Spirit vs Soul

A simple question really from Bourton on the Water, what is the difference between the spirit and the soul?

This question came in from an Anonymous reader who was studying the passage of water under the bridges of the local Bridges of Madison County locales down there in the Cotswold Hills of SW Britain.

Woke theologians from California like to dwell on those distinctions between the world of the spirit and the world of the soul, one NWC or new world charismatic and the other OWT or olde worlde traditionaliste. Historically though, in the two expressions “spirit” and “soul” two semantic worlds collision, collude, and then collide and clash rather like the movie Clash of the Titans, one word representing the Hebrew world, that of spirit or nepesh or ruach, and the other representing the Greek world of “psyche” from which we derive modern terms such as “psychology.” A romano-romano theologian from the Roman collegio romano and a friend of the Venerable English College, when friends of the colleges there were necessary during a German occupation, explains that the Hebrew word for the spirit is very close to the Gaelic word for the spirit too, the two words often transliterated, transposed, and transferable. The Hebrew word is absorbed into the Greek world only over time and chiefly with the coming of the christians for whom such spiritual realities as angels were for real, notwithstanding the teachings of certain materialist Jewish movements of the time, but yes, beginning with the teaching of the foreign sounding messiah who overcame the negationist ideology of the Sadducees on a few memorable occasions. There is no distinction really between these two terms nowadays as they both refer to what the Holy Office’s biblical department calls the spiritual element or more properly the spiritual dimensionality in the human body that survives the normal physical processes of death itself, as per and pro its documents on the Letters of Silencing of certain well-known Kungian theologians. Where there were semantic nuances in the ancient world, it was that soul or “psyche” reflected a more mental concept of the soul considered as a mind and this nuance is intended in the later medieval world of mens, mentis. So for the medieval philosophers after Boethius earthly life was a journey of the mind - Itinerarium mentis in Deum - into God, as St Bonaventure describes it so ably. The Hebrew word “spirit” emanated from the simple story-like discussions of the historio-genesis of the human person in Genesis what with the creation of Adam and then Eve. The Hebrew word tended to denote the whole gamut of spiritual faculties and powers of the soul, including a sharp religious and charismatic dimension to it in se and ipso facto. So no such distinction exists nowadays in popular Kommentar and catechesis - they refer back to the same reality. Only a semantic distinction remains between those two ancient worlds, Hebrew and Greek. Worry not.