No Escape: Seneca on Earthquakes and Death

In The Gay Science, Section 125, Nietzsche’s madman accuses his modern Atheist audience of killing God. The Death of God will someday in the future lead to a profound nihilistic disorientation unless we find new ways to “comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers.” The pending discomfort — a discomfort that is held at bay by the mocking laughter of the Atheistic crowd — is represented as a disorientation that as of yet is only felt by the madman:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still anyway up or down? Are we not straying as if through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as of yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

The Death of God is a loss of a vertical orientation of our souls to truth. When the earth below is untethered from its sun above, endless churning and disorientation occur. Where will comfort be found? The will to truth will likely hold on for a while, but its grip will be tenuous. The Christian God is dead for certain. The Atheistic crowd has arrived there, but in the process the vertical orientation to the truth is dying alongside this other death. This other death can be profoundly understood as the decaying and decomposition of this vertical orientation: the truth as upward and outward movement from this world. The ascetic ideal of the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals is the disposition of the soul that is necessary to access and reconnect with this upward and outward truth. When this vertical orientation is lost, we are left with a profoundly disturbing loss of our sense of salvation. Where will comfort be found? What kind of a soul can put it all back together if the vertically oriented soul is not available?

The echoes, at least for me, of Seneca are clear. Like all echos, they are not perfect copies. The reflection of the sound off the forces of the landscape shape what comes back to us as recognizable yet different. Here is a passage from “On Earthquakes” where he is reflecting on the recent destruction in 62 CE of Campania by an earthquake:

Comfort needs to be found for the fearful, and their great terror needs to be eradicated. For what can anyone regard as sufficiently secure, if the world itself is shaken, and its firmest parts crumble; if the one thing that is immovable and fixed, so that it supports everything that converges on it, starts to waver; if the earth has lost its characteristic property of standing still? Wherever will our fears find rest? What shelter will our bodies find, where will they escape to in their anxiety, if the fear arises from the foundations and is drawn from the depths? (“On Earthquakes” 1.4)

Of course Nietzsche’s madman is addressing the figurative disorientation of a loss of the verticalized will to truth. Seneca is clearly talking about a literal earthquake that destroyed a city and many of it inhabitants. These differences are clear, but both are talking about the loss of stable foundations and the disorientation that occurs when we no longer take for granted things we thought were stable. The result is fear and madness.

There is another difference between these passages beyond the literal and figurative disorientations that must be made clear. First, the madman’s questions: they are for the moment rhetorical and unanswerable. The time has not yet come for them to be answered. Yet the risk of delay is that the mocking laugher of the crowd becomes a nihilistic disposition to any attempt to finding a spiritual orientation to oneself and others, including non-human others. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have yet to arrive. Once the vertical orientation of the soul’s will to truth is undone, can the soul even continue to exist as the seat of our will and our morality? What happens to humanity without that soul? These are dreadful questions for Nietzsche, and a comfort in Atheistic laughter and mockery of religion is not something we should embrace.

Unlike the madman’s questions, Seneca’s questions are answerable, and with his answers will come comfort if we allow ourselves to be influenced by the text. In this meditation, I want to focus on how his answers to these questions provide a way of thinking about “practices of the soul” beyond the vertical orientation and thus beyond the verticalized will to truth. I use the phrase “practices of the soul” to signal my belief that “the soul” is not a pre-existing thing that we must care for (Socrates) or save (Christianity). It does not have an eternal form. Rather, practices of the soul signal that our souls are creations — we are “bred” (to use one of Nietzsche’s favorite terms) to have souls. We must take “breeding” seriously. It is not only a metaphor. Breeding is a process of making something come into existence rather than finding something that is already there. Breeding is the application of practices to raw material and its energies to channel them in particular ways. I think that this is Nietzsche’s challenge to us — how can we create new practices of the soul that avoid nihilism in the face of the Death of God. Getting rid of the soul is not a solution for nihilism — it is the very recipe for nihilism.

