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Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward.

— G. W. F. Hegel

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I realize it’s been a month since I posted anything, so you can be sure that all I’m going to use this gasp of air for is to talk about the books I’ve been buried in, which can finally make themselves of usefulness in this way, having largely been culpable for my absence in the first place. I recently began reading Hegel’s gargantuan volume, Phenomenology of Spirit, though if the current trend holds, I will not be able to report having finished the book until either it or natural causes kill me. Nevertheless, I am determined to hack through the tangle of mystery that seems to surround Hegel, especially in Christian spheres. 

Despite his work on the nature of spirit being hefty enough to bludgeon a rhinoceros, most treatments of his Phenomenology I’ve encountered from Christian sources rise only to a few paragraphs or less. His synthesizing dialectic is described, or at least its terms enumerated, and he is tossed into the bin labeled “pantheist.” This has made an incredibly lackluster impression, comparable to approaching the foot of Everest and being told what the summit is like by someone who merely flew past it by plane. That fellow may have seen the top, but he is no climber. He may be able to name and point out the formations of the mountain, but he has never comprehended them. That is to say, there may be some value in the flyover surveys often offered by those passingly familiar with Hegel’s work, but such cursory summaries do little to explain why Hegel’s system appears so comprehensive, complex, and influential.

The real start of my tumble down the rabbit hole of Hegelian insanity begins, however, with a more general frustration with evangelical pneumatology. Concurrent with my burgeoning venture into German idealism was a journey of no meager suffering through a systematic theology of the Holy Spirit. While the work of theology in question was modest and quite orthodox, its modesty ultimately proved, in my reading, a great detriment. The real substance of the text consisted in what it lacked, that is, the whole thing was constructed on a foundation of assumptions, especially in the realm of metaphysics. Assumptions are hardly a good starting point for what purports to be a thorough theological treatment of its subject.

But, as a matter of fact, I think the offending book actually represents a prolific and profound deficiency in American Protestant culture and thought. This void has nagged at my mind for a long time, though I am encouraged to finally feel a nascent ability to articulate why. I don’t know what a “spirit” is. Does anyone? Language with real theological punch is thrown about quite casually in mainstream, broadly evangelical contexts, at least the ones I am familiar with. Terms like “spiritual beings,” “spiritual realm,” “spiritual warfare” and so on are loaded with serious implications that are, in my estimation, just as seriously neglected. In order to understand what any of this means, one functionally and of necessity assumes a meaning of “spiritual” and “spirit.”

What I often find disheartening about the way these assumptions are borne out upon investigation is that the metaphysics of the average faithful often boils down to a very modern, materialistic essence. The so-called “spiritual realm” is thought of with little more depth than the popular scientific notions of alternate realities, dimensions, or universes. The spiritual realm is thought of in strictly material terms, like just another physical world with arbitrary augmentations such as a lack of visibility. When angels appear as men in scripture, or other heavenly beings are envisioned as wheels or multi-headed chimeras, the assumption is often that such depiction constitutes the essence of those things, that they simply are creatures like any other, merely unseen. 

I think that, as is often the case, the medieval Church is much to blame for the development of this view, at least as it pertains to angels. Angels in the medieval age were regrettably confined to a hyper-feudal view that, while not without its merits, ultimately served to subject them to an unfittingly rigid systematization that races far beyond the confines of Holy Scripture rather than deeper into its inscrutable recesses. That is a fine line, no doubt.

I’ve talked at length in my other work (all highly-acclaimed, I would guess) about myth and symbolism. It should come as little surprise, then, that I believe a deeper sense of symbol can help to remedy this ailment just as it does with medieval metaphysics of the Eucharist. I believe when angels and spirits and things are described in Holy Scripture, that when a picture is painted of an invisible thing, we should not expect that the image conjured in the mind is anything more than an image. What I mean is, a seraphim is not an organism with feathers and eyeballs and working innards that we simply cannot see, just like a giant is not just a human arbitrarily taller and nastier. “Do not mistake the moon with the finger that points at it.” A seraphim is like the image of a creature with six wings symbolically, not photographically, analogously, not univocally. What does this mean? The heck if I know — to put it plainly. 

We do know from the Scriptures that something about the nature of spirit is such that God’s own Spirit “dwells” collectively in the Church and individually in her members. Hegel interestingly, as far as I understand him to this point, seems to condense the more general function of Spirit and its more particular action into a middle movement in the abstractions of historical narrative. The biggest weakness I thus anticipate finding in Hegel is that he might tie Spirit too closely to a particular concept, stifling its invisible momentum and especially the transcendence of God’s own Spirit. What Hegel seems to get profoundly right, however, is his approach, particularly in treating pneumatology as a phenomenological arena, that is, regarding spirit as event. Now, Hegel is still a distinctly modern figure, and thus can be expected to share to some degree in the weaknesses of modernity, but this basic fact seems to be of incredible utility. 

In Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, “spirit” is described with words meaning “breath” or “wind.” Spirit is not just invisible, but intangible as well, because it is dissipative. A spirit, I think, is not an object that moves, but rather a movement as an object. Wind is not an object, but a pattern of movement through a substance. Breath is also understood in such phenomenological terms. Why should we interpret spirit any differently? 

I think the deficiency I see in the American church, then, can be best described as a lack of care in the assumptions we import into our understanding of spirit. Perhaps this is related to a general anti-mystical sentiment in Western thought. This sentiment is not entirely unwarranted and, as I think is often the case, is actually necessary for a proper dynamic of dialogue between harmoniously dichotomous halves of a healthy approach to theology — a synthesis, if you will, of the sublime and the beautiful, the obscure and the clear. But, I’ve said before and I will continue to say that the West in its intellectualism has metastasized a culture of supreme demystification. Enlightenment and enchantment can and should be harmonized rather than strictly pitted against one another. 

Angels are historically symbolically closely associated with stars. That being the case, the prevailing understanding of spirit in America seems to be closer to the science of astronomy than to simple stargazing, full of empty knowledge and devoid of wholesome awe. Consider Christ, who used mud, the antithesis of sight, to cure blindness. Consider Paul, who first needed to be blinded by the light of Christ before the scales could fall from his eyes. Such is the reenchantment of a view of the spiritual we need quite severely.

All of this is to say nothing of the nature of spirit with a view to human “being.” Perhaps the spirit is the dynamic element and the soul the static. Perhaps the soul describes consciousness and the spirit vitality, or perhaps, if mind and soul describe the same thing, then the soul is where spirit and body intersect. I don’t imagine I’ll do much better than Hegel in this endeavor, but that is indeed perfectly acceptable. If the approach holds true, then to move is certainly better than to stagnate.

This element of movement has become quite a fixation for me. I increasingly find it essential to knowing what “spirit” means. As I mused in my anniversary article, I think a phenomenological approach to “being” itself is apt, though I understand I am using “phenomenology” a bit loosely here, wishing more to evoke a literal sense than an historic one. Spirits are not “beings” in an ontological sense, not “beings” as objects, but “beings” as “happenings,” continual “occurrences.” “Being” is more fundamentally a state, a process, a condition, a pattern than it is a strict, structural “thing.” Consider, if you will, consciousness not as a thing, but as a state. It cannot be separated from the moment, it is always in the infinitely precise moment of the present. The continuity of your consciousness is not found in its objective existence in the past or the future, but the pattern of its persistence in the present.

This is what Heraclitus meant when he characterized the cosmos through the principle of flux. Consider how the human body is continually dying and regenerating a la ship of Theseus on the cellular level. It is not the static continuity of the components of the body that make it one thing, but its continuity as a pattern, as a phenomenon, as an imprint in the negative. The universe exists, but it is infinitely far from static. Its existence is in the movement of stars, the spinning of planets, its sameness emerges from the constancy of change. “There is nothing permanent except change.”

If this is true, as I think it is, then God might be said to consist, in part, in the permanence holding that change together. “In Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17b). Or, as Paul quoted from Epimenides, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” God is seen, at least emblemized, in the permanence which emerges from flux. As Christ is to the cosmos, then, His Holy Spirit is to those in whom He “dwells.” See, once again, how the assumed meaning of “dwell” is so often inadequate. Does Christ literally knock on a door made of wood or metal or glass on the interior of your body? Does He bodily come to sit in the little house inside your chest and eat with you? So what then does “dwell” mean? We understand it physically, but the physical merely symbolizes His activity. I hope we can push through an understanding of this “dwelling’ that is merely literal with an attribute of invisibility tacked on. 

The Holy Spirit is characterized constantly throughout the New Testament as movement, no less a divine person, as an agent and change. He acts, He wills, He “carries along” apostles and missionaries. His continuity holds our phenomenon of being together within the continuity of His transcendent personhood. His “being” is inseparable from His activity. His being is activity, or at least manifest in it. That activity includes incorporation into identity which is inseparable from transformation, that is, a continuity emergent from flux. He mortifies the old self (Rom. 8:13) as the first component of the process of vivification, which might thus be thought of as dissipative. He visibly institutes a pattern manifest in behavior which is continually modified.

I don’t wish to deemphasize the personal nature of spirits or of God’s Spirit, but I feel that an overemphasis on a personal view of spirit tends to get stuck in the mire of demystification, and a fixation on divine personhood introduces the risk of reducing the members of the Trinity to mere persons as men and women are persons. I am convinced that even describing God as “personal” is a bit insufficient, and something like “superpersonal” would probably be more apropos. Obviously, in the limited capacities of human minds, any emphasis will open vulnerabilities to corresponding weaknesses. But the body of Christ is one of many members, and I think we are all edified in this way by fellowship with believers who appreciate certain perspectives more than ourselves.

God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. — John 4:24 (KJV)