HOWEVER, UNEXPECTEDLY spirituality has returned in a ‘secular’ postmodern age. While ‘spirituality’ cannot be proved as such, the concepts of ‘spiritual’ and ‘spirituality’ have not been disproved, nor have they been successfully rendered nonsense concepts.

In the postmodern era, the positivists and the sceptics brandishing scientism, have themselves come in for criticism. The Enlightenment model and modernist science with its off-shoot, technology, has been discredited as contributing to the degradation of the environment and threatening the planet. There is a new scepticism which questions whether scientism and its philosophical axioms are the best epistemological route forward, let alone the planet’s saviour. The public is increasingly turning against a purist science and technology without debate on values, for example unease over biogenetic engineering. In the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century, positivism and scientism have been found wanting by many.

One can not live by positivism and scientism – at best they are tools for clarifying meaning, but are not the meaning itself. Spirituality, it would seem, has escaped and we are still searching for meaning. New Zealand botanist and ecologist, Philip Simpson illustrates this with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which he argues:

“…provides an ethical or spiritual dimension to human life that is ecocentric rather than egocentric. Some see the living Earth concept in mystical terms. There is no doubt that a competitive model of Earth is damaging to our relationship to nature, and science is strangely lacking in providing meaning.”[i]

Spiritual reality is being recognised, despite a lack of proof; while science is found to be lacking in meaning, even by some scientists. However the question of what ‘spirituality’ is, or how one defines it, remains.

One thing is certain however, ‘spirituality’ has become secularised. Jon Alexander maintains that the trend to use the word spirituality in an experiential and generic sense appeals to our irenic age but it also presents some theological difficulties: “Today we encounter the word spirituality so frequently in our reading and conversation that it is surprising to learn that its use is a recent phenomenon.”[ii]

John Elias argues that the 1960s began with the announcement that God was dead and it seemed that the United States had finally become a secular society – but by the 1970s some scholars were already talking about the return of the sacred and others were maintaining that the sacred had never left, except among certain social scientists. Elias maintains certain words are now heard that had virtually passed from usage, even in religious circles:

“While the word religious remained in use, the words spiritual and spirituality were rarely uttered during the decades when the focus was on the secularization of society and its institutions. Today these words are used without apology in both religious and non-religious circles. Social scientists use the term spiritual or sacred as a category to explain understandings of selfhood and human striving. Religionists use the words to highlight the highly personal elements of one’s religious life.”[iii]

Whereas in earlier centuries spirituality had been equated with religion, now as Walter Principe points out, there were many aspects of religion which were less related to the spiritual ideal and some which were even opposed to it.[iv]
Van Ness argues that while Nietzsche was perhaps the most explicit in charting an irreligious spiritual path, spirituality born of radical scepticism is also found in the naturalistic and nondogmatic views of some Oriental sages.

A SPIRITUAL LIFE in a “world come of age” was notably also the argument of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian executed by the Nazis for his part in a conspiracy to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer was very impressed by his non-religious co-conspirators who were also executed and while he “characteristically identified spiritual life in theological terms, as life shaped by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, his last writings place an emphasis on wholeness and vitality”, which are the “hallmarks of a more general rendering of the spiritual dimension of human existence.”[v]

Van Ness states that in Bonhoeffer’s last writings “The positive evaluation of the secular world begun in the Ethics was even more firmly stated in the idiom of “the world come of age”. Bonhoeffer argued that “God is increasingly being pushed out of a world that has come of age, out of the spheres of our knowledge and life, and that since Kant he has been relegated to a realm beyond the world of experience.” [vi]

If God was increasingly being pushed out of a world come of age as Bonhoeffer argued – Bonhoeffer’s relation to the philosophy of Nietzsche is complex. However in his prison theological deliberations he seemed to move beyond Barth’s dialectical appreciation of Nietzsche to a “closer embrace of a religionless or secular spirituality such as was championed by the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra”.[vii]
Van Ness states that from “Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard and Barth also, Bonhoeffer learned that religion, including the Christian religion, was part of what an authentically spiritual life must criticize and move beyond.”[viii]