Another way to think of these practices is how we use them to guide and channel our attention. Seneca signals that the management of attention is how his questions will be answered and comfort will be attained:

Since the cause of fear is ignorance, is it not worth acquiring knowledge in order to remove your fear? How much more worthwhile it is to investigate causes, with your whole mind focused on this goal! For no more deserving subject can be found, and you must not simply lend your mind to it, but spend your mind on it. (On Earthquakes 3.4)

Here Seneca is telling us how to read Natural Questions. This is no cursory reading. This is an all-in engagement with the providential power of natural laws. But we don’t do this simply because we have a will to truth. We do this because our souls (translated as “mind” in the above passage) are transformed through the dedication of attention. We will see ourselves as a part of the whole and will find comfort in its inevitabilities, particularly our own deaths.

This is not a verticalized will to truth as Nietzsche saw it in the ascetic ideal. This will take some unpacking for sure, but for the moment, let me say this: to pursue the truth of earthquakes in Seneca’s sense — to “investigate causes” — is a horizontal practice of the soul, not a vertical one. A vertical practice of the soul tends to atomize the soul in its relationship with divine truth. This atomization creates a relationship to the world as “other.” The soul/mind separates from the body and looks out at all the things of the world as either helpful or harmful in its vertical quest. Ultimately, the soul is not part of this other world. The vertical orientation asserts the independence of the soul from the world. In the hands of Christianity, the world will become a kind of sub-creation that either serves or doesn’t serve man in his quest for Salvation. In the hands of Enlightenment philosophy, the world will become a repository of mechanical laws that the verticalized intellect will look upon as a puzzle to be deciphered — salvation will be secularized as the unending pursuit of “progress.”

This is not Seneca’s orientation when he writes about “investigating causes.” One strains to find an exclusively or primarily vertical orientation of the soul in Seneca (and Stoicism is general). To “investigate causes” more deeply connects one’s soul with the world rather than separating it and lifting it out of the world. In other words, it is not a soul seeking a permanent anachoresis (withdrawal) from the world to look upon it with disdain (Christianity) or an epistemological puzzle to be solved (the Enlightenment): it is a soul seeking a deeper understanding of how it is connected with it. To “investigate causes” is to breed a soul that finds its home in the world and comes to terms with its mortality.

Neither is it an Atheist’s comfortable mockery; it is a deeply serious understanding about how one’s soul is mixed into, results from and returns to the substance of the cosmos:

To these arguments one can add another to show that earthquakes are produced by breath. Our own bodies as well tremble only if some factor upsets the breath in them: when it contracts with fear, when it grows weak with old age and becomes feeble in sluggish veins, or when it is subdued by cold or diverted from its usual course by the onset of a fever. As long as it is flowing unimpaired and moving as normal, there is no trembling in the body. But when something arises that restricts its normal functioning, then it is not strong enough to tolerate what it had been able to endure while it was healthy; it grows weak, and causes shaking in parts of the body that, when it itself was strong, it kept firm. (18.6-7)

This is canonical Stoicism. The life-giving breath (pneuma) than animates the cosmos is the same breath that animates the soul. This is not a comparison of the body to the earth; this is an equivalence. If there is verticality here, it is inseparable from the flow of energy that mixes with other energies as it encounters them. The vertical can quickly become the horizontal, the diagonal, the folding back and reaching out. Direction is unpredictable. Our souls are plugged into everything and subject to the “laws” of the flow of energies: “such a mighty force cannot be contained, nor can any structure contain a wind” (18.3)

What is this if not the breeding of a particular kind of soul? Natural Questions is, as should be clear from even a cursory reading, a prolonged demonstration of a spiritual practice. I want to dig in on why this is not a verticalized will to truth as a spiritual practice but a different orientation of the soul to the cosmos that is far more productive for escaping the nihilistic, ressentiment-fueled trap that Nietzsche feared. For me, this is all part of a long-term process of my rethinking what it means to have a soul and to somehow reclaim it from canonical Christianity. As should be clear, my inspiration is Nietzschean and anti-nihilistic. At the end of the Genealogy of Morals, he asks whether or not the soul can survive its breakup with the will to truth: “An astonishing amount of human energy has been expended to this end [aligning the will with the pursuit of truth] — has it been in vain?” (GM, 3.17). When he asks, “has it been in vain?” he is asking if we can retain the energizing power of the will — our souls — when our willingness to believe in divine Truth is no longer seriously available to us. This energizing power of the will is the Judeo-Christian legacy that Nietzsche is tracing.

