Spirit

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Spirit is the name several traditions gave to the animating principle of a living thing — the breath by which a body lives, departing it at death. The word itself carries that origin plainly: the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma, and the Hebrew ruach all mean, at root, breath or moving air, wind no less than the breath in a chest. To watch breath leave a dying body and not return was, for the cultures that coined these words, to watch the thing itself go. The intuition is older than any of the philosophies built on it: that the boundary between a living person and a corpse is not the flesh, which lies there unchanged for a while, but something mobile and invisible that has withdrawn. A name was given to that something, and the name was breath.

Three words, one root

The terms are not interchangeable, though translation has long treated them as if they were. Each began as a plain observation of moving air and was then bent toward a cosmology, so that by late antiquity the same word could mean a gust of wind, the air in a person’s lungs, the stuff of the soul, and the deity who sends it. The history of the concept is in large part the history of those three words crossing into one another’s languages and carrying their freight along.

In the Hebrew scriptures ruach is the wind over the waters at the opening of creation, hovering before anything is made. It is the breath that returns to the dry bones in Ezekiel and makes them stand and live — there summoned from the four winds, so that wind, breath, and life-giving power are the same word doing three kinds of work in a single passage. And it is the force that seizes a prophet: it comes upon a person from outside, divine and mobile, not the person’s own possession but a power that arrives, acts, and lifts away. In the lexical accounting of the Hebrew Bible ruach falls into roughly these registers — wind in the world, breath in the body, and the spirit that is the highest thing in a human being and also the moving energy of God — and the scriptures pass between them without ever quite fixing a boundary. Later rabbinic and kabbalistic schemes would slot ruach between nefesh (the lower vital soul tied to the blood) and neshamah (the higher breath), making it one rung of a graded soul; but the biblical word itself is not a rung so much as a weather, present where it blows and gone where it does not.

Pneuma: the subtlest body

Greek thought gave pneuma a more physical career, and it is here that spirit acquired its first rigorous metaphysics. The Stoics, founded at Athens around 300 BCE by Zeno of Citium and systematized by Chrysippus, made pneuma the active principle running through all things — a fine, warm, mobile breath of fire and air mixed, which holds the cosmos together and constitutes the soul. Their physics was thoroughgoingly corporealist: only bodies can act or be acted upon, so whatever animates a body must itself be a body, the subtlest there is. Pneuma on this account is not opposed to matter but is the most refined matter, blended completely through coarser stuff and giving it whatever coherence and quality it has. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the doctrine plainly: the vehicle for the divine active principle is pneuma, literally breath, and the breath comes in gradations. At its lowest tension it is mere hexis, the tenor that keeps a stone or a beam one thing rather than a heap; at a higher tension it is the growth-principle of plants; higher still it is animal soul, the seat of sensation and impulse; and at its finest it is the rational, governing part — the hegemonikon, the commanding faculty — in which thought and assent occur. The cohering and animating of the whole world is one continuous scale of breath at different tensions, and what the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy reconstructs as Stoic philosophy of mind is, at bottom, an account of pneuma doing the work that later traditions would split between body, soul, and spirit. The breath at its highest tension is also, for the Stoics, the rational ordering of the cosmos itself — the logos that is god immanent in matter — so that to speak of spirit and to speak of reason was, in their physics, to speak of the same fiery breath under two descriptions. For the Stoic there is no spirit-against-matter dualism to be had: spirit is matter, the living kind. This is the key point at which the later Western reading of spirit parts company with one of its own sources.

Greek medicine, following the same word, traced a pneuma coursing through the body as the vehicle of life and sensation — a usage with roots in earlier natural philosophy, where Aristotle had spoken of an innate pneuma, a connate breath warmer than the elements and analogous to the substance of the stars, as the instrument by which soul moves and shapes the body. The physiological tradition that ran from the Hippocratic writers through the Alexandrian anatomists and into Galen distinguished a breath drawn in at the lungs and processed in the heart — a vital spirit carried by the arteries — from a finer animal spirit elaborated in the brain and running the nerves to produce movement and perception. A whole pneumatist school of physicians took this breath as the central agent of health and disease. Here pneuma is neither a cosmic principle nor a deity but a working fluid of the living organism, the thing the physician must keep moving and unobstructed; and this medical sense would feed, many centuries on, into the spiritus of medieval and Renaissance physiology, the subtle vapor through which soul was thought to act upon body.

Three freights, one channel

When the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures made at Alexandria from the third century BCE — rendered ruach as pneuma, and the Latin Bible in turn rendered pneuma as spiritus, three distinct freights of meaning were poured into a single channel. The Hebrew word brought its weather and its prophets; the Greek word brought its Stoic physics and its arteries; the Latin word, itself a noun of breathing built on the verb spirare, received both and added the inflections of Roman usage. A reader of the Latin Bible thus met one word, spiritus, that silently carried the over-the-waters wind of Genesis, the fiery active breath of the Painted Stoa, and the physician’s vital vapor — and much of the later argument over what spirit is descends directly from that joining. The philological coincidence that breath, wind, and life are one word in each of the three founding languages was not lost on the traditions; it was treated as a clue rather than an accident, a sign that the most reliable mark of life had been correctly named.

