About Spirituality

Spirituality in my opinion is a weasel word—I’m never sure what folks mean when they use it. For users it denotes a high value, pointing to fundamental interests and concerns. But what exactly does it signify?

The Dictionary

A dive into The Oxford English Dictionary (one of my favorite pastimes) outlines my dilemma. The earliest usage from 1417 ce, now antiquated, is in the phrase “Guardian of the Spiritualities,” referring to the person or body responsible for the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of a bishopric or archbishopric while the see is vacant.” The entry explains that spirituality or spiritualities are “The spiritual or ecclesiastical realm,” that is, the property of the bishopric.

The second definition represents our current usage. Spirituality is “The fact or condition of being spiritual.” This usage dates from 1485. Though not a particularly helpful definition, looking up spiritual makes matters a tiny bit clearer. “Of or relating to the human spirit, and related senses.” This is a tautology since the adjective spiritual derives from the noun spirit. The sub-definition 1.I.1. makes matters somewhat clearer: “Of or relating to the immaterial part or aspect of a person or of people generally.” The next sub-definition 1.I.1.a spells out immaterial: “Relating to or concerned with the human spirit or soul, esp. considered from a religious or moral standpoint. Frequently in express or implied distinction to bodily, corporal, or temporal.” This gives us much to discuss.

Spirit and spirituality are contrasted with material. In fact, its meaning derives from this contrast. As the OED suggests, it parallels or replicates the distinction between body and soul. This presents my major issue. Is it possible to understand spirituality in a non-dualistic way or is it inherently dualistic?

Latin, Greek, Hebrew

The English word spirit is a transliteration of the Latin spiritus, which means “breath” or “wind.” Human breath is the mouth’s wind. Context determines its precise meaning. The parallel words in Greek (πνεῦμα, pneuma) and Hebrew (רוּחַ , ruah) have the same meaning. These three words (spiritus, pneuma, and ruach) by extension are translated as “spirit.” This gets a bit tricky for an English speaker. We have three separate words—breath, wind, and spirit—which have no semantic or linguistic relation. That is not true in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. They employ a single word meaning breath/wind to serve as a metaphor for the activity of the divine. Ruah, as well as pneuma and spiritus, are physical terms used to point to or serve as a metaphor for divine activity or power, a nonphysical phenomenon.

The ancients understood the divine power in terms of breath or wind. We moderns do not. We have separate words for breath, wind, and God’s power, that is, spirit or Spirit.

Ruach or pneuma (breath/wind) is a metaphor for divine power. “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (emphasis in original, Lakoff and Johnson, 5) In this case, the ancients understood the power of God in terms of breath/wind. They also experienced the power of God as breath/wind. The metaphor is GOD’S POWER IS BREATH/WIND. Put another way, breath/wind structured the understanding and experience of God’s power. What is characteristic of wind and breath is characteristic of God’s power. Although wind and breath are invisible, you can feel them. Breath has heat and sometimes smell, and wind can blow you down. When a body ceases breathing, life goes out of it. These characteristics fill out the understanding and experience of God’s power or spirit.

Creation

Genesis 1:1–3 exhibits this metaphorical structuring. Let’s look at three different translations wrestling with this challenging Hebrew composition.

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At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,

when the earth was wild and waste,

darkness over the face of Ocean,

rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters—

God said: Let there be light! And there was light. (Fox)

When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (NRSVUE).

Both translations respect the metaphorical character of ruach. Everett Fox in The Schocken Bible displays his English translation in the sound lines of the Hebrew and strictly follows its grammar: the main verb is “said.” He capitalizes “Ocean,” because this is often a divine figure in ancient Near Eastern mythology. He translates ruach as “rushing-spirit,” attempting to preserve the metaphor at play but pointing to its extended sense. The contemporary NRSV translation translates ruach as “a wind from God.” This is an honest translation which emphasizes the metaphor. In a footnote, the editors note “spirit of God” or “mighty wind” as other possible translations. “A wind from God” balances well with chaos, darkness and face of the deep, evoking a strong mythical image. God’s wind flows over the primeval chaos and God brings order by speaking, “Let there be light!” Speaking is directly related to breath. Speaking is sound in breath.

The King James Version takes a different tack.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

This translation avoided the mythology of the original Hebrew in favor of abstraction (“without form and void”) and Christian concepts (Spirit of God). By capitalizing “Spirit,” the third person of the Trinity enters the scene, and the metaphor of breath/wind disappears. The King James translators have read Christian trinitarianism into their translation. Hardly a literal translation. The NRSV is much closer to a literal translation, and Fox closer yet. 