Side note before I dig in: Stoicism quite often cuts off the deeper implications of its insights on the horizontal orientation of the soul. There are plenty of ways in which Stoic philosophical practices are used to re-verticalize the energy of the soul and atomize the self: as “life hacks,” as self-improvement that makes you a more powerful capitalist (or at least employee), the understanding of “self-sufficiency” and the mental state of apatheia as atomization, et cetera. Stoicism is not a panacea for this verticalization, and I’m certainly not interested in becoming a Stoic. Rather, Natural Questions in particular is a text that relentlessly stays away from the atomizing tendencies of some Stoic practices and especially our modern reading of them. By concentrating my attention on certain aspects of this text — by “spending my mind on it” as Seneca asks of his reader — I think it is possible to envision an alternative that helps us deal with Nietzsche’s madman’s conundrum.

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For Seneca, to think about earthquakes is to think about the inescapability of death and to be comforted by this thought. This is the spiritual practice he demonstrates, and it can be summed up in this simple statement: “So let us face this disaster bravely — it can neither be avoided nor foreseen” (“On Earthquakes” 1.10). How does this practice work? How can one find comfort in the utter unpredictability of an inevitable disaster? To understand this, we find ourselves at the heart of Seneca’s ethical vision, which rests on an irresolvable paradox: the cosmos is highly determined (providentia), but the human mind can only experience it as unpredictable (fortuna) — “it can be neither avoided nor foreseen.” Even though the cosmos is providentially determined, we have no ability to accurately predict what will happen and when. In short, providentia can only be experienced as fortuna. The repeated contemplation of this paradox is a spiritual exercise designed to reduce the fear of bad fortune and death by accepting your fate as unknown and unknowable to you. The paradox is not just a statement about the truth of earthquakes or the triviality and inescapability of death. It is a provocation to deeply and repeatedly think about this paradox without trying to resolve it. By doing so, you will be transformed — your fear will turn to calm because you see yourself and your soul as mixed with the whole.

Contemplating the paradox without trying to resolve it is the crucial “practice of the soul” here. I’ve now emphasized “without trying to resolve it” twice. Understanding this aspect of the practice demonstrated in Natural Questions allows me to find exit paths from the Christian soul and especially from its dependence on ressentiment without giving into a nihilistic energy to tear down the vertical and replace it horizontal orientation as its dualistic other. To emphasize the horizontal, in other words, is not to replace the vertical. It is to find in an earlier model — one that was absorbed by Christianity’s practices — and rechannel some of its energies to find a new way to envision and breed souls that are much more in tune with what the needs of the post/meta/modern world are: environmental catastrophe, the failure of once vibrant economies, emergence of new bacteria and viruses, ressentiment-fueld cultures and politics, the list is long. The verticalized Christian soul provides only consolation through Salvation as a form of verticalized escape and abdication of our responsibilities. In the power of earthquakes, Seneca saw no escape, and that is where his practices of the soul gain their power and relevance for today.

To pause for a moment to summarize: What is the Christian soul that I am taking issue with? To be sure, the will and the soul predate Christianity. Ancient philosophical practices were absorbed by Christianity as it moved from apologetics to a systematic and institutionalized religion with global aspirations. But Christianity revalued those practices and reoriented their energy in different directions. The result was a canonical Christian soul that orients itself away from the world to find its Salvation and Meaning in a divine God who has an ambivalent relationship to the sum of His creation. The orientation of this Christian soul is primarily “vertical” — it sees truth as eternal, divine, fixed and external to the world in which we live. The work of the soul is to reconnect with it as a metaphorically upward movement. This is the will to truth onto which Nietzsche set his polemical sights. If this vertical orientation of the soul is lost, are we left with nihilism and a “will to nothingness?” (GM 3.28)

In principle, I have no quarrel with this vertical orientation. With William James and Plato’s Socrates, I believe in the moral value of focusing one’s attention on truths much larger than ourselves. For example, I find great comfort in contemplating eternity as the complete lack of experience and time: what you felt before you were born is what you will feel after death — absolutely nothing, including the complete lack of experience of time. From the point of view of experience, eternity is an “absolute nothingness” to mis-borrow a term from Buddhism. I think that qualifies as a “religious experience” as James saw it.

