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 terms are not interchangeable, though translation has long treated them as if they were. In the Hebrew scriptures ruach is the wind over the waters at creation, and the breath that returns to the dry bones in Ezekiel and makes them stand and live, and also the force that seizes a prophet — divine, mobile, not the person’s own possession. Greek thought gave pneuma a more physical career: the Stoics made it the active substance running through all things, a fine fiery breath that holds matter together and constitutes the soul, so that for them spirit was not opposed to body but the subtlest body there is. Greek medicine, following the same word, traced a pneuma coursing through the arteries as the vehicle of life and sensation. When the Septuagint rendered ruach as pneuma and the Latin Bible rendered pneuma as spiritus, three distinct freights of meaning were poured into a single channel — and much later argument over what spirit is descends from that joining.

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 texts also speak of spirit as the highest part of the human being, set above soul and body. Out of this grew the long Western distinction — never quite stable — between spirit and soul, and the durable opposition of spirit to matter that the Stoics would not have recognized. In the Hermetic and Neoplatonic writings the term often names a subtle intermediate vehicle, finer than flesh and coarser than mind, by which the soul is clothed for its descent into the world; later esoteric schools elaborated this into doctrines of bodies within the body.

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beneath their differences, is a single intuition: that life is borne by something that moves, that can be present or withdrawn, and that is not simply identical with the visible flesh it animates.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. The resemblances across ruach, pneuma, and spiritus are real, and the shared etymology of breath is not an accident — cultures reached for the most reliable sign of life they had. 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

→ Related: Nous · Logos · Substance · Gnosis