Spirit

Spirit

Spirit is a complicated, nebulous term extending from the sacred and holy to the depths of the human. It captures human consciousness of meanings and purposes extending beyond individual lives, and directs people to the boundaries of self. Spirit may also refer to the supernatural or immaterial, the divine or sacred, an animating principle, a property of the person, mind or consciousness, the process of emergence or coming into being, an orientation to ultimate mystery, and the ethical or transformative. There is a Christian tradition, from Irenaeus in the second century to Erasmus in the sixteenth, that views the human person as a tripartite complex of spirit, soul, and body, but there is an alternative sense in which these are varying orientations of a unitary person. With reference to the individual, spirit and soul are used almost interchangeably, although spirit tends to be less individuated, and the soul more tied to the religious.

Theological development

Theological developments begin with the ancient understanding of spirit as life. The Hebrews used the word ruach to refer to divine breath, and the word nephesh to refer to a product of the spirit, translated as "person" or "soul." The Greek term pneuma, meaning "breath of life," is translated as "spirit" of life and breath and is distinguishable from the images and ideas of the psyche, translated as "soul" or "mind.". This sense of spirit may also include the "new life" of prophetic inspiration, art, poetry, and courage.

The ancient Hebrews understood humans to be unitary persons, which is also consistent with the early Epistles of the New Testament. The medieval Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) drew on Aristotle's understanding of form as inseparable from substance, seeing the human spirit inseparable from its corporeality. A disembodied soul may be theologically problematic, both in failing to fulfill the total life of a person and in negating of the body. A deeply immanent view of the relation between spirit and life is also found in modern theologies like that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), Karl Rahner (1904–1984), and Wolfhart Pannenberg (b. 1928). On this view, evolution itself is the continuous development of matter towards spirit, nature becoming conscious of itself in human beings, systems open to the future.

The idea of spirit is restricted to mind in early Christian syntheses, equivalent to the Latin word mens for Augustine of Hippo (354–430 c.e.). He sees the self as transcendent in all of its functions, including memory and understanding, and his emphasis on private experience contributed to the inwardness institutionalized by Christianity. During the seventeenth century, René Descartes argued that mental faculties are largely explainable as bodily activities, except for conscious thought. To account for consciousness, Descartes posits a nonmaterial dual substance, causally interacting with the brain, knowable only through privileged and incorrigible introspection. Contemporary solutions to the mind-body problem recognize an inescapable dependence on mind upon brain, but have not yet explained subjective experience.

A tension remains between a view of spirit as internal or as external to the human mind. Pannenberg warns that while the identification of spirit with mind may be a human projection, its Christian opposition often results in irrational subjectivism (p. 127). Spirit as the principle of life may be generative of mind, more than an individual's brain function, but a set of interiorized relationships. Even a scientific understanding of mind may require more than individual neurobiology, but it is not clear whether spirit requires a further step, since human invention and divine inspiration are not mutually exclusive.

Human spirit has also been equated with self-transcendence, intimately tied to human freedom and development. The theologies of Teilhard de Chardin and Paul Tillich (1886–1905) treat spirit as a dimension of life that takes one's biological, individual self-awareness into the personal and communal, with ecstatic acts of self-transcendence overcoming existential anxiety. According to Rahner, human minds enable the abstraction by which people move beyond themselves to a horizon of meaning. If spirit is about the meanings that transcend human finitude, it can encourage an obliteration of a bounded and autonomous self. The theological idea of kenosis captures this idea of emptying the self into a larger vessel. The spirit is then constituted by stepping beyond the boundaries of self, in relating to others and, as Rahner writes, to the "unutterable mystery of life we call God" (Grenz and Olson, p. 240).

Science and religion

In the dialogue between science and religion, spirit is a bridging concept between the ultimate metaphysical concerns of religion and their embodiment within human experience. The sense of spirit as an immanent creative force finds expression in process theology's use of developments in physics to understand even matter as including an experiential interior. This sense is also seen in the use of chaos theory, complexity theory, and autopoesis to understand the work of spirit. Ian Barbour sees spirit in the emergent novelties of evolution, including unique activities at higher levels of organic complexity.

Most uses of spirit in the science-religion dialogue have been in making sense of the evolutionary biology of human mental and moral lives, including both an opposition to theological dualism and an understanding that a reductive materialism would explain away much of what is important about human life. The beacon for theological anthropology is the view that spirit, soul, person, and mind are emergent properties of evolved human biology. Under this view, persons are psychosomatically unitary organisms, characterized by an inner life of extreme complexity, unpredictability, and novelty in which the evolution and development of complex nervous systems bring autonomy, identity, and will into being. The human spirit is a contingent product of a hierarchy of biological functions on which personal existence depends, and which gives rise to capacities like morality and religious experience. In theologies of nature like those of Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, and Philip Hefner, human personal and social lives are intimately related to the rest of natural creation by virtue of evolutionary emergence and novelty, mind and spirit. Religious neuroscientists, such as Donald Mackay, Malcolm Jeeves, and Fraser Watts, also emphasize a complementarity or compatibilism between neuroscience and theology. While higher-order properties physically depend on their components, relationships between the emergent unit and its elements is neither identical with nor derivable from them. Philosophically oriented thinkers, such as Nancey Murphy and Philip Clayton, describe spiritual and mental events as "supervenient" over neurophysiological ones, and as both multiply realizable and multiply constitutable. Warren Brown and John Teske suggest further that human spirituality is neuropsychologically constituted only in the context of personal relationships, and in the shaping of human brains by cultural forces.

A range of naturalistic theories of religious experiences ties them to patterns of emotional attachment and to neural structures as in Eugene d'Aquili's life-long program, synthesized in The Mystical Mind (1999). Disciplines like prayer and meditation have documentable physical effects, and a whole literature exists on the psychological benefits of spirituality. A tradition of research in the psychology of spiritual development, of which James Fowler's Stages of Faith (1981) is the best known, also connects the interdependent self of mature ego-development to the breakdown of self/other boundaries sought by spiritual and ethical traditions. At higher levels of development, spirit is really not about the individual, nor is it otherworldly, but still strongly opposes a materialistic ethic.

See also Aristotle; Augustine; Descartes, RenÉ; Dualism; Freedom; Holy Spirit; Human Nature, Religious and Philosophical Aspects; Kenosis; Materialism; Neurosciences; Physicalism, Reductive and Nonreductive; Pneumatology; Process Thought; Self; Self-transcendence; Soul; Spirituality; Supernaturalism; Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre; Thomas Aquinas; Whitehead, Alfred North

Bibliography

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john a. teske