Where I quarrel with Christianity’s vertical orientation is when it fixes itself as the only way to Salvation. In doing so, it short-circuits our ability to think about any other way of creating our souls. Here is the particular dynamic that is troublesome and is at the heart of the ascetic ideal: effort is expended primarily on seeing one’s connection with other people as an inescapable set of problems that are the very condition of our existence. Salvation must be sought through a break with the world, or at least keeping an arm’s length distrust. This has the effect of isolating the soul as an atomized unit that is horizontally cut off from others as it focuses its attention upward. Perhaps “cut off” is too strongly phrased. Verticalization focuses energy on the individual relationship with God, which has the effect of limiting the energy expended horizontally. It’s not that one is completely cut off from seeing how your soul interacts with other souls. Rather, the relationship to other souls tends to be narrowly valued — your neighbors either help you in your verticalization or they don’t. The horizontal relationship of soul to soul is necessarily an afterthought in canonical Christianity. As long as Salvation is the primary endeavor and entails a vertical relationship between you and God, your relationships with your neighbors will at best be of secondary concern. Christianity thus has a built-in preference for atomization, which can only be corrected as an afterthought so long as it doesn’t disrupt the primary vertical relationship.

Nietzsche’s innovation was to see this vertical orientation as a template for modern subjectivity. He gave it a name: the will to truth. Atheists are the same as Christians when it comes to the orientation and responsibility of the soul to truth. Both believe they have been saved by understanding the true nature of the universe. Atheists just believe that they have been saved from Christianity, not by Christianity. Let us recall that Nietzsche’s concern is not with the madman making the accusation but with the mocking response of the crowd who not only can’t answer his questions, they can’t even hear them as of yet.

At the same time, Nietzsche realized that reactivating the ascetic ideal would do no good. To replace the vertical orientation of the Christian soul with simply another iteration of vertical orientation would doom us to an eternal return as we cycle endlessly through belief and a nihilistic collapse of those beliefs. The cycle must be broken, but not by reaching to an absolute outside. Rather, we must find new lines of energy and force that create shoots and branches leading away from the primarily vertical orientation. This is what Nietzsche sought when he tempered his critique of the Christian ascetic ideal with an appreciation of what it accomplished for humanity:

But all this notwithstanding — man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense — the “sense-less” — he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved. (GM 3.28)

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Understanding the force and importance of this ending to the Genealogy cannot be underestimated. It signals to us that we cannot confront our ascetic Christian legacy with unbridled contempt. In other words, there is another nihilistic danger that must be dealt with in finding a way out of the exclusively vertical orientation of the Christian soul, and that is ressentiment. It is difficult to understand the power of the vertical orientation of the will to truth without understanding ressentiment. It is probably Nietzsche’s most important legacy for our time.

Ressentiment weaponizes the will to truth. It arises when the sense of loss turns into an intense hatred of the winner. This hatred becomes so pervasive and intense that the sense of loss becomes a kind of moral victory for the loser. It can become so pervasive that it can actually disempower the victor and become a real victory. This is what happened with Christianity: the power or ressentiment created an “imaginary revenge” out of its sense of loss that became so contagious and pervasive that it activated a morality that spread across the Western world.

