the undefinable something that makes us who we are. When we recover after being sick for a time, we might say “I feel like myself again,” which is a way of saying “I feel like my body and my soul are in alignment⁴.” The soul is what perceives the transcendentals like Beauty, Goodness, and Truth—these things feed the soul. The soul is immaterial, the soul is essential, the soul is personal.

What is growth? How does a soul grow? Like the example of being sick—we want the body and soul to be aligned. We don’t feel right when our body wants something our soul rejects, or our soul wants something which our body rejects. Souls are not given to us fully formed—we have free will, we have agency. We must steward our souls and take care of them, we must learn about them, we must feed them. As our soul grows, we generally understand ourselves better and it tells us more about us, than about the world. Any time we learn a moral truth, it reveals something about ourselves.

Excursus: Let’s say there’s someone who has been struggling with sloth. When he realizes sloth is his primary vice, and resolves to amend his life against it—he has learned something about himself. The more we form our consciences, the more we feed our souls, the more we can see into the depths of our own hearts. A body can grow up and out, can reach higher places, can run and jump, can explore, can observe. But as the Soul grows, we reach more and more hidden places in our hearts, and can now turn to the work of eradicating Self Complacency or Vice from those hidden depths.

This is also what it means that the soul grows inwards. The soul reveals more and more of ourselves to ourselves. We become confronted with self understanding. Perfecting the Christian and Catholic life involves deepening this understanding of ourselves, and walking in the world confident of this very same self understanding. When Christ admonishes us to have the faith of a mustard seed—we are looking for that mustard seed within ourselves. It’s there in all of us. We can’t find it unless we allow our soul to grow inwards.

Growing With The Village

How can we leverage this aphorism as peasants? The first thing that comes to mind is understanding that different people will be in different places of growth. You might have just had a major epiphany about yourself and feel a lot of enthusiasm about this new self-understanding. There are people (saints even) who have an EVEN DEEPER understanding than you. There are people (friends even) who do not yet have the same level of self-understanding. Our journeys are all unique and unrepeatable. We should approach people with the goal of understanding their self-understanding. Help them if we can, walk with them if we can’t. We all need friends on the journey of faith, regardless of where we are.

Yet, remembering the previous article, we should not be complacent with our self understanding. There is always room to grow further inwards. Look for those tools of self understanding. Examine your conscience, go to therapy if necessary, consult a spiritual director. Seek out opportunities for mentorship, so someone may point out your faults and flaws which you have been unable to see. Seek out opportunities to grow inwards.

You cannot give what you do not have. If you want to evangelize, you need to ensure you have a strong self-understanding. If you want to catechize, you need to ensure you have a strong self-understanding. If you want to mentor, you need to ensure you have a strong self-understanding. There is room for peasants to fill each of those roles at various times in life. Help yourself, so you can help others. And always remember that faith is a journey. If your road is smooth now, it will not be smooth forever. If someone else’s road seems smooth, it might not be as smooth as you think. And navigating the bumps and pitfalls of the journey requires a soul which grows inwards.

Photo by Jeroen den Otter on Unsplash

Thank you for reading! God bless!

AJPM

1. Escolios a un Texto Implícito

2. A habit that didn’t become ironclad until a friend invited me to Mass and then we made a habit of going to brunch afterwards and playing Cribbage. That one thing did more for my soul than all the books I had been recommended up to that point. Invite your friends to Mass.

3. This thought came to me as an addendum and I don’t know a good place to put it so it’s getting the footnote treatment. When I first became Catholic, I was also hyper-aware of all the other people in the world and very interested in throwing stones. As my soul has grown inwards, I have become less interested in the virtues or vices of other people, and more interested in growing my own virtues and eliminating my own vices. This is not to say that I have figured everything out, far from it. I am acutely aware that I have not figured out everything. What I mean to say is I am less likely to accuse someone else of the great crime of not having figured out everything.

4. We might say the same thing after confession, when our body remains whole but our soul, which has been sick, has been healed.