Spiritual Body

Paul uses pneuma in the same sense as the Hebrew ruach. In 2 Corinthians 3:6 he concludes an elaborate argument concerning the old written covenant and a new unwritten covenant by stating: “for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (KJV). The NRSVUE follows the KJV but capitalizes “Spirit:” “for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Here the NRSVUE turns pneuma into the third person of Trinity, a clearly anachronistic translation. The SV translation correctly understands the metaphor but literalizes it. “Relying on what is written kills, but the power of God’s presence gives life.” (The Authentic Letters of Paul). I would render it, “because what is written is dead, but breath gives life.” Paul makes what for the ancients was an obvious point, that a written text is dead and is only brought to life by the breath of speech. The metaphors led an ancient hearer/reader of Paul’s letter to the proper application.

Paul understands pneuma as having a bodily (physical) aspect, which, given the modern contrast between spirit and material, is impossible for us to comprehend. In 1 Corinthians 15:44, he refers to σῶμα πνευματικόν (sōma pneumatikon), usually translated “spiritual body.” For Paul, the “spirit” (God’s power or God’s breath) has a body. Paul is drawing on the second creation story.

and YHWH, God, formed the human, of dust from the soil,

he blew into his nostrils the breath of life

and the human became a living being (Genesis 2:7, Fox)

I would translate soma pneumatikon as “a body filled with God’s breath.”

While Genesis and Paul represent an ancient common-sense view of God’s ruach or pneuma based on metaphorical thinking, Plato developed a theoretical or philosophical view. He turned a common-sense metaphorical view into a cosmological and ontological theory. In this theory, the physical world is an imperfect reflection of the higher realm of unchanging forms. Plato develops the distinction between the body and the soul, a theory in its Platonic form completely absent from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. Beginning in the late second century and the early third century, Neoplatonism had an enormous and ongoing influence on Christianity making the distinction between body and soul and saving the soul central to Christianity. This philosophical and ontological model then was imposed on the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, as we have seen in the translations above.   

Spirituality and Theopoetics

John Caputo has proposed theopoetics as a way beyond the essentialism of traditional theology. I will let Caputo summarize his proposal.

Theology must become theopoetics. Talking about God does not come down to concepts, propositions, and arguments. . . .Talking about God ultimately comes down to other discursive resources—images and figures, metaphors and metonyms, symbols and allegories, parables and paradoxes, stories and striking sayings, songs and dance—in which we seek to express the grip the unconditional has upon us, by which we have been seized from a time out of mind (What to believe?, 31).

I suggest that the author of Genesis 1 and Paul were engaging in theopoetics. They were thinking with the metaphor, following out the metaphor’s logic by which they live, to use Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase. Our task is to escape the influences of Neoplatonism and re-engage with the original metaphors.

This brings me back to my problems with spirituality. First, spirituality is an abstraction and a relatively recent abstraction. So, to what does it refer? This question brings me to my second objection. Its connection to dualism taints its usage, making it unusable in my judgment. That dualism derives from the dualism of body and soul—an unsustainable dualism. It divorces us from our own life, the only life we have. The soul/body model makes the soul the true us, the body to be discarded for our true existence in heaven. This anthropology depends on a cosmology no longer sustainable. Spirituality points us away from this world. We need to focus on this world.

The ancient Hebrews and early Jesus communities used metaphors from their world to explore God’s presence and power in their experience, what Caputo names “the grip the unconditional has upon us.” That points us in the right direction. We should begin by exploring the metaphors they employed to discover the metaphors we need to explore. For me, science (Einstein and Darwin), poetry (Emily Dickenson), novels (Jane Austin, Virgina Woolf), art (Picasso), and films (Martin Sorcese) point the way forward. Fill in the parentheses with your own favorites. We can get lost in the narcissism of the present or we can discover our true place in the cosmos, our true home. 

References:

Caputo, John D. What to Believe?: Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology. Columbia University Press, 2023.

Dewey, Arthur J., Roy W. Hoover, Lane C. Mcgaughy, and Daryl D. Schmidt. The Authentic Letters of Paul. A New Reading of Paul’s Rhetoric and Meaning. Polebridge, 2010.

Fox, Everett, trans. The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken, 1995.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.