Miracles - C. S. Lewis [87]
It will perhaps be helpful to make a list of the sense in which the words ‘spirit’, ‘spirits’ and ‘spiritual’ are, or have been, used in English.
1. The chemical sense, e.g. ‘Spirits evaporate very quickly.’
2. The (now obsolete) medical sense. The older doctors believed in certain extremely fine fluids in the human body which were called ‘the spirits’. As medical science this view has long been abandoned, but it is the origin of some expressions we still use; as when we speak of being ‘in high spirits’ or ‘in low spirits’ or say that a horse is ‘spirited’ or that a boy is ‘full of animal spirits’.
3. ‘Spiritual’ is often used to mean simply the opposite of ‘bodily’ or ‘material’. Thus all that is immaterial in man (emotions, passions, memory, etc.) is often called ‘spiritual’. It is very important to remember that what is ‘spiritual’ in this sense is not necessarily good. There is nothing specially fine about the mere fact of immateriality. Immaterial things may, like material things, be good or bad or indifferent.
4. Some people use ‘spirit’ to mean that relatively supernatural element which is given to every man at his creation—the rational element. This is, I think, the most useful way of employing the word. Here again it is important to realise that what is ‘spiritual’ is not necessarily good. A Spirit (in this sense) can be either the best or the worst of created things. It is because Man is (in this sense) a spiritual animal that he can become either a son of God or a devil.
5. Finally, Christian writers use ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ to mean the life which arises in such rational beings when they voluntarily surrender to Divine grace and become sons of the Heavenly Father in Christ. It is in this sense, and in this sense alone, that the ‘spiritual’ is always good.
It is idle to complain that words have more than one sense. Language is a living thing and words are bound to throw out new senses as a tree throws out new branches. It is not wholly a disadvantage, since in the act of disentangling these senses we learn a great deal about the things involved which we might otherwise have overlooked. What is disastrous is that any word should change its sense during a discussion without our being aware of the change. Hence, for the present discussion, it might be useful to give different names to the three things which are meant by the word ‘Spirit’ in senses three, four, and five. Thus for sense three a good word would be ‘soul’: and the adjective to go with it would be ‘psychological’. For sense four we might keep the words ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’. For sense five the best adjective would be ‘regenerate’, but there is no very suitable noun. 1 And this is perhaps significant: for what we are talking about is not (as soul and spirit are) a part or element in Man but a redirection and revitalising of all the parts or elements. Thus in one sense there is nothing more in a regenerate man than in an unregenerate man, just as there is nothing more in a man who is walking in the right direction than in one who is walking in the wrong direction. In another sense, however, it might be said that the regenerate man is totally different from the unregenerate, for the regenerate life, the Christ that is formed in him, transforms every part of him: in it his spirit, soul and body will all be reborn. Thus if the regenerate life is not a part of the man, this is largely because where it arises at all it cannot rest till it becomes the whole man. It is not divided from any of the parts as they are divided from each other. The life of the ‘spirit’ (in sense four) is in a sense cut off from the life of the soul: the purely rational and moral man who tries to live entirely by his created spirit finds himself forced to treat the passions and imaginations of his soul as mere enemies to be destroyed or imprisoned.