The Flowers of the Spirit Are Rooted in the Earth

Breeze, breath, mind, life: following the trail of words that leads us to medieval—and modern—spirituality.

This is a newsletter about medieval spirituality. But what exactly is spirituality? Well, it’s the English version of Latin spiritus plus the suffixes -alis and -tas. Put all that together and you have spiritualitas, meaning the condition or state of things that pertain to the spirit. We almost have an answer: all we need to do now is explain what “spirit” is. And that’s the hard part.

One of my favorite things about studying languages like Hebrew and Old English, which seem to reach so deeply into humankind’s raw encounter with the forces of nature and the mysteries of life, is the opportunity to follow abstractions back to their tangible source. When I say “abstraction,” I basically mean “idea,” but “abstraction” is more specific: it’s an idea that is losing its connections to physical reality. The etymological meaning of “abstract” is “pulled away from”; an abstraction has been pulled away from the world of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Abstractions can be real and legitimate things, but they’ve become unmoored from the dock of sensory experience, and consequently they tend to drift off into the open sea, their full meaning and intensity slowly fading from view.

A simple example of this is the Old English word for “simple”: anfeald. This word literally means “one-fold.”

The word anfeald in the Beowulf manuscript. Transcriptions print it as one word despite the apparent space between an and feald.

Try to bring up a pure mental image or physical sensation for “simple.” I don’t see or feel much of anything, because “simple” is primarily an abstraction for me. Instead, I think of familiar examples, which don’t necessarily bring me any closer to the word’s essence: arithmetic is simple if you’ve studied calculus, autopay for electricity bills is simple if you have money in your bank account, life is simple if you live in a cabin in the woods, and even people can be simple if they like simple things and speak in simple ways.

The Old English word is different. You can see and feel the essence of “simple,” because “simple” is anfeald, one-fold: Fabric folded once is simple; if you have to fold it again and again, it’s not simple anymore. Now it’s complicated—from Latin com-plicare, “to fold together.” A braid with one fold, meaning that it has only one strand, is simple—so simple, in fact, that it’s not a braid at all, but something perfectly whole and indivisible, like the nature of God. Or like the human spirit.