The Christian tangle and the spirit/soul divide

Christian usage inherited the whole tangle and added to it. The New Testament pneuma hagion, the Holy Spirit, is at once breath, wind, and a person of the Godhead — the same Greek word that names the wind a person hears but cannot see, the breath breathed on the disciples, and the third of the Trinity confessed in the creeds. The fuller development of that doctrine belongs to its own tradition and its own treatment. But alongside it the same texts speak of pneuma as the highest part of the human being, set above soul and body, as in the Pauline prayer that spirit, soul, and body be kept whole. Out of this grew the long Western distinction — never quite stable — between spirit and soul: sometimes the two are synonyms for the one immaterial self, sometimes spirit is the God-facing apex and soul the life-of-the-body beneath it, and the line between them has been redrawn in nearly every Christian century. What is striking, against the Greek background, is that this same period hardened a contrast the Stoics would never have recognized: the durable opposition of spirit to matter. The breath that for Chrysippus was the finest of bodies becomes, in the Platonizing Christian settlement, the very type of the immaterial, set over against gross flesh — so that the word now carried, half-merged within itself, both the Stoic doctrine that spirit is a body and the doctrine that spirit is precisely what is not a body.

The Hermetic and Neoplatonic vehicle

In the Hermetic and Neoplatonic writings the term often names something more specific again: a subtle intermediate vehicle, finer than flesh and coarser than mind, by which the soul is clothed for its descent into the world and through which it acts upon the body. The treatises ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus describe the soul’s passage downward through the planetary spheres, gathering at each a layer of disposition, and back upward — by the saving knowledge they call gnosis — shedding them again, a topology that asks for some garment intermediate between the naked intellect and the earthly body, and pneuma supplies the word for it. The Neoplatonists made this explicit. Where Plato had spoken in the Timaeus of a vehicle of the soul, and where Plotinus built his metaphysics on the three hypostases — the One, Intellect, and Soul — later Neoplatonists elaborated the ochema-pneuma, the pneumatic vehicle: a luminous breath-body in which the descending soul is carried. Porphyry took it to be acquired in the descent and dissolved in the ascent; his student-rival Iamblichus held instead that the soul’s vehicle is immortal, fashioned whole by the Demiurge from a kind of ether, and so not discarded but purified. Proclus, refining the scheme, distinguished two such carriers: a higher, immortal luminous vehicle proper to the rational soul, and a lower, mortal pneumatic vehicle aligned with the vital breath. In every version pneuma names the hinge between the bodiless and the bodily — the finest substance that is still, in some sense, a something. Later esoteric schools elaborated this hinge into full doctrines of bodies within the body, sheaths and vehicles graded from dense to subtle; the whole architecture of the subtle body in Western tradition has the Neoplatonic ochema near its root, carried forward into Renaissance and modern restatements.

The unifying intuition, and where it parts

What the registers share, beneath their differences, is a single intuition: that life is borne by something that moves, that can be present or withdrawn, and that is not simply identical with the visible flesh it animates. Whether that something is a fluid, a faculty, a divine guest, or a way of speaking about the living as living is precisely where the traditions divide. For the Stoic it is the finest body and nothing supernatural attends it; for the Hebrew prophet it is the wind of God that no one commands; for the physician it is a vapor to be kept in motion; for the Neoplatonist it is the soul’s own luminous vehicle; for the Christian it is, in one of its senses, a person of the Godhead and, in another, the apex of the human creature. The shared etymology of breath is the thread that lets these be discussed as one topic at all, and the divergence of doctrine is what keeps them from collapsing into one.

Scholarship and sources

The classic synthetic study of the concept’s development is Gerard Verbeke’s L’évolution de la doctrine du pneuma du stoïcisme à saint Augustin (Louvain and Paris, 1945), which traces the gradual spiritualization of pneuma from its purely material sense in early Greek thought, through the corporeal-but-elevated breath of Zeno’s Stoicism, into the two streams that culminate in Neoplatonism on the one hand and in Augustine’s fusion of Christian and Neoplatonic ideas on the other; the work is cataloged and reviewed in the Revue philosophique de Louvain. For the Stoic doctrine in its own terms, the indispensable public-domain instrument remains Hans von Arnim’s Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (Teubner, 1903–1924), which gathers the fragments and testimonia — necessarily so, since the works of Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus are lost and survive only in quotation by later authors such as Galen, whose On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato preserves much of the debate over where in the body the governing pneuma resides. The standard modern accounts of the Stoic breath-physics and its scale of tensions are set out in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Stoicism and in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s treatment of Stoic philosophy of mind. For the Neoplatonic ochema-pneuma and its afterlife, the late-antique sources are Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus; the doctrine and its transmission are surveyed in G. R. S. Mead’s older but still-cited The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition (1919), held in this collection’s library. The biblical ruach and its rendering as pneuma are best approached through the Hebrew and Greek scriptures themselves and through standard lexica of the two languages, where the threefold range — wind, breath, spirit — is laid out for each.

They did not all mean the same thing by it. Each language fixed the word to its own cosmology, and the word has been carrying those several cosmologies, half-merged, ever since.

→ In the library: Mead — The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition (1919) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

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