Given the many compromises of historical Christianity, some measure of worldliness and freedom to criticise was indispensable to a profound spiritual life. Both Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer opposed tyranny in both its secular and religious forms and both recognised the importance of spiritual discipline – for Nietzsche it was solitude and for Bonhoeffer it was silence. Both have a simplicity which confounds them being classified as specifically religious or irreligious.[ix]
Thus, the authentic spiritual life had to move beyond the dogma of monotheistic and often fundamentalist patriarchal religions in the West.

[i] Philip Simpson interview, ‘Exploring the Gaia Hypothesis’ in Nga Kaitiaki, no. 21. August/ September (1989), 10.

[ii] Jon Alexander (1980) ‘What Do Recent Writers Mean by Spirituality?’, 247.

[iii] John L. Elias (1991) ‘The Return of Spirituality: Contrasting Interpretations’, 457.

[iv] Cf. Walter Principe (1983) ‘Toward Defining Spirituality’, 139.

[v] Peter H. Van Ness (1991) ‘Bonhoeffer, Nietzsche and Secular Spirituality’, 331.

[vi] See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald Fuller et al, ed. Eberhard Bethge, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan Company, 1972), 341. Note: Nevertheless,“God is the beyond in the midst of our life”, 282.

[vii] Ibid, 337.

[viii] Ibid, 338.

[ix] Ibid, 339.

WHILE MANY WESTERN THEOLOGIANS during the twentieth century had become uncomfortable with the concept of spirit and spirituality, Western theology was itself under increasing philosophical attack and siege. Spirituality, metaphysics and theology became ‘nonsense concepts’ with the advent of logical positivism, the philosophical school based on linguistic analysis in the 1920s and 1930s. Logical positivism rejected metaphysical speculation and held that the only meaningful statements are those that are analytic or can be tested empirically. Based on linguistic analysis (to clarify the meanings of statements and questions) and on demands for criteria and procedures of empirical verification (for establishing at least in-principle truth or falsity of statements, by observation or experiment), logical positivism was essentially a systematic attack on metaphysics by demanding observations for conferring meaning. Metaphysics was rejected as nonsense.

In the modern world of the twentieth century it often seemed that ‘spirituality’ was on very tenuous ground as regards meaning. Evans (1993) has argued that the skeptical contemporary world-view regarding spirituality is to some extent in all of us: “It is part of the largely unconscious mind-set of our culture”. [i]

[i] Donald Evans (1993) Spirituality and Human Nature, 102.

MODERN SCEPTICISM OF SPIRITUALITY dominated the twentieth century. James Lapsley has argued that “By the early twentieth century the word spirit had come to connote a vague sense of airy impotence, almost to the point of meaninglessness, in western theology”.[i] The modern theologians who did consider the issue of spirituality in the twentieth century, showed a much closer affinity with biblical ideas than had most of their more recent predecessors.[ii]

Reinhold Niebuhr’s (1949) The Nature and Destiny of Man, posited nature and spirit as basic constituents of human beings. Although, significantly, he later abandoned ‘spirit’ for the secular concept of ‘self’ to refer to human beings. Paul Tillich (1963), Teilhard de Chardin (1959), and Wolfhart Pannenberg (1985) also used spirit as a major category. Tillich took the position that the spirit of human beings is a distinctive created spirit, whereas Teilhard and Pannenberg both argued for an identity between divine and created spirit which is thought to characterize all of life.[iii]

 

[i] James N. Lapsley (1990) ‘Spirit and Self’, Pastoral Psychology, v.38 (3), Spring (1990), 136.

[ii] Ibid, 135-7.

[iii] Ibid, 135-7.

