An intriguing way of looking at it.
In my religious tradition, we tend to regard the soul as the form of the living body.
A being or living thing's 'soul' is, therefore, conceived of in terms of its vital functions like perception and movement, arising from consciousness or self-awareness; which makes a human being not just
alive but also a free agent with a bundle of their own subjective experiences in the form of sensations, phantasmata, emotions, cognitions and volitions ("
qualia").
Most of the early church fathers believed that, in the human case, this 'bundle' was subsumed within an incorporeal essence bequeathed directly by God some time after conception that made it a
spiritual soul: one both immortal and capable of being divisible from the human body in death (this became the orthodox position of the Catholic Church). A minority position, represented by Tertullian in the third century, was that the soul should be understood as "material", albeit made up of a very rarefied and subtle form of matter that is imperceptible to the senses and invisible to us.
For the mainstream orthodox Catholic position typified by Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the shifting 'parts' of this seemingly consistent (and subsistent) conscious experience - equated with the most essential essence and first principle of life - were broken down into three primary powers: the
memory, the
will and the
intellect, and a huge number of additional 'faculties'
.
Behind these powers and all the "faculties" of the soul - which included the understanding, thoughts, emotions and imagination or phantasms etc. - however, lay the soul itself in its pure, bare "
essential being".
This was understood to be the locus of spiritual / mystical experience i.e.
"....The natural, normal, mode of operation of the mind during its present state of union with the body, is by sense impressions, images, concepts, 'intelligible species', reasoning; when it operates in another mode, without these means it is acting mystically. Fr Browne says:
In theory it is necessary, unless we want to be lost in hopeless confusion, to state firmly that, as soon as one ceases to use discourse of the faculties of the soul, so soon one's prayer begins to be passive and one is really entering on the mystic road' (op, cit. p. 138). This seems to afford a true and easily applicable discriminant delimiting the frontier between mystical and non-mystical prayer...."
(Dom Cuthbert Butler OSB, Western Mysticism (published 1922))
The true nature of the soul was described by the early desert fathers of the fourth century - in figurative language - as inherently "luminous" like sapphire when freed of incoming defilements (that is attachment to sense-impressions and mental images).
In the medieval mystical tradition of the Catholic Church, this concept of the "
sapphire light of the dispassionate soul" was developed further by our monks, friars and mystics into the idea that the soul was innately a dual phenomenon: with a lower seat rooted in the imagination and emotions, and the intellect; while above this (or below it, if you like) was the "
apex", "
ground" and "
essence" of the soul (in Latin
synderesis - a functional intuitive capacity - or the core of the person and the transcendental self), wherein contemplative prayer takes place, and union with God.
At this 'level of consciousness', the multiplicity of experiences is thought to fold into one coherent and numinous experience. At the end of his
Book of Spiritual Instruction Abbot Louis de Blois, O.S.B., (1506 – 1566), a Flemish monk and mystical writer, sets forth at some length the doctrine of the Catholic mystics on this hidden essence of the soul/mind:
"...Few rise above their natural powers; few ever come to know the apex of the spirit and the hidden fund or depth of the soul.
It is far more inward and sublime than are the three higher faculties, for it is their origin. It is wholly simple, essential, and uniform, and so there is not multiplicity in it, but unity, and in it the three higher faculties are one thing.
Here is perfect tranquillity, deepest silence, because never can any image enter here. By this depth, in which the divine image lies hidden, we are deiform. This same depth is called the heaven of the spirit, for the Kingdom of God is in it, as the Lord said:
'The Kingdom of God is within you'..."
St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic theologians also believed that all growing things and sensory beings possessed some kind of soul, but that only the souls of human beings were possessed of an intellective life, in addition to these other functions. He thus classified souls into three broad categories:
Kind of Soul Characterized By
Nutritive/Vegetative Souls (in plants) = Life
Sensitive Souls (in animals) = Sensation
Rational Souls (in humans) = Intellect (Reason)
So according to this schema, humans have a soul that is at once nutritive, sensitive and intellective.
As you can probably tell, the medieval theology of the soul was rather complicated