Christians discovered that the principle binding soul to body was God’s creative activity.

In parallel, the Christian’s xiety (what they have, could have had, or pretend to have) may be a divine gift.

If this is so, then Christian anxiety would be the fear of the loss of this gift.

There is a certain beauty in deduction, is there not?  The irony contained in the divine gift – the holy creative activity – binding soul to body – is that – already for us – the divine gift has been compromised.  This (not some human propensity to anxiety, rage and violence) is Original Sin.

From a theological point of view, the babe has a soul that is bound to her body through some principle.  Somehow, this parallels the way that I am bound to my anxiety through my xiety.

After its creation, the soul, in a way, has no life of its own but can have any life.  The potential of the soul is infinite.  At the end of the person’s life, the soul has a life of her own and can pretend to have another life (as ghost or as in “possession”), but it cannot “live the life it could have had”.  The potential of the soul has been realized.

This, I sense, matches Jung’s cryptotheological psychoanalytical term: “individuation”.  Individuation is the principle by which the soul fulfills its potential.

Like xiety, the “this individuating principle” exists in the realm of possibility, accounts for the actualities of human behavior, and is bound to the real.

For xiety, the Lebenswelt is real.  For the principle, the binding is real.

“The soul” and “the principle binding soul to body” are ancient formulations that led to philosophical controversy.   In fact, these formulations produced the first controversy that set (what later would be called) Christians on the path to articulating the Doctrine of Original Sin: What is this “principle, mechanism or whatever” that binds the soul to the body?

Today, we face a parallel question, what is the xiety that bind me to my anxiety?