FRENCH PHILOSOPHER Gabriel Marcel (1889-1975) maintained that the spiritual life is a dynamic relationship between the mind and something outside it – “all spiritual life is essentially a dialogue” and uses for the first time, one of the words of real dialogue by referring to God as a “you”.[i]

Ferdinand Ebner (1882-1931) an Austrian philosopher who developed a religiously informed philosophy of language, argued that the spiritual essentially belongs to the I-You relationship. For Ebner the human spirit “is essentially determined by its being fundamentally intended for a relation to something spiritual outside it, through which and in which it exists” – that is, God.[ii]

This line of thought was developed further by Martin Buber, the Austrian Jewish philosopher (1878-1965) in his now famous formulated philosophy of spiritual dialogue. Buber’s I and Thou, published shortly after Ebner’s book, contains a formula for the Ebnerian idea “Spirit is not in the I but between I and You. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breath”.[iii] Indeed, ‘I and Thou’ were words taken over from Feuerbach who had maintained that the “true dialectic is not a monologue of a solitary thinker with himself; it is a dialogue between I and Thou.”[iv] For Buber the spirit is wherever “encounter” occurs, whether it be with a human being, a cat, or a tree. As New Zealand theologian Lloyd Geering points out:

“Buber came to feel that spiritual power exists in the personal relations which draw people together in reciprocity. It led him to emphasise the value of true dialogue, and to suggest a fresh understanding of God as the Eternal thou present in all deep human relationships of the I-Thou variety.”[v]

[i] Steven G. Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), Ibid, 37.

[ii] Ibid, 37-38.

[iii] Ibid, 38.

[iv] Lloyd Geering, Religious Trailblazers (Wellington: St. Andrew’s Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, 1992), 26.

[v] Ibid, 26.

WITH HIS MATERIALIST VIEW of spirituality, German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) turned both Keirkegaard and Hegel on their heads. Rather than ‘spirit’ being the parent of matter, matter is the parent of spirit. Starting from physical matter he went on to explain the rise of human consciousness, ideas, culture and what is the nature of human spirituality. While Hegel expounded an idealist philosophy, Feuerbach expounded a materialist philosophy. This was to become the prevailing philosophy of the modern world in the twentieth century.

Spirituality in I-and-You

HOWEVER, FEUERBACH also had a relational view of spirituality. He asserted that “spirituality resides in the I-and-You sociality of mortal, sensuous beings”. [i]

In fact Feuerbach maintained that the personality of God is none other than the projection of the personhood we find in humankind. We make God in our own image. Because the human spirit is creaturely it must relate itself to an Other. These connections and the relational aspects of Feuerbach’s theory are developed further in the thought of Gabriel Marcel, Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber. [ii]

[i] and [ii] Ibid, 36.

 

THE IDEALIST VIEW expounded by Hegel (1770-1831) was meant to overcome all dualisms. A major Western philosopher and a formidable critic of his predecessor Immanuel Kant, Hegel argued that spirit unfolds itself in nature and history. For Hegel, spirit moves the world as a formal and final cause. Spirit is the true meaning of things, their true nature and the end for which they will be realised. Take out any reference to God and this is a strikingly postmodern secular view of spirituality.

The Dane Soren Kierkegaard’s (1813-1855) definition of spirit is similar to Hegel’s. Kierkegaard was however, one of Hegel’s more devastating critics. Widely credited with providing the tools for modern existentialism Kierkegaard gives a theological take. Spirit-words continue to be regarded as the property of Christianity. There is a distinction between divine and human spirit. “The individual must synthesize soul and body, the eternal-universal and the temporal-particular into a unity, a self – and this accomplished relation when it is accomplished, is called “spirit.” [i] For Kierkegaard human individuals can only with great difficulty actualize themselves as spiritual beings.

[i] Ibid, 29.