This sense of loss became real power such that all people gained a soul and a will, but they also became ungovernable by the conventional methods of the state. Martyrdom, for instance, was a powerful demonstration of the Christian soul’s ungovernability. Crucifixion, setting people ablaze, and sending them to the arena to battle lions were not exclusively inflicted on Christians. Any prisoner would be subject to such treatment. Christian martyrs were able to absorb and redirect the energy of those practices to inspire a new audience through their calmness and serenity as they underwent their deaths. While the crowd mocked them, others were watching (and eventually reading through authors like Eusebius) and finding a new way to see their relationship with the state and with a God who could promise Salvation separate from the state:

Though our religion has revealed the truth to us and the true path, it has made us value worldly honor less, while the pagan valued it greatly… Our religion also places the highest value on humility, debasement, and disdain for worldly matters, while ancient religion placed the highest value on greatness of spirit, strength of body, and on everything that makes men strong. If our religion does demand that you be strong, it is so that you will be able to bear suffering rather than carry out feats of strength. It is this way of life that seems to have rendered the world weak, delivering it to wicked men to be ransacked. And these men have no trouble in doing so, since mankind, its eyes set on paradise, strives to endure pain rather than avenge it.

We can easily read this as Nietzsche’s voice. It is not. It is Machiavelli in the Discourses, Book 2, Chapter 2. Here we have a pretty clear statement about how the Christian soul untethered itself from the state and sought its Salvation outside of that context — “its eyes set on paradise.” Machiavelli is not quite to ressentiment in this passage, but he is close.

Nietzsche probably learned of Machiavelli’s reading of Christianity when he attend some lectures in Basel. Nietzsche’s addition to Machiavelli’s story was to see the energy of ressentiment as crucial. In Machievelli’s telling, one can see how Christianity’s soul developed as an indifference to the pagan values of the state. Where Machiavelli saw indifference, Nietzsche saw a hostile disposition that would turn into a desire for revenge and a totalizing anger toward the world:

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality deveops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed…. in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all — its action is fundamentally reaction. (GM, 1.10, 36-7)

In seeking a way out of the verticalized Christian soul, I must be careful of ressentiment as my energizing force. It is important to understand that ressentiment is not the exclusive province of Christianity. It energizes any kind of morality that verticalizes its model of salvation, weaponizes the will to truth, and sees enemies as evil. This includes Atheism, nationalism and any kind of racial supremacy. The mocking laughter of the Atheists toward the madman belies their own form of ressentiment as they revel in the defeat of the all-powerful God. It was only a matter of time before the laughter of the crowd could become the very public, science-fueled hostility of a Dawkins or a Harris or a Hitchens.

Nietzsche provides something like a prescription for overcoming ressentiment in the Genealogy, and it sounds a lot like Seneca:

To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long — that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modern times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done to him and was unable to forgive simply because he — forgot). Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others: here alone genuine “love of one’s enemies” is possible — supposing that it is possible at all on earth. — For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction…. In contrast to this, picture “the enemy” as the man of ressentiment conceives him — and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived “the evil enemy,” “the Evil One,” and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a “good one” — himself. (First Essay, Section 10, 39)

Isn’t the first part of this passage a powerful description of the spiritual practice Seneca gives us in Natural Questions? Mirabeau is indistinguishable from a Stoic exemplar or sage. He does not acknowledge insults, which was central to Seneca’s morality. Cultivating the ability to “shake off with a single shrug” an insult or the devastating power of an earthquake or the thought of one’s own death is the antidote to ressentiment. To do so, one must drain them of their ability to produce fear that can turn into hatred and self-poison. One must drain the energy that casts the enemy as “evil.”

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With this long preamble, the power of Seneca’s spiritual practice demonstrated in Natural Questions becomes more clear. We are operating within a moment before fear has turned to anger, and before anger has turned to a self-poisoning ressentiment. We are also operating within a moment before the soul has locked in on the vertical as the direction of its Salvation. We are thus operating at a moment before religion (as a concern for one’s spiritual connection with the whole) has become separated from philosophy (as a concern for intellectual connection with the truth). The vertically oriented soul has not fully arrived to create the world as radically “other” to be invested with ressentiment.

