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.

Many things are called spirits. An angel is called a spirit, our soul is called a spirit, and this wind which is blowing is called a spirit; great virtue also is spoken of as spirit.
—St. Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386)

The earliest records of civilization reveal a universal sense that somewhere inside the human body is something that isn’t flesh, or bone, or blood, or sinew. Something that seems to possess the essence of life, and give this life to the body, and retain it when the body is dead. Ancient peoples needed words for this ethereal, imperceptible entity, and they found them where they found all the more familiar and comprehensible elements of their lives: in the natural world.

Ancient Hebrew, which in the Middle Ages was assumed to be the original human language received from the Creator, has two words that convey the idea of a human spirit or soul:

resh-vav-khet (from right to left), with vowel markings: “ruakh”

nun-pei-shin (from right to left), with vowel markings: “nefesh”

The Hebrew word ruakh is frequently interpreted as “spirit” and has various English translations, but the core meaning is “breath” or “wind.” Likewise, nefesh is fundamentally “a breathing creature” and is translated as “soul,” “life,” and “mind.” Is it not fascinating to imagine ancient peoples contemplating the elusive human “spirit” and embracing its apparent kinship to breath, the vital principle of the body, and wind, the great motive force of the earth? I like the way that literature scholar Kato Sadamichi expresses this:

Early Semitic stories, like many indigenous cosmologies, employed the concept “spirit” ... without substantively pulling the sacred out of the ecological matrix. Spirit, rather than forcing the value of life to stand away from or against nature, conspired with the physical: quite simply as the air is indivisible, so the breath (spirit) of life that God breathes into the first human is indistinguishable from the human’s own breath.

The Hebrews looked with wonder into the world around them and saw that breath—the movement of air—animated the terrestrial cosmos. A breathing body was alive, and a non-breathing body was dead; nature with wind was alive in motion and sound, and nature without wind was still as though lifeless. Air is also invisible, like a person’s inner life force, and it cannot be separated into parts, just as a soldier in battle can lose a leg or an arm but not a portion of his immaterial self. Thus, if there is something deep inside a human being that animates—that imparts distinctive life and makes movement, thought, speech, and feeling possible—it must be ruakh or nefesh: breath, wind, soul, spirit.

The Middle Ages inherited basic concepts of spirituality from the ancient world: Hebrew ideas were transmitted through the Old Testament, and Greco-Roman culture was the immediate ancestor of medieval Christianity. The word spiritus in Latin is similar to Hebrew ruakh: its core meaning is “breath” or “breeze,” and it also signified the “spirit”—the inner life force—that ancient Romans believed had been somehow breathed into the body. The Greek equivalent of spiritus was πνεῦμα (“pneuma”), which once again means “breath,” “moving air,” and, by analogy with the physical world, the human “spirit.”

Societies of the Middle Ages possessed detailed doctrines and philosophical theories concerning the human spirit or soul. Scholars explored its ontological status, its relationship to the body and the mind, its participation in the divine essence, and its eternal destiny. These ideas contributed in meaningful ways to the development of culture and the practice of religion. But formal, systematic philosophy is only one path toward wisdom, and sometimes it’s an indirect or incomplete path.¹ The study of words and poetic expression is a crucial supplement to philosophy: it can take us back to primal, sensory realities, and help us to untie a knot of abstractions that has prevented us from fully hoisting the sails of human life.

Medieval culture built elaborate philosophical and theological structures around the human spirit, but these were dependent upon, not opposed to, basic conceptual pillars found in ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Roman thought: The human spirit, like a mighty wind, cannot be seen, and cannot be held in the hand, but it is real, and it is powerful. Like breath, it animates the deepest essence of our being, flowing inward and outward in a perpetual rhythm that echoes the myriad rhythms of the earth and the heavens. Like God, who moves the winds and calls all the stars by name and breathes His life into our bodies, it is simple, and immaterial, and immortal.

The flowers that I included in this essay are examples of the countless floral decorations that beautify medieval manuscripts. Flowers are a delightful symbol of the spiritual life: they bring pleasure and reverie to the hard labors that sustain the body, they reach up toward heaven and open to the light of the sun, and they seem most comfortable swaying in a gentle breeze—or maybe we should say, in a gentle spirit. But we do well to remember that even the finest and loftiest and most fragrant flowers have their roots in the earth.

1. Aristotle’s theory of the soul, for example, was accepted (and adapted) by many medieval philosophers. According to one modern interpretation, Aristotle describes the soul “as a form or principle of actualization inseparable from the body it actualizes, although in the case of the human soul he speaks of the intellect as in a sense incorruptible.” I respect the value of such treatments, but they are difficult for most of us, and much of the difficulty lies in the attempt to explain one abstraction (“soul”) using more abstractions (“form,” “actualization,” “intellect”).