“The problem which above all is confronting us today is the problem of the spirit and of the spiritual life.” (Nikolai Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit)
“If Kevin were here, he’d say, ‘Deedle-deedle queep’. Kevin has no use for the Profound.” (Philip Dick, Valis)
As I was saying yesterday: I have been wrestling with the notion of “spirit”. Is “spirit” a metaphor or a reality, poetry or prose? Is it a substance or an energy? Is it the wind beneath our wings? Is it the same as “soul”? What is its purpose and/or its function? Does it emanate from God? Does “spirit” exist even if God doesn’t?
Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) believed not just in the reality but in the primacy of spirit. His anthropology of “God-manhood” was based on his belief that man is a creature composed of both mortal flesh and immortal spirit, with the latter taking ontological precedence: “The truth is that man is a spiritual being,” he wrote. According to Eugene (Evgeny) Lampert, the study and understanding of spirit was integral to Berdyaev’s thought:
“Berdyaev [proposed] what he calls pneumatology, which considers man first of all as a spirit, equally personal, free and self-determining, yet always open, continually surpassing itself, and vitally correlated with God, other men, and the world at large.”
Berdyaev himself put it this way:
“Life appears to me as the mystery of the spirit, a drama in which man strives in a constant but strangely unavailing effort to embody the creative vision of his spirit…the meaning of life lies in a return to the mystery of the spirit...”
For those of us who need to have spelled out for us exactly what “spirit” is, Berdyaev did his best:
“Spirit is activity. Spirit is liberty. The nature of spirit is the opposite of passivity and necessity; it is for this reason that spirit cannot be a substance… Spirit is creative becoming…the antinomy between spirit and nature is above all things the antithesis between life and thing, between liberty and necessity, between creative movement and passive submission to exterior impulses… It is spirit which is revolutionary, whilst matter is conservative and reactionary…the orientation of spirit determines the character of consciousness, which in turn decides the nature of knowledge. Knowledge is spiritual life, the activity of spirit. “
Not just human beings but the universe itself is spirit: “The inner life of the cosmos is a spiritual reality.” The cosmos has an “inner life”—who knew? But then, as previously mentioned, knowledge itself, or the act of knowing, is spiritual, and reality will only be revealed to those properly attuned to it:
“The discovery of reality depends on the activity of the spirit, on its intensity and ardor. We cannot expect that spiritual realities will be revealed to us in the same way as objects of the natural world, presented to us externally, such as stones, trees, tables, chairs, or such as the principles of logic...in the realm of spirit reality is not extraneous, for it proceeds from the spirit itself.”
“Spirit,” then, is not an object; it is no "thing” ("nothing") but instead is activity. Like love, spirit is not a noun but a verb, and a creative, unpredictable one at that; the author of the Gospel of John advised, “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit… (John 3:8) When Berdyaev describes "spirit" as activity, and when he writes about "God-manhood," I can't help but think of Carter Heyward's wonderful neologism, "godding":
"It is open to each of us to incarnate God (that is, to embody God's power), and we do so most fully when we seek to relate genuinely to others in what she calls "relationality". When we do this, we are said to be 'godding'." (Wikipedia)
In yesterday’s post on this subject, I cited an article by Nancy Colier (in Psychology Today) in which she claimed that the Self, the human ego, is the primary obstacle to spirit. Berdyaev agreed, and in fact went further: “The ego,” he wrote, “has been a fatality both for the human self and for God.” In Pauline fashion, he then humble-bragged, “This was once revealed to me in a dream.” Berdyaev also agreed that cultivation of the human spirit must not come at the expense of our bodies; we are hybrid creatures, as it were, and responsible to sustaining both parts of our nature. Berdyaev:
Detachment from the sensible and concrete world, and all multiplicity and mobility in nature, combined with an orientation toward the unchanging world of ideas, is not the highest degree of spiritual experience and contemplation…life in its basic and original form is both higher and deeper. 1
Echoing again what I wrote yesterday, Berdyaev, who had affinities with both Existentialism and Personalism, decisively rejected modern individualism:
“A [genuine] community of people bears a personalist character, it is always a community of persons, a matter of “I and Thou”, the uniting of the I and Thou into the We. This is unattainable by an external organization of society, which seizes upon only part of the condition of the human person and does not attain to its depths. No sort of organization of society is able to create the totality of life. The illusion of this totalization obtains in a strange constriction of the life of the person, the impoverishment of its consciousness, by the strangling in it of the spiritual side of life.”
Finally, allow me to share this excerpt from an Orthodox prelate, Archimandrite George:
“As long as man does not find himself on the path of [Spirit] he feels an emptiness within himself... he feels that something is not going right, so he is not joyful even when he is trying to cover the emptiness with other activities. He may numb himself, create a glamorous world, or cage and imprison himself within this world, yet at the same time he remains poor, small, limited. He may organise his life in such a way that he is almost never at peace, never alone with himself. Surrounded by noise, tension, television, radio, continuous information about this and that, he may seek to forget with drugs; not to think, not to worry, not to remember that he is on the wrong path and has strayed from his purpose.
In the end, wretched contemporary man finds no rest until he finds that “something else,” the highest thing; the thing which actually exists in his life which is truly beautiful and creative.” 2
Saint Paul believed that being “born of the Spirit” was the privilege of baptized believers in Christ; Nikolai Berdyaev believed that every human being and everything in existence is born of the Spirit. I’ll take my stand with Berdyaev on this; assuming there is such a thing as “Spirit” in the first place, it seems only fair that we all get a share in it.
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1 This, from a man whose only ambition from youth was to be a philosopher, a thinker, and who led, all in all, a relatively austere (though certainly not ascetic) life: Philosopher, heal thyself, as they say.
2 http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/theosis-english.pdf
The Eugene Lampert quote is from Nikolai Berdyaev and the New Middle Ages. Most of the Berdyaev quotes are from Freedom and the Spirit.
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