Instead, we have a soul that sees itself as part of the world. For Seneca, this is a break with the gods as fickle yet controllable actors (through rituals and festivals, celebrations and sacrifices) and an embrace of “causes” not as the hidden mechanisms of a clocklike machine made up of the interaction of discrete parts, but as the basis for our own connection with a living cosmos:

It will also help to realize in advance that the gods are not responsible for any of this, and neither the sky nor the earth is shaken by the anger of divinities: these things have their own causes, and do not run wild to order, but, like our bodies, they are upset by certain defects, and when they seem to be causing harm, they are suffering it. When we are ignorant of the truth, everything is more terrifying, especially when rarity increases the fear. (3.1-2)

What does he mean by “when they seem to be causing harm, they are suffering it”? This is profound and vitally important to understand, and again we can turn to Nietzsche for guidance. There is no “subject” causing the harm of earthquakes behind the scenes. Like Nietzsche’s lightning, there is no separation of the doer from the deed: “the popular mind separates lightning from its flash and takes the later for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning…. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed” (GM 1.13, 45). The same can be said of Seneca’s earthquakes. Yes, they have causes, but those causes are not the result of the will of gods or of a God. Neither are they the effects of some other definable cause standing behind them. “There is no such substatum.” The earth “suffers” the causes just as we do — earthquakes and bodily fevers are the effects of forces that are always in motion but are not so at the will of something external and prior to them. Our souls are part of it, and we are flowing with all of it. We are only responsible for what we can control for as long as we are alive, and after that, we are done. From this we derive our comfort and dispel our fears.

But we should not go too far in analyzing this text. To “investigate causes” is to invoke wonder and marvel at the forces at work in the cosmos. As such, the kind of attention that Seneca asks of his reader (we are all Lucilius) is an openness and receptivity to letting the truth of these causes enter into the readers’ experience so that we see, intuitively and aesthetically, how our souls are part of the cosmos. In modern terms, it is an aesthetic experience he seeks to provoke and not an intellectual analysis. It is also important that this is an experience that Seneca himself seeks as he writes. He is old and is coming to the end of this life. To engage in this “enterprise” is to seek to hold onto the sense of wonder and marvel of a younger man — the wonder and marvel that occurs when one grasps the truth as a feeling arriving from outside ourselves before we attempt to name it and control it. This openness is the spiritual exercise of Natural Questions.

I thus resist analyzing this text too far. It seems to ask for a form of attention that is not “interpretation.” Whenever I sit down to read Natural Questions, at some point I find myself attempting a close reading — what does the text seem to be saying about whatever it is I’m interested in at the time. But then I will step back from this interpretive mode of reading and just give myself up to its worldview. This openness to seeing the cosmos the way that Seneca presents it allows me to absorb that worldview as a passive experience that delivers spiritual and philosophical rewards well before attempting to analyze and interpret it.

To finish this meditation, let me simply present a short passage and challenge whomever may be reading this to simply soak in the worldview and follow its lines of force and flow without trying to stop and analyze it:

It is plain that the earth contains breath: I do not mean just the breath that makes it cohere and keep its parts united, which is found even in rocks and dead bodies, but I mean the life-giving breath that is vigorous and sustains everything. Unless it contained this, how could it instill breath into all those trees and all those plants that have no other source of life? How could it nourish all the different kinds of roots that go down into it in different ways — some growing near the surface, others sent deeper down — unless it contained a lot of soul to produce so many varied plants and make them grow as they breathe and feed on it? (On Earthquakes 16.1)

There is no ressentiment here. There is the diffusion of fear and the comforting feeling that we are part of it all. To be sure, Natural Questions will reward repeated engagement and analysis, but much of its power comes from a passive attention and openness to wonder and marvel, and to accept Seneca’s provocation to see our souls as deeply intertwined with the world.

The effects can be very real and powerful for modern practices of the soul. What happens when we allow our practices of the soul to stretch out into the world? What happens when we see ourselves as part of a global ecosystem? Do we start to look at our habits of consumption and the trash we produce differently? Where is that plastic bag going to end up after I passively accept it at the grocery store? Where is the power coming from that I use to keep my house at a comfortable temperature? The verticalized Christian soul has limited ability at best to orient us to these questions. In fact, if Salvation is a matter of choosing Jesus as the thing that ultimately matters, and this choice orients us to a truth that is upward and outward of this world, then pondering our effects on the world in which we live is an unessential disposition. At best, it will be optional but not required. Any attempt to do so with any authenticity will require the Christian practitioner to come to terms with a model of Salvation that devalues being in the world. It takes a different concept of the soul to see the situation otherwise.