Spirit

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Spirit

"Spirit" is a religious concept in American history and culture that cannot be reduced to any one definition—its meanings are too various. At the beginning of the twenty-first century these meanings proliferate across multiple boundaries: theological, psychological, and philosophical, as well as institutional, ethnic, and gender. In the broadest sense, definitions of spirit have at their core a focus on persistent, existential questions. What is the "really real"—that is, the nature of reality and of the universe? Is there someone or something, energy or presence, that brings the universe into being and sustains it? Does that something lie outside the boundaries of the cosmos in other realms of reality? Or does it dwell within nature as an inextricable part of the whole? Of what substances and forces, energies and organizing principles is it made up? What substances and forces, energies and organizing principles make up the human being? How do we as human persons most fruitfully name the sources of our experiences of depth or transcendence, "the More," as William James put it?

Responses to questions such as these emerge from the plurality of religious and secular worldviews that are at home in America at the beginning of a new millennium. The very variety of worldviews testifies to the fact that temptingly terse definitions of spirit, such as "incorporeality," "consciousness," "energy," "animating principle," "life source," or "inner dimension" offer a starting place for understanding the complexities of what spirit means. But they do not convey the density of meanings or the metaphysical and cultural struggles that have accrued around "spirit" in a religiously plural society that is also secular and consumerist.

In spite of the religious pluralism of present-day America, in a society whose historically dominant religious tradition is Christianity, "spirit" has strong, persisting connections with the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Christian Trinity. Diverse and even competing interpretations of the Holy Spirit have acknowledged to greater and lesser degrees their foundations in the Hebrew concept of ruach, "breath of God," and the Greek pneuma, or soul (pneumatology is the branch of Christian theology devoted to doctrines of the Holy Spirit). It is the function of the Holy Spirit in Christian theology to pervade, sustain, and sanctify the universe, to be the bridge between God and the world. The most versatile in form of the divine persons (wind, fire, dove, etc.), the Spirit is known to break forth in unpredictable and innovative fashion. The revivals that are so much a part of American religious history—the First and Second Great Awakenings of the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the holiness and pentecostal movements of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the charismatic renewals in Catholicism and Lutheranism in the 1960s and the political prominence of the religious right in the 1980s and 1990s—all of these are attributed by followers to the workings of the Spirit. This emergence is often accompanied by theological and political conservatism—back to the basics, back to the time of apostolic origins.

Paradoxically, invoking the Spirit also continues to serve as a strategy to counteract institutional or social restrictions. Numberless women have asserted a call by the Spirit to preach when their religious traditions have forbidden them to do so. Many prophets and founders of new religious movements report visitations of the Spirit as the source of their new revelations and the basis for claiming religious authority. In fact, new religious movements often come into being at least in part based on dissatisfactions with prevailing understandings of spirit and its relationship to matter.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and other Transcendentalists speculated about the extent to which nature reveals or conceals and distorts spirit. They looked to the human heart and within nature itself as sources of wisdom and truth on the assumption that spirit dwelt within each. In response to the growing primacy of science as the arbiter of truth and fears about human abandonment in a mechanistic and soulless universe, Emerson's contemporaries, the nineteenth-century Spiritualists, sought knowledge of life after death. Based on messages from the spirits of the dead, they claimed the reality of a spirit world whose laws ran parallel to those of the material world and that could be learned just as surely as the laws of chemistry and physics. Joseph Smith (1805–1844) and those who followed the Mormon religion he founded engaged in developing a commonsense theology undergirded by an understanding of spirit as eternally existing invisible matter. Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), the founder of Christian Science, broke the growing tension between spirit and matter by declaring her loyalty to Spirit as the only reality and matter as ultimately an illusion that was the cause of sin, suffering, and death.

A leap to the beginning of the twenty-first century reveals ever more diverse groups of Americans struggling to find understandings of spirit and access to it that:

are coherent with post-Newtonian, even post-Einsteinian, knowledge about how the universe operates;
take into account discoveries in psychology and the biological sciences about the human person, such as the fact that we share more than 99 percent or our DNA with chimpanzees;
can accommodate the multiple religious worldviews available, from Eastern religions to beliefs about spirit and spirits among Native North Americans to theories about healing energies abroad in the universe;
recognize the manifold manifestations of religious vitality and creativity that lie outside institutional and academic boundaries;
have as their goal not only individual fulfillment and healing but also the good of particular communities in the larger society and the well-being of the entire planet.

All of this ferment and creativity have fostered the contemporary emphasis on spirituality. Attention to this phenomenon suggests a pivotal question: To what does the "spirit" in "spirituality" refer? To press that question is to discover that it is nearly impossible, or at least not satisfying, to speak of spirit or spirituality in the abstract. One is compelled to turn immediately to particular kinds of spirituality and to pursue what "spirit" might or can mean in any of them: Jewish feminist spirituality; Tibetan Buddhist spirituality; Roman Catholic creation spirituality; Celtic spirituality; New Age spirituality; womanist spirituality; gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender spirituality; Lakota spirituality.

The list, if not endless, is very, very long. If spirituality in general refers both to a way of seeing the world and a way of acting on what one sees, definitions of "spirit" point in more particular directions to the very heart of a tradition or worldview or practice and to the acknowledgment that distinctions are required. The "emptiness" of Buddhist spirituality is not the equivalent of the Spirit in Christian spiritualities, for example, nor are the multiply described energies of the New Age movement reducible to one source. In other words, if "spirit" is to be understood in contemporary America, its meanings must always be sought out in a particular context. Spirit is always embodied in the beliefs and practices of a particular community. If, as the old saying goes, spirit bloweth where it will, it nonetheless cannot be felt or defined until it becomes the stuff of human experience.

Then again, even after an insistence on the plural nature of "spirit," and its propensity to take many forms, it must be acknowledged that there are efforts in American culture to articulate understandings of spirit that stress its unifying power. Many philosophers and theologians who place themselves in the lineage of early-twentieth-century American pragmatism believe that there exists an underlying American spiritual culture that has contributions to make to public life and the flourishing of society in all its diversity. They tie the meaning of "spirit" to possibilities of transcendence in nature that are, finally, finite and do not presuppose absolute meaning or any kind of underlying, unifying reality that exists independent of natural forces or human experience and efforts at transformation.

What becomes apparent in a brief survey of the meanings of spirit is that the power of this concept to inspire creative efforts at definition has not been diminished—not by the desupernaturalizing of the cosmos, the rejections of metaphysical absolutes, the competing worldviews of religious pluralism, or challenges to the house of institutional authority. "Spirit" continues to conjure images of transcendence in human experience and to lend its intimations of "the More" to American culture.

Bibliography

Albanese, Catherine L. Nature Religion: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. 1990.

Anderson, Victor. Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating the Intersections of an American Philosophy of Religion andPublic Theology. 1998.

Bednarowski, Mary Farrell. New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America. 1989.

Brown, Warren S., Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony. Whatever Happened to the Human Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature. 1998.

Miller, Timothy, ed. America's Alternative Religions. 1995.

Van Ness, Peter H. Spirituality and the Secular Quest. 1996.

Mary Farrell Bednarowski

Contemporary American Religion