IN THE EMPIRICIST VIEW, spirituality is rejected entirely. Perhaps the most important European philosopher of modern times, Prussian Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was decisive on the issue of spirituality. Kant almost entirely ignored the German word for spirit – Geist. A forerunner of the scientist sceptics of today, Kant rejected epistemological claims of metaphysical supernaturalism – this meant questions as to the existence of God, soul and in fact anything which can not be resolved by an appeal to possible experience. Kant maintained they lacked any true cognitive foundation. Instead he was much more interested in illuminating objectivity and was concerned with objectively valid principles in scientific and moral judgement.[i]

[i] Steven G. Smith (1988) The Concept of the Spiritual, 26.

THE DUALIST VIEW is exemplified by French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who laid down the philosophical foundations for the ‘modern scientific age’. This happened some twelve hundred years after Augustine (354-430), the philosophical founder of the Western church, who in spite of his hostility to paganism, was nevertheless influenced by Greek Platonism and equated the ‘spiritual’ with God substance, subjectivity and soul. Ironically Descartes was to conceive of ‘spiritual substance’ in much the same way as St Paul. While Descartes was a physicist committed to mechanistic scientific explanation – and a spirit-matter dualism was an embarrassment, as causal relations between spiritual and material are difficult to explain – Descartes nevertheless reinforced the distinction between spiritual and material for religious reasons.[i]

[i] Ibid, 25. Note: Leibniz and Berkeley tried to remove the embarrassment by deriving the appearances of matter from spiritual substance, while Hume and Kant tried to resolve the problem by rejecting the notion of spiritual substance. This was to make the status of soul more mysterious than ever.

SPIRITUALITY WAS CAPTURED by orthodox monotheistic religion. After the many Gods, or polytheistic, believing ancient Greeks – this multi-faceted view of spirituality was driven underground. The “Thou shalt have no other God but me” patriarchal monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and the Church took over the concept of spirituality. Hence spirituality in the West was for many centuries equated with ‘religion’ – the ‘spiritual teachings’, the ‘spiritual life’, the ‘devout life’, the ‘interior life’ or the ‘piety’ within a particular religious faith. Spirituality was further equated with particular dogmatic and spiritual referents – Judaic spirituality, Christian spirituality, Islamic spirituality, Catholic spirituality, Protestant spirituality. Christianity brought about new norms for all thinking in the West – and part of its impact was a distinctive conception of the spiritual reflected in a new use of the word pneuma.[i] Indeed, both Christians and Jews saw divine pneuma as a benefit available to them by virtue of their membership in religious communities. The writings of St Paul, for example, show the ‘pneuma’ of the faithful must be distinguished from the unholy ‘spirits’ (of the Pagans).[ii] For Paul, ‘spiritual reality’ is imperishable and is separated from worldly reality.[iii]

Following the work of the Early Church Fathers – philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marcel, Ebner and Buber, have further added to the discourse on spirituality. While less tied to the Christian and Jewish religious doctrines and orthodoxy of their times, they were nevertheless still influenced by them. They also introduced new elements into the dialogue, for example a relational view of spirituality, which remain with us today.

[i] Steven G. Smith (1988) The Concept of the Spiritual, 21-22.

[ii] Ibid, 22

[iii] Ibid, 23.

FOR SIMPLICITY’S SAKE we begin with the ancient Greeks, bearing in mind that for even earlier, pre-monotheistic, religions – otherwise known as the Pagans, Canaanites, animistic, matriarchal and primal religions – the spiritual imbued everything in the natural and physical world. More will be said on this later.
For the ancient Greeks, all humans were spiritual beings. There were four important spirit words – pneuma, nous, psyche and thumos. “Humans were enfolded and sustained by cosmic pneuma; ruled by the universally operative faculty of rational cognition nous; vivified by an individual psyche; and had an emotional attraction to the right, the noble, and the good thumos”. [i] In ancient Greek philosophy ‘spirituality’ had cosmic, intellectual, psychological and moral components and implications. This is a holistic view of spirituality which found favour once again in the late twentieth century.[ii]

[i] Steven G. Smith The Concept of the Spiritual (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 21.

[ii] For a humanist and premodern view of spirituality see Donald Evans, Spirituality and Human Nature ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), viii.